OK, you're down to do the work. Cool. First, let's talk about what we mean by "Design" and "Designer".
Design as a formal profession has only been around for a relatively short time, during which BIPOC were systematically excluded from both higher education (where designers become formalized) and industry (where designers work). On top of this, systematic oppression of BIPOC has kept their wealth and power in the economy low, which is used as a justification not to design with or for these end users.
So, we will need to expand our idea of design beyond that which is done by formally trained designers. Instead, we should think about all traditions of problem solving which try to satisfy human need with technological capability, while pursuing an aesthetically beautiful solution. These may include traditional crafts, toolmaking, architectural design or decoration of traditional buildings, traditional graphical motifs and styles, letterforms or scripts, graphical designs for communication, or the systems of interaction developed and used by communities.
Likewise, the individual people responsible for certain designs may be known, or designs may have emerged from the world of many artisans working simultaneously within a culture. This collective, low-ego design strategy stands in stark contrast to the ideal of the lone designer that dominated European design for most of the 1900s.
Finally, we should be open to "designs" other than those of mass produced consumer products. Colonial powers in Europe and the United States literally invented the consumer economy during the industrial revolution when workers found themselves working so many hours that they had no choice but to buy all the furniture and tools they needed for living. BIPOC communities which were not influenced by this colonial power structure (for example, in pre-European contact North and South America, in the Polynesian archipelago, or during the Medieval Islamic World) did not have economies which required designing massive numbers of similar products to compete for consumer dollars. Because of this, we should be careful to consider one-off products (for example, an altar in a church) or products made by their users. It is also worth thinking about selectively bred plants, animals, farming strategies, water management technologies, fishery designs, and other problem solving strategies which fall outside of the consumer product design norm.
Comments
Post a Comment