This piece is a contribution from Dr. Anuradha Chatterjee, Professor and Dean, School of Design and Innovation at RV University.
Hosted at Karnataka Chitrakala Parishath in Bangalore from 10-12 May 2024, Design for Justice was a curated public exhibition led entirely by the students at the School of Design and Innovation at WDO Member RV University. The School is known for its focus on design, technology and society and while it prepares the students for corporate and entrepreneurial careers in design, it also builds in them a strong social responsibility ethic. Design for Justice is not a graduation show: it is a curatorial glimpse into the works done by students across User Experience Design, Product Design, Spatial Design, and Communication Design. It is a response to the need for design to cater to the needs of those peoples and communities that are generally marginalized and overlooked in and through design and its complicity in asymmetries of power. The exhibition was curated along the six sub themes of Accessibility, Sustainability, Wellness, Design-Ability, Ethics and Privacy, and Access for Digital Equality.
The intersection of design as addressing the needs of social justice has partially led to the emergence of design justice as a form of practice and research globally. In the book Design Justice by Sasha Costanza-Chock, it is observed that there is a “growing community of designers, developers, technologists, scholars, educators, community organizers, and many others who are working to examine and transform design values, practices, narratives, sites, and pedagogies so that they don’t continue to reinforce interlocking systems of structural inequality. It’s about design, social justice, and the dynamics of domination and resistance at personal, community, and institutional levels. In essence, it’s a call for us to heed the growing critiques of the ways that design (of images, objects, software, algorithms, sociotechnical systems, the built environment, indeed, everything we make) too often contributes to the reproduction of systemic oppression. Most of all, it is an invitation to build a better world, a world where many worlds fit; linked worlds of collective liberation and ecological sustainability.”
To this end, this curatorial perspective emerged as I sat with the Exhibition Committee to brainstorm the theme and I started thinking with my students about how to move our curatorial themes beyond the beige into thinking of the theme as a ‘net’ that is cast into the sea of student works to see what comes up, and what it means for us as a school and for our students as designers of their generation and in the world as it is today, leading to questions around what matters and what should matter. To this end, the exhibition is a form of inquiry, rather than the presentation of an idea articulated in its finality.
Furthermore, through their involvement in a curated exhibition such as this, RV University students gained tangible experience in curatorial practice and curatorship, display and exhibition design, event and project management, social media and marketing, which will not only go into their portfolios, but it will give them greater clarity in their own trajectory as a designer. At the School of Design and Innovation, RV University the pedagogy is focused on providing these unique opportunities, above and beyond learning within the curricular framework of the University, positioned fundamentally in the idea that students need to make their work seen and made sense of in a public domain, as design is a public discourse.
