Decolonizing Design Practices: Towards Pluriversality

Decolonizing discourses teach us that we need to move away from the universalizing ‘grand narratives’ of knowledge production and focus on contextualizing diverse and situated experiences, epistemologies and narratives. Yet, few contributions actively demonstrate what a shift to decolonizing design means in practice. Participatory Design (PD) approaches are particularly well-suited to contributing to contemporary debates of decolonization in design due to PD’s long-standing political traditions and values of equality and empowerment, but even here empirical methods and techniques to fully realize pluriversality in design are lacking. In line with the CHI 2021 theme of Making Waves. Combining Strengths, this interactive workshop will invigorate the debates and practices in HCI of decolonization by bringing together and demonstrating how designers and researchers in diverse global contexts are working with and adapting modes, concepts, methodologies and sensibilities into decolonizing design practices. Not only will this workshop provide new ways of thinking in HCI but also fuse theories and practices to develop truly transcultural approaches to HCI.

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