Month: November 2023

The Collaborative Challenge unit ended with a presentation of each of the 6 students’ teams about the process and outputs of their projects. The team responded to questions and received feedback from the supervisors, guest speakers and a group of MA Service Design students from LCC who will work on a similar brief in the upcoming Spring term.

Team A presented their ‘Craft Your Story’ project which responded to the ‘legacy’ brief, with a focus on entrepreneurship. The project aimed at celebrating craftsmanship and cultural heritage, decolonising education by creating more inclusive spaces, and empowering refugees through access to employment opportunities. The team created a textile book which serves as an engagement tool to foster connections and cultural exchange amongst people from diverse background.

Team B presented their ‘Shifting Identities’ project, responding to the ‘artefact’ brief of this Collaborative Challenge. The aim of their project was to express the shifting identities of refugees, showcase the beauty of cultural diversity, and inspire dialogue, understanding and appreciation of human experiences. The team delivered a co-creation workshop to customise a pair of jeans through photography, cyanotyping, painting, and embroidery on fabric patches representing the participants’ diverse layers of identity and cultures. The focus of the project on multi-layered identities and their ever-evolving nature was fascinating, and it evidenced the influence of the refugee collaborator in developing this outcome. The choice of jeans as a durable item that everyone has was interesting, but this appeared as a controversial object for a project on decolonising design and the team didn’t provide enough evidence of critical reflection on the inversion of power in this collaborative project.

Team C presented ‘The Flavour Exchange Project’ responding to the ‘storytelling’ brief of this Collaborative Challenge. The project brought together textiles and food into a storytelling campaign aimed at shifting narratives, honouring diverse cultures of refugees, and fostering social integration. As an output of a co-creation workshop involving students and refugees, the team produced a large tablecloth and a recipe book which showcase stories and traditional recipes from around the world. This was a very rich outcome; however, the team could have more critically engaged with the concept of decolonising food, and made a clearer link between food and fashion in the project.

Team D presented ‘The Creative Legacy Collective’, which responded to the ‘legacy’ brief of the Collaborative Challenge, with a focus on advocacy for policy change. The team focused on the specific needs of LGBTQI refugees and asylum seekers, who feel extremely isolated, are particularly exposed to abuse and violence, especially in the contingency hotels where they live. As an output of their project, the team created a short documentary film as part of a legacy campaign, which is intended to further develop into a network of creatives wanting to share their professional skills and work. The team has fully embraced the activist ethos of this project and produced a very beautiful and powerful output. However, they didn’t come up with policy recommendations and therefore have not fully responded to the sub-brief posed by this Collaborative Challenge.

Team E presented their project response to the ‘artefact’ brief of this Collaborative Challenge. The aim of their project was to honour and celebrate the identity and cultural heritage of the students and refugee collaborator. As an output of their project, they created a textile artefact as a patchwork that represents a sense of displacement and belonging. The project focused on the feeling of home, but this had the potential to be triggering for some people who have fled their countries or don’t feel comfortable at home. Nevertheless, the refugee collaborator gave very good feedback to the students who – according to her – collaborated in a very ethical and mature way.

Team F presented their project in response to the ‘storytelling’ brief of this Collaborative Challenge. The aim of this project was to challenge stereotypes about refugees, foster a compassionate understanding of their resilience, individuality, and highlight the importance of community support. The team created a conceptual textile artefact with a poem handwritten by the refugee collaborator, aimed at dissecting the personal and political implications the hijab holds in resisting colonial legacies. They also created a powerful short film to showcase the tumultuous past of a refugee and serving as a call to shaping a more compassionate future.

I am a member of the UAL DESIS Lab, as part of the international DESIS (Design for Social Innovation and Sustainability) network. Together with Cecilia Casas Romero, Alberto Franco Gomis, and José Manuel Chavez Muñoz (from Zaragoza), I am contributing to launching a new DESIS thematic cluster on Practice and Education in Design for Social Change. I believe this opportunity, parallel to my ARP, is a valuable opportunity to share my experience in delivering student project briefs involving vulnerable people, and gather various perspectives from other educators around the word, and receive advice to inform future developments of this important area of work.

