The Design Exit: Don’t Look Behind!
Hesitations of a Field in Turn and Turmoil
The introduction below is an excerpt from a published chapter in an edited volume titled: Unununimimimdededesign – The Hesitant State of Design edited by Joannette van der Veer and published by Onomatopee in 2022.
The Design Exit is a project that negotiates repositioning design outside of the art-school system (within a European-context), and discusses the overdue critical turn in design education as a form of alter-reality.
A critical turn took place in the early 1970s among scholars in the humanities and social sciences to make cultures, criticality, decoloniality and plural relations the foci of contemporary debates; whilst also demonstrating a shift in emphasis toward meaning, and away from a positivist epistemology(1). Design is only 50 years late to this debate. The field is in need of a shift into a new era outside of the art academy, away from solutionism and design-positivism(2).
The Design Exit was launched as a series of digital round-tables for the months of September, October, and November 2020 hosted by Imad Gebrayel with guest participants: Ahmed Ansari, Chris Lee, Eva Gonçalves, Maya Ober, Nadine Rotem, Nina Paim, Sara Kaaman, Sérgio Miguel Magalhães and Zoy Anastassakis. The aim was to start an active, open-ended debate about design, design education and disciplinary boundaries.
This essay threads auto-ethnographic passages with excerpts from the series, where fragmentation and messiness become intentional carriers of open-ended questions and reflections. Contrary to popular belief, this essay does not provide solutions. I hereby share provocative hesitations and self-reflexive thoughts on my own positionality in liminal(3) spaces between design academia and anthropology. While complicit in disseminating (and resisting) colonial academic structures through teaching and studying in colonial institutions, I believe in using my (precarious) position to entice counter-disciplinary thinking, self-critical knowledge production and unions. I believe in unions. […]
Purchase link via: https://www.onomatopee.net/product/unununimimimdededesign/
Students can contact me directly for the text: imadgebrayel@gmail.com
2022
Published on:
August 30, 2024
#Anthropology, #Design, #Design Education, #Ethnography, #Migration
Gebrael, I. (2022). The Design Exit: Don’t Look Behind. In J. Van Der Veer (Ed.), Unununimimimdededesign. Onomatopee.
ISBN978-94-93148-89-5
(1) Also referred to as “positivism”, referring to the school of research thought that sees observable evidence as the only form of defensible scientific finding. Positivist epistemology, therefore, assumes that only “facts” derived from the scientific method can make legitimate knowledge claims. It also assumes the researcher is separate from, and not affecting the outcomes of research. “What Is Positivist Epistemology,” IGI Global, accessed May 12, 2021, https:// www.igi-global.com/dictionary/positivist-epistemology/23062.
(2) A common jargon promoting design as a problem-solving discipline, amplified by subfields like design thinking and innovation labs. Such understandings of design — when intersecting with Othered communities— create volatile, void, and apolitical outcomes favouring design (and designers) over accountable, sustainable engagement.
(3) A position that is “ambiguous, neither here nor there, betwixt and between all fixed points of classification”
(Turner 1974:232). I advocate for understanding liminality through the lens of black feminist authors developing the concept towards double-liminality: FRANCES E. MASCIA-LEES, PATRICIA SHARPE, and COLLEEN B. COHEN, “Double Liminality and the Black Woman Writer.” American Behavioral Scientist 31, no. 1 (1987): pp. 101-114. https:// doi.org/10.1177/000276487031001007.
The Design Exit: Don’t Look Behind!
2022
Published on:
#Anthropology, #Design, #Design Education, #Ethnography, #Migration
Gebrael, I. (2022). The Design Exit: Don’t Look Behind. In J. Van Der Veer (Ed.), Unununimimimdededesign. Onomatopee.
ISBN978-94-93148-89-5
Hesitations of a Field in Turn and Turmoil
The introduction below is an excerpt from a published chapter in an edited volume titled: Unununimimimdededesign – The Hesitant State of Design edited by Joannette van der Veer and published by Onomatopee in 2022.
The Design Exit is a project that negotiates repositioning design outside of the art-school system (within a European-context), and discusses the overdue critical turn in design education as a form of alter-reality.
A critical turn took place in the early 1970s among scholars in the humanities and social sciences to make cultures, criticality, decoloniality and plural relations the foci of contemporary debates; whilst also demonstrating a shift in emphasis toward meaning, and away from a positivist epistemology(1). Design is only 50 years late to this debate. The field is in need of a shift into a new era outside of the art academy, away from solutionism and design-positivism(2).
The Design Exit was launched as a series of digital round-tables for the months of September, October, and November 2020 hosted by Imad Gebrayel with guest participants: Ahmed Ansari, Chris Lee, Eva Gonçalves, Maya Ober, Nadine Rotem, Nina Paim, Sara Kaaman, Sérgio Miguel Magalhães and Zoy Anastassakis. The aim was to start an active, open-ended debate about design, design education and disciplinary boundaries.
This essay threads auto-ethnographic passages with excerpts from the series, where fragmentation and messiness become intentional carriers of open-ended questions and reflections. Contrary to popular belief, this essay does not provide solutions. I hereby share provocative hesitations and self-reflexive thoughts on my own positionality in liminal(3) spaces between design academia and anthropology. While complicit in disseminating (and resisting) colonial academic structures through teaching and studying in colonial institutions, I believe in using my (precarious) position to entice counter-disciplinary thinking, self-critical knowledge production and unions. I believe in unions. […]
Purchase link via: https://www.onomatopee.net/product/unununimimimdededesign/
Students can contact me directly for the text: imadgebrayel@gmail.com