LDS is a collaboration among Scholars of Design Practice who want to explore the expanded field of Critical Studies, Design, and its history in a contemporary academic, context. Here, both lecturers and students take on the role of researchers and contribute to a critical exchange of knowledge regarding narrations of Design. Therefore LDS evokes an inclusive and participatory discourse about a multitude of Design Stories and neglects the concept of one Design History.

Localizing Design Stories enhances narrations of intersectional and subjectively shaped concepts towards Design which break down a Western European and Western American design canon by sexism, classism and racism.

Historically patriarchal structures and colonialist historical events continue to shape our ways of thinking today. This also applies to Design conceptions and is particularly reflected in the retelling of a unified universal linear Design History. A continuously repeatation of this questionable narration leads forgetting, muzzling and unauthorized appropriation of marginalized groups such as women and culturally exploited societies and their impact on and stake in conceptions of Design.

Through critically informed methods of data collection and analysis, LDS aims to reappraise and record more inclusive Narrations of Design Stories particularly focussing on suggesting alternative educational concepts for Design Practitioners.

LDS is explicitly not looking for users but for collaborators; the development of this network and the entire project is fundamentally accompanied by the initiators questioning and becoming aware of privileges. We are actively looking for exchange and criticism.

• Bianca Koczan (Projektleitung)

Lehrinnovationfond HTW Berlin

Beaconhouse International University BNU Lahore

Hochschule für Künste Bremen

Burg Giebichenstein Kunsthochschule Halle

German International University Cairo GIU

Lehrinnovationsfond HTW Berlin

https://www.localizingdesignstories.com