Keynote
17:15 – 18:15, 21 May
x preliminary criteria for a power-critical design pedagogy
Presented by
Lisa Baumgarten
What does a decade of teaching and researching design actually teach you? This keynote follows that question — looking back at ten years of practice to ask what has held up, what has shifted, and what had to be unlearned.
The result is ten preliminary criteria for a critical design pedagogy. The criteria draw on questions that have proven persistently foundational: How do power structures constitute design and its teaching? What does it mean to walk the walk of a power-critical practice? How do we create conditions for genuine critical consciousness to develop — and what do we do when those conditions fail?
Offered as a working inventory rather than a programme, these propositions are one practitioner-researcher’s attempt to articulate what critical design education means — shared here as a starting point for conversation.
About
Lisa Baumgarten [she/her] is a critical design mediator — designer, researcher, writer, and teacher/learner. She is the co-creator of Teaching Design, a participatory research platform exploring design education through intersectional feminist perspectives, and publisher of its infrequent newsletter.
Baumgarten has held interim professorships at the University of Applied Sciences Mainz, Burg Giebichenstein University of Art and Design Halle, and Braunschweig University of Arts. She has been teaching design theory and practice at German and international universities since 2017.
Her workshops and conversational formats have been commissioned by institutions including the Whitechapel Gallery London, Design Museum Gent, Estonian Academy of Arts, and re:publica. Together with collaborators, she offers Diskrit/Design — a lecture/workshop format for design educators focused on discrimination-sensitive approaches.
Her current research centers on design mediation as critical practice. Her writing has been published and presented at DGTF, Nordes, and form design magazine, among others.