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About me

Dr. Frederick (Fred) van Amstel (he/him/his) is a tenured Associate Professor in the Design & Visual Communications program at the University of Florida, US. Dr. Van Amstel’s research and education address contradictions in design: why and how design projects face conflict, ethical dilemmas, trade-offs, and complexity. In recent years, the contradiction of oppression climbed to the top of his research agenda due to the ascension of far-right extremism, climate racism, and digital colonialism in the Americas.

From 2019 to 2023, Frederick held the position of Assistant Professor at UTFPR in Brazil, where he cofounded the Design & Oppression network and its local hub, the Laboratory of Design against Oppression (LADO). From that position, he guest-edited two special issues of the Diseña Journal on Design, Oppression, and Liberation, hosted the international course Designs of the Oppressed, and organized the Theater of the Techno-Oppressed outreach activity. Frederick and his peers in the Design & Oppression Network are consolidating a dialectical-existential perspective over design based on the works of Paulo Freire, Augusto Boal, Álvaro Vieira Pinto, Oswald de Andrade, and other Latin American authors. The identification of userism, the ideology that reduces humans to users, is a major finding in this line of work.

Dr. Van Amstel’s PhD thesis, accepted by the University of Twente in the Netherlands, identifies several contradictions in architectural design and service design. Instead of eliminating them, his practice of expansive design harnesses contradictions as a source of change. Further research in nearby fields has demonstrated that, by representing contradictions in an open-ended way, a community or an organization can figure out how to transform its surrounding reality by releasing its inner conflicting forces. This can be done through serious gaming, data visualization, digital theater, metaphorical building blocks, speculative design mockumentaries, and other means of representing contradictions without solving them.

After defending his thesis, Dr. Van Amstel focused on the contradiction of oppression and the possibilities for liberation. This turn has led him to contribute to decolonizing, feminist, anti-racist, embodied, commoning, self-managed, existentialist, critical, and transdisciplinary approaches to design. So far, he published, together with collaborators, over 60 peer-reviewed papers in several fields of inquiry, including Participatory Design, Human-Computer Interaction, Design Studies, and Architectural Design.

Frederick Marinus Constant van Amstel is a transdisciplinary adventurer with a Bachelor in Social Communication (Media Studies), a Master in Technology (Science & Technology Studies), and a PhD in Design. He knows best what he can carry on his belt: a range of carefully crafted qualitative methods, design patterns, and digital infrastructures. One of these infrastructures, Corais Platform, has been widely appropriated by social movements, indigenous communities, art collectives, and popular educators associated with the Brazilian digital culture movement. Corais is the main legacy of Faber-Ludens Interaction Design Institute, the first one of its kind in Brazil, founded in 2007.

For a thorough description of Frederick’s adventures, please check his CV:

Frederick M. C. van Amstel – Full Curriculum VitaeDownload

Main expertise

Technologies of interest

Theoretical sources

Artistic influences

Personal profile

I’m a Dutch-Brazilian Latino man, who grew up in a middle-class family in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Rio is a beautiful and chaotic city that inspires me as much as it worries me due to the strong oppressions the population experience in their daily lives. At the age of 8, my family moved to Curitiba, a city in the South of Brazil that is successful in hiding its social contradictions through careful urban planning. The experiences of growing up in these two cities marked my understanding of the world.

Since childhood, my mother taught me to live the Hare Krishna lifestyle, which I follow these days. That includes meditation, vegetarianism, Indian music, mysticism, studying the Vedas, caring for nature, and other habits. Above all, that means constantly reflecting on my life path, the dharma.

Industry profile

I’m a design practitioner with experience in the following industries:

Check my design portfolio with selected projects.

Academic profile

I’m an engaged scholar with the following experience:

See my journal articles and other publications.

Research profile

I like to introduce myself as an engaged design educator and researcher. My work characterizes itself by redefining design in terms of transformation, subversion, liberation, and revolution. I use these not in the shallow meaning often used by activists and innovators but in the Marxist sense of becoming through struggle. In fact, it is a life project I entertain: developing an authentic dialectical-materialistic foundation of design.

In line with that, my current research aim is to develop a participatory design foundation based on historical-dialectical materialism that can support students, researchers, social movements, non-profit organizations, and startups interested in tackling the contradictions that prevent the realization of social justice. Technology offers the unique opportunity to deal with contradictions at a micro-level (infrastructure) without waiting for reforms or revolutions that deal with contradictions at a macro level (superstructure). Engaging in participatory design projects makes it possible to identify, analyze, model, and transform contradictions that society may deal with later. In this way, technologies can probe, simulate, and anticipate social change.

