Decolonizing design education by flipping the directionality in international design collaborations

The narrative around international collaborations using design and design thinking often relies on the assumption that the expertise comes from the partner from a developed country, who is supporting a partner in a developing country. In this workshop, we wanted to disrupt the design savior narrative by intentionally flipping the direction of the collaboration. Students at an American university collaborated with students at a university in the Caribbean. A scenario was created where the students from the Caribbean were hired by a consulting firm to understand a social problem of the Acirema people, drawing inspiration from Miner's popular anthropology text "Body Rituals of the Nacirema". Instead of focusing on the entire design process, this class focused on the tension and unfamiliar roles that the students played. The American students expressed their discomfort at being 'studied' at several points during the two-session design workshop. This paper is useful to help other educators create learning experiences that help students examine their positionality, privilege, and biases, while also creating a space for them to practice humility and reflect on power dynamics in design work in a very intentional way.