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About me

Dr. Frederick (Fred) van Amstel (he/him/his) is a tenured Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the Design & Visual Communications (MXD) Master of Fine Arts at the University of Florida, USA, a program known for its emphasis in codesign — collaborative, community-oriented, communication design. Since 2024, he sits on the editorial board of the leading journal in this field, CoDesign.

Frederick’s research and education address contradictions in design: why and how codesign 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. In response, Frederick intensified his research on designing technologies to support the liberation of the oppressed.

Before moving to Florida, Frederick held the position of Assistant Professor at UTFPR, the only technical university in Brazil. There, he co-founded the Design & Oppression network and its local hub, the Laboratory of Design against Oppression (LADO). He also played a pivotal role in establishing UTFPR’s graduate program in Prospective Design, the first of its kind in Brazil. 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, Rogério Duarte, and other Latin American authors. The identification of userism, the ideology that reduces humans to users (and only users), is a significant finding in this line of work.

Designing alter/native design methods and tools (metadesigning) and studying them in practice (infradesigning) is at the heart of Dr. Van Amstel’s praxis-oriented research. These methods and tools are mostly used in participatory, decolonizing, feminist, anti-racist, embodied, commoning, self-managed, existentialist, critical, systemic, and transdisciplinary design approaches. Many fields are interested in such progressive approaches to design. So far, he published, together with collaborators, over 70 peer-reviewed papers in several fields of inquiry, including Human-Computer Interaction, Service Design, Participatory Design, Design Research, Architectural Design, and Construction Management.

Dr. Van Amstel’s PhD thesis, accepted by the University of Twente in the Netherlands in 2015, identifies several contradictions in architectural design and service design. Instead of eliminating them, the 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 playful means. The pretext of play claimed by these means enables dealing creatively with contradictions while still developing critical consciousness.

Frederick 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 of its kind in Brazil, founded by Frederick in 2007. This early entrepreneurial experience shaped his views on the relationships between academia and society. Since then, he has been busy recognizing and producing non-academic and anti-disciplinary knowledge.

Transdisciplinary adventures

Frederick Marinus Constant van Amstel defines himself as a “transdisciplinary adventurer” with a Bachelor’s in Social Communication (Media Studies), a Master’s in Technology (Science & Technology Studies), and a PhD in Industrial Design Engineering. While developing such backgrounds, Frederick transgressed disciplinary boundaries and engaged deeply with non-disciplinary knowledge, an experience that led him to remain critical of the way knowledge is produced and accumulated in academia.

Frederick’s adventures are visually summarized by the animated diagram above. The full story can be appreciated in his lecture Why I became a transdisciplinarity design researcher (2024). His CV contains detailed information of those adventures:

Full Curriculum Vitae (CV)Download

Main expertise

Technologies of interest

Theoretical sources

Artistic influences

Personal profile

I’m a Dutch-Brazilian Latino cis 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.

Leadership profile

I’m not particularly eager to play the role of boss, expert, or any figure of authority that can undermine my collaborators’ autonomy. I’m always eager to hear, discuss, and debate with collaborators because participation is not only appropriate for design in a democratic society but also for management. As a leader, I’m a great facilitator, but sometimes, a complicator too. I don’t avoid having difficult conversations, for they push the psychological and collective development necessary for change. I am an enthusiastic proponent (and researcher) of self-management and leadership-as-practice. That means I prefer to develop leadership as a shifting, alternating, democratically governed, and collectively owned practice. This preference requires me to make my work practices as much as visible, permeable, questionable, and changeable as possible. Having the patience to wait for others is fundamental not to take a bridge too far in the organizations I work for. I appreciate (and perform) followership as much as leadership.

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 approach that can support students, researchers, social movements, non-profit organizations, and startups interested in tackling the contradictions that prevent the realization of social justice through high and low-tech. In tech projects, contradictions manifest as deceptive patterns, algorithm bias, stereotyped user models, gendered color patterns, class aesthetic taste, colonized mental models, and mechanized gestures. They affect the mutual constitution of people, technology, and the world, preventing underprivileged bodies from developing to their full potential. My research unleashes designing potentials that have been prevented or denied in specific communities and social groups through technology appropriation, critical pedagogy, theater of the oppressed, and other Marxist-inspired approaches. The concept of technology-mediated liberation, or developing technology for the oppressed’s liberation, summarizes them all.

