Many worlds meeting. Unsettling design practice at the intersection of mobility and possibility

This study aims to highlight co-existing perspectives in the decolonising debate by examining how geo-political historicity permeates throughout epistemologies and ontologies and manifests through creative practices such as design. The thesis sets out to study a small group of globally mobile designers in a transnational design community in Bali, Indonesia. This is a practice-led research project based on my working life and transcultural experiences as a design practitioner living and working in Bali. I recognised patterns in the expressions of the community of designers who I have named Designer Beyonders for the pragmatic reasons of selection and to draw upon the creativity research of Paul Torrance (1993) from the adjacent field of psychology. The Designer Beyonders (DBs) of this study demonstrated significant sensibilities that have implications for decolonising design epistemologies and practices. These included qualities such as dynamic, flexible, intersubjective, and creative action-led approaches to problem solving. In this study, the designers’ practices demonstrate deep-seated visions that address and challenge the epistemic injustice of colonialism through anti-colonial relationships, anchored in clear sets of values. The study perspective is framed within epistemic decolonisation, which creates a form of social hope via the emancipatory political creativity that the Designer Beyonders, working in Bali, and their world artisanship of design practices offer. These design practices contribute to a re-centring of the knowledge enterprise and how it is currently taught and practised in the West. 

There are three studies positioned within a critical constructivist paradigm that aim to rebalance the asymmetrical flows of power, knowledge, and resources between people, including during the knowledge recovery process, such as through life story interviews and a sensory cartography workshop where the participants could explore their own lives and emotions that could extend towards others in both social and political ways. The contextual review on decolonising design presents a pedagogical opening, by examining practice, that explores how to deliver the kinds of knowledge and understanding that can properly address longstanding systemic issues of power. For this reason, the qualitative and ethnographic research was designed with proximity in mind through a multi-method approach whilst asking the meta-question of the study: how to materialise decolonisation in design research and practice. This led to a conceptual action meta-framework, the Visitor's Hut, that acts to facilitate a self-awareness as a researcher through the complexity of global conversations; many worlds meeting. 

The key findings, across the three studies, indicate that the DBs embrace difference through the politics and ethics of interdependence, rather than domination. Their stories offer a social hope through an ecology of design knowledges recovered from their practices. This is an ecology that represents interculturality and assists in understanding both the circulation of knowledges and an ecological perspective. It is a critical metaphor for design that can embed new patterns of interculturality into design philosophy and practice. Thus, an ecology of design knowledge is an epistemological and political option for designers to ensure inclusion and optimise the opportunity for materialisation of decoloniality. These are active processes through material participation and practices such as a designer who keeps bees, fermenters, plastic eradicators, indigo growers, designers of waste management, beach cleaners, clay players, body mappers, game makers, anti-trend writers, and heritage preservers: others will be more deeply explored in the findings. These are knowledges that illuminate that the practice of inclusion is not diversity for diversity's sake but has the purpose of repair through the concept of creating opportunities for transposition. The three studies illuminate the deep connection between physical mobility and mental imagination.