ACADEMIC WRITING

Here you will find some of my academic writing.

In Another Life Another Being: On Design and the wages of decoloniality, Disena (2024)
Despite the struggles for design disciplines to confront their colonial legacies and practices, the question remains: who can truly afford a decolonizing practice worthy of the name? This paper will investigate why Industrial Design, as a discipline, has been glaringly absent from the decolonial conversation, and the critical institutional gaps between decolonial thought and action. I will investigate the pragmatic relations between labor, value, care work, and social reproduction within the political economy of design that dissuade and constrain the discipline from articulating its responsibility to transform its social and material realities. In setting this provocation, I argue that if decolonizing design is to be anything more than an epistemological curiosity, moving beyond the niche corners of design academia, it will need a diverse ecology of accomplices—to imagine other lives for itself and become other beings.

Citation:
Joseph, J. (2024). In Another Life Another Being: On Design and the Wages of Decoloniality. Diseña, (25), Article.7. https://doi.org/10.7764/disena.25.Article.7
Refuturing Studies: Rehumanizing Futures through/by Design (PhD Thesis, 2023)
With the onset of climate and ecological breakdown, organized human life faces a precarious present and an even bleaker future. The sixth IPCC report (2021-2022) states that the window for drastic climate action is closing fast. At the same time, the atmosphere of climate disinformation, denialism, and delay has calcified the collective social imagination, unable to see desirable futures beyond Business as Usual. For this thesis in Industrial Design, the question is relatively simple—can Industrial Design imagine radically hopeful climate-resilient futures? This Research through/by Design thesis answers this question by imagining a desirable future that doesn’t yet exist and what it may take to get there.
This thesis travels through two worlds or paradigms—‘What-is ‘and ‘What Could-be.’ The world of ‘what-is’ explores the typologies of defuturing and dehumanization as they manifest with climate breakdown. The thesis imagines a speculative future world that ‘could-be,’ explored in the accompanying The Open Journal of ReFuturing, a fictional design research journal from 2131 AD. The journal is written as an indigenous critique from the future, looking back at the first century of climate reparations through the speculative solutions enacted today. These speculative solutions are generated through/by designerly ‘What-ifs’ and its designed artifacts for climate-resilient solutions and ‘Technologies of Care’ that make this world thinkable and doable today. This seriously playful yet studied imagination of ReFuturing Studies is an invitation to reimagine a transformed ‘ecology of disciplines’ for climate action—to reclaim and rehumanize the dehumanized present such that the future is profoundly different when we arrive in it.

