Responding to the theme Unsaid

Holly Farley (2024)

For too long, we—designers who reflect the dominant culture and intersecting identities—have been designing within the extent of our own knowledge and skills. Using our knowledge and professional skills to create environments that reflect us, with some small inclusion for accessibility and, more recently, Country. However, as Mother Nature and folks worldwide scream, it’s clear operating within the bounds of our own knowledge is failing us. 

It seems we, white folk, have lost some important knowledge and skills in our hunger for power and privilege. The knowledge and skills required to sit with humility, to truly listen, learn and support the expression of diverse ways of knowing, doing, being and becoming. The skills necessary to foster human connection across socially constructed divides. My question is, are we brave enough to resist, deconstruct and dismantle the dominant modes of knowing, doing, being, and becoming—West is best, and White is right[2]—and move to a position where we can collaboratively reimagine ways of co-creating? To shift from power over to power with.

Design education teaches us that by our own hands, we create. We hold the pen (or mouse); we hold the power. We draw the lines; the lines transform into physical elements on stolen land. We learn discipline-specific information and skills through formal education and configure these learnings through our identities. Developing individual design practices that conform to and/or resist the dominant culture’s norms. We learn to embody the associated and accepted Western ways of knowing, doing, being and becoming – we become experts. In understanding ourselves as experts, we subsequently privilege, value, and trust the information of other experts. Folks just like us who have been legitimised by a system founded on individualism, transaction and power. But what about the expertise that isn’t ‘legitimised’ by a university certificate or a fancy job title—expertise so rich it could change how we understand a place or have the multi-generational knowledge to solve problems Western colonial systems perpetuate?

This isn’t to say experts with discipline-specific knowledge aren’t required, valuable and necessary, but to highlight that when we privilege ‘expertise’ over all else, we inherently exclude folks and uphold systems of harm. We maintain the Western colonial status quo. Consistently, we (sub)consciously learn what and whom to value. To shift from the dominant modes of knowing, doing, being, and becoming, much head and heart learning is required.

 The first step in reimagining requires us to learn and articulate how we know, do, be, and become. We need to know and fumble with our own intersectionality, power and privilege, and the systemic context before inviting folks to sit with us to embark on a journey of multiway learning and co-creating. Without a process of learning and systemic change, we are just bleaching things through to the oppressive system we (un)consciously work in and uphold. We can’t resist what is so pervasively unsaid – whiteness– if we don’t learn how to see and hear it.   

We need to take the time to (re) learn and practise the skills of human connection—the skills inextricably linked to our collective humanity. The skills of sitting together, hearing the unsaid, and enabling collective understanding and decision-making. Imagine a design workshop where we focus just as much on a project as enjoying a laugh over a chop the consistency of boot leather. Or where we spend a significant amount of time designing engagement experiences so folks feel safe enough to participate and contribute in ways that they feel comfortable.  

As designers of the physical environment, these moments require our time – the chops, the cups of tea – sitting together, hearing with our whole being, heart and mind open. Then, maybe, we can be part of a process that begins to co-weave a tapestry of expansive, diverse knowledge that moves us in a direction where we can collectively reimagine environments and systems.

[1] Kerb Journal(2024) —> https://kerb-journal.com/editions/32

[2] Ravulo, J. (2024) —>Impact Policy Podcast, Ep 10: Jioji Ravulo - "Decolonising, Deconstructing & Disrupting Dominant Discourses", 2023