No more excuses. Yes I can (write about design)!
Writing is painful! I find so many excuses to stop me and to justify not writing.
“I studied Art and Design, so didn’t write enough in secondary school or at University!”,
“The use of English to write does not come easily to me, since I did my undergrad in another language (Portuguese), and my academic writing foundation actually happened in Portuguese not English”,
“I don’t read a lot, so I have a hard time writing…”.
The reality is, all of these are true, and perhaps none of them are true. We often think about ‘why we can’t’, and probably spend less time thinking about ‘why we can’.
So why can I?
“I have a strong point of view and something to say / share”,
“I enjoy telling stories”
“I enjoy connecting with people, and writing is a way to do so.”
I’m working around my own real and imagined barriers, like the lack of time, imposter syndrome, the anxiety of getting it ‘right’. These days I’ve discovered some techniques that help like converting speeches to essays, using ‘type to text’ features and using a ‘just get it done!’ philosophy. These have increased the writing I’ve done more recently. However I still have to battle my imposter syndrome and tackle more academic writing.
My problem these days is actually there are so many things that I want to write about. There are also too many meetings, too many classes, too many distracting conversations. I’ve had to devise a range of techniques to help me turn these conversations into writing.
One successful technique has been to write scripts for my talks, and to try to turn these into ‘writing’ soon after. So this resulted in a Medium post, a conference paper (that will hopefully morph into a journal article) and an actual published article on Design Observer.
I heard two inspiring stories recently about women who made time to write at times when it seemed impossible. One was Toni Morrison, who wrote at 5 am while her children were asleep and before her editor work day started. The other was an unnamed professor, who was a colleague of a friend of mine, who wrote her book before the start of meetings, and as other people talked or argued during the meeting.
As this complicated 2020 comes to an end, I still have to create strategies to move my writing forward. I’ve been happy for the invitations to speak and teach, yet these also serve as distractions. They do, however, provide some external validation to help me move beyond my fears.
I was recently asked ‘what are you an expert in?’ It’s a frightening question. Maybe I’m not an expert in anything! After several days of tracking every guest lecture, podcast interview, panel discussion and keynote talk that I’ve ever done, I decided that maybe there are a few things that I know that are worth writing about.
Here are the five areas that I’ve decided that I’ve decided to focus on over the next few months.
1. Design Education — decolonizing it, pluriversalizing it, and reimagining a new future for it.
Particularly as a person from a place with a colonial legacy, and as someone with sound knowledge of literature around decoloniality, I know I have knowledge to share. I have been experimenting with creating design classes using different approaches, influenced by my interest in delinking design from Eurocentrism, and focusing on a more localized design practice for many years. I’ve also intentionally created space for plurality of thought in forums like the Pluriversal Design Special Interest Group and the Pivot 2020 Conference. It’s time to share my practice by writing more deliberately about the work that I do.
2. Critical Design Thinking
I work in the field of design thinking, however I tiptoe away from famous design thinking models and practice, and say that I practice design thinking through a critical and emancipatory lens. We use a critical approach to a discipline when we challenge knowledge and methods that are presumed to be right. So when I practice critical design thinking I am challenging hegemonic design thinking practice and proposing new approaches. An emancipatory lens means that work cannot happen without the involvement of the people who are most affected. My critical and emancipatory design thinking practice are new approaches that I would like to write about and share with others.
3. Designing for inclusivity
Our discipline is exclusive, how can we make it more inclusive. My “Designer’s Critical Alphabet” began as an in class experiment around inclusivity, with me trying to see how could I get designers to remember other points of view in their work. Inclusivity around race and ethnicity, gender and sexuality, income, education, nationality, disability status etc, will continue to a prominent theme in my work, and I will train myself to write more about what I do to share my practice.
4. Social and Civic Innovation
I’ve been experimenting with using Critical Utopian Action Research and Equity-Centered Design Thinking to reimagine our futures. I throw in a little Paulo Freire, super-hero magic, Afrofuturism and liberatory methods into the way I approach this work. I know what I am doing is different and yes I can write about it! I will!
5. Design Research Methods
Over the last eighteen months or so, where I’ve taught design outside of a College of Design or Art School have mean I’ve had to find new ways of making myself and my work relevant. This has led to exciting collaborations with colleagues at Tulane University and in New Orleans, including a fun, futuristic class Math-design class about Ordinary Differential Equations, a 150K grant to understand how design methods can support COVID research, and even supporting another colleague as she turned her Latin class into a design class. These interesting experiments and ways of combining the way we teach, research and think in design with other disciplines are worth writing about.
Writing may be easier with the support of friends and colleagues. This article was a response to a prompt from my writing group, a cohort of design educators who I met through Design Incubation. Our prompt was “Unborn Children” and it developed out of a conversation about our ideas and writings that never see the light of day.
Follow our Medium publication and join my colleagues, Saskia Van Kampen, Johnathon Strube, Karin Jager, Anne Galperin and I, as we work together to get through the difficulty of writing especially through the COVID-19 pandemic.
