Interview: Dr Naomi Bueno de Mesquita, Professor of Design and Social Justice
Dr Bueno de Mesquita is a spatial designer, educator and researcher based between Spain and the Netherlands. Naomi has lived in different cities (Jerusalem, Amsterdam, Rome, and Barcelona) for large periods of her life. In 2022, she completed her PhD at KU Leuven in which she examined collaborative forms of mapping in the construction of and debate about public space. Her research was initially performed at Design Academy Eindhoven for the European Research Program TRADERS (short for ‘Training Art and Design Researchers for Participation in Public Space’) as part of the Readership in Places and Traces that was led by Dr David Hamers. Naomi began her new professorship at DAE in October 2022.
Samein Shamsher caught up with Naomi earlier this month to discuss her practice as well as her vision for her new professorship at DAE - from actionable social justice to transferrable design research; limitation as a designer and productive failure to the obligation to continuously (re)educate ourselves.
The below transcript of the conversation has been edited collectively.
→ Samein Shamsher (SS): Could we start by discussing how you consider mapping as an integral part of your design practice, and how is that related to social justice?
Naomi Bueno de Mesquita (NBdM): I think that’s a nice start, because it brings it to the core of the issue, which is how to not only theorise about social justice but what design can actually do for social justice. And this is what I’m dealing with in the professorship, which I find so interesting and challenging at the same time. In my works, in my PhD, I dealt with the question of representation, amongst others. So, who is (under)represented and in what ways are certain communities underrepresented? And more importantly, what can we as designers do about that? What do we mean by representing something or someone and what responsibilities come with this practice? What kind of skills can designers deploy to examine different ways of representing, ones that do more justice to the topics or communities they work with, or that go beyond the visual to include more embodied ways of understanding.
I believe that designers have certain skills and sensibilities that are particularly interesting to explore in this context. For example, mapping is a method that is typically used in design practice. In a project I worked on in Amsterdam with undocumented migrants, for example, I was interested in exploring how participation in the public domain takes place; who is able to participate in this sphere, and in what ways. Using mapping as participatory research method, I looked at what kind of actions are needed to participate and how certain communities can be activated through choices that are made in the design. I furthermore looked at of the formative role that embodied interaction with the map plays on knowledge acquisition and knowledge transfer.
Questions that I am interested in is how the public domain is made actionable and how the political comes about. And what can designers do to bring in certain communities who would otherwise not participate in this political arena? In my research with undocumented migrants in Amsterdam I looked at other forms of representation, ones that are more embodied, because there is an interesting tension to this notion of participation in the public sphere among those who cannot be visible. They have developed strategies of how to be invisible and still act within the public spaces of the city.
So part of my work was to learn how to think with them, to learn what those strategies are, and how I can still work to give people caught in this struggle a voice, or to have them participate through different channels, such as through aural narratives. Audio thus became a navigational tool to get to know the proverbial ´other´ And through it the act of listening became a way of navigating the city in search of ´the other´. I was not only interested in giving a voice, but also what it means to listen differently. Instead of say, waiting for our turn to speak, how do we instead design conditions for active listening? In this project it was done through moving ones body and syncing with an undocumented´ voice in direction and pace of walking for the audio to unlock. Those are some of the questions that I’m wrestling with and have dealt with in my work and that I feel relate to this idea of what design can do for social justice.
→ SS: There is a focus in your work to question what it means to participate and bringing attention to how public spaces, or spheres as you describe them, how they are collectively formed. How do you think you could adapt these kind of inquiry within the Academy?
NBdM: I first want to understand what work has already been done internally in addressing these issues at DAE and build from there on. A lot has changed at the academy since last time I worked there in 2017. At the time (from 2014 until 2017) I was an Early Stage Researcher for the TRADERS project under the supervision of, previous DAE lecturer, David Hamers. I pay tribute to David who was one of the pioneers to plant the seed for my research as a Professor at DAE. I was fortunate to learn what doing research at DAE entails and take that experience with me, to adapt it to the current context and developments.
I think there are two levels of operating in my new role. There is the institutional context that I will explore together with the diversity officer Leigh Tukker. While Leigh focuses more on the state of the art and what needs to be done to make the academy a more diverse and inclusive environment to study and work in, I will translate that exploration in knowledge sharing and use it to feed my community based research. In that respect, my role is more research oriented regarding the changing role of design in a vastly changing society and how designers can contribute to knowledge production and knowledge transfer through their research.
