DOI:10.6531/JFS.201903_23(3).
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E S S A Y
A Manifesto for Decolonising Design
Danah Abdulla
Brunel University
UK
Ahmed Ansari
Carnegie Mellon University
USA
Ece Canlı
Independent Scholar
Portugal
Mahmoud Keshavarz
Uppsala University
Sweden
Matthew Kiem
Independent Scholar
Australia
Pedro Oliveira
Heinrich-Heine Universität Düsseldorf
Germany
Luiza Prado
MeetFactory
Czech Republic
Tristan Schultz
Griffith University
Australia
Much of the academic and professional discourse within the design disciplines over the last century has
been bereft of a critical reflection on the politics of design practice, and on the politics of the artifacts, systems
and practices that designerly activity produces. Our premise is that— notwithstanding important and valued
exceptions—design theory, practice, and pedagogy as a whole are not geared towards delivering the kinds
Journal of Futures Studies, March 2019, 23(3): 129–132
Journal of Futures Studies
of knowledge and understanding that are adequate to addressing longstanding systemic issues of
power.
These issues are products of modernity and its ideologies, regimes, and institutions reiterating,
producing and exerting continued colonial power upon the lives of oppressed, marginalised, and
subaltern peoples in both the ‘developed’ and ‘developing’ world. This planet, shared and co-
inhabited by a plurality of peoples, each inhabiting different worlds, each orienting themselves
within and towards their environments in different ways, and with different civilisational histories, is
being undermined by a globalised system of power that threatens to flatten and eradicate ontological
and epistemological difference, rewriting histories and advance visions of a future for a privileged
few at the expense of their human and nonhuman others.
To date, mainstream design discourse has been dominated by a focus on Anglocentric/
Eurocentric ways of seeing, knowing, and acting in the world, with little attention being paid to
alternative and marginalised discourses from the non Anglo-European sphere, or the nature and
consequences of design-as-politics today. This narrowness of horizons and deficiency in criticality
is a reflection of the limitations of the institutions within which design is studied and practiced, as
well as of the larger socio-political systems that design is institutionally integrated into.
We believe that a sharper lens needs to be brought to bear on non-western ways of thinking and
being, and on the way that class, gender, race, etc. issues are designed today. We understand the
highlighting of these issues through practices and acts of design, and the (re)design of institutions,
design practices and design studies (efforts that always occur under conditions of contested political
interests) to be a pivotal challenge in the process of decolonisation. We also want to move beyond
academic discourse to critique and think around the ideas and practices that circulate through the
work of professional designers embedded in the various sectors of production that stimulate and
sustain the modern/colonial world economy.
Our goal is ontological rather than additive change. It is not sufficient for design institutions to
simply include a greater diversity of actors or perspectives. This only goes to serve a delaying and
offsetting demands for radical systemic change. While we support and defend measures to include
marginalized subjects and our/their concerns in spaces from which we/they have been excluded or
remain precarious, we also believe there is little point to diversifying institutions, practices, and
processes that ultimately sustain colonial imperatives. Our aim is not to direct our efforts to prop
up existing power structures, or to sustaining them through ameliorative measures. Rather, our aim
should be nothing less than to seek the radical transfiguration of these structures through the critical
eye of the programmatic imagination that dares to identify the possibilities and conditions that will
give us alternatives to the now.
Our objective—as design scholars and practitioners—is to transform the very terms of present-
day design studies and research. Designers can put to task their skills, techniques, and mentalities
to designing futures aimed at advancing ecological, social, and technological conditions where
multiple worlds and knowledges, involving both humans and nonhumans, can flourish in mutually
enhancing ways. For us, decolonisation is not simply one more option or approach among others
within design discourse. Rather, it is a fundamental imperative to which all design endeavors must
be oriented.
It is with the aim of providing an outlet for voices from the fringes, the voices of the marginal
and the suppressed in design discourse, that we have opened this platform. We welcome all of those
who work silently and surely on the edges and outskirts of the discipline to join and contribute to
conversations that question and critique the politics of design practice today, where we can discuss
strategies and tactics through which to engage with more mainstream discourse, and where we can
collectively experiment with alternatives and reformulations of contemporary practice.
We encourage and seek decentralised dialogues, in which different voices can coexist in their
130 difference rather than in an assimilated narrative. In this platform we welcome:
A Manifesto for Decolonising Design
• Contributions from designers working at the intersections of materiality and culture,
postcoloniality, decoloniality, gender studies, race studies, and other areas of human thought
and action which seek to analyse, question and challenge the relations of power in the world
today;
• New curatorial practices of designerly knowledge, that seek to challenge and disrupt
colonial understandings in the field and develop knowledge and understanding of how
designs for decolonisation might be presented, discussed, published, disseminated, and so
on;
• Reviews, interviews, debates, podcasts and other forms of discussion and debate beyond the
confines of academic language. We also invite formats that are generally devalued within
academic contexts such as visual essays, audio papers, performance works, etc.
• Possibilities for the dissemination of critical thinking in design well beyond the canons of
the discipline (e.g. design studies and/as epistemic disobedience);
• Critical pieces written originally in languages other than English; as well as potential
translations into languages other than English;
• Critical pieces written by researchers, practitioners, independent scholars, and students in
the process of completing their degrees and/or who feel they are marginalised or poorly
supported by academic institutions. In other words, we welcome incomplete ideas, work-
in-progress, and other forms of dealing with the questions above outlined, thus amplifying
discourses outside the remit of institutes, which may or may not be projects enfolded in
academic work.
Moreover, we seek to connect with already existing endeavors within and beyond the design
field for a decolonisation of not only academia, but all professional practices and pedagogies, to
connect and foster exchanges of knowledge that speak from, cross, and remain in the borderlands of
design and coloniality. Through this platform, and in collaboration with like minded others, we hope
that we can make a substantial commitment to contributing to the continued existence, vitality and
diversity of human presence on this planet.
Correspondence
Ahmed Ansari
Carnegie Mellon University
USA
E-mail: [email protected]
Notes
Decolonising Design Collective is made up of Danah Abdulla, Ahmed Ansari, Ece Canlı,
Mahmoud Keshavarz, Matthew Kiem, Pedro Oliveira, Luiza Prado, Tristan Schultz. This piece
of writing initially appeared as an Editorial Statement at http://www.decolonisingdesign.com/
statements/2016/editorial/ and has since been updated and edited.
References
Decolonising Design Collective. (Revised 2017, June 27). A Manifesto for Decolonising Design.
Retrieved from https://www.decolonisingdesign.com/statements/2016/editorial/
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