The InterDesigning team pay our respect to Elders, Ancestors and Traditional Custodians of the lands where this network was conceived: Wurundjeri, Woi Wurrung, Boon Wurrung language groups of the Kulin Nations, Bidjigal and Gadigal peoples of the Eora nation, and Ngāti Whātua Ōrākei, Ngāi Tai ki Tāmaki iwi (tribes). We also pay respects to our own ancestors and acknowledge how they have shaped the stories and knowledges we share here.
4-5 Introduction
6-13 Impact & Engagment
Two-day international symposium: Co-creating the praxis of teaching design from decolonial, intersectional and pluriversal approaches
Reflections from participants
14-15 Publications
Interalities: A conversation on positionalities, localities, pluralities within design education futures
Towards co-creating the praxis of teaching design from decolonial, intersectional and pluriversal approaches
16-18 Conference Presentations & Workshops
Crafting interalities: Positionalities and localities through intersectional DEI in design education
Wellbeing in dialogue: How to innovate design teaching through positionality, intersectionality and pluriversal approaches
Introduction
Through gatherings, workshops and publications the InterDesigning team promote the formation of a network of like-minded educators and practitioners to encourage more diverse ways of designing and the inclusion of varied voices in design. The network’s strength lies in the relationships fostered among design practitioners and academics across the Asia Pacific region and Global South geographies.
Higher Education Institutions in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand have a high number of culturally diverse students from the neighbouring regions who learn alongside local settler-migrant and Indigenous students. All learning and teaching happens on Indigenous lands. However, design and design history courses taught in these institutions remain entrenched in anglo- and euro-centric narratives that omit place-specific contexts, local histories and knowledges, and diverse ways of designing, including those by the various Indigenous peoples across Oceania. To address the persistence of colonization in design education and counter the alienation and disengagement experienced by a student body who seldomly see their cultures represented in design courses, The InterDesigning team proposed the formation of a InterDesigning network in 2022.
As the InterDesigning team, we value collaboration, not top-down leadership and are open to experimentation and trying ideas. Our diverse experience as female and/ or migrant academics and designers support our vision for building international connections between educational institutions and communities in creative ways. These connections increase understanding between diverse cultural and social educational contexts and help us engage with a range of separate yet related questions on how to co-create decolonial, pluriversal, and intersectional voices, materials, themes, and approaches within our disciplines. The InterDesigning team seek to create space for diverse voices in design and connections between educators who want to share experiences of trying, failing and succeeding to implement approaches to positionality, locality, and plurality in the classroom. The InterDesigning network strives to be a home for histories, perspectives, and practices of design that have been—and often remain—underrepresented within dominant design dialogues and university curricula across the region. We are excited by the opportunity to continue developing this important and impactful network.
The InterDesigning Team
Dr Livia Rezende, SFHEA, has a PhD in History of Design and lives on Gadigal land. She works as a Senior Lecturer and Postgraduate Research Coordinator at UNSW Art & Design, Sydney, and serves as book editor for the Manchester University Press and editor for the Journal of Design History. Her current research project examines the institutionalisation of modern design in Latin America during the Cold War through a transnational perspective.
Dr Livia Rezende (UNSW)
Dr Diana Albarran Gonzalez (UoA)
Dr Diana Albarran Gonzalez is a designer, educator, researcher, and craftivist. Director of the PhD in Design at the University of Auckland. Her research explores different ways of collaboration from decolonial, intersectional, and pluriversal perspectives, interested in collective wellbeing, Indigenous knowledge, crafts-design-art, textiles, embodiment,`DEI and creativity.
Dr Nicola St John (RMIT)
Dr Nicola St John is a fifthgeneration colonial settler from Australia, and a communication design researcher and educator. She is a Senior Lecturer in communication design at RMIT University. Her research focuses on fostering collaborations between First Nations creatives, community schools, design organizations, and tertiary institutions to encourage knowledge transfer, intercultural collaboration, and student belonging.
Dr Fanny Suhendra (Swinburne)
Dr Fanny Suhendra is a design researcher and educator in Indonesia and Australia. Currently the lecturer in Swinburne, Melbourne. Her primary research focuses on the relationship between design and DEI, specifically on the effort to break the exclusivity and niche perspective around communication design informed her teaching, research and practice.