I will specifically look at the level of criticality in design practice in the curriculum in how social justice issues are dealt with. For example, questions such as; who are we designing for and who and what is included in decisions that inform our designs? are fundamental questions to ask if we wish to build inclusive products, services, and environments. However, in many design practices these questions are often overlooked or not addressed with sufficient criticality. One reason can be that designers are not sufficiently trained in accommodating the needs of people with diverse backgrounds and abilities. The consequences can be far-reaching with designers’ creations unintentionally contributing to marginalising or impairing certain groups. Design decisions that are made throughout a design process have power and agency, and have the potential to offer extended inclusivity or exclusion of individuals or groups of individuals in relation to aspects such as age, disability, gender and culture. Addressing these aspects as well as geographic, financial or social factors requires an emphasis on how we understand diversity within present and future contexts. So, there is this perspective from the institution, and then there is this larger societal perspective. I will be operating on both levels. At the same time, it is crucial to feed the research back into the curriculum.
→ SS: What about this particular moment in time do you think has necessitated a closer security of who is able to participate in the activation of our public sphere, and the need to support those who have been historically marginalised, or underrepresented?
NBdM: Well, first of all, we live in a time of multiple crises and there is demand for meaningful action. It is a very different moment, compared to when I did my undergraduate studies, almost two decades ago. This generation is no longer willing to accept this sort of ´business as usual´ mentality, nor the abuse of power within academic institutions, and art and design schools. Students are much more vocal, and this difference is very visible. And of course, this is driven by other calls to action, or social movements that call for justice, such as the Black Lives Matter, or MeToo movements in the United States. There is a momentum from all these collective actions that we simply cannot ignore within design.
It feels really that we’re at a point of no return where, for a design institute to be credible, it must be able to respond meaningfully to these larger social movements. However, there is a tendency for design to follow along with trends, and that is something I am very wary of. We have to ask then, is this really a structural change we’re working on, or, more pessimistically is this simply a trend, within design, that will fade away? That’s why I think it’s important for me to continuously question if what I do contributes to a structural change while safeguarding a space of free speech and fair dialogue for students and tutors alike. This notion of lasting change also goes hand in hand with a design research culture.
For example, how can you contribute to design research so that the work becomes transferrable, placing the research at the forefront? How can you really perpetuate a culture of research within design that new practitioners and others can continue, and build off of the work that others have left? This is something that I think really needs further scrutiny and development in design research practice and that I would be very interested in exploring.
→ SS: There is a tendency for designers and artists to be very careful about what they share in terms of their own methods, to really go into some depth or detail about their own particular methods, a practice that you would normally find in other professions.
NBdM: Exactly. This has been a sticking point within design, and design becoming research. An explanation is, in part, that product design used to be market-oriented and very competitive. But I do think that it is changing, and that we’re seeing increasingly more design that is purposed for knowledge production and that is research oriented. We are also seeing a greater transparency and sharing within the field, one that is necessary in order to advance in knowledge, but also to advance in our own understanding about the larger goal of a person’s design practice.
→ SS: In relation to this idea of sharing and transparency - have you thought about the kinds of knowledge sharing that could happen among different institutions within the Netherlands, or even more broadly across Europe?
NBdM: Definitely. I will look at other organisations in the Netherlands, such as OBK, Unsettling Rietveld program, The Research Center for Material Culture at the Tropenmuseum, or those at ArtEZ University of the Arts, to see how they deal with these issues and if they are interesting examples that we can learn from. I also think there is an added value of working in different institutions and different contexts. For instance, as I’ll be splitting my time between Eindhoven and Barcelona, I think it is invaluable to consider what methods the municipality in Barcelona and the university here are using to address similar issues. It helps to bring in new perspectives to learn from other contexts , and from people who are working on the same kind of problematics. So, I think it’s a crucial part of this process, and for me to be transparent about it because this is the only way we can learn and call it research.
And of course, this is a collective effort, not something I can do alone. Working in the field of social justice is a continuous journey, one that is never finished and that requires us to continuously revise our theories and practices in accordance with new experiences and societal developments. For me it means that I will be looking at institutions in the Netherlands and abroad to see how they are dealing with issues of social justice and what kinds of exchanges can be developed, to learn from one another. What has worked, and where did things not work, and more importantly why didn’t it work and for who? This is, I think a crucial part of this discussion around transparency and integral to learning – you have to be honest about the work. At the same time, a university should be a safe space where it’s accepted to make mistakes. There has to be space for dialogue, fair dialogue.
→ SS: Is there something within your current locale of Barcelona that you would like to try and translate for the Dutch context?
NBdM: I think there are many projects from the municipality to draw from in this respect. Especially from the perspective of care that they have in the city of Barcelona, like the Superillas or Vila Veïna’s. Vila Veïna for example is a community care initiative, working at a very small, local level in different neighbourhoods. It is a pilot project from the municipality with care hubs to understand how neighbours can help each other, and what kind of resources, or skills are available and needed within the community. So thinking about proximity, and networks of care, I think these are projects that are inspirational and useful as examples to consider when we talk about designing for inclusivity and diversity. And while in the case of Vila Veïna, it is very context dependent - the issues it seeks to address are particular to the city and the neighbourhood - it still serves as a model that we can learn from, and begin to adapt to the context of the Academy.
