How can we enrich Design Justice with experiences from the Mediterranean?
We have launched the Mediterranean node of the Design Justice network! Check out what we have been busy doing over the last months and join us!
The Platoniq team is really proud of being behind the creation and launch of the Mediterranean node of the Design Justice network! Over the last months Elena and Nadia from our team have been working hard together with a bunch of great other people and organisations in order to get this started. Here is the report of the what we have done so far! You can also find it here: https://designjustice.org/djn-med.
The first meeting
The Design Justice Network encounter in Pisa brought together multiple organisations and actors committed to more just design practices and to collaborating across borders to reclaim the Mediterranean geography to shift paradigms of power and cultural and technological production. Between the 12th and 14th October 2019, Design Justice Mediterranea was born! We are extremely proud and excited about was we have been able to get started over the last months and during this intensive weekend. Want to know more? Please read on!
The Pisa encounter: what was it?
This encounter has been the result of the work of many hands, minds, and hearts, collaborating over oceans with actors, organisations, and committed individuals. Each session and workshop has been developed and designed by thinkers, doers, and makers who have experience and a passion for participatory processes, are engaging in anti-oppression work, and are committed to greater justice especially in design around the Mediterranean region.
The goals of the Pisa encounter were to:
- Begin to contextualize the Design Justice Principles to the Mediterranean through adapting and translating the principles into various languages and cultural contexts;
- Develop a governance structure to begin a Mediterranean node of the Design Justice Network;
- Learn and develop through knowledge and practice exchange with Design Justice Steering Committee members Wesley Taylor and Victoria Barnett;
- Get a first motor group started, identifying who is and is not in the room: engaging with an accountable process of intentional invitations for the months to come.
Critical Insights from the encounter
Context Matters. Essential to this encounter was design as a concept and practice as well as the Design Justice Principles that resonated with each of the participants. However, how we ground design within each participant’s work and how the principles translate into each socio-economic, political, and cultural context matters. For instance, the settler colonial history of North America differs from the Mediterranean and in different parts of the Mediterranean. A present and salient question will be collaborating on our principles and resulting work to translate, footnote, or expand upon keywords within the principles such as: healing, liberation, accountability, indigeneity, migration etc.
Design that connects and transforms. Design can be difficult to pin down. But while that makes creating taxonomies complicated, it also creates space for fluid connection between fields of work, thematic areas, and interaction points with communities, organizations, and individuals. Design in Pisa served as an important point to develop relationships because of its ability to be crosscutting and the commonly held belief that design can be used for social transformation and support movements for change.
Fuck Borders and Binaries. While in Pisa, it was clear that the encounter may have been inaccessible for a number of reasons from borders to funds. An important practice was to continually hold space for the communities and individuals who have yet to come to brainstorm, create, and collaborate. As part of this practice an ongoing project will be working on accessibility, looking for grants, and organizations to make more diversity possible as well as holding space for those not in the room. In addition, what was a speedy agreement was on our community agreement detailed later on how we envision community standards. Important to the space DJN Mediterranea is cultivating is with the common understanding that guiding principles revolve around intersectionality, feminism, and creating safe(r) spaces.
How did Design Justice Network Mediterranea come about?
The idea originated from a group of 5 individuals from different organisations (Platoniq, Liquen Data Lab, DigitalFems etc) who have met by the magic of the universe and the internet. When we met, we realized that we were all incredibly inspired by the Design Justice Network and wanted to do something that spoke to our experiences. If you want to read more about the process to initiate the node, you can read our previous post here.
One of the places where DJN has taken root was in Spain (for example during the Hackató de Ciència Ciutadana: Polítiques Públiques + Design Justice). As a result of a collective phenomena of an interest in stronger praxis for more just design within a cluster of intersectional feminist oriented design practitioners in the Spanish state during the summer of 2019 and thanks to the support of the Internet Festival organisers, the idea of hosting a Design Justice Mediterranea encounter was conceived and pushed forward. We started dreaming of a physical meet-up with members of the network in North America and circulated the call within our networks to create a first Mediterranean motor group. The organisers of this event (Elena Silvestrini and Nadia Nadesan from the Platoniq team, Josep Almirall and Marta Delatte from Liquen Data Lab and Thais Ruiz De Alda from Digital Fems) invited activists, organizers, designers, facilitators, techies and the like to get together strive towards an intersectional lens and exercise the collective use of our knowledges, practices, and aspirations. Those who came and form now part of the group (Nushin Yazdani, Rafael Pascual-Leone, Andrea Giuliano, Valeria Taddei and Chiara Missikoff) would love to have more people to join.
