Image: Ulrika Bergfors
Image: Ulrika Bergfors
PhD project at Umeå Institute of Design at Umeå University.
This PhD research project explores potential ways in which the entanglement of design and its museums with oppressive structures might be understood and addressed in order to bring about positive change. It combines design research and feminist research to get insights into how established design museums have been shaped over time, how their interwovenness with systems of oppression might be challenged, un-raveled or at least be re-arranged. This thesis demonstrates that there is hope, and formulates characteristics and qualities that could make alternative design museums.
The design discipline is implicated in the trajectories that have led us to an unsustainable present. There is an urgency to re-direct the design discipline, so that it can become able to not only stay with past and present trouble, but also to develop other futures. How can we do this? How can the design discipline be disentangled from systems like patriarchy, so that it becomes able to support change towards more justice?
While some of us are currently looking to the example of design education and schools, less research is done on the role of design museums. This thesis explores potential ways in which the entanglement of design and its museums with oppressive structures might be understood and addressed in order to bring about positive change. It combines design research and feminist research, and assembles concepts from feminist standpoint theory, queer phenomenology, matters of care, and onto-cartography. These concepts support a researcher’s positioning and formulation of understanding of knowledge production. Furthermore, they function as a guide when selecting, combining and applying methods such as inventories, museum visits, illustrations, consulting secondary literature and hosting workshops. Here these methods are applied in order to get insights into how established design museums have been shaped over time, how their interwovenness with systems of oppression might be challenged, un-raveled or at least be re-arranged. The aim of these efforts is to explore which possibilities alternative design museums could offer as a way to change the discipline toward more just futures.
This thesis contributes to the field of design museums alternative ways of moving towards more equity and justice; as well as ideas of how design museums or exhibitions might look and work in more just futures. On a broader scale, the thesis shows ways in which feminist approaches might be applied in design research. And it also introduces some ideas of how feminist research might benefit from design theories and methodologies. Finally, this research project also contributes to activism in the field of design, by strengthening communities driven by the same and similar questions and values.
Throughout the process it brings people together, introduces new thoughts and methods. In workshops and journalistic texts, insights as well as materials and sources are shared. Rather than presenting universally applicable solutions, in the end the result will be the journey itself, how and which kinds of methods are assembled and used, – even though such a process will never be complete. This thesis demonstrates that there is hope, and also formulates characteristics and qualities that could make alternative design museums.
