| Author: | Navarrete Rigo, Andrea |
| Title: | Autonomous design as a decolonial tool |
| Advisors: | Hasdell, Peter (SD) Ng, Sandy (SD) |
| Degree: | Ph.D. |
| Year: | 2024 |
| Subject: | Design -- Social aspects Social planning Hong Kong Polytechnic University -- Dissertations |
| Department: | School of Design |
| Pages: | xix, 328 pages : color illustrations |
| Language: | English |
| Abstract: | This study argues that there is an urgent need to embrace Autonomous Design, especially for socially engaged designers who collaborate or work directly with vulnerable communities or subaltern groups. This is because Autonomous Design is framed by solid decolonial notions and narratives that foster the reorientation of rationalistic and nondualist ways of thinking, doing, and relating. Simultaneously, it promotes co-creative paths for social construction, and most importantly, it enables other ways of being to emerge and prosper. In recent years decolonial thinking has propagated into various disciplines, including the design field. However, very few authors have challenged socially engaged design or Social Design by looking at these practices through decolonial lenses. This a task that should be taken seriously because Social Design arose as a design practice with the intent of alleviating poverty and fulfilling basic needs through design in marginalised communities, which increased the action field for designers within development and humanitarian programmes. Even though it is broadly accepted that development and globalisation have had a net positive impact on society, this had disproportionately benefitted those in the upper echelons. Development and globalisation have imposed destructive productive and consumerist patterns and have generated pressured for a homogeneity of social behaviours that endangers the local cultures, knowledge, and creative expressions that are the primary sources for alternatives to development. Social Design intends to solve some of these problems through the rhetoric of development, misunderstanding inequality as a structural problem and perpetuating the western notion of problem-solving. This research intends to address the reasons and possible paths to transcend Social Design and move toward Autonomous Design, in which design is considered an autonomous means to rearticulate what was fractured by the colonial project and perpetuated by modern society. Through two studies, this dissertation examined why and how Autonomous Design could be embraced and promoted so that a community can imagine, explore, and construct or relink forms of doing and thinking to sustain and thrive in a globalised world by (1) constructing a decolonial perspective around development, (2) engaging in participatory and social ways of learning, and (3) transforming social groups into autopoietic systems. In the first study, I analyse three case studies across Mexico, where, to different degrees, autonomy, design, and development are interdependent notions that have created the circumstances, conditions, and strategies for Autonomous Design to flourish and justified the need to transcend Social Design based on the contributions and expressions of Autonomous Design. In the second study, I address, using participatory action research, how Autonomous Design could be nurtured by promoting social learning and systems thinking, highlighting the contribution of design to imagining alternative ways of being, thinking, and doing. Additionally, the study suggested an alternative methodological proposal for designers to interact with, facilitate, and mediate in communities. This research demonstrated that Autonomous Design could articulate alternatives to development, create adequate conditions for life projects to emerge, support social construction, and restructure power dynamics. Finally, the study suggested possible future lines of research that could lead to the betterment of socially engaged designers by embracing participatory action research and fostering alternatives to development by further examining the interrelationship between autonomy, design, and development. |
| Rights: | All rights reserved |
| Access: | open access |
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