Similarly there is an endeavour (Design for City Making) we had with the School of Design and Engineering of Barcelona, ELISAVA, and the municipality, where we worked collaboratively across several projects. That format, I found very interesting because by the end of each semester students had become really involved with genuine concrete problems facing people in the city. It was a process of opening up the university to the public spaces of the city. The university then becomes a means to better understand what does this building do with and for the space that surrounds it and how can the city, in its turn, become a living lab for the Academy?
→ SS: This idea of accountability that you’ve touched upon seems critical - in what ways do you imagine being responsive or responsible to the spaces you intend to create?
NBDM: I think it is key to understand that we’re doing this work collectively and in a design school. So looking at what is being designed and how, and what it can mean in practice. This is where I want to emphasise the importance of what does it mean in practice and how can you actually, revise practices through these new experiences and knowledge that is gained. My task is to safeguard that it always relates to design and that we are therefore not creating new theories but are actually looking into how social justice can be practiced and designed for.
The question of accountability is, in my opinion, also linked to ethics and integrity, to understanding the consequences of your actions and behaviour. This is still a school, a university, and of course it’s a playground, but there are consequences to certain behaviours, and its imperative to understand what those are. Being a very diverse community and knowledge institute we have the obligation to continuously (re)educate ourselves on certain topics, such as developing social and cultural literacy and practices of integrity. This is where I think the idea of accountability comes in, to continue educating ourselves and each other as students, tutors, mentors, and staff of the academy. We should see it as a work in progress that we are doing together and that we can help each other in.
→ SS: This ties back to this practice of listening that you described as a central method. How do we leave ourselves open to, learning and to actually recognizing that, as members of an academic institution, it is incumbent on us to continue studying, and learning regardless of our position within the academy, which is part of the privilege of being there in some ways.
What do you think are important limits to this kind of work as a designer?
NBdM: I have observed that designers working with social justice issues, sometimes become too much invested in a project or turn into social workers. This goes back to something I mentioned earlier in our discussion about staying true to the design field and really understanding what does your work or your research contribute to the field. For instance, a dependency can occur by staying in projects for too long, of transposing a design practice into becoming a social worker. And I’m very critical of this development, I think this is also where it is instructive to really go back to remind yourself, what is your profession, what are the skills that you are good at, and how can you avoid creating these dependencies in the people or communities your work with. I think this is relevant to keep in mind, about staying true to the profession of design and being honest about your limitations.
→ SS: This feels like an important point you’ve brought up, about setting certain expectations, and being careful not to create dependencies, perhaps it relates to this idea of building agency within a group as part of a design practice.
NBdM: Exactly, there is a lot we can learn from design anthropology in this respect. It is important to understand what kind of skills you need to develop as a designer to understand the local context you’re working in and with, and what kind of knowledge and skills the people you may be working with already have. It is also the presumption of what is design which makes you more humble. I think it helps to understand what you can actually bring in and equally important, where your work as designer stops.
→ SS: I’ve been thinking recently about the relations between translation and failure. As a translation is never a perfect duplicate of the original, it is always going to resolve differently. I’m wondering then if you have thought about these conceptions of failure and translation in a productive sense? Put another way, what kinds of space is there for productive failures in a social justice context?
NBdM: What an interesting question. I think that translating is a good analogy. As a designer you are constantly translating by materialising the social. However, designers are often not aware of the impact of their designs in the way they mediate the world and the kind of (new) relations they create or curate. So, looking at design as a relational practice than really focuses beyond the product, on what it does and how it can contribute to the social and eventually the political.
→ SS: I appreciate how you’ve highlighted the fact that the way that we are called to participate within something like the public realm is so narrow, and so the question becomes what other forms of participation could exist?
NBdM: Practices like mapping can incentivise people to participate in public space and public issues in ways that they would otherwise not be inclined to. Through digital mapping in combination with open-ended or explorative narrative structures, for example, you can actually open up these fields of participation. It has different kinds of advantages that I think are interesting to explore and that I have looked at in my PhD.
I would like to mention one more thing around this idea about failure, because I think it’s an interesting way of making my point earlier. You mentioned looking at translation as some kind of failure, because you cannot do right to the language in the way it was originally written. There is an assumption here that something is lost in translation. And often the same can be said for maps; every form of representing reality in a map is doomed to fail because there is nothing more real than reality itself. I believe that it is important to understand that translating is also a practice of sense making and the act of giving meaning can be transformative. Translating is something designers typically do and they have the skills to explore ways of doing it that are more poetic, participatory or that do more justice to the topics or communities they work with. For this reason, I believe, design is particularly interesting when working on issues of social justice.
The interview was performed by Samein Shamsher, researcher, PhD candidate, and DAE alumni.