Wicked problems, Wicked designs
Channel: Design & Oppression
Date: 2021-11-19

Wicked problems, Wicked designs is a Theater-Forum session held during the Attending [To] Futures conference in 2021 organized by the KISD School. Theater Forum is a technique developed by Augusto Boal to make structural oppression visible through acting while also rehearsing liberation from oppression. In this forum, the goal was to reveal and challenge the sexist, colonialists, racists, and capitalists oppression in contemporary design thinking. 

The plot consists of a Brazilian designer who wants to get funded by a foreign investor for her solution to the wicked problem of period poverty. The investor uses design thinking to evaluate her proposal and suggests some improvements to her idea, which pushes her to explore what the feminist social movement was doing in Brazil against President Bolsonaro's veto of a period poverty protection Law. 

Members of the Design & Oppression network staged the play and mediated the debate with the audience. A innovative format was developed based on the experience of the Theater of the Techno-Oppressed, a research program that aims at adapting Theater of the Oppressed to online venues. The streaming video became the aesthetic space, whereas the characters wore digital masks built with augmented reality to express the wickedness of design.

The Design & Oppression is a network of students, professors, and practitioners interested in joining forces against any kind of oppression in and through design. The network includes an online weekly reading group, a series of Youtube videos, and an orchestrated participation in design events and conferences. The network is woven by an expanding group of volunteer complicators spread across Brazil. This Theater Forum session will be complicated by Frederick van Amstel (UTFPR), Bibiana Serpa (UFRJ), Rafaela Angelon (UTFPR), and  Carmem Saito (RCA).


Check also the online international course on Designs of the Oppressed offered by the network in 2021: https://www.designeopressao.org/designs-of-the-oppressed/