Walking the word of design: explorations and reflections of a decolonial-interventionist practice

This dissertation is the result of a seven year research process, inquiring into the participatory potential of design interventions (and interventionist practices) in the public sphere. Most definitions of interventions entail a conventional autonomous model, in which one person or a selected group of people decide whether a situation demands for a certain action with which they - unannounced, unadvertised and not commissioned - enter into a context (Markussen, 2013). From such a perspective, interventions might be perceived as a 'colonising metaphor' in design practice, insofar as they involve an external agent entering -and acting within- a context not their own (Diethelm, 2016). By presenting and discussing different experiences from the Global South (Participatory Action Research, Autonomous Design, Critical Pedagogy, designs with other names, etc.), through this dissertation we suggest alternative readings for the notion of intervention -and interventionist practices at large. Giving great importance to the act of situating knowledge (Haraway, 1988; Mignolo, 2011) and design (Kiem, 2017), we argue for 'ways of intervening' in which the dichotomy between researcher and object of study is collapsed (Fals Borda, 1985), designers embed in the 'everyday life' of the communities they enter and submit interventions to their governing principles (Escobar, 2017), proposed actions are not geared at disturbing the internal workings of a community but un-blocking its relational flows (Van Heeswijk, 2012) and where intervening is seen as an ethical imperative with transformative purposes (Freire, 2000). By breaking open the notion of -and proposing alternative approaches to- interventions, this research aims to bring forth a decolonial option for design interventions and contribute to the larger discussion on decolonising design.

Publication year:2021

Accessibility:Open