Why Mediterranean?
Our focus on the Mediterranean wanted and wants to reclaim an identity around this geography. In what ways can the original Northern American Design Justice discourse be enriched from our situated experiences? In our current political climate (especially concerning migration) we want to diverge from the Global North / South dichotomy and development narratives. We want to develop critical and creative practices to design processes starting from what is already working locally across the region. As part of our process we want to engage critically with the concept of fortress Europe and Europe as a monolithic entity. We acknowledge different routes to innovation, questioning power dynamic framing the Mediterranean and everything East and South as backward and powerless. We want to create more access to resources and collective intelligence and develop materials in languages other than English.
Executive Summary
Achievements
The work and insights that we were able to generate in Pisa would not have been possible if not for the four years of collaboration, organisation, and work put in by the Design Justice Network and the Allied Media Conference decades before. As a result after our three day encounter we were able to agree on core values reflected in our adopted community agreements that share a commitment towards safety, celebration of diversity, and justice based practices. Shortly after and importantly, we made had a rapid consensus to create the Design Justice Node in the Mediterranean and form its governance and decide upon a series of collaborative projects.
Governance
During the two and half day encounter we were able to establish a governance system with the support of Wes Taylor and Victoria Barnett and their experience. Two parallel systems were created: the steering committee and project groups. The steering committee will manage and check in on the health of the node and report to the steering committee in North America. The members of the committee will also periodically rotate. The projects groups will work on the ongoing internal and external projects within the node.
External Projects
One of the main achievements was setting the foundation for translating and contextualizing the Design Justice Principles in the Mediterranean. However, the work is far from done as we continue to translate, interpret, and add culture/ language groups. In addition, the other project the Design Justice Mediterranea Node will be pursuing is co-creating and organising a space within the Sharing Cities Forum in Barcelona in November 2019. The third project is to compile an online repository of tools and references to guide and inspire design practices that are consistent with the Design Justice Principles. These can include tools used to evaluate a design process; toolkits that embody the Design Justice principles; or isolated tips or best practices.
Newcomers
During the retreat theme throughout our workshops was the importance of holding space for who/what was absent and pushing for greater representation across communities, borders, and oceans especially from but not limited to communities and individuals with connections to Greece, the Balkans, countries in the Levant, and Northern Africa. From the beginning it was evident that the first retreat would be limited to those that could afford to travel to Pisa. However, we welcome interested individuals, organizations, and communities to make contact and collaborate regardless of attendance at the Pisa encounter. We intend to look for funds to be able to build in greater accessibility. Currently, we would love to have individuals who would like to work on adapting the Design Justice principles to the Mediterranean area, on our external projects and / or on communications for the node. To get in touch with us and collaborate, please email us at djn-med@cryptolab.net. Sign the Design Justice principles at designjusticenetwork.org.
THE SESSIONS
Want to read even more in detail about what we did? Read below!
Community agreements. We started our days together by coming together in a circle, and taking turns reading the Art-and-Feminism Safe Space/Brave Space policy, (http://bit.ly/afprinciple) which we then collectively agreed to adopt as community guidelines.
Mapping the room. Our next activity was to begin connecting, trusting each other, and exploring who we are as a community. Each of us was given a pad of post-it notes. To help us understand ourselves, each other, and how we might already be connected, everyone was asked to spend a few minutes minutes identifying key aspects of ourselves, writing one on each post-it note. Once everyone had finished their self-analysis, we took turns introducing ourselves, laying out our post-it notes as we each shared important glimpses into who we are, where we come from, our studies and work, interests, and other key aspects of our identity. Finally, we all joined forces in merging and clustering our collective post-it notes into ‘islands’ (representing themes of our work and how we connect). Thus, we created maps of our physical and affective geographies, and of where our skills and expertise meet. We also acknowledged who was and was not in the room, and began to think about how our next gathering might be made more inclusive.
Dreams and expectations. We then collectively shared our hopes and expectations both for this retreat, and for Design Justice Mediterranea. Sharing this information facilitated us to open informal conversations and generate complicities among the participants.
What is design for us? We shared our individual understanding of what design is in order to generate a vision of the concept from a wider view and to make it speak to our situated experiences. It was an emotional and bonding moment for the group. Thanks to the process we developed a shared definition of how the Mediterranean network understands design.
