Anti-oppressive Tools and Frameworks
Anti-Oppressive Tools and Frameworks
Experiences, artifacts, tools, and frameworks that support designers to create anti-oppressive interventions
The Politics of Design seminar, led by Chris Rudd and Jessica Jacobs, examined how design exerts politics through its creation of “preferred situations”. Through readings, discussion, and design activities, this course aimed to develop critical thinking and trigger uncomfortable discussions around the following questions:
How do design and designers intersect with social and cultural sources of power and authority?
How do design decisions affect the distribution of resources and opportunities?
How do design and designers extend practices of oppression and exploitation?
How might design and designers create for a just world?
How might we ethically and responsibly engage with design and this power?
As the final project, students had to explore the question of how designers intervene in the midst of exploitation and oppression. How might we create an experience, artifact, tool, framework, and/or service that helps other designers to create anti-oppressive designs?
The approaches developed by students functioned at the project, institutional, or societal level — or several levels at once.
See below some samples of their work.
Faculty Leads:
Chris Rudd
Jessica Jacobs
Class:
Politics of Design
Students:
Harini Balasubramanian
Kanal Chhajed
Tommie Collins
Audrey Gordon
Kie Ichikawa
Lavanya Julaniya
Mithila Kedambadi Prasanna
Katherine Petersen
Adithya Ravi
Julia Rochlin
Prachi Saxena
McKinley Sherrod
Julian Walker
Catherine Wieczorek
A New Design Approach by Katherine Petersen
Designing for equity. This framework intends to name oppressive forces and hold designers accountable for the lasting impact of their work. It is applied as an overlay to Nessler's Revamped Double Diamond. While progressing through the process, designers encounter a series of stop gates. Visually displayed as bars, symbolizing imprisonment, designers release these bars only after they gather ethical implications of the oppressive forces related to their project. All designs coming through this process will be accountable to user's equity evaluations. This builds power among those who experience oppression and are often voiceless.
This course assumed the power of design and exposed the responsibility of designers. I intend to use this awareness and intentionality in my design process moving forward.
“This course assumed power of design and exposed the responsibility of designers. I intend to use this awareness and intentionality in my design process moving forward.”
- Katie Petersen
Ribeiro Toolkit by Julia Rochlin
A diagram holds political agency. This is a crowd-sourced toolkit with a collection of elements that enables you to design a different kind of diagram. One that is crafted to privilege marginal narratives and to challenge neutral protocols of visual representations. New perspectives and visual strategies are required not only to expand people’s perceptions about the representation at play but also to provide alternative directions for diagramming more thoughtfully.
This is the first edition of Ribeiro cards that are formatted in a way that can also be printed. It is a work in progress that aims to support designers, architects, artists, cartographers, geographers, researchers, activists, and others, to explore and develop ways of constructing visual manifestos to tell inconvenient stories that upset and resist the status quo.
This is for everyone who is working against representations of a dominant idea that hides stories and realities.
Crip-ing' Design Thinking Workshops by Prachi Saxena
Reimagining workshops by proposing a toolkit inspired by crip theory and critique
Taking inspiration from crip theory, which questions the able-centrist dominant narratives, this project poses a simple toolkit for planning a design session. Design sessions involve planning out activities, time considerations, tools to be used, with the ultimate goal of consensus building to reach new ideas, solutions, innovations, etc.
Inherent in there are unchecked assumptions.
Activities are linear, distinct, and bounded.
Time is collective, focused, and rational.
Materials that are visual & verbal centric are the best to unlock creativity.
Consensus is possible and beneficial.
This toolkit provides provocations to include when planning your session and a scorecard to evaluate and reflect on learnings. In no way is the toolkit aiming to be exhaustive - it is just one step in questioning the inherent assumptions that build our most fundamental design methodologies - a design thinking workshop.
“This class was unique in the discourses it introduced within the design space, a space which often feels sterile. These discourses included racism, oppression, and feminist narrative. As someone who had been comfortable engaging in these discussions from a social science perspective, I hadn’t expected that in a design context the stakes would suddenly feel so much higher, with meaningful change seeming further beyond our reach.
The class really clicked for me around the final project, even though it was only a couple of weeks of work. In many ways, it was great to see how easy it is to channel critique into imagining things afresh; the tangibility of our final projects was welcome after how spiraling the class discussions had often been. The social sciences miss out on this tangibility, but design offers it and requires it.”
— Prachi Saxena