A central concept of this praxis is contradiction, which can be largely defined as an accumulated tension between opposing societal forces. Wicked problems, constraints, and dilemmas are just some visible manifestations of contradictions but so are solutions, proposals, and quick fixes. Perceiving the underlying contradiction requires the participation of people who embody the social forces at stake. Computers can assist in identifying, probing, simulating, anticipating, and playing out contradictions, provided these forces have easy access. To avoid formalizing contradictions too early based on poor understanding, I typically start participatory design projects with low-tech analog representations and end up with high-tech digital representations.

Three contradictions attract my attention now:

1) Commodity fetishism (contradiction of activity). The first one is at the core of capitalist design activity, which gives form to desires and needs, strategies, and ideologies. As a result of this contradiction, design must articulate the commodification and customization of its products to increase exchange-value without losing too much use-value. I study this type of contradiction through the lens of Cultural-Historical Activity Theory (CHAT), which offers plenty of ethnographic, experimental, and analytical methods to research computer-mediated interactions. 

2) Neoliberal impotence (contradiction of space). The second contradiction relates to the design space, which is, on the one hand, expanded by the liberalization of economic activity, and, on the other hand, reduced by the privatization of public spaces. Despite all the possibilities generated by entrepreneurial innovation, this contradiction stimulates a general feeling of impotence against the transformation of spaces into markets, artworks into products, and everyday life into alienated existence. I take the perspective of the production of space to study contradictions of space, like gentrification and fragmentation.

3) Dehumanizing humans (contradiction of body). The third contradiction comes from the design body, a new dimension I found while engaging with the decolonization struggle in Brazil. This contradiction relates to the denial or underestimation of the development of a particular group of human bodies, the oppressed people as if these were less capable. These bodies are often treated as less-than-human resources or even as objects of design. The result is gentrified, racialized, ableist, and gendered designs that aggravate contradictions of activity and contradictions of space.

In my doctoral thesis, I found that contradictions of activity reproduce in participatory design space — the possibilities considered in a project — by playing design games and other kinds of metaobjects. This led me to define the social production of design space in Design Studies (shortlisted for the Best Paper of the Year), pushing the field away from the individualistic understanding of the concept.

After studying design activity and design space, I am interested in the design body, or the collective agent who designs. This concept applies to social groups, institutions, and individuals who have historically claimed authority over design spaces and developed specific identities (e.g. styles). In contemporary design activity, several design bodies might compete for authority in a contested design space, with sticks and stakes. Alternatively, design bodies may engage in collective authorship in a shared design space that even those with no stakes or sticks can join. In either case, I am most concerned with the oppression of underprivileged bodies by privileged bodies. Colonialism, classicism, sexism, racism, xenophobia, ableism, homophobia, and other forms of oppression also manifest in design in subtle ways — subtle enough to compromise the production of shared design spaces.

Recent design research tries to reframe bodily differences as a positive feature that can strengthen diversity, innovation, democracy, and design space exploration. They propose new design approaches that consider the body not as a mere cognitive machine or an anthropometric model but as a social being with color, shape, history, voice, desires, and rights. Decolonizing design, ontological designing, feminist design, design justice, and autonomous design have made significant progress in dealing with contradictions of body. Nevertheless, they did not look at how these intertwine with contradictions of activity and of space. That is the sweet spot I want to stay on top and dig underneath.

Participating in the Design & Oppression Network has been essential to grasp contradicitons of body and their entanglements with other contradictions. The network led me to the philosophy of technology of Álvaro Vieira Pinto and its political implications. I got much experience from participating in design projects and conducting design research; however, I still feel that the contradictions I found require me now to dig deeper into philosophy to open up the design space for liberating technologies, prepare the design body for new forms of mediated social consciousness, and devise new participatory design activity.

So far, in the projects that I have worked on, Free, Libre, and Open Source Software (FLOSS), as well as Open Hardware, work better for this intent; however, they often reproduce the same interaction esthetics of proprietary software. In addition to the ethical challenge, there is an esthetic challenge to recognize the beauty expressed by subversive uses of computers like gambiarras done by users to abuse of what is left to them. I recently taught a Designs of the Oppressed online international course, which made me realize how many design schools hide user oppression under euphemisms like User-Centered Design. This way of designing should not only draw from the humanities or the arts, but also from engineering and science, as it aimed at superstructure and infrastructure, including — and not being restricted to — the re-presentation of reality.

