Decolonizing Design

Decolonizing Design

Within many fields in academia, the term decolonization has recently become a significant subject of debate. Decolonizing is about stepping away from Euro-centric narratives and changing the systems of our world that came to be through colonial practices and thinking. Research on decolonizing the design process has just begun. The following research I have done is incredibly fascinating and groundbreaking. These papers are just the start of this growing and evolving field. The goal of my paper is to synthesize my research on decolonizing design and incorporate these discussions into my practices as a future designer to be a voice of change in another field that is tied up with colonization. I will begin with a discussion about colonization and then get more specific about how design came to be a colonized system. Afterward, I will explore the concept of decolonization and the risks before discussing what design encompasses. Finally, a large portion of my essay will examine decolonizing design and how I see myself executing this in my practices.

Colonization, as taught to us in the American school system, is defined as the act of settling among and establishing control over indigenous people in an area.  Alternatively, the definition given by Google defines colonization as the action of taking an area for one’s personal use. From my perspective, this definition does a better job of conveying the negative consequences of colonization. It is a process that describes a group entering a territory, establishing sovereignty over the people who have been existing on the land for generations, and utilizing the land for their own advantage at the expense of the indigenous group. The dominant group takes control of an area through a number of forceful methods. They seize land and remove people from the land they claim. Indigenous populations are wiped out by disease, warfare, or being taken for labor. Children are separated from their families and forced to learn and practice the colonizer’s language, religion, and culture in an attempt to ‘civilize’ individuals seen as savages. In this way, groups are dehumanized and othered, which leads to their being obscured from the historical record. Colonization is about profit, expansion, claiming land and resources, and forcing a hierarchy. The problem with this definition is that it is too simple. It leaves the impression that colonization was a one-time event that was conducted and completed in the past. Colonization is truly a process that continues long after the colonizers land in an inhabited region. All of these approaches have created a system that has lasted hundreds of years. The process then becomes embedded in every system of the world in which we live. These colonial systems and structures continue to oppress and harm.

Through intentional deconstruction and transformation, colonial systems can be dismantled. The field of design has very recently begun having discussions about what it would look like to decolonize design practices. Before being able to understand what decolonizing design would look like, it is imperative to understand when colonization truly became tied into design. The mid-1700s began a period known as the Industrial Revolution. To offer a brief history lesson, the Industrial Revolution is defined by a transition from creating goods by hand to utilizing machines, leading to a period of significant innovation. The issue, however, is that the Industrial Revolution was centered around Europe and America, whose intentions were profit and colonization. This meant that every “innovation” created a solution to problems that impacted the normative theory of humans: middle-class, white, European, and male. This Eurocentric revolution standardized everything to benefit these individuals and these individuals only. The Industrial Revolution colonized design in considerable ways. Architecture, city plans, graphic design, machinery, household goods, and more became standardized around the needs and desires of these colonizing powers. This demonstrates how the Industrial Revolution contributed to and perpetuated the colonization of design. Understanding the history and circumstances of colonialism and the outcomes that persist in the present is important, as colonialism has impacted various parts of the world at different times in several distinguishable ways. Colonialism’s impact on design is different from how colonization became intertwined with archaeology and other academic fields.

Design has been influenced by Western ideas and aesthetics, which has erased the voices and experiences of marginalized people and communities. Decolonizing design requires recognizing the power dynamics at play in the field of design and actively working to disassemble them. Decolonization is defined as the challenging and deconstructing of Eurocentric thinking and techniques. In general, it calls for material change incorporated with critical reflection and multiple voices. While accessibility and inclusion are a huge focus in the design process, Rebecca Sweeton does a great job explaining the differences between diversity, inclusion, and decolonization using the metaphor of a party.

Diversity is getting an invitation to the party.

Inclusion is when someone asks if you want to dance.

Decolonization is allowing the most vulnerable to choose the music, plan the food, etc. for the party. (Sweeton, 2020, Pa. 5)

This metaphor helps to starkly contrast these concepts and serves to show that diversity and inclusion alone do not go far enough to decolonize the field.