Impact & Engagement
Two-day international symposium: Co-creating the praxis of teaching design from decolonial, intersectional and pluriversal approaches
Naarm/Melbourne, 28-29 November 2023.
Attended by around 40 design scholars, educators, and practitioners from Alice Springs (NT), Brisbane (QLD), Sydney (NSW), Melbourne (VIC), Perth (WA), Aotearoa New Zealand, South America and other places, working across various HEIs and design studios.
• The symposium included eight guest speakers from Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand engaged in the textile and visual communication industries, the GLAM sector, community work, among other areas.
• Four guest speakers were First Nation peoples from Aotearoa, Samoa/Tonga, and across Australia, and two were Postgraduate students.
• The symposium explored diverse and inclusive ways of teaching and designing within tertiary institutions, fostered real-life translation of conceptual thinking (decoloniality, pluriversality and intersectionality) into classroom activities, and drove community building among design educators.
Thanks to the generous support of various organisations [detailed on page 18], in late 2023 the InterDesigning team organised its first free-to-attend, in-person symposium held over two day at the RMIT University in Naarm/ Melbourne. Then, we also launched a bespoke online platform (interdesigning.com) to archive and disseminate our work and build a wider community of educators invested in invested in improving and diversifying design and design history education.
This two-day international symposium brought together design researchers and practitioners, including several Indigenous guest speakers and participants from Australia, Aotearoa New Zealand and the Pacific region. The symposium facilitated exchange and perspective sharing in design practice and education through creative workshops and panel discussion. It aimed at undoing and contesting design as a western-dominated field and encouraging greater community engagement with more diverse approaches to teaching.
Titled ‘Co-creating the Praxis of Teaching Decolonial, Intersectional and Pluriversal Design and Histories’, the symposium gathered over 40 design educators from Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand, postgraduate students, and design practitioners in a frank dialogue to facilitate the sharing of experiences and challenges in the classroom,
and the development of strategies to advance the decolonization of design education.
The upholding of Indigenous sovereignty—a premise of our work—was reflected in privileging Indigenous voices and following appropriate cultural and local Indigenous protocols.
The symposium included circles of conversation led by guest speakers and two co-creating workshops facilitated by Dr Dion Tuckwell (Monash University) and Andrés Ortega, a PhD candidate at RMIT. These workshops resulted in a series of material outcomes, including meaningful reflections and feedback from participants [see pages 12 and 13, more are displayed on our website: [1]].
The first circle of conversation, ‘Connecting to Place’
The circle brought together Ayla Hoeta, a design lecturer from Waikato Tainui iwi (tribe) from Aotearoa New Zealand, Dr. Cecelia Faumuina, an Auckland-born design lecturer from Samoa and Tonga, Emrhan Tjapanangka Sultan, an artist who belongs to the Luritja and Western Arrernte Nations in Central Australia and Kokatha Nation in South Australia, and Jesse Wright (JESWRI) a Gadigal artist. They discussed Indigenous design history and practice, the implementation of local cultural protocols, and emphasised how their struggles and achievements in integrating Indigenous knowledges in design practice, teaching and learning are underpinned by an ongoing and ever-evolving connection to place and land.[2]
The second circle of conversation, ‘Connecting as a Teaching Community’
This circle included speakers with diverse experiences in design education: Nicole Crouch, a textile print designer for commercial fashion and industry, a sessional educator and a PhD candidate at UNSW; Bridie Moran, a sessional educator, curator, editor, cultural development and policy consultant, and a PhD candidate at UNSW; Shivani Tyagi, a lecturer and researcher at Swinburne’s School of Design and Architecture, and Peter West, a senior lecturer in RMIT’s School of Design. As Crouch summarises, this circle proposed that
“the role of design education goes beyond that of developing technical design skills. We are
committed to supporting students formulate worldviews, establish design practices that are expressions of such worldviews, values, and ethical approaches. We are expected to challenge the systems around us to contribute to a more equitable society through creativity.”[3]
First Collective Exercise, ‘Co-creating a reflective imprint for InterDesigning’
Building on the conceptual framework of circles, places and shores, Dion Tuckwell facilitated a co-creating mapping exercise to address the challenges, tensions and hopes of bringing decolonial, intersectional and pluriversal praxes into the classroom. This exercise asked participants to imprint
[3] https://interdesigning.com/Co-creating-the-Praxis-of-Teaching their thoughts and feelings reflectively on a huge map laid on a large table. It culminated in a collective and distributed debrief at the end of the first day. Considering the potentially challenging impacts that these conversations could have for some attendees, it also provided a space and activity for an embodied emotional offload from participants.