Design methods can assist with (or hamper) developing consciousness of contradictions. I plan to develop further interaction design theater, speculative rhythmanalysis, germ cell models, controversial design space mapping, differentialist graphs, existentialist supervisory practice, and other design methods based on dialectical logic. This type of logic connects mental, social, and physical phenomena so that it is possible to capture and analyze qualitative data from their objective appearance. Historical analysis, video-based interaction analysis, and grounded theory are some of the scientific methods I use to dig into the essence of the phenomena where contradictions thrive. I want to continue developing open-source design software,cooperative work infrastructures, and participatory decision-making tools that use qualitative and quantitative approaches to deal with contradictions.

My latest research taps into the ontological implications of the user condition, which prevents people from developing to their full potential when producing their existence with computers. Besides reproducing structural oppression like racism, sexism, and ableism, HCI reproduces specific oppression we call userism. Participatory design has done a lot to fight userism, yet participation is not enough to liberate from this condition of being a mere user. From my readings of critical pedagogy, oppressed users need to recognize the existential threats posed by computers and, from that critical understanding, organize to develop computers for their humanization.

This research program is the old, now reimagined utopia pursued by participatory design. With this reimagining, interaction design may motivate young researchers, particularly women, indigenous people, black people, latinxs, immigrants, and other students from historically oppressed origins who want to use radical technologies for their liberation. Since this program is primarily based on Latin American oppression studies, it will likely contribute to rebalancing the international knowledge flow from academic centers to academic peripheries, expanding the possibilities for decolonizing design research.

In addition to creating things, I am equally interested in thoroughly criticizing them. I like transcribing, coding, annotating, and triangulating qualitative data collected from design projects. I am well-versed in Cultural-Historical Activity Theory and have experience with Rhythmanalysis, Interaction Analysis, Grounded Theory, Oral History, and Ethnography of Infrastructures. The interest in qualitative research stems from a belief that design should be in touch with science as much as with art to deal with society’s contradictions.

Teaching profile

As a design educator, I wish to train my students to become conscious political subjects in society. So, most of my assignments ask students to respectfully learn with a different kind of person, culture, or technology they are used to. With that, I cultivate an atmosphere that favors creativity as much as criticism. I address creativity through engagements with artistic movements. Surrealism, for instance, states that anybody can create art, provided enough methods or games. This approach is liberating for those who do not feel creative. Most of the time, it is just a matter of broadening their repertoire for creative ideas to start emerging. Yet, this expansion must bear a critical mindset; otherwise, imitation follows. The Brazilian Modernism movement had a compelling tactic for avoiding replication: first, appreciate the work and then critically digest it. This cultural form of anthropophagy reached a global status with the Tropicalia movement, which mixed different cultures to create a new breed of Pop Art in Brazil. Theater of the Oppressed politicized Tropicalia and made it an instrument of liberation, the ultimate creative act.

As for critical thinking in design, I usually look for insights into the social sciences. The reflective practice theory of Donald Schön states that the design studio is a learning environment that depends on critique for advancing further expertise in situations that designers cannot determine in advance. I consider this kind of critique superficial. Paulo Freire’s critical pedagogy goes deeper in crafting the criticism, including the confrontation of different knowledge, disputed realities, and clashing historicities. Inspired by Freire and a colleague I worked with at PUCPR, we developed an interaction studio pedagogy based on the Brazilian tradition of anthropophagy that nurtures alterity relations among teachers and students, students and students, and students and the unexpected Other.

The anthropophagic studio opens up and reaches out. I usually ask students to post short videos or blog posts about their projects circulating in their local community. Eventually, I share these projects in my social network profiles to engage with practitioners, disseminate my research results, publish speculative essays, and craft open educational resources. Institutions, community leaders, and government representatives learn about my work through these networks and get in touch to see if we can work together. I typically liaise between these people and my supervised students to foster collaborative or participatory design projects.

