Recipes from the Pluriverse: Cooking up change in design

The design community has made several calls to reimagine a future design education, including calls to decolonize the field. Lesley-Ann Noel’s design practice has been grounded in critical consciousness, positionality, an emancipatory worldview, pluriversality, and critical utopias. Drawing on her own positionality as an Afro-Caribbean designer educated in Latin America, in this lecture she shares recipes for change in design practice and research. She will use rich storytelling to discuss the guiding philosophies and examples of how these principles have impacted her design curricula, design tools, and research. She will also reveal “behind the scenes” stories of recent and upcoming publications, in the hope of inspiring other designers from the Pluriverse to also share their stories.

Dr. Lesley-Ann Noel (she/her) is a Trinidadian design educator, based in Raleigh, North Carolina, U.S.A. She practices primarily in the area of social innovation, education, futures workshops, and public health. She is co-Chair of the Pluriversal Design Special Interest Group of the Design Research Society. Before joining North Carolina State University where she is an Assistant Professor, she was the Associate Director of Design Thinking for Social Impact at Tulane University in New Orleans, and she was a lecturer at Stanford University in the U.S.A. and at the University of the West Indies in the Caribbean. She is one of the editors of The Black Experience in Design, and is currently writing two books and several chapters in other publications about equity-centered design.