A HYPER-LOCAL PLACE-BASED PEDAGOGY FOR EXPLORING DESIGN JUSTICE, ONTOLOGICAL DESIGN AND SYSTEMS ENTANGLEMENT
Year: 2024
Editor: Grierson, Hilary; Bohemia, Erik; Buck, Lyndon
Author: Spencer, Nicholas; Carrion-Weiss, Justine; Simmons, Helen
Series: E&PDE
Institution: Responsible Innovation Hub, Northumbria University School of Design, United Kingdom
Page(s): 509 - 514
DOI number: 10.35199/EPDE.2024.86
ISBN: 978-1-912254-200
ISSN: 3005-4753
Abstract
To design ways to actively transition into fairer and healthier ways of living, we need to better understand how systems create conditions that damage the planet and make life difficult, unhealthy and unjust. However, which design practices support systemic understanding and exploration, what design strategies are useful for different forms of systems change and how do we educate students to have a more sophisticated set of understandings about their agency to responsibly navigate complex challenges? This research, in response to these questions, contributes to a growing body of knowledge about responsible design innovation pedagogy. In an attempt to engage students with increasingly complex challenges and issues, we have noticed that students can struggle to cope with the complexity they encounter. This research is interested in identifying approaches that support more effective engagement with complex, open, dynamic, systemic challenges. This paper focuses on the planning, performance and review of a project undertaken by a multidisciplinary group of Design School Masters students [anonymised for review]. The project aimed to provide spaces to create understandings of the ethical and social implications of design practices, to creatively deal with excess and adapt systems that can influence the futures of people in a place. Building upon a review of literature about systemic design and responsible design pedagogy, this research presents a place-based 2-week project that deliberately took a simple starting place - excess mugs in the design studio - to begin a critical design inquiry. Analysis of our research data generates a set of practices, strategies, and systems understandings related to the agency of the group. This is important because it foregrounds an important two-way relationship between taking action in a setting and a grasp of the past-present-future of interacting systems.
Keywords: Responsible design innovation, pedagogy, systemic challenges