Designing Together in Multi-Crisis Times : Effects of Mundane and Strategic Work with Indigenous Communities in the Ecuadorian Amazon

This article explores the effects of committing to collectivity when considering the role of mundane and strategic work in cultivating a powerful action space for design research, particularly design for social change, with indigenous communities in the Ecuadorian Amazon. We reflect on the process and advanced results of an ongoing design intervention that aims to collaboratively design a system of pictograms for popular education processes, supporting the strengthening of identity and the creation of politicized spaces for education and action with and for the youth of indigenous nationalities, their communities and organizations, part of a regional indigenous movement. The project began by joining efforts with young student representatives from different Amazonian nationalities who were motivated by their need to make visible and denounce how the COVID-19 pandemic harshly deepened historical structural restrictions on access to higher education for indigenous peoples. The impact of COVID-19 on indigenous nationalities in the Amazon helps us address the way in which historical intertwined inequalities reflect in socio-environmental multi-crises in the region. The focus of this article is the histories of collective effort that underpin the design intervention. Through this focus, we argue that spaces for mundane and strategic work, explored before with citizen-designer or user-designer communities, hold vital potential for tangible, practical effects in grappling with the immediate and long-term needs of historically marginalized communities facing multi-crises and occupying contexts of oppression. Thus, we explore experiences where sustaining transitions between designing together and taking roles across levels of involvement with the latter, allow all of us to try out various forms of knowledge and skills building, critical understanding, and connection to reality. We then weave together the experiences outlined with reflections on two effects of committing to collectivity in collaborative design with indigenous communities: (1) more-than-academic encounters with communities and (2) redistribution of participation related to knowledge, production, and burdens.