Through Witnessing: Threading the Critiquing, Making, Teaching of Design

How does design give form to social fictions? How does design and the professionalization of design schooling maintain the priorities of nations and capital? Through Witnessing names and wrestles with institutional design education’s pseudo-neutral relationship with colonial capitalist world orders and what it means to teach and design today. It slowly weaves together ideas on designing as a mechanism of maintenance and teaching against bureaucratic inertia. This volume compiles discussions from the Post-Radical Pedagogy lecture series organized by Nida Abdullah, Chris Lee and Xinyi Li, who are all assistant professors in the Undergraduate Communications Design Department at Pratt Institute in New York. The series operated as a vehicle to activate pedagogical practice through and against institutional inertia; it explored, antagonized, challenged and interrogated the values and legacies that shape design pedagogy today. Engaging in pedagogical expressions of rage, generosity, forgiveness, slowness and chaos, the lectures, essays and interviews in this book reflect on the possibilities and sometimes impossibilities toward undoing and un-maintaining the enduring legacies of colonial powers. Contributors include Ahmed Ansari, Danielle Aubert, Hayfaa Chalabi, John Jennings, Elaine Lopez, Silvio Lorusso, Maya Ober, Uzma Z. Rizvi, Kelly Walters, and Lauren Williams Edited and designed by Nida Abdullah, Chris Lee, and Xinyi Li Published by Set Margins' Publications, 2025 Softcover, 176 pages, 6.75 × 9.5 inches ISBN: 978-9-08-335012-7