Rational
Decolonising design is an independent initiative based on over twenty five years involvement in international development projects around the world. Decolonising design aims to promote the use of indigenous creative languages and cultural knowledge in the development of contemporary products rather than utilising standard European based perspectives.
Why should this be necessary you may ask? Although it is clear that development agencies have assisted in the creation of employment in many parts of the non western world, the deeper traditional aspects of the material and anthropological worlds that traditional cultures inhabit have been overlooked in preference for more mainstream western orientated models.
The internationalist creative language was forged in the western world during colonial times from the creative worlds of others it encountered and is propagated even today by design schools around the globe.
This creative approach has dazzled those outside its own borders so much so that the creative potential of their own vocabularies have often been reduced to mere visual embellishments or ignored altogether.
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Decolonising design hopes to forge a cross disciplinary approach to product development strategies and so looks for collaboration between as many disciplines as possible.
Decolonising designTherefore sees itself as a conduit for creative collaborations between those wishing to develop creative contemporary ideas based on their own cultural heritages and those who can inform these new directions.
If you are an archaeologist, anthropologist, design practitioner, architect, or any other specialist interested in building a new kind of project to project dialogue then please join us.
If you are a small scale enterprise development project, or none governmental organisation looking for a new approach to raise the value of your products then please register your interest.
All you have to do to become involved in this
Initiative is to have an open mind and send us an email.
looking to work with anthropologists, archaeologists and design based enterprises to create working groups that will use indiginous creative languages and cultural histories in the development of contemporary prouducts for the home and export market.