Discussions by professionals in the design field have included the need to decolonize Westernized universities and step away from seeing the world as having only one correct way to be interacted with. “Mundo donde quepan muchos mundos” means a world where many worlds fit. In a roundtable discussion, Pedro Oliveira called for the need to “decolonize our roles in the spaces upon which we act, namely where we teach, exchange, think, and practice design” (Schultz et al., 2018). Oliveira explains that the education system teaches designers how to think and practice, and consequently, the voices oppressed by colonization must be included in academia. This can be done in many ways, such as by learning other languages or having a translator on design teams so designers can learn from and work with other voices. This can begin the process of changing who is given a seat at the table. There needs to be a deconstruction of segregated spaces within academia. We must also challenge the learned assumption of the “world-as-problem” in which the world is viewed as a single set of problems needing to be solved. It requires critical reflection on the system in which designers learn and opposes the Eurocentric lens through which design is taught.

There is a risk with “decolonizing” design in that decolonizing could become a metaphor or a buzzword with little to no significance. “The easy adoption of decolonizing discourse by educational advocacy and scholarship, evidenced by the increasing number of calls to ‘decolonize our schools,’ use ‘decolonizing methods,’ or ‘decolonize student thinking’, turns decolonization into a metaphor” (Tuck & Yang, 2012). In this quote, Tuck and Yang best explain how and why decolonization can operate as a metaphor. In the field of design, this could take the following forms: “Decolonize your Design Practices in Three Simple Steps!” or “Two-Week Summer Class to Decolonize Your Designs”. Making decolonization a metaphor for “doing good” will render decolonization irrelevant before any impact or transformation is accomplished. In the roundtable discussion examined previously, Danah Abdulla explains, “The morality aesthetic risks simplifying decoloniality and stripping it of its criticality” (Schultz et al., 2018). As a designer, you are told to stand out by claiming your desire for accessible design, a powerful moral code, and the necessity to provide designs “made for everyone”. This is what I understand Abdulla to mean when they say “morality aesthetic”. While well-intentioned, producing claims of decolonized, inclusive, diverse, accessible, etc. practices makes it seem as though intentions alone can transform the system in which we design. The intention must be there to decolonize any practice, but it takes considerably more. It takes chronic unlearning and relearning of the concepts we are taught. With the seriousness of decolonization conveyed, I now describe what “design” is and in what concrete ways it needs decolonizing.

Design, as a verb, is the process of planning and creating. As an adjective, “design” describes the products of designing. I recognize this definition is broad, but the field of design encompasses so many things: tangible objects, art, the layout of a city, architecture, vehicles, graphic designs, and more can all be understood as designs. Let us look at the distinctive example of design that perpetuates colonization: the layout of cities. Cities and neighborhoods were designed in such a way that different ethnic and economic groups did not mix, segregating households by race and class. This is a very clear example of a colonized design or a design that benefits the colonizers. In this way, the superiority of the colonizers’ ideal family could not be denied. Design is all around us; we usually do not even detect it as we interact with and move through the world. The way design surrounds us preserves the idea that there is only one correct way of moving through and seeing the world. Homes are built based on Eurocentric assumptions about who makes up the family unit and how they use and move throughout the spaces in their home. Roads are built with the middle-class assumption that everyone has a car, with little to no biking lanes, walking trails, or public transportation in many cities. Furniture is designed with Western aesthetics and for Western purposes. Even the way critical information is designed to pass through TV news channels and phone notifications assumes constant access to these goods. In just a few minutes, I came up with these examples of how designs were standardized through colonization and created in a way that maintained colonial ways of thinking and being. While the definition of design is broadly encompassing, there are numerous tangible examples of designs we interact with every day that are based on taken-for-granted assumptions about the world and normative ideas about humans. Now, what are discussions on decolonizing design saying?

One of the most significant points of discussion on decolonizing design is integrating design practices within the context of the locals and their culture. This can be done by working with local communities to co-create designs that impact them and using local community members as participants in design research methods. This connects back to a previous point I made about bringing translators to research teams. This will ensure community members are not left out of the research process ‘because of a language barrier’. Decolonizing design goes beyond incorporating local knowledge and co-creation into design practices. This requires recognizing indigenous and local knowledge as more meaningful than the design team’s beliefs about that community’s needs or desires. Another big topic in the conversation on decolonizing design is abandoning Westernized assumptions about reality being represented by binaries. Built environment vs. nature, male vs. female, white vs. other, right vs. wrong . Critical reflection would reveal that these binary ideas are not understood to be accurate across all cultures but rather a concept brought to the forefront via colonialism. There are other ways of knowing, being, thinking and seeing that need to be considered equally correct and important ways of moving through the world. When it is said that decolonization requires a complete breakdown of systems, it means that a serious change in understanding is necessary and requires more than just cultural relativism and empathetic understanding. In their article, Decolonizing Design through the Perspectives of Cosmological Others, Arguing for an Ontological Turn in Design Research and Practice, Ahmed Ansari powerfully explores these concepts in more depth.