Given the current world’s environmental, social and economic crises, it is increasingly recognised that designers can play an important role in working with vulnerable people and persons at risk of exclusion, contribute to improving their living conditions and foster social justice (Costanza-Chock, 2020). This is aligned with DESIS’s goals and this proposal for a new cluster is intended to give it an explicit space within the network. Being part of DESIS as an international network of Universities that undertake research, knowledge exchange and teaching in design for social innovation, we invited Lab members to share experiences and insights on education as a way to shape a fair transition to a better (i.e. more socially, environmentally, economically, and culturally sustainable) future. The aim of this thematic cluster is to share experiences with the purpose of framing social design practice as a set of approaches or mindsets which we can develop when designing and teaching social design, and which can complement the regular performance of the design discipline in its different facets (product design, graphic design, fashion, service design, etc). Similar to my ARP, this proposal for a DESIS cluster could focus on exploring what it means to work with students in challenging contexts that include vulnerable people (e.g. Prof. Lorraine Gamman’s work with Product Design students from UAL and inmates) and to reflect on the implications of this work for social design teaching and practice. We therefore invited DESIS Lab members to share experiences in this area and identify commonalities, differences, and potential strategic pathways for future work (e.g. workshops, talks, publications, collaborative projects, etc.). This proposal also aims to fulfil the so called ‘third mission’ (Compagnucci & Spigarelli, 2020) of Universities and engage in knowledge exchange with communities and other organisations contributing to positive social impact. This proposal for a new cluster also builds on the success of the ESDA Social Design Days from the past two years, creating a platform for discussing, collaborating, experimenting, developing, delivering, and amplifying this area of work. I look forward to participating in the III ESDA DESIS Days in March 2024 which will be the “kick off” of this new DESIS Cluster.

We gathered interested DESIS Lab members in an online meeting on 14th November to explore interest in participation and generate ideas. This was the first step to inform the plans for the III ESDA DESIS Days, in which we will then exchange experiences in teaching and practising social design, with the involvement of students, staff and wider communities. 

Below you can look up the introductory presentation we delivered, as well as the slides by other DESIS Lab members (DESIS Lab @ Nova SBE in Portugal, KNUST DESIS Lab in Ghana, and DESIS CENTRO in Mexico) who shared their projects involving vulnerable people, the challenges and opportunities experienced and their ideal next steps for the cluster. The meeting included also verbal presentations by the DESIS Lab at Design School Kolding in Denmark, Northumbria University DESIS Lab in the UK, Designmatters ArtCentre in the USA, and the Art + Design elearning lab in Cyprus.

30 people expressed interest in the DESIS cluster and 21 people attended the online meeting, which brought to the fore several issues relevant to this forum on practice and education in design for social change, particularly relevant also to my ARP engaging students and vulnerable people:

• How we define “vulnerable people” in different cultural and educational contexts?
• How do we go about if the students are “vulnerable” themselves too?
• How do we encourage students to participate in this kind of experiences (e.g. what incentives can we offer?)
• What does it mean for students to participate in these initiatives?
• How can we avoid the risk of “pedagogic tourism” and “parachuting” students into vulnerable communities?
• How can we tackle this emotionally, how can we build trust and boost empathy?
• Which are the ethical, political, educational considerations to bear in mind when we bring students together with vulnerable people?
• How can we manage the power dynamics at play when involving multiple stakeholders in such projects?
• How to deliver authenticity when there is inherent imbalance in power in these collaborative projects?
• How to manage project partners’ expectations from such student projects?
• How can we sustain these student projects, beyond the timeline of a Unit?
• How can we support students / graduates to create spin off from such projects?
• How can we evaluate the social impacts of such projects, especially beyond the timeline of a Unit?

A video recording of the full meeting is also accessible on the DESIS Network YouTube Channel: A Call for all DESIS labs, hosted by ESDA DESIS Lab

To complement the general schedule of the Collaborative Challenge with its consultancies with the project supervisors (myself and Dr Seher Mirza), I curated a programme of masterclasses to inspire the students with talks and seminars delivered by diverse guest speakers and project partners sharing their expertise in co-creation, sustainable fashion, storytelling, social entrepreneurship, and campaigning, as well as experience of working with refugees and vulnerable communities. I designed the sessions with the aim of aiding the students’ development of mindsets and skills in systems and future thinking, critical reflection, collaboration, resourcefulness, activism, creativity and collaboration.

