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• Sarita Srivastava, OCAD University
• Charles Reeve, OCAD University

From the spinning wheel on India’s flag, to Cape Town’s Zeitz Museum of Contemporary African Art, to Victoria Kakuktinniq’s adaptations of traditional Inuit gloves and parkas—for many decades, design’s myriad forms have intersected globally with post-coloniality in the registers of the everyday, the aspirational and the institutional. Yet these vibrant cultural trajectories still struggle for inclusion in design’s historiographies. Responding to this challenge, this panel invites contributions to a conversation on why and how design histories matter in a colonial/post-colonial/decolonial frame. Can we reconsider familiar structures, systems and objects to foreground new or different relationships between things, spaces and nations? Can we anticipate how anti-colonial efforts and post-colonial conditions will inspire, enable and require new design imaginaries—new objects, structures and systems? All epochs, cultures and design practices interest us (especially if underrepresented), as do methodological interventions and discussions by practitioners of how their work confronts these problematics.

keywords: design, post-coloniality, decoloniality, history, global

session type: panel

Printed Plates and the Dish with One Spoon: The Imposition of British Property Ideals by Victorian Canadian Decorative Arts

• Vanessa Nicholas, Concordia University

Examining decorative objects featuring landscape imagery that figured in middle-class Victorian Canadian homes, including albums and printed dinner services, this paper will consider how nineteenth-century material culture contributed to the imposition of British property ideals onto Indigenous land. Punctuated with scenic vistas, the walls, parlour tables, and china cabinets of Victorian Canadians were daily reminders that their settler colonial condition was dependent upon a continual maintenance of power over Indigenous territory and its natural resources. As such, I will argue that the place of landscape imagery in the nineteenth-century Canadian home must be considered within the history of Indigenous land and its conversion to private property by the treaty system, which involved undermining the collective and reciprocal attitude towards land and resources exemplified by the Dish with One Spoon Wampum Belt Covenant struck between over thirty First Nations in the great lakes and St. Lawrence River valley region in 1701. Even those household objects that seem to idealise the remote wilderness and the ethos of conservation that emerged amongst English Canadian society towards the end of the period ultimately reinforce the imperial imperative of control since these locales were valued as recreational and industrial sites for the benefit of settler-colonial society. This paper will introduce some of the initial conclusions of my postdoctoral research on the cultural significance of natural imagery and materials in the Victorian Canadian home, a project that situates Canada’s design history within contemporary discourses on reconciliation and ecology.

keywords: Victorian, Canada, design, ecology, settler-colonialism

Design in Two Acts

• Kai Wood Mah, McEwen School of Architecture

Social order, compartmentalizing difference, and philanthropy of care are three transnational concepts of settler colonialism. Inherited from the nineteenth century, these concepts continue to inform assumptions, cultural biases and binary thinking in conceptualizing spatial order, relationality and regulation in twenty-first-century design. Imagining otherwise means asking designers and design historians to break free from settler mindsets guiding design thinking, process procedures and histories. We must perform the colonial archive to “undo,” or at least loosen, the colonial grip.

For the panel, I propose presenting part of a performance using a mix of audio-visuals, including drawings, movements and spoken word, to dismantle the ossified humanist concepts and make room for critical posthumanist and postcolonial design practice. The performance plays with the documentation of one custodial care institution for juvenile dependents from late nineteenth- century Toronto. The origins of colonial practices return us to historical sites of care for children and youth before reconfiguring current sites of care.

The first act of the performance aims to “undo” the colonial concepts through site-specific micro-installations. The second act intends to “redo” the concept of care institutions with drawings and other visual notations. The final proposed product is altogether a non-product. It’s a design practice that isn’t based on a standard, norm, best practice, or template. It isn’t about prototyping new objects but using the body, movements and senses as embodied tools to decolonize design. An unscripted, non-predetermined cache of actions of knowing, doing, and when prompted, undoing to imagine a more just world from scratch for the postcolony.

keywords: decolonizing design, settler colonialism, performance

Design otherwise, craft otherwise? Collaborative and relational practices in the production, promotion, and circulation of vernacular pottery in Oaxaca, Mexico

• Anna Hoddé, Concordia University

Looking at contemporary vernacular pottery in Oaxaca from a decolonial perspective, this communication interrogates collaborative methodologies and relational practices in clay-related projects involving artisans and designers, as a practice of design otherwise (Abdulla, 2018). I focus on initiatives led by Innovando la Tradición (IT), a social design collective involved in producing, promoting and commercializing functional pottery made primarily by Zapotec and Mixtec potters. IT promotes alternative design practices, knowledge sharing, social economy, cultural development and social transformation through clay, using methodologies based on the ethics of buen vivir. From local collaborative production to sales and exhibitions abroad, their activities sit at the confluence of various scales. While clay work operates within a global value hierarchy as a product circulating in capitalism's discursive space, it is also rooted in local ecologies and ontologies. Vernacular pottery closely relates to the living world, geographical specificities, land and territory. It is characterized by its connection to earth, water, and fire, climate and seasons, crops and farm work (Mier y Terán y Barrera Suárez, 2019). Practices based on apprenticeship through kinship, shared knowledge and collective production entail approaches of materiality and temporality set outside of Western thought's inherent dualism, linearity and anthropocentrism. This case study explores what alternative philosophies and methodologies can re-imagine the artisan-designer relationship, based on relational/decolonial ethics of care. How do such projects work towards the concretization of a craft and design “otherwise”? Considering vernacular pottery as a relational practice, I explore its potential for the unfolding of pluriversal and counter-hegemonic narratives in the field of critical craft and design studies.

keywords: pottery, social design, critical craft, relationality, decoloniality