Walls: Participatory Design Activism

Abstract

Nikki Juen and Basma Hamdy are two graphic design professors from North America and the Middle East respectively. Despite the distance between them, they are both operating in the spaces between the individual and institution, subject and system, and their practice, in different ways, is concerned with public mass demonstrations but also individual efforts and grass roots protest. They discuss how their approach to design teaching and practice is more concerned with energies over objects, with processes over products, and with legacies over artifacts and how their work moves beyond the four walls of the institution and outside the traditional definitions of design practice into fluid, participatory spaces.