Disarming Design from Palestine.

How can design be a vehicle for political action and solidarity? How can one engage through the act of design, in complex politicized realities and how can design practices be a way to resist oppression and form a strategy to set up sustainable positions in fractured societies? These questions have become pertinent in my practice particularly through the experiences of working in Palestine. Building upon these relations and involvements I want to define conditions to empower the social, political and emancipatory impact of design. A subquestion is how to develop educational models that stimulate such design practices, ultimately arriving at design education that reinforces and commits to the economic, political and artistic independence of designers, especially for those in marginalized positions. Combined with literature research on alternative schools and design in suppressed realities, and through a wider framing of comparable practices, I will reflect upon these exchanges and develop collaborative models in which designers, crafts and the political realm meet. Specific conditions will be developed and tested in direct collaboration with Disarming Design from Palestine, the Birzeit University in Palestine, the Sandberg Instituut in Amsterdam and foremost the Sint Lucas School of Arts. These findings will result in a publication that shows the potential for a design-mentality that supports social resilience, solidarity and equality, and secondly to the establishment of an educational platform for design in Palestine

Keywords:DESIGN, PALESTINA, EDUCATION, CONFLICTS

Disciplines:Social design, Critical heritage, Social and relation art

Project type:Collaboration project