In Another Life Another Being: On Design and the Wages of Decoloniality

Abstract

Despite the struggles for design disciplines to confront their colonial legacies and practices, the question remains: who can truly afford a decolonizing practice worthy of the name? This paper will investigate why Industrial Design, as a discipline, has been glaringly absent from the decolonial conversation, and the critical institutional gaps between decolonial thought and action. I will investigate the pragmatic relations between labor, value, care work, and social reproduction within the political economy of design that dissuade and constrain the discipline from articulating its responsibility to transform its social and material realities. In setting this provocation, I argue that if decolonizing design is to be anything more than an epistemological curiosity, moving beyond the niche corners of design academia, it will need a diverse ecology of accomplices—to imagine other lives for itself and become other beings.

Keywords

• design research
• industrial design
• refuturing
• decolonizing design
• climate reparations