DE7046 - Design Activism Studio

You will learn through design activism as part of a collective. You will produce work to put into the world and learn from the responses it receives. As a collective you will work together to make decisions and maximise the potential impact and value of your design activism work. While the issues that concern the collective may be of global concern you will consider how they impact the human and non-human in a specific local area. This specific place will give context and content for your work and the audiences you seek to learn with, inform and influence.



As part of the Design Activism Studio, you will be introduced to people and groups who may wish to join your collective or support its work. You will also need to be active in developing networks to inform and support your activism. The academic team will support your work by giving you an initial framework for design activism. They will continue to support your learning through reviews of on-going work, joining you for co-creative sessions and critically reviewing the coherence of your thinking and the creativity of your responses.



In each studio, project practice is complimented with critical discourses introduced through active seminars. In the Design Activism Studio critical discourses relate to ‘design, politics and neoliberalism’, ‘making and advocating for change’, ‘activism and terrorism’, ‘local actions and activist movements’, and ‘why we all need to be activists’?



Regular feedback provided by peers, academic tutors and collaborators alongside your studio practice will help you track your progress and make improvements. Written feedback will be provided in response to your assignment submission at the end of the module. The assignment and this feedback will help you consolidate your learning to date and carry it forward into the next part of the programme.

Activism and advocating for change can be deeply personal. You will be supported in this module to explore the concerns and issues that matter to other people and that you believe in. This will be done in a supportive environment. Care and principles of ethics will help to ensure that people do not feel judged for the views that they hold.



You will be sign-posted to resources and events to inspire your learning and practice. Collectively, as a community of students and researchers, over the course of the module we will populate the physical space with materials we collect and the things we make. This will support everyone academically through the co-production of this learning environment. There will be an informal time each week, where we consider these materials and what they mean to us and for the work we are engaged with. In some sessions we will be joined by guests from across and beyond the university.



The module’s tutors, together with other leading specialist academics from across the university, will support you throughout the module so that you understand what to expect, how classes and project-based activities relate to your assignments, and so you can receive feedback within supervised studio sessions. You will see your tutors throughout each week of the module where there will be opportunities to ask questions and gain support. Digital platforms allow you to engage in discussions and share relevant resources with the studio members (your peers, tutors and collaborators). These platforms also provide the means to contact your tutors directly.

All modules at Northumbria include a range of reading materials that students are expected to engage with. The reading list for this module can be found at: http://readinglists.northumbria.ac.uk
(Reading List service online guide for academic staff this containing contact details for the Reading List team – http://library.northumbria.ac.uk/readinglists)

Knowledge & Understanding:

Locate and summarise key social change and activism theory.

Identify discourse that underpins and resists societal transitions.



Intellectual / Professional skills & abilities:

Create persuasive communications, targeting specific audiences and advocating for change.

Engage with diverse stakeholders to ground and inform a design activism practice.



Personal Values and Attributes:

Situate your own values within a design activist agenda.

Formative assessment will be provided through weekly contact with peers and tutors, and through in-depth project review and debriefing sessions.



Summative assessment will be based upon a presentation of the collectives’ (the cohorts’ collaborative work including your own contributions) design activism work. Assessed against an agreed project proposal submitted in week two of the module. The presentation will highlight your synthesis of contextual information providing a justification and social change rationale for your activist outputs. The presentation will be followed by a question-and-answer session to further explore the work and the collectives learning. Verbal feedback will be provided as part of the question-and-answer session.



Written summative feedback will be provided to highlight the strengths of your assignment submission and its areas for improvement. This feedback will make clear how you performed against the assessment criteria. All MLOs will be assessed through your presentation.

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Become a design activist! Stand up for what you believe in. Call out injustice, inequalities or what’s wrong with the way things are. Based on an ethics of care and non-harm, in this studio we will support you to use design to lead towards the positive changes that you believe in.



You will work closely with external stakeholders and networks to expose and respond to a real-world, place-based, matter of concern. You will learn the methods, tools and approaches of Design Activism, and, working with your peers, apply these, as advocates for change, to address that situation.



In addition to providing a dynamic and future-focused authentic learning environment, this studio is designed to enable student to act as co-researchers contributing new knowledge and understanding about responsible design activism for just futures. Your project-based contribution will be assessed through a presentation made to project stakeholders, tutors, researchers and peers.