This month, we are featuring the work of Valérie Lechêne & Lindsay Miller, who are DJN members who both attended Dr. Lesley-Ann Noel’s DJN Member Stories Share session. (These are informal sessions for DJN members to talk about their work and how it intersects with design justice and the design justice principles! They share a written, text or oral/video story, and present about it with/for other DJN members. Joining and participating in these member story sharing sessions is one of DJN's member benefits!)

Valérie Lechêne wrote the article below, and Lindsay Miller drew the illustrations and supported with documentation. Read more about them below - and please check out the amazing article and illustrations! Thank you also to other volunteers who helped document/take notes during this session: Will Denton, Aki Younge, and Anna Chung. (If we’ve missed you - please email us at designjusticenetwork@gmail.com).

Valérie Lechêne - Val practices design, research, and organizing at the nexus of climate action, housing justice, and information architecture. Among other activities, she is an active member of The-Architecture-Lobby where she co-organizes the Architects Beyond Capitalism school and the campaign for an internationalist just transition (Green New Deal). She loves the poetry of Stella Nyanzi.

Lindsay Miller - Lindsay Miller is an applied technology and video game design researcher and artist/illustrator working out of San Diego, CA in the USA. She loves finding spaces where her design research and illustration skills can intersect, especially to support the creation of more accessible and inclusive futures. You can learn more about her applied design research work here or her illustration here.

If you are a DJN member doing interesting work, and would like to be featured in a future newsletter or blog post, please email us at designjusticenetwork@gmail.com.

Critical Utopian Action Research: Member Story Session with Dr. Lesley Ann-Noel

How can our dreams become a reality? My participation in DJN’s member session with Dr. Lesley-Ann Noel provided insights and tools to answer this question; in turn, this report-back text encapsulates my experience, reflections, and takeaways.

Critical alphabet

Lesley-Ann Noel is the author of, among other things, an evolving design researcher’s critical alphabet which both introduces fundamental critical theory concepts and interpellates towards their application through action. The critical alphabet associates the letter P with positionality, a concept paramount to her approach.

Positionality as methodology

Positionality happens in self-analyzing and objectifying one’s biases within a specific design research context. It consists in describing, portraying, and articulating the qualities characteristic of one’s context of belonging in relation to the context for which design research is performed. As such, a positionality statement foregrounds the worldview of the design researcher, reveals its situated partiality, and acknowledges kinship with the framework studied. In a reversal of roles, it objectifies the situatedness of the design researcher, thus providing a significant opportunity to reflect on and incrementally shift power away from the colonial matrix of domination.

Screenshot Image: On the left - black slide background with blue square. On the blue square, written in white reads: “Positionality: Positionality is the practice of a researcher delineating their own position in relation to a research context. A p… — Screenshot Image: On the left - black slide background with blue square. On the blue square, written in white reads: “**Positionality**: Positionality is the practice of a researcher delineating their own position in relation to a research context. A positionality statement can also help designers reveal their own biases and understand who they are and how that affects the solutions that they propose. How does your positionality affect how you approach a specific design task or problem?” - on the right, scnreeshot image of Lesley-Ann Noel, wearing a black touque, burgundy scarf, black top and headphones.

To introduce herself to other members of the Design Justice Network, Lesley-Ann performed positionality. She delineated her peregrinations across various parts of the Global South to bring to light her perception of the Global North. Descriptions of the sociohistorical, geographical, and cultural circumstances which she inhabited over the years informed the development of her pedagogy in critical design thinking, sometimes called critical and emancipatory design thinking, terms which she coined.

Drawing of a world globe (blue, green and brown shades), and a large red pin drop. Beneath the globe reads “My positionality allows me to challenge how homogenous the space is.” - Drawing by Lindsay Miller

Pluriverse as destination

These observations prompted me to reflect on my own positionality, and the various conditions that led me to attend this session. Lesley-Ann Noel captivated my curiosity in her usage of another term beginning with the letter P, the pluriverse, which is not featured in the critical alphabet, but which in my opinion, deserves a card of its own. I first encountered the term in the writings of Arturo Escobar, namely through his 2018 book ‘Designing the Pluriverse.’ Escobar introduces the pluriverse as a future-focused, critical, and utopian destination antithetical to the exploitative and oppressive systems against which DJN organizes. The pluriverse is present throughout the work of Lesley-Ann Noel. A great introduction to her thinking and doing towards the pluriverse is a conference paper called Envisioning a Pluriversal Design Education, which she gave in June 2020. Her cultivation of an arsenal of practices enabling the pluriverse had motivated me to participate to DJN’s member talk and summarize it with the report-back text you are reading now.