Siiri Paananen, Mari Suoheimo, and Jonna Häkkilä compiled 26 publications relevant to decolonizing design in their systematic literature review. Their research led them to the term heartware. This term is a deviation from the terms software or hardware. Hardware and software both focus on design using technology. Contrastingly, heartware requires “soul, personality, and emotion” (Paananen et al., 2020). The term heartware reminded me of our discussions on heart-centered archaeology as a method of decolonization. Archaeologies of the Heart describes archaeology of the heart as a practice that “animates what we do as archaeologists, uniting our intellectual, emotional, physical, and spiritual faculties and allowing us to bring our whole selves to practice” (Supernant et al., 2020). Centering archaeology and design practices around the heart changes how we consider others. Being able to bring to the table our own positionality, personality, emotions, and knowledge, as well as empathetically looking at others’ positionality, is essential for heartware practices. This brings the discussion to me as a designer, about what kind of work I will do and how I can push for and practice decolonizing methods in my own career.

As a UX (user experience) researcher and designer, my work will focus on the entire journey of a user’s interactions with a company’s website or app. It is similar to product design except with technology interfaces. The focus is on how the user interacts with and moves through a company’s web product. There are many techniques a UX researcher can use to determine users’ problems and frustration points and find unique solutions to these issues. This requires user interviews, creating flow charts of how users would accomplish a specific goal, creating user personas, and more. This type of research works with and impacts people and requires the designer to put themselves in the users’ shoes. 

My education has placed a considerable emphasis on accessibility and inclusivity throughout every step of the design process. Specifically, it is critical to think about users with situational, temporary, and permanent disabilities that impact how a user could interact with a product. A situational impairment would be scrolling through your phone with one hand while eating a burger with the other. You have a limited range of motion with one hand. A temporary disability could be caused by an injury, such as breaking your wrist, which temporarily impacts your ability to type and text. Permanent disabilities include everything from visual and hearing impairments to cognitive disabilities or disorders such as learning disabilities. Someone who is color blind may have a difficult time using an app that is primarily red and green. Hearing impairments require captions or other instructions. It is also necessary to consider the diversity of participants in your user interviews and product testing because individuals from different backgrounds think about the world differently and move through applications in unique ways. While diversity and accessibility have been heavily discussed in my certification course, there has been nothing I would describe as decolonial practices. Furthermore, the current research on decolonizing design is still scarce and covers design broadly, not specific fields such as mine. I want to discuss how I believe I could decolonize my processes as a UX designer.

The first thing that stands out to me is user personas. UX designers will create one or two user personas during their research. These personas serve to encompass all potential users of a product or company. User personas include pain points (frustrations) and needs or desires for the product. These user personas are referenced throughout every step of the design process to ensure the main issues are being solved and the ideal user will benefit. The issue with this is that, from what I have seen, user personas are typically white, middle-class people who are supposed to encompass every user’s needs. I could enhance my work by including more diversity in user personas as well as creating more than one or two user personas. This way, I could keep in mind the goals of a greater range of people throughout my design process. Including a wider range of diversity in my user interviews and product testing will also allow me to hear more voices. The next thing that stands out to me is being critical in deciding what projects I choose to work on.

As Tuck and Yang make clear in Decolonization is Not a Metaphor, decolonization cannot be accomplished without relinquishing settler moves to innocence. This phrase describes a response to the discomfort or guilt one feels by denying one’s responsibility and refusing to recognize or give up the power and privilege given through colonization. With this being said, I believe it is imperative to consider the project and the community it is impacting. While uncomfortable to admit, I feel another way I could practice decolonized practices in my work is by passing up projects where I cannot identify with the experiences of the ideal users. Let us take, for example, Crocodile Language Friend: “We present the Crocodile Language Friend, co-designed with the Wujal Wujal community, to foster children’s use of the Kuku Yalanji Aboriginal language” (Taylor et al., 2020). In the face of language extinction, this app was developed in collaboration with the community to make learning the language easier and more exciting for kids. I bring up this example for two reasons. The first is to show that I do not have the same lived experiences as this community. It may, therefore, have been a project I should either pass on or allow a designer with a similar way of seeing the world to take the lead on. I feel as though I cannot truly create a solution to a problem that challenges a community I am not a part of. The second reason I bring this app up is to show that not only do design practices need to be decolonized, but through design, other systems can be decolonized. Deliverables of UX designers, such as apps like Crocodile Language Friend, can serve as tools that empower and support communities.

