Author: raplanch

(Re)Considering Belonging: Building Community Across Spaces

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By Randa Hadi Whether you’ve never left your hometown or have veered far away from where you were born, belonging is something we all seek, and maybe something we are in constant search of. Your sense of belonging can take different forms, whether it’s through friendships, maps, archives, or digital communities, we form our identities even when we’re straddling two worlds (Al Abas, 2019). Belonging can exist on several scales: micro, meso, and macro levels.  Belonging Permeates Life in Various Ways Muhammad al-Idrisi spent most of his life creating cartographic maps of the Arab world. Although his true intentions for making the map are not clear, it’s safe to assume that it was driven by wanting the Arab world to be represented the way an Arab saw it. I first came across these maps when Sherine Salla presented them in the Against the Grain Fellowship at Futuress. I was so intrigued by their form, directionality, and non existing political borders. North is pointing down, and South is pointing up; a small, yet beautiful detail in …

Statement of Practice as a Design Educator

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By Rachael Paine In my experience as a creative director, I found unleashing the talents of others the most rewarding aspect of my position. I took opportunities to create intense working environments that required peoples’ best thinking and doing. I am motivated by helping others to see obstacles as opportunities. After thirteen fulfilling years in the business realm, I decided that teaching and mentoring are significant drivers for me. With my passion for creative leadership and direction, I have a solid understanding that the purest form of liberal, creative thought happens in education.  I view both intelligence and talent as continually developing. I believe that an individual’s intelligence and skill can grow in circumstances where they are challenged. As an instructor, I find opportunities to push students to open up new possibilities within their work. I work individually with students to draw attention to areas of potential investigation, prompting them to dig deeper and push harder in developing their final projects. These methods came directly from my work as a creative director where I devoured …

On Designing Belonging & Belonging in Design

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By Victoria Rabelo Gerson Belonging is a topic, word, a feeling, that I’ve been exploring in my own work since my early beginnings in graphic design in high school. I still look back at the short book I designed titled “Home” using photos of my travels through Brasil, where my family is from, as an important artifact. In this book, I documented my thoughts and feelings during my trip to Brasil and wrote about feelings of belonging several times. I wrote about how family and friends from my mother’s home country made me feel so accepted, even after not seeing them for 5 years. How everyone let me in, making me feel like I was where I belonged. I wrote about how “never before had I felt like I’d seen my mother for who she truly is until I saw her in the place she so obviously belongs (Figure 1).” And about “the assurance of knowing who I am, where I came from… feeling like I belong in this place and in this skin.”   When …

From One to Many

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By Michael Carbaugh Finding a sense of belonging across disciplines as a design team of one After spending a decade on large enterprise design teams as a user experience designer, I couldn’t shake my curiosity. I wanted to know what it would be like to lead design at a small company that aligned closely with my values and interests. With fortunate timing and a little bit of luck, I’ve been able to spend the last year as a solo UX designer for a summer camp management software company. While I was ecstatic to find my dream position, I struggled to let go of the fear of feeling isolated knowing I’d be a design team of one. I assumed that I’d need to exhibit more self-reliance and independence at work than I had as part of a large design team. How wrong I was! All it took was working on my first major feature that incorporated the input of many different roles, a revamped email communication tool. Starting out uncovering our user’s needs and the pain …

Design for Awkwardness: Belonging in Intercultural Teamwork

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By Kelly Murdoch-Kitt & Dr. Denielle Emans Introduction Design for belonging has been the foundational value of our research, teaching, and creative practice since our collaboration began in 2011. Long intrigued by the intersection of design, education, and culture, we launched a study of remote intercultural design teams that continues to the present. Our research focuses on Collaborative Online Intercultural Learning (COIL), specifically in Intercultural Design Collaboration (IDC). Based on the belief that systemic challenges require multi-perspective ideas, we bring students together through IDC to collaborate on sustainability topics and related wicked problems. Like design practice itself, IDC is project-based and provides an experiential learning opportunity for students to explore themselves and their cultures through teamwork and design.  Our study reveals that international collaboration on global challenges positively affects student engagement in these topics. Bringing different perspectives together for more creative problem-solving helps students compare how various issues manifest in different parts of the world and enables them to connect with challenges beyond their own cities. Students learn to build trust, belonging, and collaborative outcomes …

Belonging Together: Reflections on Lived Experience to Promote Inclusivity in the Design Classroom

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By Liese Zahabi Central to the word belonging is the word longing. As social creatures, most humans long to be part of a group, to be understood by people with common perspectives and values, to have the support of others. The concept of belonging also suggests a sense of inside and outside: when you belong you are part of a group of some kind, whether a small circle of friends, an extended multi-generational family, a school full of students, a company full of employees, or a town full of citizens. Either you are within this circle, inside, or you are on the outside of these designations. Putting ideas, objects, and people into categories is a fundamental human tendency: this is a spoon and it belongs in this drawer, this is an aeonium succulent and it belongs in this classification of plants, this is an idea that does or does not fit within my value system and therefore does or does not belong in my worldview. Academic disciplines and fields of practice perform categorization in even …

On Belonging

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By Lincoln Hancock There’s a paradox at the heart of human understanding that makes belonging a tricky thing.  The world before us is seductively full and present. We want this for ourselves, to manifest, to coincide, to be what we are. It seems so simple and foundational. But to apprehend a thing is to be not-it. We are a different kind of thing, a thing that apprehends the world. So we are in the world, but not of it.  Our very awareness implies a distance or gap, an otherness. This is the necessary form of our knowledge of ourselves: our constructs of being and is-ness imply and contain a sort of emptiness, a void that serves as a constant backdrop against which we grasp the thing that is — its distance from us, and its distance from the other things in the world.     So we know things through what they are not. Orange is not nothing, but it is also not-green, not-red, not-yellow. Yet what makes orange orange eludes us. We can go on at …