Second collective exercise: ‘The Workshop’
The symposium’s second day included a workshop facilitated by Andres Ortega where participants were asked to explore the idea of ‘Geographies of the Selves’ to become aware of, and materialise through threads, paper, fabric and other props, their positions, intersections, and the multiple worlds that are entangled in our lives. After these experimental activities, participants were asked to produce some reflections and practical recommendations—or simply, feedback and insight—to the InterDesigning team, that included propositions for the future of the network.
It is from the results of these two co-creating exercises that we have been deriving the contributions that the network can make to promoting change in design practice and education.
Reflections
“Supporting one another to offer our teaching practices and students the opportunity to learn from different voices from different universes in design.”
—Symposium participant reflection
“Allowing or making different spaces and occasions to help that happen -keeping up the momentum and allowing opportunity.”
—Symposium participant reflection
“... We also know how much our mind-body-soul becomes ‘colonized’ by the sheer habituation, repetition of work-emails, zoom meetings- etc.
What if there were times we co-ordinate being/ doing differently? Like the archipelagos + cosmovision activities, what range of activities from subtle to extreme, can we begin to ‘design into’ our daily work lives?”
—Symposium participant reflection
Interalities: A conversation on positionalities, localities, pluralities
within design education futures
Across Australasia, design courses within the tertiary education sector continue to remain entrenched in euro-centric narratives and pedagogical approaches, which in turn omit place-specific contexts, cultural histories, knowledges, and diverse ways of designing. In response, we are a collective of design educators working across the Asia-Pacific region, who have come together to de-link from the dominance of Western design education, to unpack the intersections between pluriversality, decoloniality and intersectionality within our own teaching practices. We each have our own relations to these alities, and our conversation begins from drawing out our individual positionalities, shaping how we see and interpret the world around us. Practising positionality as design educators is a meaningful way to reflect on our own inter spaces, and how they inform our teaching approaches, while also acting to facilitate discussion around common experiences and challenges. Our conversation enables an acknowledgement of our individual lived experiences, insights, and knowledges, while collectively grappling with shared concerns. We hope through discussing our own efforts, we can encourage other educators to join us in creating more diverse design education futures.[4]
[4] St John, N., Rezende, L.L., Suhendra, F., Albarrán González, D., and Ahmed, Z.(2023) Interalities: a conversation on positionalities, localities, pluralities within design education futures, in Derek Jones, Naz Borekci, Violeta Clemente, James Corazzo, Nicole Lotz, Liv Merete Nielsen, Lesley-Ann Noel (eds.), The 7th International Conference for Design Education Researchers, 29 November - 1 December 2023, London, United Kingdom. https://doi. org/10.21606/drslxd.2024.047
Towards co-creating the praxis of teaching design from decolonial, intersectional and pluriversal approaches
Across Oceania, design courses within the tertiary education sector remain entrenched in Eurocentric narratives and pedagogical approaches, which omit place-specific contexts, cultural histories, knowledges and diverse ways of designing, including those of First Nations. This concern drove the four authors to create the InterDesigning Network, a supra-institutional network that aims at connecting like-minded educators, practitioners and students. This article reflects on the results of the InterDesigning Network’s first symposium, titled Co-Creating the Praxis of Teaching Decolonial, Intersectional and Pluriversal Design and Histories. As the core team behind the network, we listened and learned from a panel formed by First Nations people that discussed Indigenous design practice, local protocols, connection to place and land, common struggles and ways of integrating Indigenous knowledges into contemporary design education. We also listened and were inspired by the insights shared by another panel made of diverse design educators who discussed how their positionalities and experiences inform their teaching practices. By reflecting on these insights as well as on the rationale behind the formation of a design educators’ network, this article offers actionable suggestions on how to disrupt the status quo for a more diverse and inclusive design education future. [5]
[5] Rezende, L., St John, N., Suhendra, F., & Albarrán González, D. (2024).
