Laboratories of the Future: Red Power Meets Counterculture White
Friday, February 14, 2020: 2:00 PM
Private Dining Room 2 (Hilton Chicago)
This paper examines the intersections of countercultural and visionary design and Red Power—an
activist movement led by indigenous youth to promote native self-determination—through an analysis
of various design futures offered for Alcatraz Island between 1964 and 1986. Both movements emerged
in a period of experimentation in design practice that sought to articulate alternatives to modernist
progress, leveraging emergent technologies and spectacular forms of spatial practice—from shelter to
protest and occupation—to offer evocative models for living otherwise. The varying promise and
breakdown of these experiments—and their distinct design responses to a common sense of cultural
crisis—raise a series of questions about design, its politics, and its relation to difference that are urgent
today: Can design contend with its epistemic and methodological ties to Western histories, aspirations,
and violences? What is the shape of this reinvented design at the level of practice? Is design capable of
thinking for formations other than the liberated individual or the universal system? And can design
futures offer means for the flourishing of culturally autonomous community rather than the sublimation
of difference? This comparative history is instructive for its early illustration of the limitations of nowhegemonic
models of design practice born from this era, from participatory to technoutopian thinking.
The failure of visionary proposals from within the counterculture and allied practices in settler society to
accommodate aspirations emerging from within culturally sovereign movements like Red Power throws
into relief design’s continued struggle to articulate methods and discourses that foster, rather than
efface, difference.
activist movement led by indigenous youth to promote native self-determination—through an analysis
of various design futures offered for Alcatraz Island between 1964 and 1986. Both movements emerged
in a period of experimentation in design practice that sought to articulate alternatives to modernist
progress, leveraging emergent technologies and spectacular forms of spatial practice—from shelter to
protest and occupation—to offer evocative models for living otherwise. The varying promise and
breakdown of these experiments—and their distinct design responses to a common sense of cultural
crisis—raise a series of questions about design, its politics, and its relation to difference that are urgent
today: Can design contend with its epistemic and methodological ties to Western histories, aspirations,
and violences? What is the shape of this reinvented design at the level of practice? Is design capable of
thinking for formations other than the liberated individual or the universal system? And can design
futures offer means for the flourishing of culturally autonomous community rather than the sublimation
of difference? This comparative history is instructive for its early illustration of the limitations of nowhegemonic
models of design practice born from this era, from participatory to technoutopian thinking.
The failure of visionary proposals from within the counterculture and allied practices in settler society to
accommodate aspirations emerging from within culturally sovereign movements like Red Power throws
into relief design’s continued struggle to articulate methods and discourses that foster, rather than
efface, difference.