I delivered the first session together with my colleague Prof. Helen Storey from Centre for Sustainable Fashion, UAL on 18/10/2023 at LCF East. The session was titled “Decolonising Fashion, for Emergency and Emergent Times” and was aimed at aiding the students in reflecting on their positionality, and exploring the potential to play the role of change-makers, challenging the status quo and collaborating with London-based refugees and asylum seekers in order to explore cultural, social, economic and environmental issues. Given that at the time of this session, the new LCF building hosted the ‘Designed for Life’ exhibition, which showcases my work as well as that of Helen Storey using fashion as a force for positive social change, we decided to deliver this session as an interactive guided tour of the exhibition spaces. In fact, instead of showing slides about our work, we wanted to offer the students an immersive experience and engagement with our physical work, while discussing the role of fashion to shape better lives, explore the reality of refugees, how to create reciprocal processes of learning and making, and what we can learn from refugees in terms of cultural sustainability and community resilience. It was quite an experience delivering a talk about people’s displacement while we were also transitioning to the new LCF building, and we moved around the exhibition spaces.

After the tour, we went to a classroom, where I delivered the unit briefing (see slides below) and Helen and I facilitated an interactive activity, helping the students to form teams, and reflect on the type of change (economic, social, cultural, environmental) change they wanted to create in the world and fashion system, and unpack the values, roles and skills they could contribute to the project, as well as discuss potential challenges and opportunities they could experience in this Unit.

As Helen Storey said: “We cannot ‘save’ other people, and we should never imagine we can; instead, we can fine-tune into reality as it presents itself and let it determine what needs expression, making, changing, inventing, or letting be, together”.

The second session – titled “Art / Design / Fashion as Social Practices for Social for Cultural Sustainability” – was delivered by Prof. Lucy Orta and Dr Seher Mirza from Centre for Sustainable Fashion, UAL on 01/11/2023 at LCF East.

Lucy shared her 30-years of experience as a socially engaged artist, and unpacked some of her past and current projects to exemplify participatory practice in relation to issues of identity, refuge, migration, women’s empowerment, social connections, etc. In discussing her practice focused on tackling social issues and weaving social relationships, she highlighted the value of processes as metaphors, the role of art to create social change, the importance of ethics and the challenges of evaluating social impacts of projects.

Seher’s talk focused on power and perception in design with communities, building on her own doctoral research (Mirza, 2020). She discussed the process of decolonising design, which entails critical reflection, unlearning, relearning, rethinking, and addressing colonial legacies of oppression and exploitation. She also unpacked different forms of power, as set out in Miller and VeneKlasen’s (2006) social sciences framework – power ‘over’ (outsiders controlling decision making processes), power ‘with’ people (design as collective strength), power ‘within’ (using design to build one’s sense of self-worth) and power ‘to’ (design capability to shape own life and make a difference). Seher ended the talk discussing factors influencing power dynamics in collaborative processes, such as community’s perception of the designer, positionality, body language, practice, and modes of collaborating.

The session ended with an interactive discussion about ethics in design processes, community-centred design, and storytelling. Each of the six teams also pitched their initial design concepts, and received feedback and advice from myself, Lucy and Seher to support their project developments. One highlight of the session was when one of the refugee collaborators openly shared her experience in this project:

“As a refugee, I felt like a stone. You need to find a way to share your pain, and this project is giving me an opportunity to get closer to my feelings, and turn my pain into something beautiful”.

The third session – titled “Shifting Identities and Perceptions through Ethical Storytelling” was delivered at The Lab E20 on 08/11/2023. The session was delivered by Tim Stephens, although it was initially conceived also by Kate Keara Pelen who unfortunately couldn’t join on the day due to illness. Tim facilitated a very interactive session inviting us to be present, welcoming every feelings. He challenged the concepts of power and knowledge, how they are created and shared with others, and talked about cultural difference, cultural appreciation and appropriation, intraculturality and multiculturality. In talking about ethics, he highlighted the responsibilities we – as designers and researchers – have towards others and ourselves. Tim facilitated several hands-on activities, such as knotting thoughts, feelings and sensations, writing poems about being human, turning micro-aggressions into micro-affirmations, talking and showing objects meaningful to us, and even played the drum to perform the Rumi poem “The Guest House”, which was such a memorable experience!

Tim also shared a wealth of references and resources, such as the “PALO! Al Monte” song to reference that when we are tired of being human, we need the elemental (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5hITdznu9aw), the film “My Stolen Revolution” on Iranian women activists after prison (https://www.netflix.com/title/70285606), the book “Songlines” by Chatwin (1988) on the historic conflict between the settled and the nomadic, and “The Figure of the Migrant” by Nail (2015) on the universality of the migrant and the contemporary importance of movement and migration.

