Article Design and diaspora, voices from the Global South

Abstract

This presentation will reflect on the practice of doing and managing a podcast on social design for 4 years. Diseño y diáspora, the podcast, is the most listened-to podcast in Spanish-speaking countries and maps current and emergent topics in the social design field. Most of the interviewees are Spanish and Portuguese speakers living in their own countries or in the diaspora. Though, lately, the podcast presents a once-a-month interview in English. Including designers living in the diaspora is key, as this podcast is done from Finland. Going deep into the archives of this podcast is a way to understand what is going on in social design and invite to the discussion to others, interested in sustainable design, design with a gender perspective, design in cooperatives, NGOs, and the public sector, design with Afroamerican and indigenous communities, decolonizing design practices, and design for public policies. As new design practices emerge and consolidate, giving voices to the doers is a way to legitimise the practice and clarify expectations and promises. In this presentation the book: Design and Territories was presented through answering two key questions: How do these interviews provide an idea of what is going on in design now in the Global South? How to design the documentation of emergent design practices without borders and in a multi linguistic way?  The interviews of this podcast are at the moment the largest oral archive of design stories in Spanish. There is a community of design practitioners that recognise themselves as followers of the podcast and find themselves part of a larger web of social designers. However, there is no research on the content and how it represents what is going on in design from the Global South. In addition, little effort has been done into documenting and archiving social design when it is not produced as part of an academic project. There are no large collectives or foundations working in this documentation and when they exist they are based in one country and try to document the design from this country. This practice goes against international and regional collaboration.  This presentation shows the need for international archive practices that are multilingual in their conception and allow communities of designers and design researchers to find each other and collaborate.