The impotent toolkit : challenges and limitations of co-design for societal value in Southeast Louisiana's landscapes of African American dispossession

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2015-05

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McDowell, Robin Boeun

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Abstract

This report details a reflexive practice that lies in the emerging field of co-design for societal value. This territory marks a move from user participation to equal empowerment of stakeholders--that is, designers, users, and other project constituents defining objectives and working through design processes together via a shared vision for more just and sustainable ways of living. The body of design work examined in this report is a combination of traditional products of graphic design, participatory design methods, and ethnography. Initiated around a physically demolished and institutionally repressed history of enslaved Africans in St. Charles Parish, Louisiana, the value of this work is not found in formal qualities of designed objects or in a groundbreaking process model, but in detailed documentation of consistent reflection on the role of the designer as outsider. This broadened analysis offers an expansion of the repertoire of co-design case studies.

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