Anti-Ableism in Design Seminar: Notes on Form & Intent
This post is a WIP draft of a design seminar on the intersection of ableism, critical access, and design. Publishing this unfinished draft on Medium reflects my commitment to crip technoscience, disability justice, and critical access studies by rendering porous the outline of the design institution and which bodyminds enter into an affective relationship with it. I hope by inviting a cohort of crips into this learning community, and as the seminar takes shape, its ideas and protocols invite discourse, dissent, and, once collectively considered, dissemination.
Statement on Meditation:
In this class, our learning goals extend beyond the instrumental and into the domain of the relational. Though it is important for designers to cultivate knowledge around the methodologies, tools, and technologies that bring form to creative ideas, it is equally important for us to engage in critical self-reflection in order to bring into focus the assumptions and beliefs we enact through design praxis (i.e., an ongoing cycle of reflection and action). In “Constructing Situated and Social Knowledge: Ethical, Sociological, and Phenomenological Factors in Technological Design,” Damien Patrick Williams writes, “[T]he technology we use shapes and is shaped by our perceptions and the context in which it was made…” Here, Williams highlights how the “what” of design is bound up with the “whom” of design; that is, the designer and the cultural, social, geographic, economic, political, and psychological backdrop they deploy to create meaning out of their life experiences. Similarly, tools and technologies shape our relationships with ourselves and others, as well as where this line is drawn and enforced. Thus, it becomes clear that a focus on instrumental knowledge without critical self-reflection masks how design at once shapes and is shaped by us and the network of relationships that frame and give meaning to our lived experiences.
Meditation is one such way to develop an awareness of how our thoughts and feelings shape our identities and actions. The practice of meditation is based on Buddhist teachings emerging over 2,500 years ago. Our orientation toward critical-self reflection — which can be practiced through meditation — is not foundationed on any cultural or religious outlook. Instead, I draw on the work of Chögyam Trungpa and the Shambhala tradition. For Trungpa, basic virtues like love, compassion, and acceptance can be practiced in a religious and secular context. In Shambhala: The Sacred Path of the Warrior, he writes, “The discovery of basic goodness is not a religious experience, particularly.” By extending the psychological benefits of Buddhist meditation to secular audiences, Trungpa hoped to build an open pathway toward understanding and dismantling, what he called, “the great problems now facing human society.” Today, Shambhala has a global presence and, I argue, has much to offer justice-oriented approaches to design education.
Educational theorists concerned with social justice from Paulo Freire to bell hooks have adopted meditation in their personal, pedagogical, and political practices. Jack Mezirow, who created the concept of transformative learning during his tenure at Columbia University, argued that mindfulness helps learners examine their life experiences alongside their “habits of mind” (i.e., patterns of emotions, thoughts, and perceptions). Following the example of Trungpa, Freire, hooks, and Mezirow, I invite you to incorporate meditation into your design praxis in order to identify some preconceptions, values, and norms that shape your relationship with self and society, and how these factors imbed themselves in the designs you create. Remember, putting something into the world is always a statement on how you think the future should be. So, critical self-reflection carried out through meditation is one way to discern your location within a matrix of interrelated material and symbolic forces, how you are shaped by them, and how you might mobilize design as an instrumental, relational, and political strategy to intervene in and transform them from the inside out.
Note, in this class, meditation is positioned as a nonsectarian (i.e., not committed to a certain religious or political outlook or group) practice that draws us into a closer relationship with our thoughts and feelings, and the identities and sociocultural formations they produce. By taking this orientation, however, we acknowledge and resist the impacts of settler colonialism and white supremacist capitalist heteropatriarchy in the ongoing appropriation and co-optation of sacred traditions to “enhance” the creativity and productivity of workers and accumulate surplus value. In contrast, we engage in meditation as a means to name, agitate against, and block extractionist logics and systems, as well as design liberatory forms of resistance. To this end, we honor the lineages, knowledges, and communities of practice from which meditation emerged and join in solidarity with the Design Justice Network to “challenge the erasure of indigenous peoples, knowledge, and practices” and commit to an ethical framework for design theory and praxis that seeks well-being for all inhabitants of our planet in perpetuity.
If you choose to incorporate meditation into your learning process, I’ve included a few exercises below as a starting point. These are only suggestions, and you can practice meditation however and with whomever you choose. If you have questions or concerns regarding the exercises below, as well as particular access desires that conflict with these practices or the practice of meditation in general, please send me an email (halstead@artcenter.edu). I would love to co-design alternatives or adaptations with you.
Length, Width & Depth
To arrive at the present moment, try to drop your awareness to the level of sensation. Notice your heartbeat, breath, temperature, and muscular tensions. Depending on the senses available to you, what do you hear, smell, taste, feel, and see? Is your mood heavy or light? Is it dispersed evenly or collected in a particular area? The following guide uses spatial dimensions (length, width, and depth) as a framework for centering bodily knowledge and agitating the politics of design. This exercise derives from First Nations practices and draws on the somatic teachings of Richard Strozzi-Heckler and Thomas Loxley Rosenberg.
Length equals dignity. To become aware of your length, begin at the crown of your head and relax your scalp, ears, jaw, throat, shoulders, chest, back, ribcage. Take another deep breath and continue through the rest of your physical body. This is your length, your dignity.
Width equals belonging. Width is the dimension of our social, relational being. The Lakota people say Mitákuye Oyás’iŋ (all my relations). Feel the energy around you: people, animals, trees, sun, moon, the cosmos. Notice your body expanding. This is the dimension of belonging. All day, our bodies react to social situations by expanding and contracting, reshaping to fit in.
Depth equals time. Finally, consider the dimension of depth. Lean back slightly and feel the presence of your ancestors, mentors, and past experiences. Notice the back of your head, shoulders, hips, and — when you are ready — the cavern of your heart. This is the dimension of time. Feel yourself emerge at the intersection of past and future — fully embodied in the present moment.
Read “Embodied Learning” on our Google Classroom to learn how the spatial dimensions of length, width, and depth influence the design process.
Spatial Bodies
The exercise below moves our understanding of exclusion from the theoretical to the embodied. It should be only one in a series of regular attempts to focus on embodied experiences in and of the world. The self is configured through repeated cultural encodings, practices, and the discursive forces that we use to make sense of them. Yet, we too often reserve this attunement and mode of feeling to the experience of art. The impact will not be immediately noticeable. But the goal is to develop somatic awareness into a lifelong practice — where we make space for naming and redesigning personal and collective experiences in society and the environment.
The next time you are in a public space, notice how you react to others and your surroundings. Do you feel welcome or unwelcome? Under surveillance? Do you feel at ease or an urge to tighten? What feels closed, and what feels open? What do you do without even noticing, and when are you the most aware?
Consider how your external appearance (e.g., disability, gender presentation, race) affects your experience. Similarly, consider how your internal climate (e.g., attention, mood, perception) affects your experience. How does this manifest in your body? And how does your experience differ from those in your learning community?
The “Spatial Bodies” meditation and explanatory text above is borrowed from “Making Space for Disabled Bodyminds in Design Pedagogy,” an opinion piece written by Emeline Brulé, PhD and myself for The AIGA Design Educators Community.
