Practicing Sustainable, Equity-Based Design in Marginalized Communities: Experiences from the Field

A number of approaches to design such as Participatory Design, Co-Design, and more recently, Transition Design, seek to promote a new understanding of how design is practiced––a practice that is aligned with concepts of self-determination, decolonization, place and equity-based values, and sustainability, among others. Structuring new design practices under these conceptualizations and values requires, among other things, the sharing of a common design framework. Such framework calls for the distillation of key design aspects into a model, simple enough to be taught to audiences with no technical or design expertise, and sufficiently complex to be scaffolded in accordance to cultural, material, economic, and infrastructure realities. Moreover, practicing and embodying these new ways of engaging in design when collaborating with marginalized communities, requires re-thinking traditional frameworks within design education.This presentation shares experiences from five iterations of a model exploring these ideas, implemented in Colombia in partnership with waste-pickers, rural farmers, indigenous peoples, and former guerrilla combatants. This presentation highlights challenges and tools created in the process of adapting established design practices to these contexts, as well as how design values and expectations are negotiated between designers and community members.