Positionality worksheet

To kick-start the exercise of positionality within groups, Lesley-Ann Noel employs a dedicated worksheet. It consists of a wheel featuring a dozen intersectional question prompts directed equally at each of the group members and centering on the ultimate inquiry: ‘who am I?’ The worksheet asks each member to identify themselves through descriptors such as Race, ethnicity, age, gender, sexuality, ability and disability marital status, parental status, geographical and socioeconomic origins, current geographical and socioeconomic status, level of education, professional activity, and languages spoken. Participants are invited to add sticky notes to designated parts of the worksheet, enabling an individual and collective reading of positionality (as illustrated below). The worksheet is available for download on Lesley-Ann Noel’s website.

More in depth view of the Positionality Worksheet above - circular diagram of 12 grey circles, one grey circle in the centre reads “Who Am I?” - and each of the 12 circles further breaks down the various positionalities of Lesley-Ann Noel.

Critical Utopian Action Research

Lesley-Ann Noel’s doctoral research with rural children in Trinidad and Tobago provided the ground through which she began developing the emancipatory methodologies that now constitute her expertise. In that context, she developed an approach in three steps enabling students to practice Critical Utopian Action Research. First, one engages with critique by asking ‘What is wrong?’ Second, one names a utopian destination through which to overcome what has been named to be wrong by answering ‘Where do we want to go?’ Third, one is prompted to imagine and delineate ‘How can our dreams become reality?’ thus enabling the design process. Lesley-Ann Noel knew this methodology was fulfilling its purpose when the students she was using it with began asking transformative questions that demonstrated a critical understanding of their positionality.

Solving First World Problems

Belonging in the Global North, where she is a professor at Tulane University, as well as in the Global South where she spent the first fifteen years of her design research career, Lesley-Ann Noel’s unique positionality is able to put the two in a candid dialogue. To this end, she proposed innovative models of collaboration between the two using pedagogy.

Climate science narrates to the Global North what the Global South has long known: global industrialism is murderous to humans and nonhumans alike. A legacy of colonization, global industrialism is culturally rooted in the Global North and holds the planet captive with its tentacles of extraction, financial instruments, and supply chains.

In response, Lesley-Ann Noel has crafted a subversive class titled ‘Solving First World Problems’ in which she partnered two groups of students, one one in a university of the Global South (situated in Trinidad where she used to teach), and one with a university in the Global North where she was teaching (situated in the bay area of California). As such, she flipped the narrative of assimilation intrinsic to academic institutions of the Global North in which the seductive narrative of diversity actually disguises politics of assimilation and cultural erasure. She enabled students of the Global North to take away a most valuable lesson: understanding what it feels like to be studied, and thus begin to assemble the experiences empowering them to empathize with ground to empathize with those belonging in the Global South.

In terms of its specific curriculum, the class was framed by an anthropology text titled Body Rituals Among the Nacirema by Horace Miner (1956). It presents an ethnological account of the Nacirema tribe located in North America. Do you know how to spell America backwards? The answer reads Nacirema. Based on Miner's account, the Nacirema culture is characterized by a sophisticated market economy in which participants are curiously focused on rituals centering on their human bodies and its appearance of health. The text enabled a scenario in which Global North students were positioned as members of the Nacirema tribe; meanwhile, Global South students were asked to study the Global North student, to diagnose their problems using a standard design thinking methodology, and to design in response to this knowledge base. Global South students were appalled by the loneliness and isolation that characterized life for Global North students. Students in the Global North did not know what students in the Global South were looking for in them; as a result, students in the Global North explained: “I wanted to hide what people would think was a problem.” It prompted students to reflect on the process of problematization epitomic to design thinking. Who has the authority to say that something is a problem? Is the outside designer really suited to make such a diagnosis? The imposition of their world-view is a problem in itself, the one on which Lesley-Ann Noel’s critical design thinking pedagogy centers.

White, femme person in a green dress, hiding a scary purple monster behind her. Quote reads, When the power was reversed they wanted to hide the real problem. - Drawing by Lindsay Miller

Many of the Global South students’ design proposals introduced to the Global North social practices fostering social exchanges building community. Dr. Lesley-Ann Noel co-taught this class with Glenn Fajardo.

Medium toned hands holding a phone with an image of a person with a broken heart. Quote reads, They wanted to build things to help with the sense of loneliness in tech. - Drawing by Lindsay Miller

Critical Design Thinking and Public Health

Currently, Dr. Lesley-Ann Noel is working on methods for public health. Her goal is to shift power in public health research by designing community meetings where participants are ranking what they think a given research organization should be studying instead of it being imposed by the administrative body of the research organization.

Questions of equity are woven into each and every facet of Lesley-Ann Noel’s work. Being in her presence inspires analogous momentum.

Article and Image Credits:

Written by:
Valérie Lechêne
Twitter: @velechene
www.velechene.com

Drawings and Alt-text captions by:
Lindsay Miller
www.seacowsoda.com
Artstagram: @seacowsoda