The anthropophagic studio: towards a critical pedagogy for interaction design

Abstract

The design studio is the standard approach for interaction design education in the Global North. Nevertheless, in the Global South, this approach is not directly applicable due to authoritarian educational systems founded on colonialist ideologies. This research reports on an attempt to appropriate the design studio and fundamental interaction design concepts in Brazil. Following the anthropophagy tradition of hybridization, the foreign concepts were not rejected but devoured and digested together with Global South concepts, such as radical alterity, mediation, and oppression to form what we call the anthropophagic studio. The process gradually revealed to students and researchers the role of interaction design in reproducing other historical oppressions beyond colonialism. This finding points to the need for a critical pedagogy that can aptly tackle technology-mediated oppression.