Design Studies Program Adjunct Assistant Professor. University of Illinois at Chicago School of Design
Creating and facilitating the Design studio class about Participatory Design and Co-design: Perspectives from the Global South
I am excited by sharing the Popular Education (Freire 1979 ) approach as part of a participatory design course. Students from the BA in design program at the UIC School of Design reflected on how they perceive themselves in their communities, bringing their stories, experiences, and cultural backgrounds into the design process. They created a common language to discuss social isolation, identified as an essential topic for the collaborative approach. We applied tools from the Design of the Oppressed Network that allowed us to discuss our role as designers in our culture and how we reinforce and promote social changes.
Students developed an iterative co-design process to build on their collective experiences. One of the results is the Creative Conversation tool: a collaborative card game with the objective of reshaping the design school landscape. During the last month, students, staff, and faculty from the UIC School of Design participated in the game implementation, generating an open conversation among participants, who reflected on their community and imagined positive tactics to strengthen it. We finished our participatory process, including implementation feedback with a final version of this open-source tool.
Adjunct Assistant Professor for the Graduate Studies program en University of Illinois Chicago, College of Architecture, Design and Art
- Creating and facilitating the graduation seminar Participatory Design and Co-design: Perspectives from the Global South
My experience facilitating the graduate course Participatory Design and Co-design: Perspectives from the Global South, has been a fantastic opportunity to learn from new participants and share my previous collaborative work with indigenous communities in Mexico and Ecuador. We have implemented a participatory approach in design processes with a great group of graphic and industrial designers from the UIC School of Design. We applied insights from popular education and action research that bring to light essential issues experienced by the student community. Then participants co-designed visual tools that promote awareness of these topics to amplify a social conversation within the School of Design community. Ultimately, implementing the participatory interventions aims to imagine future possibilities and design collective actions. #design #education #community
To learn about participant’s processes, you can follow the links:
Food Routine action research group
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1_fhMKjf7DWE6l_a0spnObeUBdj5Vvxtv
Commute to UIC action research group
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1RFOJRTbNhujS_ru3-KaJyyd2Z-Uvy7d_
Seminar description
Explore and learn methods of participatory design (PD) and co-design which follow the popular education (PE) approach developed by Brazilian educator Paulo Freire. These collaborative methods incorporate an egalitarian dialogue between participants and facilitator; both are considered critical thinkers who are recognized in their capacity to make, create and transform through a praxis (action/reflection) model. In this way, students will experience and learn how to integrate PD with their professional practice, which will promote empowerment in the social sphere by including all people involved in their process.
We will explore methods including game design, sensory cartography and community mappings among other visual tools, to support a co-design process that incorporates expressive media. We will identify PE concepts fundamental to its methodology such as the generative theme, which according to Freire ¨is characterized by a complex of ideas, concepts, hopes, doubts, values and challenges in dialectical interaction with their opposites striving towards their fulfillment¨. The concrete representation of these generative themes are linked with participants’ interest in finding a common praxis. Discussions will be held with an emphasis on authors and design projects from Latin America to help us interpret and understand decolonizing perspectives of the PD practices that will integrate knowledge and practices from the Global South.
Assistant Professor of Visual Communication, Branding and Editorial design 01/01/2018 – 02/29/2020
San Francisco de Quito University, School of Communication and Contemporary Arts, Quito, Ecuador
First liberal-arts institution in the Andean region with 9,000+ students and 300 full-time faculty
- Instructed 80+ introductory-level students in implementing graphic design thinking and participatory design methods in education
- Developed tools such as interviews, focus groups, visual brainstorming, mind mapping, visual research, empathy maps, FODA analysis and business models to promote research and develop projects applicable for solving practical problems
- Prepared classes following the curricula for multiple subjects including: Visual communication, branding, editorial design, and graphic production
Students portfolio: School of Communication and Contemporary Arts, San Francisco de Quito University, Quito, Ecuador
Lucía Garcés Dávila 