To put it in a historical perspective, this research program is the old, now reimagined utopia pursued by participatory design. It is a vision of emergent technologies contributing to maximal (not minimal) changes in everyday life, such as the end of imperialism, classism, racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, fatphobia, ableism, and all forms of oppression. With this reimagining, participatory 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.

Instead of formulating a comprehensive theory and applying it later, I prefer to be active in research projects, outreach activities, social movements, governmental initiatives, and startup ventures promoting change. I use that first-hand experience as material for theory-building, as in the praxis epistemology. So far, my research has developed two radical praxes of change through design: expansive design and designing for liberation. Expansive design aims at harnessing contradictions as a source of change in design activity and design space, whereas designing for liberation tackles oppression by raising critical consciousness about oppressed rights, aesthetics, and technologies. In both praxes, however, change is characterized as conflict-laden, not necessarily positive, sometimes chaotic, always affective, and unpredictable; in summary, it is a never-ending process of becoming through struggle or contradiction.

I understand change through contradictions. Contradiction is an accumulated tension between opposing societal forces. Wicked problems, constraints, and dilemmas are just the visible manifestations of contradictions, and so are solutions, proposals, and quick fixes. Perceiving the underlying contradiction requires the participation of people who embody the social forces at stake. I gathered enough evidence that design methods can assist with (or hamper) developing critical consciousness of contradictions. Design methods crafted on the digital humanities premise are more conducive to critical consciousness due to their mediational properties. To avoid formalizing contradictions too early based on poor understanding, I typically start with low-tech analog methods and end up with high-tech digital methods.

Three contradictions draw my attention now:

1) Commodity fetishism (contradiction of activity). This is at the core of capitalist design activity: giving form to desires, needs, strategies, and ideologies that are not real. 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, interventionist, experimental, and analytical methods.

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 inauthentic 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 of research I found while engaging with the decolonizing design movement. This contradiction relates to the denial or underestimation of a particular group of human bodies, the oppressed people, as if these were less capable. These bodies are treated as less-than-human design subjects or even as design objects. The result is gentrified, racialized, ableist, and gendered designs that aggravate contradictions of activity and contradictions of space.

Besides those three, I am interested in any contradiction of activity, space, and body that manifests in design praxis. 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 in 20216), pushing the field away from the individualistic understanding of the concept. That research found that many contradictions arise once these two design aspects are treated separately, i.e., as if activity was the sole concern of service design and space of architectural design. Instead of an integrated approach that supposedly eliminates conflict, the expansive design practice studied in my PhD thesis includes contradictions to anticipate organizational change and development.

While studying contradictions of body such as oppression, I discovered the formation of the collective design body, or the agent who designs in codesign and participatory design projects. In capitalist design, bodies typically compete for authority and power in a controversial design space, using 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 both cases, I am concerned with the oppression of underprivileged bodies by privileged bodies.

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.

Most of the current design approaches end up reproducing contradictions of space while addressing contradictions of body, for example, by including Black or Indigenous people in human-centered designs based on the same centralizing strategy that sustained colonization and land exploitation.  This can be partly attributed to the historical predominance of formal logic over dialectical logic in design thinking. Contemporary design thinking needs to develop dialectical logic as much as formal logic. Even if dialectical logic is complex, dealing with contradictions inclusively and creatively is essential. It does not require mastering complex formal languages as formal logic does, but it does require engaging with a praxis.

Participating in the Design & Oppression Network drew me to that rabbit hole of intertwined contradictions. There, I found the philosophy of technology of Álvaro Vieira Pinto that lay a design space for liberating technologies, preparing the design body for new forms of mediated social consciousness, and devising pluriversal participatory design activity. Vieira Pinto’s philosophy led me to discover userism with Rodrigo Gonzatto, an existential condition in which a social group becomes a computer user (and only user). Privileged designers underestimate, patronize, persuade, exploit, and profit from computer users. However, users also rebel and fight back by forming associations, resisting, complaining, and lobbying. For instance, strikes against labor platforms can be considered an emerging form of user resistance. Participatory design has done a lot to fight userism and democratize technology appropriation, yet participation is not enough to liberate from this condition of being a mere user. According to our research, the oppressed users need to recognize the existential threats of emergent technology and, from that critical understanding, organize to develop technology for their humanization.

