The idea I keep coming back to…
I was encouraged to free-write for 30 minutes about “The idea I keep coming back to” as a prompt from my writing accountability group. Here’s my response!
I keep coming back to wondering what relevant design curriculum for students who are not rich, White, Male, American, or European. In other words, what is the design curriculum for people like me? These days I’ve been pushing myself to move away from just designing a curriculum for people like me and to push myself even further to ask how does the non-able-bodied, non-English speaking show up in the design studio? Sometimes this curriculum may not be different from what currently exists, but other times it is radically different. In other words, the ideas that I keep coming back to are related to decentering hegemony. Sometimes called diversity, inclusivity, pluriversality, anti-universality, and multiple perspectives.
I started this exploration when I was working in Trinidad. I was trying to create a post-graduate design program for craftspeople in the Caribbean, many of whom had never completed an undergraduate degree. Some of whom had not completed high school. Around 2013, I was thinking about opening up some of the academic gates, removing barriers to sharing knowledge between people with learned and lived experiences and honoring people’s lived experiences. I believed that diverse spaces with people with their rich business acumen gained from years of producing handicrafts, together with art school students, business school students, and engineering students, all at the University of the West Indies, could lead to great innovation and cross-pollination of ideas. My ideas never really took off. I ran out of steam. Interestingly, my colleague from Engineering was the most interested in the diploma that I wanted to propose. Still, university bureaucracy, or perhaps even our perception of university bureaucracy, got both of us' better since it might have been perceived and not real. The project only lives in an obscure and probably unread paper in the Design Management Institute 2014 academic conference archives.
I’ve explored this idea to create a curriculum as a thought experiment in response to a quote in an article by Ken Friedman. I found that Prof. Friedman seemed to be implying in his 2012 article in Visible Language that design was a discipline tied to large industrialized economies. As someone from a small (microscopic even) country, it seemed like a slap in the face. I had invested so many years in my design education and career. Was I not even relevant? So this curriculum was about finding out what could go into a curriculum for more extreme case economies. Always with the idea that these extreme cases could actually inform ‘traditional’ or mainstream design curricula. I created a curriculum for people from Landlocked Developing countries, Small Island Developing States, and Least Developed Countries. I did this in 2014. Today, my way of thinking about design, growth, and development has changed significantly. I think differently about the denominations of LLDCs, SIDS, and LDCs. I also see the connection between design and modernism more clearly, so, while I may disagree with Prof. Friedman any more today than I did back then, I’d create a different diagram today. I’ve continued the diagramming curricula as I did for this project over the years and have a series of ‘curriculum as image’ drawings that I’ve shared in this paper. The problem with this curriculum was that it focused on establishing our reasons for existence as designers from outside of the dominant narrative. Fortunately, I’m no longer trying to frame my work or existence on justifying why I and others like me need to be here.
I’ve spent the last two years focusing more intentionally on students' experiences from global majority identities in predominantly white institutions; this means the experiences of black and brown students at predominantly white institutions. After completing my doctoral studies at NCState, I spent ten months at an elite PWI in California doing a teaching fellowship. Even though NCState is also a PWI, I felt that there was a lot of intentionality in crafting the experiences of black and brown students, with varying degrees of success. At the private institution in California, my role shifted into a teaching one. I was closer to some of the administrative questions like ‘how can we encourage more black and LatinX students to enroll in our classes?’ I was also able to see with my own eyes the ethnic composition of the classes that I taught, some of which were diverse and some were not. Most importantly, during that period, though, I was able to ask black students, ‘Why are you not signing up for design classes?’
They were happy to tell me! After chatting with them, even as a black educator, I reflected on how design curriculum and design experiences exclude. I compiled their feedback from two focus groups into a fairly detailed report, which I shared with other educators at the program I was in. I left that institution shortly after, so I don’t know the impact of those reports on the school or the other educators.
Conversations about inclusivity and exclusion make people very uncomfortable, especially when we realize we are the ones who are doing the excluding. I haven’t yet written a paper to make some of the contents more public, but it’s on my ‘to-do’ list. I’ve kept the student recommendations in mind as I work. I aim to publish them in a paper later this year. Fingers crossed, I’ll actually get it done in time. The feedback and recommendations have changed the way that I work. Perhaps their recommendations have made me much more public and vocal about decolonizing design and creating more comfortable spaces for students who may be ‘othered.’ I’ve also learned to intentionally decenter the comfort of students from the perceived dominant group, even decentering my own comfort as I bring difficult conversations about race and identity into design classes.
Sadly, in my current role at another elite PWI have not taught a single black student in four semesters. I’ve had probably three students who have identified as students of color, out of about fifty students over the time I’ve been there. I have the frustration of knowing that I haven’t yet really put my knowledge into practice. The experience of talking with black students at a PWI about why they did not want to join the design studio has made me more intentional about my LGBTQ+ students' experiences, my student who is hearing impaired, and our relationships with the POC community partners. I anxiously look forward to sharing the learnings from the black students with other educators. I also anxiously look forward to teaching students from more diverse backgrounds in the future.
References:
Friedman, Ken. “Models of Design: Envisioning a Future Design Education.” Visible Language 46.1/2 2012: 132–53. Web
Noel, Lesley-Ann. (2014) Developing a design curriculum for rural entrepreneurs of the arts and crafts sector in the Eastern Caribbean Paper presented at the 19th DMI: Academic Design Management Conference — “Design Management in an Era of Disruption, Design Management Institute, London September 2–4, 2014.
Noel, L. (2020) Envisioning a pluriversal design education, in Leitão, R., Noel, L. and Murphy, L. (eds.), Pivot 2020: Designing a World of Many Centers — DRS Pluriversal Design SIG Conference, 4 June, held online. https://doi.org/10.21606/pluriversal.2020.021