Towards co-creating the praxis of teaching design from decolonial, intersectional and pluriversal approaches. Art Design & Communication in Higher Education, 23(2), 149–169. https://doi.org/10.1386/adch_00095_1
Crafting Interalities: Positionalities and localities through intersectional DEI in design education
Design Research Society Conference 2024, Boston, USA, June 2024
Design education is dominated by Western discourses reinforcing modern-colonial views of design as ‘universal’. This is infused with the idea of the designer as ‘neutral’ without acknowledging the influence of the designer’s background based on their disciplinary training, worldviews, and identities. To challenge these, design educators and students must be aware of the influence of power, politics, privilege, and access (3P-A) imbalances we carry in our different roles based on our distinct positions and identities. It is important to move away from dominant design and embrace diverse ways of knowing, doing, teaching, and learning design in tertiary education. For this purpose, the founding members of the InterDesigning Network suggest craft-making as a decolonial embodied practice to visualise and materialise concepts to support awareness, in this case, using diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) dimensions through an intersectional lens. This approach aims to be an introductory exploration of our positionalities based on our different locations and reflect how our identities, positions, power, and agency can contribute to weaving collective aspirations contributing to pluriversal design education.
Conference presentations & workshops
Wellbeing in dialogue: How to innovate design teaching through positionality, intersectionality and pluriversal approaches
Thriving Futures, The Australian Council of University Art and Design Schools (ACUADS) online conference, Australia, 2-3 November 2023
Across Australasia, design courses within the tertiary education sector continue to remain entrenched in euro-centric narratives and pedagogical approaches, which omit place-specific contexts, cultural histories, knowledges, and diverse ways of designing, including First Nations’. Euro- and Anglo-centrism in design curriculum and teaching practices contribute to students (local and international) feeling alienated and disengaged when their lived experiences, backgrounds and aspirations are not reflected in the classroom. Likewise, educators teaching canonical design narratives from traditional pedagogical approaches have been found it increasingly challenging to relate to their course material and engage students in meaningful learning.
Addressing the conference’s prompt that asks ‘What are the key issues affecting the wellbeing of Art & Design staff and students? What role can Art & Design play in relation to societal wellbeing?’, our paper and presentation will centre positionality, intersectionality and pluriversal approaches as key praxes in design education that have the potential to increase students’ sense of belonging while improving staff confidence and ability to teach from and including diverse perspectives. Through these praxes, we propose to contribute to Design staff and student wellbeing as well as to support the discipline fulfill its societal role through the centring of culture, care, and community.
Our paper and presentation will take the form of a conversation among the authors, design educators working across the Asia-Pacific region who have come together to de-link from the dominance of Western design education, to unpack the intersections between pluriversality, decoloniality and intersectionality within our own teaching practices. Through a dialogical method, we draw out how our positionalities, intersectionality and pluriversal approaches have helped shape how we see and interpret the world around us, with direct impact on how we teach design. Our conversation enables an acknowledgement of our individual lived experiences, insights, and knowledges, while collectively grappling with shared concerns.
Practising and sharing positionality as design educators in this paper, we will also facilitate discussion around common experiences and challenges in the classroom. Through discussing our own efforts, we hope to encourage other educators to join us in creating more diverse design education and thriving futures.[6]
The InterDesigning activities have been funded by competitive grants and awards from:
1. Australian Council University Art and Design Schools Research Grant (2021)
2. Design History Society (UK) Symposium Grant (2023)
3. UNSW School of Art & Design Research Grant (2022)
4. RMIT University Internal Research Support funding (2023)
5. University of Auckland, Research Development Fund. INTER creative explorations: A positioned and relational research project towards decolonising design education (2023)