After trying many things, I realized Theater of the Techno-Oppressed worked best for that purpose. The analogy between theater and digital technology reveals the invisible social implications of acting with technology and its ethical dimension. Ethics is often neglected in technology development, mainly due to the influence of the solutionist ideology that equates technology with absolute goodness and relative neutrality. As for theater, ethics is at the core of the play. Theater raises ethical questions through aesthetical expression, which technology does as well, yet in a low profile. The solutionist ideology, for example, expresses its neutrality and goodness through minimalist, flat, and clean Graphic User Interfaces. Behind this ideology lies the less obvious yet more profound ethics of interaction aesthetics or the procedural time-based structures that steer people to certain human-human interactions. In addition to theater, I have experimented with other approaches to explore the ethics-aesthetics relationship in technology development: creative coding, physical modeling, pattern-based codesign, and improvised videos.

When participants agree, I record and analyze these design activities, spaces, and bodies according to explanatory theory. In the past few years, I have been digging into the theory of critical consciousness of Álvaro Vieira Pinto (Paulo Freire’s master). For this theory, human consciousness reflects reality and projects reality intentionally, keeping up and rolling with the movement of matter in the world. If the intention is to fixate on the world as it is and has always been, consciousness is naive. In contrast, consciousness is critical if the purpose is to welcome change in an unjust world. Vieira Pinto put a lot of effort into disclosing the role of art and technology as material support for both naive and critical consciousness.

So far, Free, Libre, and Open Source Software (FLOSS), as well as Open Hardware, were the most advanced materials I worked with for this intent; however, they still often reproduce the same interaction esthetics of proprietary technology. In addition to the ethical challenge, I understood there is an esthetic challenge to recognize the beauty expressed by subversive uses of technology like gambiarras done by users to abuse what is left to them.

Beyond progressive government bodies, my research is possibly helpful to social movements, NGOs, startups, and other institutions interested in liberating society from the neoliberal motto of “There Is No Alternative.” This condition is characterized by tight design spaces, technocratic design activities, and homogenized design bodies. With the dialectical-materialistic foundation for design I am developing, these progressive actors will expand design thinking beyond the current hegemonic problem-solving, aesthetic taste regimes, and behavior-steering approaches.

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 I 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 art to deal with society’s contradictions.

Education 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 somehow 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, though. Paulo Freire’s critical pedagogy goes much deeper in crafting the criticism, including the confrontation of different knowledge, disputed realities, and clashing historicities. Together with a colleague 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 is characterized by opening up and reaching 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 on 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. I believe 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 who 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 inspires students to join people who face similar barriers and develop participatory design projects by them, not with, not for.

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. Becoming that requires 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 consciencious political subjects in society. This is pretty much all that I expect them to learn from me. The rest are bonuses.

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 a cultural phenomenon surrounded by disputes. In line with my critical academic background, 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 pushed forward the potential contribution of interaction design to the emerging Brazilian Digital Culture movement. One of 
our projects, Corais Platform (2011-actual), 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 since 2014. This early entrepreneurial experience shaped my views on the relationships between academia and society.

Soon after launching Corais, I moved to the Netherlands to pursue doctoral research at the University of Twente (2011-2015) in a project to integrate architectural design and service design in hospital construction. There, I faced intense conflicts between epistemologies of the North and epistemologies of the South, artistic and engineering methodologies, and a range of other cultural differences. I managed these conflicts and ended up with designing with contradictions as my thesis topic. Instead of eliminating contradictions, my thesis makes the case for design harnessing them as a source of organizational change.

When I returned to Brazil (2015), I got caught by a significant national political turmoil. I briefly worked for President Dilma Rousseff in the Dialoga Brasil project, a social participation app that pioneered digital participation in Brazil. Then, I sadly observed her gendered and unfounded impeachment in 2016, which stalled the initiative and put Brazil on the line of far-right extremism. My thesis had limited applicability to the contradictions we were dealing with. While comparing what I had written in the Netherlands with what I experienced in Brazil, I realized I needed to decolonize my body and mind from European canons to be responsive and relevant to the society in which I grew up.

As a design educator, I began studying and practicing science & technology studies (via Álvaro Vieira Pinto and his late research network), critical pedagogy (via Paulo Freire and his international legacy), and theater of the oppressed (via Augusto Boal and his Centre for Theater of the Oppressed in Rio de Janeiro). In this shift, I got involved with various progressive social movements and developed an engaged scholarship profile.

