Anne West GD3 Thesis Workshop

I am:
Using design to tell stories I am interested in. For me these stories are rooted in intersectional experiences of being a woman/Mexican and “White”/of a specific time and place.

Because I want to find out:
What it is like to see your own lived experience reflected back at you through the lens of thoughtfully considered design.

So I can:
Teach other people how to tell the stories they are interested in.

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I am:
Interested in finding ways to remove barriers and expand access to design education. Crashing the gates, and shoving as many people as I can through.

Because I want to find out:
What happens when the population creating visual communication is a mirrored reflection of the people consuming visual communication? I suspect the result will be a reduction in the systemic harm design is a part of scaffolding and perpetuates.

So I can:
Contribute to solving problems as opposed to perpetuating them, and alleviate the anxiety and existential dread I feel every day when I look at the most dystopic parts of humanity.

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I am:
Building a framework that makes space for a diverse population of designers to learn how to become design authors.

Because I want to find out:
What kind of future we can build when we are empowered to invent design artifacts as opposed to only practicing design as labor—where the clients are primarily interested in the fast and disposable?

So I can:
Bear witness to what is possible when we have access to a more balanced narrative around what being a human is like.

FEEDBACK NOTES:
The benefits of speed can come at the cost of quality/enrichment.
This could work if the community can agree to cooperate towards a common goal. (consent/ consensus)
How will this ensure equity to all parties?
Identifying a space as “safe” is not something the person at the top of a hierarchy can do—that is an individual perspective belonging to each person in the room. We can do our best to support safety, but we cannot guarantee it for each person in the room—because free will be free willin’.
No one is entitled to our stories.
Do not mistake entitlement for an invitation to intimacy. The person inviting you to tell them about your deepest secrets and trauma while they get up to make popcorn.

THIS QUESTION DRIVES ME FUCKING NUTS IN THE BEST WAY:

Do the “non-benefitting” or “non-marginalized” parties need to be considered?

Reflection

Parable of the Sower

  • Lauren describes “Earthseed” as an act of discovery, not invention. I think this is how I feel about everything I create—which is also probably driven by the fact that I can’t “create” images in my mind.

  • Learning not to say everything you know out loud. Holy Shit, I feel seen. This has been a lifelong struggle for me.

  • Does the secret society of oppressors have a dystopic book club where they figure out what we fear most…and then do that?

  • This book hits different I suspect for those of us who are native Angelenos. I live in the suburbs of LA, in the neighborhoods Lauren’s journey begins in. Except for the brief and miserable year that I tolerated living in San Francisco—I’ve lived here my whole life. I have watched it move through seasons of dystopia and renewal, but Butler’s dystopia is deeply unsettling in how similar her 2024 conditions are to our real 2024 conditions.

  • Someone mapped Lauren’s journey: https://uploads.knightlab.com/storymapjs/17d4e3ebc9ba6280b11694156ede825d/parable-of-the-sower-section-01-02/index.html

  • In Octavia Butler’s novel, she describes two hordes responsible for the downfall of America. the first is corporate greed, and the second is hordes of humans driven to violence and insanity by a powerful narcotic that was originally designed by pharmaceutical companies to treat Alzheimer’s disease. it’s not far off from Los Angeles (and many other places) in 2024.

  • There are two “hordes” that are blamed for the downfall of Los Angeles “Tech Bros” and “Junkies” would be the least gracious description. The root of the existence of these two populations is directly tied to government and policy. Gavin Newsom has enabled the tech gentrification of California through policy, which has displaced large populations of people who were BORN in the neighborhoods they are being pushed out of. While the unhoused experience extremely high rates of substance abuse disease/ disorders—data shows that the drugs follow the feeling of despair that comes from losing your housing and being subjected to the violence of living on the street. In Los Angeles our unhoused population is not a RESULT of substance, the substances are a result of being unhoused, which is a result of unchecked gentrification by big tech and corporate landlords. Unchecked capitalist exploitation is enabling what feels like a return to feudalism.

  • “Create no images of God. Accept the images that God has provided. They are everywhere, in everything. God is Change— Seed to tree, tree to forest; Rain to river, river to sea; Grubs to bees, bees to swarm. From one, many; from many, one; Forever uniting, growing, dissolving— forever Changing. The universe is God’s self-portrait.” In many Abrahamic religions, the creation of images of God is forbidden. when I first heard this idea it blew my Catholic mind—I couldn’t fathom praying to a god with no image of HIM to behold—later I realized that this is part of what makes the Catholic brand so strong, and also drives so much division along religious lines. We keep fighting over who God is, who is favored (and who isn’t), who God has entitled land, rights, and free-passes on immoral behavior too.

  • He told them many things in parables, saying:
    “A farmer went out to sow his seed. 4 As he was scattering the seed, some fell along the path, and the birds came and ate it up. 5 Some fell on rocky places, where it did not have much soil. It sprang up quickly, because the soil was shallow. 6 But when the sun came up, the plants were scorched, and they withered because they had no root. 7 Other seed fell among thorns, which grew up and choked the plants. 8 Still other seed fell on good soil, where it produced a crop—a hundred, sixty or thirty times what was sown. 9 Whoever has ears, let them hear.”

