Learning in spite of the school
Why is the design discipline in particular challenged to question its own epistemologies, its methods of knowledge production, its logics and its historiographies? How can design be freed from its entanglement with Western notions of universality? How can we rethink design’s agency beyond the Western solutionist model and anthropocentric model? What alternative emancipatory approaches are addressed by practices and discourses on the decolonization of design knowledge and design education?
These four questions accosted me on a rainy afternoon, and I let them pour into me. The more I thought about them, the more I found myself paralyzed, muted. How could one even begin to address such complex issues within such a limited character and word count? Though the list of questions starts with the problem-posing interrogation of “why,” it quickly moves into the solution-seeking demands of “how” and “what.” If I combine these four questions into one, they can be reframed as: “If we acknowledge that design is deeply problematic, how do we accept that and begin undoing its harms?”
Our world is deeply troubled, and design is fundamentally complicit in this. This is true whether we understand design as a self-contained discipline, as an academic and professional field, or whether we think of it more broadly as what humans do, which in turn designs (or shapes) us back. As a discipline, design is not neutral. It emerged in a specific time and place, namely 19th-century Europe, at the heart of the industrial revolution, and as the domain of elite white men. From its origin, this field has been inextricably entangled with Western, capitalist, and colonial heteropatriarchal modernity, and it serves to reiterate, reinforce, and replicate these various systems of oppression. Even if we look at design more broadly, we’ll also arrive at a similar conclusion. Our world is not “naturally” unjust and unequal; injustices are engendered into our world by design, by the powerful, by the oppressors. So how do we begin to undo them? I’m reluctant to provide any answers because I can only speak from my own experiences, which are inherently imperfect and incomplete. What follows might appear to be an exercise in self-exposure, but it is, rather, an attempt to listen to my body, my heart, and my mind, and speak my truth.
Design was not my obvious first choice of career. Before arriving at this troubled field, I briefly studied economics at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio), a private university located in an upper-class neighborhood of Rio de Janeiro in Brazil. I left not because I disliked economics per se, but because the environment was sexist, racist, classist, and homophobic. As a queer woman, my everyday life made me feel deeply othered. This didn’t come exclusively from the curricula or the professors, but also – in fact, especially – from my daily interactions with my classmates. Essentially, I couldn’t imagine them as my future peers, and I believe that some of them may have eventually found positions in president Jair Bolsonaro’s far-right government. At the time, I left because I needed to find “my people.” I share this experience to make two points: firstly, the problems we are discussing are not unique to design – they are systemic. Secondly, the violence and exclusions we face in the spaces we inhabit often change the entire trajectories of our lives. In the end, finding community is key to seeking liberation from any kind of harm.
After PUC-Rio, I enrolled in the design program at the School of Industrial Design/Rio de Janeiro State University (ESDI/UER), which is a public institution with free tuition. In 2003, UERJ became the first university in Brazil to implement quotas for low-income, public school-educated, self-declared Black, brown, and indigenous students. When I arrived there, these policies had already been in place for three years, and what had historically been a highly elitist space was already – though slowly – beginning to change. Oppressive hegemonic structures were still present, though significantly more on an institutional level than in my daily interactions with classmates, which, I must stress, were still conflictual. A snapshot of my classmates standing against the school’s grey building shows a non-conforming bunch that often aroused reprimanding looks as we walked defiantly through the streets of Rio de Janeiro. With these peers, who often came from backgrounds that were very different from my comfortable middle-class upbringing, I began to organize myself politically, unaware of how this experience would later impact my life.
At the time, ESDI offered a five-year general program that framed design as an all-encompassing problem-solving discipline (notably, the curriculum has since undergone reform). As designers-in-the-making, we were taught that we could shape things of all scales and levels of complexity. From trains to coffee cups, pictograms to political campaigns, nothing seemed off-limits to us as omnipotent designers-to-be. But there was a disconnect between what we learned in the classroom and the deeply unequal Brazilian reality, constantly seeping, and sometimes pouring, through the cracks in the school’s veneer. The curriculum was a steamroller: long days followed by long nights, bookending afternoons of exhausting manual labor in the school’s workshops. As designers-in-training, we had to be “formed,” which meant we had to conform to fit in. We were plastic materials to be molded, which often required us to be broken down and reshaped again. This was mentally, physically, intellectually, and spiritually draining. To finish an assignment, I remember once taking a block of resin into the shower so that I could continue painstakingly sanding the material while also attending to my bodily needs, my own tears blending with the cocktail of water and residue as it all swirled away down the drain.