In my first assistant professor job at PUCPR (a private university), I tried using design thinking, social entrepreneurship, and open innovation to tackle these contradictions. The social impact was minimal. Even so, I attracted and managed a medium-sized research project on open innovation with a total budget of 3.6 million Reais, one of the highest research budgets in the university. I also developed socially oriented entrepreneurship programs cooperating with industry partners such as 
Apple, Renault, Copel, and local ecosystem startups. Alongside these business-oriented initiatives, I developed a critical pedagogy for interaction design that finally captured, represented, and worked out the tensest contradiction of Brazilian society at that time: oppression. This contradiction manifests in interaction design as gendered, racialized, ableist, and generally oppressive designs. Most of what I did after that stems from the discoveries my teaching partner and I made in the anthropophagic studio, as we called it.

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 within social movements, I realized that academia needs to go beyond its current focus on serving privileged people to support underprivileged people in their fight for humanization.

Among the several approaches we experimented with in the anthropophagic studio, Theater of the Oppressed stood out as my preferred way of engaging students or the public with researching the contradiction of oppression. Instead of approaching the topic in a detached and rationalistic direction, this approach stimulates the sensitive thinking essential to understanding the subjective implication of oppression. After taking some courses at the Center for Theater of the Oppressed, founded by Augusto Boal in Rio de Janeiro, I started to develop new additions to its arsenal of techniques. For instance, I experimented with spect-actors impersonating objects, artifacts, or technologies to make design intentions and biases explicit to the public.

Theater became vital as I discovered it could reveal the invisible social implications of acting with computers and their ethical dimension. Interaction Design 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. Interaction Design, 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 make history that includes users as historical subjects.

After moving to UTFPR in 2019 (a tuition-free public university with racial, Indigenous, and low-income quotas), I collaborated with the University’s Solidarity Economic Incubator, started the Theater of the Techno-Oppressed, supported my students in a COVID-19 emergency outreach activity in disenfranchised communities, collaborated with a social movement (Uniperifa) that educates the marginalized youth on their access and right to public universities and founded the Design & Oppression network. 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 two special issues on Design, Oppression, and Liberation that I guest-edited for the Diseña Journal together with Lesley-Ann Noel and Rodrigo Gonzatto.

I witnessed and reflected on the quality and depth of the design research from the Global South. So much good research done there never comes to be appreciated (published, translated, cited, etc) by the international academic gatekeepers of the Global North. In this role at Diseña, I learned that journal editors could play a foundational backstage role in reaching out to marginalized researchers, encouraging them to challenge the exclusionary publication structure, finding reviewers capable of understanding the lived experiences at stake and making editorial decisions informed by diversity, equity, and inclusion criteria. Most of the authors and reviewers we worked with did not have permanent academic positions despite doing breakthrough research in some of the most pressing contradictions of our times: oppression.

Contrariwise to the inherently oppressive judgment of double-anonymized peer review, I see it as an opportunity to foster critical dialogues, mainly when there are mechanisms such as meta-reviews and editorial discussions that can mend eventual destructive reviews. Peer review is one of the last bastions of academic quality and freedom. It prevents the publishing business from entirely commodifying academic articles. However, reviewers — I suppose from the Global North — evaluate poorly research done by the oppressed, possibly due to being unaware of the difficulties of conducting research in oppressed realities. That is why, as a peer reviewer, I put extra effort into highlighting the research contribution and providing constructive comments to the paper’s authors whenever I come across research coming from these realities.

In an attempt to situate this scholarship in a specific reality, in 2021, I cofounded the Laboratory of Design against Oppression (LADO) at UTFPR together with Marco Mazzarotto and Claudia Bordin Rodrigues. It is an open, horizontal space for critical education, scientific research, and transformative action that approaches design as a human right. Attentive to the university outreach policy, LADO mimics social movements’ self-management style. Any student can propose a new project to its regular assembly, find partners through it, and run a working group to realize the project. I supervised several projects at LADO: the formation of a women coffee worker coalition, an autoethnographic account of a design student, a metadesign strategy for a self-management software, a decolonial furniture system, a shared management handbook, an existential crises deck, and others. These projects are characterized by design students learning how to locate and position themselves critically in the world.

These innovative experiences led me to engage more deeply with design education research. Between 2020 and 2022, I joined Donald Norman and Karel Vredenburg’s initiative on the Future of Design Education. We published the findings from our Pluriversal Working Group at SheJi. I also joined several discussions about this and related topics in the Design Research Society SIG on Pluriversal Design, its PIVOT conference and its 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 a 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. In 2024, I became MXD MFA‘s Director of Graduate Studies.

July 7, 2010 at 11:35 am