Besides the anthropophagic studio, I also developed a software studio program in partnership with Apple and an independent interaction design institute. In these studios, we experimented with programming languages like PHP, Javascript, Python, Objective-C, and Swift. We also appropriated prototyping technologies like Zope, Drupal, Arduino, Processing, Adobe Flash, Touchatag, Lego Mindstorms, etc. In my recent teaching, I realized that creative coding distracts students from where the action is. Therefore, I now emphasize improvised videos, Lego Modeling Language, interaction design theater, and other bodily activities before coding. These methods help students to grasp the social qualities of interaction materiality that are not so obvious when the body of the Other is not present.

Based on my students’ feedback, I am a good tutor of design studio courses. Even if it is not originally a studio course, I turn my classes into design studios since I like having dialogues with students while making something that can potentially transform reality. My leading talent lies in bridging the gap between the theoretical foundations of design and the everyday practice of designing. I can create studio assignments that help students realize epistemological and methodological challenges while making something tangible.

When supervising a thesis project, I begin by helping the student to locate the project within personal, professional, and societal development. I advise them to think about their projects as existential projects, as a way of becoming more than what they already are. We stumble upon the barriers to becoming more and question who else is facing similar obstacles. Like in Theater of the Oppressed, I help students realize that these barriers are not personal but structural to our society, keeping the oppressed within the bounds of oppression. This realization usually inspires students to join people who face similar barriers and develop participatory design projects.

From this vantage point, I see changing societies requiring good theoretical practitioners, committed activists, coalition articulators, material speculators, environmental bricoleurs, socialist entrepreneurs, everyday politicians, and many new ways of being a designer in the face of strong contradictions. For that, I believe it is necessary to have transdisciplinary adventures that cut across the arts, humanities, social sciences, computing, engineering, and traditional non-academic knowledge. After going through such experiences, my students realize they are more than just human resources for the industry; they are political subjects in society.

See a summary of the courses I taught and some selected student works.

Biographic sketch

In 2003, Gilberto Gil, a famous musician, was appointed as Minister of Culture in Brazil. One of his main acts was to establish a distributed network of cultural producers to explore the possibilities of digital media to support Brazilian cultural production. This act sparked a grassroots movement called Digital Culture that continues even after Gil stepped down in 2008. The movement contends free software, remix, hacking, and Creative Commons for the Brazilian Digital Culture context.

During my bachelor’s studies in Social Communication (the equivalent of Media Studies), I got inspired by Gil and decided to work with the internet as a medium, believing there was a way out of the media oligarchy that dominated the public debate. I wanted to intervene in, and not just analyze, the development of interactive media like my professors were doing at that time. Then I discovered the Interaction Design field, responsible for structuring interactive media, and decided to dig into it. In my Master in Technology (Science, Technology, and Society), I combined Latin American Cultural Studies (a theoretical approach I learned from Media Studies) and Participatory Design (a practical approach I learned from Interaction Design) to shift media design from its focus on interfaces to interactions. From that perspective, I designed many websites, applications, electronic products, games, and environments.

After working as an interaction designer for several years, I noticed that the political aspect of this work was not well considered. Cognitive information processing approaches dominated the field, and these did not consider interactive media as part of a culture surrounded by disputes. I observed the rise of technology conglomerates shaping the digital infrastructure of my country and decided to do something about it. Together with a group of educators, I founded an independent interaction design institute called Faber-Ludens (2007-2012). We tried to push forward the potential contribution of Interaction Design to Digital Culture. One of our projects, Corais Platform (2011-), became a significant infrastructure for the movement, harboring more than 700 cultural production projects spread over Brazil. Among several contributions, the platform pioneered digital money to mitigate the budget cuts in government funding, severely affecting the movement since 2014.

Soon after launching Corais, I moved to the Netherlands to pursue doctoral research on Participatory Design at the University of Twente. There I faced intense conflicts between epistemologies of the North and epistemologies of the South, artistic and engineering methodologies, and between a range of other cultural differences. I managed these conflicts and ended up with designing with contradictions as my thesis topic.

Returning to Brazil in 2015, I faced three main challenges for continuing research at an international level: 1) my local peers did not understand my thesis topic; 2) there was a rise in authoritarianism in Brazilian politics; 3) the government research budget was drastically decreasing. I noticed that I needed to decolonize my mind from European canons to be responsive and relevant to my original context. This reflection led me to focus on a specific contradiction at the center of the political debate: oppression. I studied and practiced Theater of the Oppressed (Augusto Boal), Critical Pedagogy (Paulo Freire), and Epistemologies of the South (Boaventura de Sousa Santos). 

