Sustainable Design Education in Mexico, towards a non-colonial post anthropocentric design
March 11, 2023Abstract
This article is an extension of my participation in the PIVOT 21 Virtual Conference seeking to deepen the conversation around design for the pluriverses in sustainable design education in Mexico and Latin America. As discussed in the Ancestral Future, El Futuro Ancestral panel of the Conference. We, Designers and actors from the Global South, are in the path of a transition into other ways of doing design, and dismantling the imposing structures, finding inspiration in our ancestral views of the world. The conference and the present research work raise the question of how design and design education in our territories of the Global South could learn and produce a new vision of design. A design that takes everyone into account, all terrestrial agents; a design that sustains, repairs, and respects life. Design education in Mexico and Latin America needs to adopt sustainability at its core, and it needs to be decolonized, finding its roots in the Buen Vivir (good living, collective well-being) philosophies. My research sets the groundwork for a new design curriculum for sustainable design education that adopts this view. For this, I am mapping current sustainable design education programs and teaching practices in the most important design schools in Mexico. I used the Fringe methodology of future studies to map the new critical design studies in a time frame of what is happening now, what could happen soon and in the far future regarding these subjects to have clarity on the path we have to undertake on sustainable and social design education.
Keywords
Education for sustainability, Designs of the south, Anticolonial Design, Radical Interdependence
DOI