Designing Dissent: A Roundtable on Design Pedagogy and the Culture of Resistance

Session Submission Type: Non-Paper Session: Dialogue Format

Abstract

Design and design culture is taught at hundreds of art and design programs around the country. However, this pedagogy, is still very much based in and around the formalist notions of the Bauhaus and Modernism. The Bauhaus was a German design school founded by Walter Gropius. The space existed from 1919 to 1933. Despite it’s relatively short existence, the school transformed how the world saw the designed object. In fact, it’s name is almost synonymous with the Modernist movement; echoing it’s ideas around form and function in design pedagogy and practice. When a number of Bauhaus instructors fled Germany to escape the Nazi threat, a great deal of them ended up in America and helped influence the teaching of the practice of design in our country.

For as wonderful as the school was, it’s teachings are not enough. It’s practices fail in the chaos of the information age. Design now has a system of new problems to solve and the formalist ideas around what design can be has to shift to accommodate. There new audiences to consider, new communication issues, and new methods of critical making. Traditional and non-inclusive notions of design cannot function in our hyper-postmodern world. The role of the designer has to expand and how we teach those designers has to mutate and change as well.

Design, like many other practices has been totally privatized and colonized by corporate interests and neoliberal enterprises that have taken it away from the masses. The idea that
“good design is for everyone” is now just that: an idea. In practice, design is an elitist space that creates disposable unsustainable systems, objects, and propaganda that seem to do little more than promote the next wave of unsustainable systems, objects and propaganda.

We live in the age of Black Lives Matter, the Prison Industrial Complex, a violent anti-womanist society, and rapidly depleting resources on an increasingly warming planet. How can design as an epistemology and area of practice begin to unravel the complex problems that we find ourselves faced with? We need a dangerous and dissenting cadre of designers and design teachers to combat a tumultuous world. Design’s well-formed fingers must now make a fist.

The round table that we are proposing would tackle issues around race and design, sustainable design practices, alternative modes of community organizing around design, speculative design, and design practices that privilege other voices in the design profession. It will deal with the increasing need to encourage myriad approaches to cultural production, diversity, cooperation, and experimental pedagogies to deal with a quickly shifting communication sphere that our design education system is ill-equipped to properly address.

Sub Unit

• American Studies Association Annual Meeting

Chair

• John Jennings, University of California at Riverside

Panelists

• Peter Claver Fine, University of Wyoming

• Christopher Lee, University at Buffalo (SUNY)

• Nekita Thomas, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

• Marshall L. Shorts