DECOLONIZING DESIGN WHILE CREATING SOCIAL IMPACT

This episode is all about design! I am talking about design for social impact, design education and plurality of design pedagogy. And our guest today is Lesley Anne Noel, Professor of Practice; Associate Director, Design Thinking for Social Impact at Phyllis M. Taylor Center for Social Innovation and Design Thinking. She is a Trinidadian designer, educator and an advocate of plurality in design. We touch on the topics of curiosity, social Impact & pluriversal design.

This episode is all about design! I am talking about design for social impact, design education and plurality of design pedagogy. And our guest today is Lesley Anne Noel, Professor of Practice; Associate Director, Design Thinking for Social Impact at Phyllis M. Taylor Center for Social Innovation and Design Thinking.

Some key take aways:

Design thinking is a way of solving problems in a certain way. It’s about creative problem solving. In her practice as a design educator she works with non-designers from social impact space to utilize design thinking to solve social problems—that is social impact design. And in social impact design the value generation is not about profits but about generating social change.
On BLM movement: “Everything is political, even the choice of not doing anything, that's a political choice. So for me It's hard to separate political agency or political ideas from the world that we're in or the work that we do as designers.”
Design’s role in the society: “Our design work is not neutral. And we have to think about what are we designing? Who are the people we're designing for? How do these problems impacts the people that we're designing for? Things happen in context and we have to acknowledge the context is happening around people.”
There is a lack of awareness among designers and design students about critical theory concepts and vocabulary, which inhibits them from designing with a critical social lens. For that reason she created The Designer’s Critical Alphabet as a way to teach it.
On Pluriversal Design: “The design education around the world so similar because it is based on the Eurocentric model, primarily the Bauhaus. It is devoid of the local context, people. And that is where the need for pluriversal design comes in. It is about giving people space to share the many different types of design practice that they do. Design as a field has enough flexibility that we can have individual practices that we can draw on to inform the way we do things.”
Her design philosophy: “As a design educator the goal is to get people to a space of flexibility openness, curiosity, collaboration, and these are the things that are much more interesting to me than teaching a prescriptive process.”

You can learn more about A Designer’s Critical Alphabet here.

Lesley-Ann Noel, PhD is the Associate Director for Design Thinking for Social Impact and Professor of Practice at the Phyllis M. Taylor Center for Social Innovation and Design Thinking at Tulane University. She practices design through emancipatory, critical and anti-hegemonic lenses, focusing on equity, social justice and the experiences of people who are often excluded from design education, research and practice.