A fellow graduate from ESDI, Leonardo Vasconcellos, who joined the school shortly after I left, has described a similar experience of being “broken down” by the school in a recent text published on Futuress, the feminist platform for “design-politics” that I co-founded and currently co-direct. The term, coined by the design scholar Mahmoud Keshavarz, attempts to make visible the integral bond between these two deeply entangled fields: design and politics. In his text, Leonardo describes the heartbreaking process of being shattered and deconstructed by design pedagogy and having to seek alternative ways to recompose himself outside the school. Much like him, I wasn’t aware of the implicit politics surreptitiously being slipped under my skin by the design curriculum, and I later had to confront them through a painful process of unlearning – but more on that later.
Of course, neither my generation nor Leonardo’s accepted any of this passively. Over lunches, coffee breaks, and chats as we strolled through the corridors, friendships were formed through which we imagined other possibilities for the school and for design. I was part of the group of students that initiated the academic union at school, named after Carmen Portinho, a feminist activist and the first woman in Brazil to receive the title of “urbanist.” I was also a student representative, and I helped organize surveys to fight some institutional problems we faced, including collecting complaints about harassment and abuse by teachers, and bringing public awareness to the internal theft of hundreds of books from the school’s library. We pooled our resources to organize workshops, we teamed up to curate exhibitions, we banded together to plan parties, and we joined forces to co-edit publications, often in collaboration with teachers who became our allies. My first curatorial experiment, co-organized with two classmates, was a series of lectures titled “Design Through the Looking Glass.” For a whole week, we invited designers and non-designers such as anthropologists, musicians, philosophers, and filmmakers to sit side by side and engage in a dialogue across their differences.
Although this would become the seed of my future practice, at that time, none of this was deliberate or conscious; those experiments and acts emerged from our individual and collective struggles and desires. By the time I reached my final year, despite having calluses and scars on my hands, I was convinced that I hadn’t been properly “formed,” so I decided to go on an exchange program for a semester abroad. In the Netherlands, away from home, entangled in a much more individualistic environment, but with new peers from different corners of the world who quickly became close friends, I realized how much organizing had become foundational to my understanding of design. This is something I learned inside the school, but despite the school. Migrating also produced new processes of “othering” and new pressures to conform, pushing me to seek others in similar positions. Though I eventually fully transferred my studies to Amsterdam, my graduation project, co-initiated with my long-time Brazilian friend Clara Meliande, was an attempt to create bridges between these two worlds. It materialized as a temporary, free-of-charge design school at the heart of Rio de Janeiro, bringing together over 100 participants from Brazil and the Netherlands.
After graduation, I slowly moved from design to curating and editing, working with various mediating formats such as exhibitions, publications, workshops, and more recently, texts. Much like Leonardo describes in his Futuress text, I started facing my bookshelf and looking for the voices that weren’t there, realizing that silences, indeed, speak volumes. Suddenly, I could hear a myriad of burning questions that had been there all along, suffocated into muffled echoes and background noise. I first had to learn how to properly listen to the pounding beat of a “why” stuck deep in my throat, stifled in my body, muted in my fingers – voices that were indeed desperate to speak. Exercising this critical consciousness made me question my references, preferences, and thought structures. Oppressive systems that sustain and perpetuate Western, capitalist, and colonial heteropatriarchal modernity are structural and structuring, they exist within us, inside us, all around us. Challenging design’s epistemologies, methods, and histories became a painful process of unlearning, detangling, and seeking new alliances. It is a change I’m still going through, and will likely continue for the rest of my life.
It’s been twelve years since I left Brazil for what I initially thought would be a mere six months. Since then, I’ve moved countries four times, and since January 2022, I’ve found myself in yet another new context: Portugal. These multiple migration processes forced me again and again to have to “find my people,” which has not always been easy, and often resulted in long stretches of solitude. But these difficulties and sorrows have also helped me meet others with whom to think and act. I cannot stress enough how much gaining critical consciousness, or conscientização, to borrow the term from the Brazilian philosopher Paulo Freire, cannot be achieved individually. It’s not about self-improvement or self-actualization, two tendencies that seem so prevailing in neoliberal design, but about a real transformation through dialogues across differences. Ultimately, liberation is not something that can be bestowed or given, but something that we can only achieve collectively, together, as lifelong student-teachers, forever incomplete, continuously willing to pose questions to which we might not find any answers. In the end, sometimes, the answer might begin, like this brief text, by redefining the terms of the conversation altogether.