In response to the Rumi poem shared by Tim, Janhvi Chopra, one student participating in this project, wrote “Being Human is a Glass House” which you can read in the image below.

The fourth masterclass – titled “Entrepreneurship with a Social Purpose” – was delivered by Sol Escobar and Sidorela Lleshi from Give Your Best at The Lab E20 on 15/11/2023. Sol shared her experience at Give Your Best, a social enterprise she founded to tackle the issue of clothing poverty faced by refugees, and with the aim of giving people choice, dignity, and a sense of agency. She shared the challenges of a non-for-profit organisation, the importance of partnerships, the role of storytelling, the power of fashion for good and catwalk shows to shift the prevailing negative narratives about refugees. In discussing the impact made on other people, Sol also reflected on the impact refugees have on herself as a person and entrepreneur. Sidorela shared her lived experience as a refugee, the issue of clothes poverty, the lack of choice, and agency, as well as the human need for kindness and love, which she found in the Give Your Best community where she volunteers. In the words of Sidorela:

“I feared being homeless after receiving the refugee status. It was a long process, but you will make it!”

The talk was followed up by an engaging Q&A with the students and refugee collaborators, and we talked about logistical aspects of the business (e.g. clothes deliveries, costs, safeguarding measures, quality control, partnerships and sponsorships, revenue generation, monitoring and communicating impacts) as well as other challenges faced by refugees (e.g. application for the refugee status, financial struggles, mobility, homelessness, nutrition, etc.).

One of the refugee collaborators openly shared his own experience of migration from Nigeria to Ukraine to the UK via Poland and Germany, and highlighted that the journey doesn’t end when you get to the UK. Another refugee collaborator attending the session was in tears listening to Sidorela, and she told me:

“It was fantastic and just what I needed. Also, hearing the speaker was very impactful and inspiring!”

The fifth and last masterclass – titled “Building Community Power and Campaigning for Policy Change” – was delivered by Froi Legaspi from Citizens UK at LCF East on 22/11/2023. Froi shared his experience as Senior Organiser at Citizens UK, discussed some examples of successful campaigns, unpacked the cycle of action, and highlighted the importance of listening and sharing stories to evidence issues and drive policy change. After framing the concept of power as ‘the ability to act’, Froi facilitated an interactive activity to highlight the need to receive support from others in order to collective change the system. When Froi asked to define the most pressing issues we would like to change in the UK system, the students and refugee collaborators focused on mental health support, right to work policy for refugees, and University fees. Froi also facilitated a ‘house meeting’, in which groups of students and refugees shared stories about the immigration system.

Some of the refugee collaborators highlighted that officers tend to abuse their power over refugees, and that campaigning can put people (especially refugees) at risk, especially in malfunctioning systems. The ‘house meeting’ brought to light a great variety of experiences from students and refugees from around the word, highlighting the timescale of the asylum seeking process, the lack of dignity, the sense of guilt that Ukrainian refugees feel for receiving the status quicker than people from other nationalities, the trauma faced by people fleeing their countries due to sexual violence, poverty and exploitation. As one of the students said:

“In the end, we are all in the same situation. I am really glad I am in this project. It gives me knowledge about living in this country”.

Since the brief involved cross-cultural collaboration with vulnerable people, I invited Adam Ramejkis (Intercultural Communication Trainer at UAL) to deliver two workshops (at The Lab E20, on 8th and 15th November 2023) on unconscious bias, positionality and ethical responsibility. Adam facilitated a session to talk about values (using Iniva‘s emotional learning cards), and a discussion on the ‘value of difference’, aimed at questioning dominant Western patriarchal values, and highlighting the importance to negotiate values within a group.

As captured in this Padlet, the workshops supported the students in challenging unconscious bias and stereotypes which are generally involved in intercultural communication, and highlighted the importance of being aware of the risk of cultural appropriation when designing with people from cultural minorities. The group discussions contributed to highlight how values can be individual but also shaped by surrounding groups (e.g. family, communities) and even national institutions. Finally, in creating slogan t-shirts, the project teams reflected on their individual and shared values, and conceptualised statement pieces as wearable manifestos, an artefact that tells a story (see Figure below).

See also:

‘Shifting the Centre: Anticolonial Ways of Seeing’ exhibition at Iniva.

The Values Project by the University of Western Australia.