Towards radical synergy for more just and equitable futures
Audrey Bennett, Ron Eglash, Roland Graf, Deepa Butoyila, Keesa Johnson, Jenn Low, Andréia Rocha · 2021
Inequity and social injustice are omnipresent wicked problems, complex challenges for which there are no single solutions due to their cross-cultural, cross-disciplinary, and systemic nature. For example, the “green revolution” of the 1970s was supposed to solve world hunger. But we saw instead a rise in corporate control over agriculture (Pielke and Linner, 2019). The design of social media, widely touted as creating a harmonious global village in the 1980s, has instead partly turned into hatching grounds for a global white supremacist movement and other forms of extremism. We cannot afford to passively allow accidental synergies to create global disasters. Instead, we need to bring social, technological, economic, and environmental concerns, among other considerations (the gamut of analysis often abbreviated STEEPV) into a deliberate and reflective emergent process. We refer to this decolonial, emancipatory form of design emergence as “radical synergy.” In this visual paper, we show three projects by graduate students and their partners that take steps toward radical synergy through facilitating community-based, designerly activities that promote generative justice, playful changes of perspectives, and initial-stage integrative analysis