De-centering Consumption and Opening Emergent Futures through Queering Service Design

We’ve inherited a narrative that living according to our values is primarily a matter of “ethical consumption.” But that story isn’t true—or at least, it isn’t the whole story. What-if we shifted our energy and attention from ethical consumption toward creating conditions for ethical production?

Your input and engagement in this generative session will inform an ongoing conversation that brings complex critical theories into dialogue with accessible, actionable practices. Queer Design Club (Berlin chapter) steward Rashid Owoyele will collect experiences and worldviews to identify Narrative Barriers that limit the agency and imagination of service designers. Through a series of activities, we will challenge these barriers, imagine Post-capitalist Futures, and identify leverage points for service design to become a more liberatory, pluriversal, and regenerative force.

What happened to those design school ambitions of making the world more equitable and just? Let’s reclaim agency and find out what service design can do.

Self

Field

Format

Talk & Discussion

Day

Friday, Oct 16

Room

Foyer

Time

12:00 PM

What would you be willing to give up, change, or risk to make that future possible?

Questions to unpack:

1) What narratives about work and working life have left you feeling out of alignment with your organization, ethically compromised, or limited in your agency and power? (For example: there’s a presumption that working for social and environmental good should be charitable or is “not profitable”)

2) When you have foregrounded values like care, equity, or justice, or raised a concern at work, what systems or structures could have been in place to better support you? (For example: A union could have organized our company’s workforce to demand accountability from leadership)

3) If your agency as a designer were not constrained by conventional priorities (user-centeredness, optimization, market reach) what broader social impacts would you want to create in your community, region, or country? What is your dream?(For example: I would love my legacy to be a shift from pursuing individual wealth and success to community wealth building and shared-impact)

4) If you could use your knowledge, strengths, and abilities to design an ideal organizational environment, what would it make possible for you and others? What is your vision? (For example: I would like to work in an organization that embodied principles of workplace democracy where psychological safety and a sense of agency weren’t unreasonable expectations)

5) If you had a community of peers committed to building a more equitable and just world together, what would you be willing to give up, change, or risk to make that future possible? (For example: I would gladly give up working for high-profile clients if I knew that my skills were being used to prevent further environmental degradation)

Rashid Owoyele

Rashid Owoyele

Managing Partner of transekt.agency, a creative agency specializing in program design, research, and social innovation

Rashid Owoyele is an expert in Social Innovation and Cooperativist or Worker-centered Service Design. Previously Owoyele earned a bachelor of arts in Environmental Ethics & Design as well as a minor certificate in Environmental Science in Public Health from Indiana University. Since obtaining an MFA in Transdisciplinary Design at Parsons The New School for Design in New York in 2013, Rashid has carried out social impact and social innovation projects on 5 continents, with 1,000’s of students and professionals across all sectors.

Teaching, formerly, at The New School, University of Cincinnati, Design Akademie Berlin, and University for the Arts Berlin among others; Rashid has extensive experience facilitating ideation workshops at the fuzzy front end of the innovation process, but is most passionate about systems change and transformation design working to bring these to the market through the social innovation studio Transekt UG (Berlin, Germany).

Previous projects that may be of interest from their portfolio: (2013) The New School’s Sylvia-Rivera-Boggs Social Justice Hub. (2013) Make Your Mark, an urbanism program for youth developed with collaborations at 3 parks throughout the NYC Parks Department. (2014) Studio C, a social innovation program and platform designed and developed with United Way that guided 8 non-profit organizations through developing their own Design Thinking capacities in a transdisciplinary setting.

Recent Roles:

– Senior Researcher at the Design Research Lab, Berlin University of the Arts, where Owoyele contributes to projects centered on digital sovereignty, social design, and ecological sustainability.

– Research Associate at the Weizenbaum Institute for the Networked Society, exploring platform cooperativism and equitable technological governance.