Editorial I. Perspectives on Design Literacy

Abstract

Knowledge and skills are tightly entangled with economic and political power. In past agricultural societies, most of the population required skills such as animal husbandry for food and sewing clothing to keep warm. Centuries later, with the advent of an economy centred on the extraction of natural resources and the production of consumer goods, it was necessary to develop more complex skills that enabled people to integrate into emerging societies. School systems were responsible for initiating this process through the ‘literacy’ of the child population. They provided the content and conditions for children to develop the skills needed to read, understand and produce written texts. This approach, albeit with some nuances, was the predominant perspective until the second half of the twentieth century, when new understandings of literacy emerged due to rapid technological advances and critical perspectives that questioned the role of the school in reproducing social relations of power and control (Arredondo & Corzo, 2017; Southwell, 2013).