Designing the Past

Abstract

This paper challenges the position that design is a future oriented discipline, and rather turns an eye to the past as potential material for re-design. We claim that what we call 'the past' is far from static, monolithic, immutable, and is rather subjective, fluid, and constantly renegotiated. People constantly engage in re-designing the past by re-elaborating, reckoning, and plainly forgetting. The rewriting of the past, such as in historical revisionism, is often seen as an attempt to wipe-out, and hence re-inscribe and perpetuate, injustice, oppression, and even genocide. With this paper we call for more courage to take ownership of the past as something malleable, to take responsibility for it, and in so doing to open up design opportunities to a plurality of voices.

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