Dear Sarah
Vinsel’s criticism includes a photo of one of my favorite pedagogues, Brazilian educator Paulo Freire, with a fictional thought bubble that reads, “Dear Sarah, The first 2 minutes of your talk is the same critique of education I made in 1968.”37 My own teaching philosophy draws heavily from Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, in which he writes, “if the structure does not permit dialogue, the structure must be changed.”38 So … was Freire a design thinker? Or is Greenberg a Freirian? Or does it matter? I would argue that how we chronicle the connection between ideas is what matters. Genealogies reflect and reproduce power relations. Citational practices are political, especially when we start talking about “innovation” – oppressed people and places are rarely cited for their many inventions.
Lilly Irani and M. Six Silberman contend: “What if the problem is not how we design in a highly unequal world, but the very fact that we are read as designers at all? Designers are more than those who seek to move from current states to preferred ones. Designers also occupy a relatively high rung in hierarchies of ‘knowledge economy’ projects.”
Irani and Silberman’s query grows out of their experience as developers of Turkopticon, an activist tool for workers that aims to help “the people in the ‘crowd’ of crowdsourcing watch out for each other – because nobody else seems to be.” And what they found was that, in public depictions of their work, designers were elevated while workers were cast as being “without agency and capacity to change their situation.” Even though they themselves were guided by a solidaristic relationship with the workers, the public granted them, as “designers,” a higher status than to their laboring counterparts.