The Open Journal Of ReFuturing 2131CE
A design research journal from the year 2131 celebrating it’s centenary edition on a planet having experienced an unprecedented transformation of social ecology. The fictional research journal is written as an Indigenous critique of the late 20th and early 21st century, discussing and reframing the existential issues we face collectively now and talks of the first century of climate reparations. The centenary journal edition is designed as a reviewer’s copy for a fictional journal being read in 2131, where the world is facing climate uncertainties, and human societies have undergone drastic, more “down to earth” pathways of climate reparations through andby design.
As of 2023, the journal has been translated into 4 languages—Portuguese, Russian, Hindi and Chinese. I am immensely grateful for the generous contributions by the translators who did an incredible job including Anna Martino (Portuguese), Vyacheslav Lyakhov (Russian) and Rajendra Singh Negi (Hindi).
Design disciplines in the age of climate change: Systemic views on current and potential roles (2022)
After working several years with industrial design as a tool for the kind of radical systemic change, climate change arguably requires; it now seems timely to discuss the systemic obstacles that make such a shift so hard to implement. Much at odds with current discourse, the article defends current design disciplinary skills by focusing on the tension between what designers tend to do for sustaining the present system vs. what designers could do to support transition to a radically different system and why the latter is so hard to achieve but still so urgently required. With the overarching question – "what can design(ers) do?" – the article establish design disciplines as a distinct entity apart from design. Subsequently it gives an overview of how different disciplines have emerged as 'answers' to how societies, have developed and finally suggest a model for how to address climate change through disciplinary cooperation.
Citation:
Edeholt, H., and Joseph, J. (2022) Design disciplines in the age of climate change: Systemic views on current and potential roles, in Lockton, D., Lenzi, S., Hekkert, P., Oak, A., Sádaba, J., Lloyd, P. (eds.), DRS2022: Bilbao, 25 June - 3 July, Bilbao, Spain. https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2022.365
ReFuturing Studio: Designing long-term sustainability for the biosphere (2021)
The trajectories of the Earth’s climate and ecosystem ser-vices are unravelling, pushing the life sustaining biosphere on the path towards “biological annihilation”. As the worst climate predictions come to pass, it has become urgent to introspect on the predictable consequences of our global economic system designed for extractivism. Attempting to address and understand these issues seems to create a sense of foreboding and anxiety about our climate futures. This paper will discuss this in relation to the tendencies of defuturing in design, that is, the negation and erasure of our better futures and possibilities when trying to imagine a long-term sustainable future for human and non-human others. The discussions here are based on observations and discus-sions with design students in a workshop called “ReFuturing Studio” which attempts to engage young designers to con-front the urgency of climate breakdown and long-term sustainability beyond “business as usual” (BAU).
This paper argues for a “refuturing”— to reclaim that which is defutured and dehumanized, beyond the homogenizing and hegemonic futurism of BAU by re-imagining, rethinking and ‘re-humanizing’ through a ‘designerly knowing’ of the yet unknown long-term sustainable futures. Refuturing thus critically proposes alternative perspectives, solution spaces where designers and design educators can begin to under-stand and reconcile design practice with climate action by “designing for the biosphere” by imagining possibilities for co-regenerative practices as a means for human well-being and ecological flourishing.
Walk the Talk: Towards an ecological futures framework for our designed cultures (2021)
Based on the bleak trajectory of the near and far future due to climate change, this paper outlines some of the assumptions that makes relevant actions so hard to implement. We suggest a framework that enables us to radically rethink sustainability as well as both human and design agency. Based on a simple “Walk-the-Talk” model, potential actions are mapped for both (i) established and (ii) more alternative approaches. The former being the one espoused in today’s discourse, while the latter seems to get surprisingly little support. By describing three concrete product concepts we illustrate how by shifting focus to more alternative approaches, we can precisely address the challenges that more traditional approaches have obviously failed to address. In order to find relevant leverage points for both design and required systems change, the paper finally discusses why the traditional approaches still are so dominant in our quest to address climate change.
Citation:
Edeholt, H., Joseph, J., & Xia, N. (2021). Walk the Talk: Towards an ecological futures framework for our designed cultures. Design Culture(s). Cumulus Conference Proceedings Roma 2021, Volume #2, 2, 3863–3877. https://cumulusroma2020.org/proceedings-files/DC(s)_RESILIENCE_track.pdf
Critical Futures Today Backcasting speculative product design towards long term sustainability
The age of climate breakdown brings with it an uncertain future, even within our collective imagination we are presented with increasingly dystopian visions of the future. This tendency towards a dystopian future can also be seen in product design practise. Speculative and Critical Design (SCD) process emerged as a disciplinary response to challenge the commercial design by envisioning radical futures scenarios and artefacts. These future scenarios work within existing product design praxis to create sustainable, diegetic artefacts that are embedded with certain values of that future. However, at its core, these SCD scenarios end up rejecting any solution driven perspective that ends up confining the artefacts limited to museum exhibits. This paper explores a “backcasted” solution into the present through a ‘designerly' reimagining of existing technology. This paper reflects on these radical future visions in the case of a designed artefact, a 3D printed optical solar cell. The solar cell is proposed as a possible alternative for existing solar cells which draws upon pre-existing technology and its speculation. This exploration creates new possibilities for technological forecasting in a futures-oriented practise where solution driven speculations might pose the question “what if” to the ways in which product design can contribute to climate action today while still looking towards visions of better, more thriving paradigms of the future beyond ‘business as usual’.

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