  • I’ve always argued that the statement “seek and ye shall find” is a blessing and a warning at the same time. The Bible is an epic MC full of double entendre and dialectics. I’ve come to understand the meaning of this instruction as:
    The blessing: “If you search the pages for peace, comfort, wisdom…you will find it.”
    The warning: “If you search the pages for a justification of violence and oppression…you will find that too.”
    Ultimately the fate of everything lies in our free will. Our blessing of that free will comes with consequences for the oppressed and the oppressor when it is not well exercised. What we shape, and how it will shape us. Octavia Butler’s book is a beautiful illustration of the blessing of seeking and finding or as she says discovering instead of inventing. It’s very much what I mean when I talk about seeing the image of God in creative work.

Reflection

Mutual Aid
By Dean Spade

  • Mutual Aid is a core value for many cultures - unfortunately it also not a core value for many cultures. To some, it is a wild and crazy idea “radical.” To others it’s just being a reg ass good human who does what is right to support communal health.

  • I think there is a relationship between how interconnected you understand yourself to be and how obvious the idea of mutual aid seems.

  • Maslows “read” on the American Colonizer is a salve to the soul:

“To most Blackfoot members, wealth was not important in terms of accumulating property and possessions: giving it away was what brought one the true status of prestige and security in the tribe. At the same time, Maslow was shocked by the meanness and racism of the European-Americans who lived nearby. As he wrote, “The more I got to know the whites in the village, who were the worst bunch of creeps and bastards I’d ever run across in my life, the more it got paradoxical.”

  • Deservingness Hierarchies is a word I have been looking for! I’ve thought about it as inequitable expectations of excellence or trading excellence for the right to exist where others can exist and be total poo-heads.

  • I appreciate a simple chart that makes reaching group consensus feel less impossible. I’m interested in trying it out!

My favorite quote so far:
The false separation of politics and injustice from ordinary life and the idea that activism is a kind of style accessory demobilizes our movements, hides the root cause of injustice, and keeps us passive and complicit. Robust social movements offer, an opposing view. We argue that all aspects of our lives where and how we live and work, eat, entertain ourselves, get around and get by our sites of injustice and potential resistance. At their bst social movements create vibrant social networks in which we work in a group. and have friendships, make art have sex, mentor and parent children feed ourselves and each other build radical land, and housing experiments and inspire each other about cultivating liberation in all spaces of our lives. Activism and mutual aid shouldn’t feel like volunteering, charity, or like a hobby. It should feel like living in alignment with our hopes for the world and with our passions. It should enliven us.

Reflection

I’ve been thinking quite a bit about
the term ›pedagogy‹

Lisa Baumgarten, Teaching.Design

I found Lisa Baumgarten and teaching. design through a Futuress post and I am instantly obsessed. I started with this article, and plan to dig more into what she and her collaborators are sharing. She is doing so much of what I am doing and interested in doing. She offers writing, and sharing of resources, and facilitates collaboration and conversation as a means of tackling the collective learning curve that teaching design comes with—when there is no teaching training required before entering a classroom.

Sections of this article that are especially connecting to my thoughts as I continue to develop the Imago DEIsign teaching project:

The philosopher Anne-Marie Willis sums up the concept of ontological design beautifully when she writes: »we design our world, while our world acts back on us and designs us.«

According to Escobar the current »interrelated crises of climate, food, energy, poverty and meaning« of our contemporary world, can be traced back to a »massive design failure«.

{Both of these pieces connect back to The Parable of the Sower, “What we change, changes us. God is change.”}

“Could a single design pedagogy be enough for the plurality of lived realities humans bring into teaching-/learning spaces? As I said, We are not speaking about design pedagogy enough. Not only the „how“ we teach but also how this »how« came to be. For the critical pedagogue Paolo Freire  – and I am quoting Michelle Teran again – »curricular content and educational setting must be intimately linked with an overall plan for society. Education must not be made for the people, but with the people […]. Education is a form of world-building.«
So going back to my initial question: How is design education shaping our ways of being in the world? And why is it important to think about and discuss?”

{I love these questions.}

At the same time, designers who become educators have all been through the bottleneck of design education before – something you intuitively draw from when you start teaching design. Until I started teaching, I had never wondered why my design teachers taught the way they did, not differently. I never wondered: who were they influenced by? So even though I felt like my teaching was non-referential, now I know that the way I learned design was strongly influenced by interpretations of the Bauhaus and HFG Ulm. Without much reflection on my part, this foundation shaped my approach to teaching. But is this the way I want to teach? This dilemma is what activist, researcher and educator Michelle Teran calls »the unwanted baggage that once unpacked (even unwittingly) end[s] up filling and dominating the space of one’s own classrooms and undertakings as teachers.«” {There is something extremely validating in hearing a designer who is German, also critique how unquestioningly embedded the Bauhaus is in design education. This is probably connected to encountering white folks in the design world who defend it so ferociously, and the read between the lines is they believe wokeness is coming for “their” stuff. You can low-key tell that for some critiquing Bauhaus is a perceived form of reverse racism.}

THIS >> 30 PAGE GOOGLE DOC

Things to remember

TEACHING FOR UNDERSTANDING

Hospitality - Yvette Latunde