Theater became vital to me as I discovered it could reveal the invisible social implications of acting with computers and their ethical dimension. HCI often neglects ethics, equating technology with absolute goodness or relative neutrality. As for theater, ethics is at the core of the play. Theater of the Techno-Oppressed poses ethical questions through esthetic expression, raising consciousness from the concrete experience of bodily interaction. HCI, on the other hand, subsumes ethical questions under disembodied esthetic expression. For instance, the minimalist, flat, and clean Graphic User Interfaces usually cover up the time-based structures that steer people to specific human-human interactions, including violence.

Speculative and Critical Design helped me realize that interaction esthetics typically reflect the taste and moral values of professionals and early adopters of digital technologies. Since they have too much power over these technologies, they rarely put their taste and values in check. In this way, they unintentionally (or intentionally) reproduce oppressive structures, such as racial profiling, gender bias, and work invisibilization. These structures make the oppressed feel they interact with computers in an ugly way compared to white, male, and rich early adopters. Esthetic qualities like usability may diminish this feeling, but it does not challenge the user’s status as a user. To challenge this status, we have explored the historicity quality in speculative design fiction, or the capacity to collectively make history that includes users as historical subjects.

The latest years have been difficult to pursue my research agenda, though. The Brazilian government is leaning towards institutionalized fascism and watching over professors that conduct “anti-fascist research.” To avoid this kind of research, the government cut many research funds for the humanities and the arts, so I had to rely on private funding. While working for Pontifical Catholic University of Paraná (PUCPR), I attracted and managed a medium-sized research project focused on open innovation with a total budget of aproximately 1 million dollars, one of the highest in the university. Funding came from Copel utility company, using the P&D Aneel scheme, grant number PD–2866-0496/2018. The project studied how this company learned from interacting with entrepreneurs in an Open Innovation platform. The research team designed and implemented the platform, composed of 5 professors, 2 PhD students, 2 master students, and 12 support staff. I played the role of grant writting, principal investigator, and platform designer.

I also developed entrepreneurship programs cooperating with industry partners such as Apple, Renault, Copel, and startups from the local ecosystem. Despite these achievements, I was not accepted to supervise students in their graduate programs, so I moved to UTFPR in 2019, a public university with racial and indigenous quota. The prospects for joining a graduate program are getting better now; however, I lost some ability to cooperate with private and public organizations. On the other hand, I got the possibility of cooperating with social movements through our student political engagements for diversity, equity, and access.

Previously, I thought diversity was a matter of inclusion. Then, I understood that diversity required confronting its opposite: sameness. My students, particularly women, Black, and first-generation college students, made me realize that my presence in academia sustained racial, gender, and cultural homogeneity. Thanks to a great deal of self-criticism and other-criticism, I learned to avoid my culturally-ingrained sexist, racist, and homophobic prejudices and turn my privileges into shared rights. By developing critical consciousness, I realized that academia needs to go beyond its current focus on serving privileged people to support underprivileged people in their fight for humanization.

As part of this turn to oppression, I tried opening a graduate program in Prospective Design (inspired by CMU’s Transition Design program) at UTFPR, but it was rejected by the national research agency in 2020. In spite of that, I founded the Laboratory of Design against Oppression as the local hub of the Design & Oppression network in 2021, working mainly with undergraduate students. This network includes an online reading group, a series of Youtube videos, an orchestrated participation in professional events and academic conferences, and the online course Designs of the Oppressed, attended by more than 120 people worldwide. We presented the network activities at the Design Research Society conference and in a special issue on Design, Oppression, and Liberation that I guest-edited for the Diseña Journal. Participating in the Design & Oppression network made me attuned to the challenge of historically oppressed people regaining their humanity. I participated in several discussions about this topic in the UCSD Future of Design Education initiative. My main contribution was to point out that more than having a diverse staff and student representatives, people need to be willing to change by interacting with different other. I also brought this point to the Design Research Society SIG on Pluriversal Design, its PIVOT conference and Pluriversal Design Book Club.

Due to these recent engagements, I received requests to give talks and join panels on design and oppression at several universities. These institutions recognize my colleagues and me at the Design & Oppression network as emerging voices in critical design research. In 2023, I joined the Design & Visual Communications program at the University of Florida as tenured Associate Professor. I want to use this position to advance further the alternative globalization project of the South, i.e., connecting oppressed groups in different parts of the world (including the North) to promote intercultural translations and solidarity across struggles.

July 7, 2010 at 11:35 am