Teaching Design – Infrequent Newsletter #5

Dear design teachers/learners and bibliography-lovers,

thanks for subscribing (or staying subscribed) to this mailing list and following the research project! 

This edition is curated in collaboration with Mio Kojima, a German-Japanese designer, researcher, educator, and co-director of the intersectional feminist platform Futuress.org. The two of us met in April at the student-organized Respekt und Revolte symposium at Peter Behrens School of Arts, Düsseldorf, Germany. While speaking about intersectional feminist approaches to design education, we shared a moment of appreciation

of our networks that provide us with a sense of connection and mutual support, especially in times where dealing with structural inequalities, oppression, and discrimination overwhelms us. However, allyships, too, can be fragile at times. Collaborating and communing often clashes with our neoliberal and capitalistic realities. 

So this newsletter is about collective practices, working through and across differences, and embracing friction and disagreement.

Warm wishes and until next time,
Mio and Lisa

Workshop

Recipes for Connecting Through Critical Design Pedagogy

Last Sunday Lisa facilitated a workshop to share, connect, make a salad, discuss power structures in art schools, zoom in/out and to develop concrete strategies for an open teaching/learning space. The group came up with various "recipe" ideas to connect through critical design pedagogy: from creating a collaborative code of conduct to cultivating an open door policy, spatial transformation and co-presence, to recipes for giving feedback, taking a break and learning from and with each other.

The workshop took place in the course of the exhibit Recipes for Connecting by the A–Z Collective at A–Z Presents in Berlin.
 

Added to the bibliography

Alex Martinis Roe: To Become Two – Propositions for Feminist Collective Practice. Berlin: Archive Books, 2018.

"…their [the Milan Women’s Bookstore Collective’s] experiences were the basis for the ideas that they used devise those practices. Theirs is a way of doing collective politics, where the collective force of the women’s movement is not dismantled by individualism, but also where the difference of each participant in that movement is part of it. As I thought further about this kind of politics, I began to call it ‘collective difference’ or ‘solidarity-in-difference—a way of being and acting together that did not demand consensus or the same identity."

"For the joy of being together, they didn’t have to agree." 
 

adrienne maree brown: Emergent Strategy. Edinburgh: AK Press, 2017.

"When we are engaged in acts of love, we humans are at our best and most resilient. [...] Love leads us to observe in a much deeper way than any other emotion."
 

Anja Groten: Figuring Things Out Together. On the Relationship Between Design and Collective Practice. Leiden University, 2022.

"[collectives] are mutable and at times fragile structures that, notwithstanding, manage to hold together fragmented practices, multiple places, schedules and economies. Such collectives are constantly in-the-making, and along the way."

"Collective design [...] challenges notions of individual authorship, differentiations between disciplines, between product and process or between the user and maker. [...] [C]ollective practice is not to be understood as a design method, or an antidote to an individualistic approach. [...] As fragmented and permeable configurations, collectives take shape in response to the various contexts within which they travel, and in turn are implicated in such contexts."

→ Access the doctoral thesis here.
 

bell hooks: Teaching to Transgress. New York: Routledge, 1994.

"But excitement about ideas was not sufficient to create an exciting learning process. As a classroom community, our capacity to generate excitement is deeply affected by our interest in one another, in hearing one another's voices, in recognizing one another‘s presence. Since the vast majority of students learn through conservative, traditional educational practices and concern themselves only with the presence of the professor, any radical pedagogy must insist that everyone's presence is acknowledged. That insistence cannot be simply stated. It has to be demonstrated through pedagogical practices. To begin, the professor must genuinely value everyone's presence. There must be an ongoing recognition that everyone influences the classroom dynamic, that everyone contributes. These contributions are resources. Used constructively they enhance the capacity of any class to create an open learning community. Often before this process can begin there has to be some deconstruction of the traditional notion that only the professor is responsible for classroom dynamics. That responsibility is relative to status. Indeed, the professor will always be more responsible because the larger institutional structures will always ensure that accountability for what happens in the classroom rests with the teacher. It is rare that any professor, no matter how eloquent a lecturer, can generate through his or her actions enough excitement to create an exciting classroom. Excitement is generated through collective effort. Seeing the classroom always as a communal place enhances the likelihood of collective effort in creating and sustaining a learning community."

Jenny Richards, Jens Strandberg: (Home Works) – A Cooking Book Recipes for Organising with Art and Domestic Work. Eindhoven: Onomatopee 187, 2020. 

"The key to this recipe is that there is no way of knowing the outcome. Pay attention to the details and use all your senses. Listening is an active activity, do not try to hear what you want to hear, but listen to the process and allow it to grow and unfold beyond your expectation. Who will take part in the work? Who is it for? Invite collaborators at an early stage so you can develop the process collectively, learn from each other and establish a shared language and desire."

Recommended by Judith Leijdekkers.
 

Untitled Poem by Beth Strano, April 22, 2022.

"Read this poem by Beth Strano with your students to consider what a brave classroom community looks like."

→ Access the poem here.

Found through the website of *foundationClass at Weißensee Kunsthochschule Berlin.
 

Binna Choi, Annette Krauss, Yolande van der Heide, Liz Allan (ed): Unlearning Exercises: Art organizations as Sites of Unlearning. Utrecht: Casco Art Instiute and Amsterdam: Valiz, 2018.

"We want to practice and understand the commons as more than a pool of resources, but as a value system, set of governing principles, and a way toward counter-hegemonic relations."

Feminist Health Care Research Group

"As artistic research project the Feminist Health Care Research Group (FHCRG) develops exhibitions, workshops and publishes zines. It aims to create space in which we can share vulnerability with each other, center (access) needs and break through the competitive mode of working in the arts. FHCRG questions the internalized, ableist concept of productivity that is rewarded in the art field.
In their practice FHCRG aims to develop self-empowering feminist perspectives on health care. Their recent project Practices of Radical Health Care (since 2018) is dedicated to the health movement which had emerged at the intersection of second wave feminism and the squatting scene in West-Berlin during the seventies and eighties. Working with found and archived documents, interviews and workshops FHCRG aims to retrieve and archive radical practices of mutual care of the health movement and actualize them in the frame of intergenerational exchange and workshops with today's health care activists, cultural workers and feminist and activist predecessors."

→ Learn more about the Feminist Health Care Research Group.
 

Active Listening. In: Precarious Workers Brigade: Training for Exploitation? Politicising Employability and Reclaiming Education. London / Leipzig / Los Angeles: Journal of Aesthetics & Protest Press, 2017, p. 30.

"Active listening can be used to explore a personal and/or affective dimension of an issue. You might, for example, introduce it after watching a video or reading a case study that deals with pertinent issues around free labour, affective labour, debt or precarity."

→ Access the publication here.
→ Learn more about the Precarious Workers Brigade.
 

ongoing Open Call

We invite contributions from you; design educators, students, alumni, researchers, pedagoges, enthusiasts and others to submit and share the sources which are reference points and/or inspiration to your practice! Your contribution will be published in our infrequent newsletter and in our text-based bibliography.

→ Find out how to contribute here.
 

Info

Teaching Design started as a collectively gathered bibliography focusing on design education from intersectional feminist and decolonial perspectives. Since its launch in September 2019, it has expanded into conversational formats, workshops, a temporary library and a space for reflections, which all has led to the platform in its current form. 

→ Learn more about the research project here.

Currently the bibliography as well as this newsletter is curated and edited by Lisa Baumgarten unless mentioned otherwise.