Im/material Practice: decolonizing design with big beaded earrings

As an indigenous person, I love reconnecting with my culture. I love learning words from my language, participating in ceremony and making big beaded earrings. As a designer, I often find myself working in a digital space. The juxtaposition is strange - having to clear off my desk when switching projects. Trading my laptop for bags of beads and quills, my mouse for a needle and thread. I feel like I was two different people between the activities that take up so much of my time and that these people struggled to interface their work. While I can incorporate cultural teachings of sustainability, resilience and humbleness into my professional practice, it’s been difficult to work the other way and incorporate tech and interaction principles into my cultural practices. So often within interaction design I feel as though I am a designer first, after that an indigenous person who is simply viewed as a reflection of a dusty exhibit in a museum.

There have been projects in the past that attempted eased this tension but I struggled to articulate them. This is augmented the by ongoing trauma and shame many indigenous people from around the world suffer due to colonization, especially as we make efforts to reconnect with stifled culture. Earlier this year I had the opportunity to receive support around a project bridging my seemingly disparate practices, and away I went. This study has turned out a number of outputs and proposals including networked colour-changing beading, interactive denim jackets with biomimicry panels, loop-station sound installations of material practice and sparkling sensor-riddled necklaces.

In initial research I didn’t find anything online that directly reflected what I wanted to pursue. Searching the words “digital” and “native” didn’t turn up what I was looking for, in fact quite the opposite. From this, part of me feels like my people aren’t supposed to connect with the digital world - but there were sparks of light, other natives bridging tech and tradition, although not in the way I had in mind. The ongoing work of decolonizing design practice by bringing my traditional teachings to it, and by pulling down walls that exclude and devalue so many things that are integral to my existence to a person within my community is pulling me out of the dusty museum exhibit and into a world where I and my design and im/material practice can thrive.