Another method I believe could help decolonize UX processes requires a focus on collaborating with minority-owned businesses. There is also a need to understand that every design choice that is made has the potential to exclude or include a community or group. I need to be intentional about each design decision that I make and its consequences. The last issue I have seen is a lack of diversity within the field of UX design. While I cannot find exact statistics, it is clear to me that there is not a tremendous amount of diversity among professionals within this field. There is not a wide range of representation. Due to the fact that UX design is a fairly new field, I think now is the time to start pushing the field out across platforms and calling for more diverse perspectives and backgrounds to join. The point needs to be stressed that, unlike other fields such as archaeology, UX design does not require completing formal training at all, let alone going into debt for a college degree. The lack of specific training makes it a more accessible field. Using relationships and connections, the user experience can reach a more diverse crowd. I want to recognize here that my discussion of ideas to decolonize my own practices will fail to systematically change the field of design. As I discuss in-depth, decolonization is more than just an intention; it requires a complete breakdown of the colonial systems of our world. These are just a few ways I have personally thought of in which I could attempt to practice decolonized research and design approaches.

The purpose of this discussion was to pull together all my research on decolonizing design and apply it to my own practices as a UX designer. In sum, there need to be more explicit discussions of decolonization within various fields of design. As it stands, the field lacks representation and diversity. There is a focus on designing for the normative idea of human, which is defined as European, heterosexual, middle-class, young adult or middle-aged, and male. This idea of the normative human leaves a tremendous number of people out of the discussion. Decolonizing design would require a systematic change and a breakdown of thinking of the world as only being able to be moved through in one way. Current design principles need to be critically evaluated and reconfigured to be inclusive, diverse, accessible, and decolonized. Throughout our course, I have become genuinely excited to be part of this discussion on decolonization, and I hope that as I move forward in my practices, I can bring silenced voices and communities to the forefront of design and create real change through my products.

Works Cited

Ansari, Ahmed. (2019). Decolonizing design through the perspectives of cosmological others: Arguing for an ontological turn in design research and practice. XRDS: Crossroads, The ACM Magazine for Students. 26. 16-19. 10.1145/3368048. 

Fryer, Tiffany C. 2020. “Reflecting on Positionality: Archaeological Heritage Praxis in Quintana Roo, Mexico.” Archaeological Papers of the American Anthropological Association 31 (1): 26–40. https://doi.org/10.1111/apaa.12126.

Jennyfer Lawrence Taylor, Wujal Wujal Aboriginal Shire Council, Alessandro Soro, Michael Esteban, Andrew Vallino, Paul Roe, and Margot Brereton. 2020. Crocodile Language Friend: Tangibles to Foster Children’s Language Use. In Extended Abstracts of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI EA ’20). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 1–14. https://doi.org/10.1145/3334480.3383031

Paananen, Siiri, Mari Suoheimo, and Jonna Häkkilä. 2022 Decolonizing Design with Technology in Cultural Heritage Contexts – Systematic Literature Review. [ ] With Design: Reinventing Design Modes: 1839–1855. https://lacris.ulapland.fi/ws/files/26484009/Paananen_et_al_2022 _Decolonizing_Design_with_Technology_in_Cultural_Heritage_Contexts_Systematic_Literature_Review.pdf, accessed March 28, 2023. 

Sbravate, F. (2022, March 2). Decolonizing design: What exactly are we talking about when we use the term? Medium. Retrieved April 24, 2023, from https://uxdesign.cc/decolonizing-design-what-exactly-are-we-talking-about-when-we-use-the-term-b104322ef343 

Schultz, Tristan, Danah Abdulla, Ahmed Ansari, et al. 2018 What Is at Stake with Decolonizing Design? A Roundtable. Design and Culture 10(1): 81–101. 

Supernant, Kisha, Jane Eva Baxter, Natasha Lyons, and Sonya Atalay. 2020. Archaeologies of the Heart. Archaeologies of the Heart. Cham, Switzerland: Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-36350-5.

Sweeton, R. (2020, December 17). Decolonizing design. LinkedIn. Retrieved April 24, 2023, from https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/decolonizing-design-rebecca-sweeton- 

Tuck, Eve, and K. Wayne Yang. 2012. “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor.” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education and Society 1 (1): 1–40.