Design researcher & educator

Cultural studies

1. 

   Prospective design: A structuralist design aesthetic founded on relational qualities

   Botter, F., van Amstel, F. M. C., Mazzarotto Filho, M., and Guimarães, C. (2024) Prospective design: A structuralist design aesthetic founded on relational qualities, in Gray, C., Hekkert, P., Forlano, L., Ciuccarelli, P. (eds.), DRS2024: Boston, 23–28 June, Boston, USA. https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2024.883 - Jun 17, 2024
2. 

   Anticolonial prospects for overcoming the coloniality of making in design

   Saito, C., Freese Gonzatto, R., and van Amstel, F. (2024) Anticolonial prospects for overcoming the coloniality of making in design, in Gray, C., Hekkert, P., Forlano, L., Ciuccarelli, P. (eds.), DRS2024: Boston, 23–28 June, Boston, USA. https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2024.255 - Jun 17, 2024
3. 

   Cultural alienation in design

   Some months ago, I joined Lee Moreau, Lesley-Ann Noel, and Alicia Cheng in the inaugural episodes of the Design As podcast (Apple/Spotify), connected to the Design Observer project. We discussed Design as Culture. The conversation was so rich and dense that we split it into two parts. Luckily, Design Observer published a transcript for those […] - Jun 1, 2024
4. 

   Pluriversal Futures for Design Education

   Noel, L.-A., Ruiz, A., van Amstel, F. M. C., Udoewa, V., Verma, N., Botchway, N. K., Lodaya, A., & Agrawal, S. (2023). Pluriversal Futures for Design Education. She Ji: The Journal of Design, Economics, and Innovation (Vol. 9, Issue 2, pp. 179–196). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.sheji.2023.04.002 - Sep 3, 2023
5. 

   Diseño y la colonialidad del hacer

   Keynote addressed at the 13th International Conferences on Design History and Studies, Universidad de Bogotá Jorge Tadeo Lozano, October 2022. Resumen: La colonialidad del hacer se refiere a las relaciones internacionales de producción que sobrevaloran el trabajo intelectual en los países desarrollados y subvaloran el trabajo manual en los países subdesarrollados. Al garantizar esta desigualdad […] - Oct 23, 2022
6. 

   Designers as cultural producers (2022)

   Polyana de Andrade Tavares, a graphic design student at LADO, embarked on a profound journey of collective conscientization that transformed her understanding of her role as a cultural producer. Her final work reflects on this transformative process through an autoethnographic lens, weaving together personal experiences and broader socio-cultural contexts. Initially, Polyana approached her study with […] - Jun 1, 2022
7. 

   Monster aesthetics as an expression of decolonizing the design body

   Angelon, Rafaela and Van Amstel, Frederick M.C. (2021) Monster aesthetics as an expression of decolonizing the design body. Art, Design & Communication in Higher Education, 20(1), pp. 83-102(20). https://doi.org/10.1386/adch_00031_1 - Jun 9, 2021
8. 

   Domesticated futures and monster aesthetics

   So far, design has contributed mostly to domesticate futures for the colonized. Nevertheless, design can also serve decolonizing practices that bring back the contradictory nature of human futures. The domestication of the future is a colonialist strategy that reduces existential time to a desirable space of possibilities that can be designed, packaged, and sold to […] - May 18, 2021
9. 

   The digital smoke: Infrastructural inversion of COVID-19 from the Yanomami perspective

   Pelanda, M. F. L., & van Amstel, F. M. C. (2021). A fumaça digital: inversão infraestrutural do COVID-19 pela perspectiva Yanomami (The digital smoke: Infrastructural inversion of COVID-19 from the Yanomami perspective). International Journal of Engineering, Social Justice, and Peace, 8(1), 69-85. https://doi.org/10.24908/ijesjp.v8i1.14735 - Mar 18, 2021
10. 

    The Anthropophagic Studio: Towards a Critical Pedagogy for Interaction Design

    Van Amstel, Frederick M.C and Gonzatto, Rodrigo Freese. (2020) The Anthropophagic Studio: Towards a Critical Pedagogy for Interaction Design. Digital Creativity, 31(4), p. 259-283. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/14626268.2020.1802295 - Jul 25, 2020
11. 

    Anthropophagy traces in a cultural commons platform

    Van Amstel, Frederick M. C. (2020) Anthropophagy traces in a cultural commons platform. Commoning Design and Designing Commons Workshop (position paper), Participatory Design Conference, Manizales. - May 18, 2020
12. 

    Design and Culture

    45 hours – Graphic Design — UTFPR This course, taught with Marinês Ribeiro dos Santos in 2019, ties the dots between design, culture, and society. Designers are producers and also reproducers of cultural artifacts, signs, and experiences. Being conscious of this fact helps them to find possibilities for changing oppressive cultural patterns and normalities. - Mar 28, 2020
13. 

    Design Livre: Cannibalistic Interaction Design

    Van Amstel, Frederick M.C.; Vassão, Caio A.; Ferraz, Gonçalo B. 2012. Design Livre: Cannibalistic Interaction Design. In: Innovation in Design Education: Proceedings of the Third International Forum of Design as a Process, Turin, Italy. - Apr 9, 2012
14. 

    Interaction Design as a Cultural Project

    I’ve been very lucky to attend Interaction 12 in Dublin last week. Everything was so well organized and still with a human touch. The conference allowed a lot of networking between presentations. There was large corridors and rooms for side conversations, which for me are the best part of going to conferences. On the background […] - Feb 8, 2012
15. 

    Cannibalistic Interaction Design

    Last week, I was in Italy for an academic forum about Latin perspectives on Design and I presented our view from Faber-Ludens Institute. I described the context where the Institute emerged and explained our Design Livre approach for project development. Previously, I used the translation Free Design, but from now on I’ll keep the original […] - Nov 9, 2011
16. 

    Interaction Design as Mediation

    During my Master’s research, I looked for alternative views on Interaction Design that went further than User Interface Design. Most definitions say that the former is broader than the latter, but they didn’t provide clear objects to work with. David Malouf did a good job of extending Dan Saffer’s elements, but his foundations look still […] - Jul 26, 2011
17. 

    Cultural Studies of Design Fictions

    Design fictions are speculative scenarios about everyday use of new technologies. They are produced mainly by companies for branding their vision of the future, exploring popular imaginary and desires. Nokia Morph (2008), for example, is a short animation that shows how nanotechnology could be applied to cellphones to make them more flexible, durable and fashionable. […] - Jul 22, 2011
18. 

    Toy Hack for opening the cultural black box

    Last saturday, I organized a Toy Hack workshop at the brazilian national design students meetup with the purpose of invinting young designers to open the black box of electronic products, mix it’s components and see what happens. The new frankentoys created by the participants are shown in this video (portuguese): Industrial Designers are commonly not […] - Jul 20, 2010
19. 

    Trends, cliches and cultural reproduction in Design

    Design is sometimes used as synonymous with innovation, creativity, innovation, cutting edge. But how much design is able to bring the new? The society fears and rejects movements that propose radical changes, such as the Landless Movement, hackerism and Punk, but deify changes proposed by design because this changes do not threaten the status quo, […] - Jul 9, 2010

हरे कृष्ण हरे कृष्ण कृष्ण कृष्ण हरे हरे हरे राम हरे राम राम राम हरे हरे