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Title: Towards radical synergy for more just and equitable futures
Inequity and social injustice are omnipresent wicked problems, complex challenges for which there are no single solutions due to their cross-cultural, cross-disciplinary, and systemic nature. For example, the 'green revolution' of the 1970s was supposed to solve world hunger. However, we saw a rise in corporate control over agriculture (Pielke and Linner, 2019) instead. The design of social media, widely touted as creating a harmonious global village in the 1980s, has instead partly turned into hatching grounds for a global white supremacist movement and other forms of extremism. We cannot afford to allow accidental synergies to create global disasters passively. Instead, we need to bring social, technological, economic, and environmental concerns, among other considerations, into a deliberate and reflective emergent process. We refer to this decolonial, emancipatory form of design emergence as 'radical synergy.' In this paper, we begin by visualizing how radical synergy provides scaffolding for the program. Then, we show snapshots of how it took pedagogical form over the past two years, enabling graduate students and their partners to take steps toward attaining it by facilitating community-based, deep collaboration informed by anti-racism, decolonization, and integrative critical analysis, and facilitated by an integrative design thinking and making approach.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
1930072
PAR ID:
10331468
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ; ; ; ; ;
Date Published:
Journal Name:
LEARNxDESIGN 2021: 6th International Conference for Design Education Researchers
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
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