Through Witnessing

This book enacts pedagogy through years of witnessing. It wrestles with and names design and institutional design education's seemingly neutral relationship to colonial and capitalist world orders and what it means to teach and design today-weaving together ideas on designing as a mechanism of maintenance while reflecting on teaching as a subversion of bureaucratic inertia. How does design give form to social fictions? How does the professionalization of design schooling maintain the priorities of nation and capital? What are the forms of agency available to designers? Through expressions of rage, generosity, forgiveness, slowness, and chaos, the contributions-comprising lectures, essays, and interviews-consider the limits and possibilities of dismantling and reconfiguring the persistent legacies of colonial and capitalist impositions on design.