- Design is the engineering of “advancement” of society
- Design is a language: it expresses something
- Design is a vehicle of power. (Design is ‘the package’. Power is ‘the contents’.)
- Design is the visual, environmental or instrumental expression of forces at work
- Design is the translation of values into artifacts, tools, systems
- Design is a vehicle for power
- We design our environment and our tools, and then our environment designs us
We identify a contradiction between Simple, Agile, Streamlined (design) processes Vs. processes that are Slow, Contextual, Intersectional; Confronting systems of oppression.
Learning from the experiences of the Design Justice Network.
One of the highlights of the retreat was listening to experience and insight from members of the Design Justice Network in North America. Wes Taylor and Victoria Barnett recounted some of the history of the Design Justice Network (designjusticenetwork.org/about-us), and how it gradually emerged over several editions of the Allied Media Conference, through the collective expression of a diverse and distributed community of changemakers. They shared experiences of the different DJN nodes throughout Northern America and ways in which the Design Justice framework has been utilised as actionable tool to bring about change. Wes Taylor shared with us some of the essential qualities of that creative context through the powerful and poetic “Six emblems of Complex Movements” (designjusticenetwork.org/complex-movements).
The Design Justice Principles
Continuing our engagement with the work of the Design Justice Network, we then turned our attention to the ten principles elaborated collectively by the network members over the years, dialoguing with them from our Mediterranean situated context. With the principles written on a large piece of paper, everyone was invited to take note of any questions, concerns, or suggested changes starting from the languages and geopolitical contexts we inhabit. Ultimately, there was broad consensus that the ten principles proved remarkably suitable for the Mediterranean context. However, the issue of translation in languages other than English (central to our work across countries and geographies in the Mediterranean area) raised questions about translatability of concepts and wording. The group acknowledged the limited representation of languages and experiences in the room (Spanish state, Italy, Malta mainly represented) and is determined to expand its reflections by creating space for more people and lived experiences.
Reflections on the ten principles of Design Justice:
1. We use design to sustain, heal, and empower our communities, as well as to seek liberation from exploitative and oppressive systems.
- The concepts of healing is not widely used in critical practices across the Mediterranean (to our knowledge), what would that be called instead?
- There is no direct translation for the term “Empower” in Italian or other languages
2. We center the voices of those who are directly impacted by the outcomes of the design process.
- Directly impacted in Spanish or Italian doesn’t translate well…”directamente afectadas”?
3. We prioritize design’s impact on the community over the intentions of the designer.
4. We view change as emergent from an accountable, accessible, and collaborative process, rather than as a point at the end of a process
- #4 sounds a bit abstract to us. How does one translate ‘accountable’ into Spanish?
5. We see the role of the designer as a facilitator rather than an expert.
- We might want to add an acknowledgement of privilege?
- Designer is not an accessible role or word. The concept of Design itself has little relevance for many movements in this geopolitical context
- The position of the designer is not neutral
6. We believe that everyone is an expert based on their own lived experience, and that we all have unique and brilliant contributions to bring to a design process.
7. We share design knowledge and tools with our communities.
- We should add reference to “open source”
8. We work towards sustainable, community-led and -controlled outcomes.
9. We work towards non-exploitative solutions that reconnect us to the earth and to each other.
- How does one translate “non-exploitative” into Spanish or Italian?
10. Before seeking new design solutions, we look for what is already working at the community level. We honor and uplift traditional, indigenous, and local knowledge and practices.
- What does ‘indigenous’ mean for the Mediterranean? Should we add reference to migrant knowledge instead?
- Reclaiming lost, erased, and marginalised practices of disenfranchised communities
- Diaspora
- Going South/East of Europe
- **Culture — is seen as a monolith in many Mediterranean contexts. Make it a moving and living concept; embrace positive contamination
In summary, the following words may carry a different meaning in the Mediterranean context as compared to North America:
Empower — in the North american context it might mean handing over or sharing power; from non-profit jargon alternatives might be channel, express power, visibilize
Liberation — For whom? Redistribution and reparation
Heal — heal colonial and patriarchal violence; there is no healing without Black and People of Color communities.
Design — can be a disempowering word, seems elite which is a contradiction if they define justice
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This is it for now! Thank you for reading this far :) and don’t forget to get in touch with us through djn-med@cryptolab.net to join us, ask information or exchange experiences! You can get in touch with the Platoniq team behind the Design Justice Mediterranea node through elena@platoniq.net.
