Decolonising Design Education: Assembling Caring Futures

This thesis explores how Decolonising Design Education can be enacted as a practice of condition-making rather than surface diversification. Grounded in practice-as-research, it introduces Artefactual Speculative Co-Storying (ASC), a methodology that braids speculative design, participatory facilitation and qualitative interviewing to co-produce knowledge. Unlike approaches where artefacts merely prompt discussion, ASC treats artefacts as epistemic infrastructures that organise participation, making temporal, affective and relational registers tangible. Through speculative workshops and interviews with design educators and students in UK higher education, the study explores how Eurocentrism continues to structure curricula, assessment and pedagogy, while also foregrounding the possibilities of decolonial practice for structural transformation.

From these encounters, the research develops a change/collapse analytic, distinguishing between aspects of design education that can be reconfigured through sustained effort and logics so entangled with coloniality that they must be dismantled. Synthesising these insights, the thesis proposes a Decolonial Design Framework articulated as six commitments: refusal, plural epistemologies, care and horizontality, values-based reciprocal assessment, institutional accountability, and imagination as method. It argues that Decolonising Design Education is not an endpoint but an ongoing, relational practice of world-making that redesigns the conditions under which knowledge is produced, recognised and sustained. The study contributes both to theoretical discourse and to the collective labour of building caring, plural futures, emphasising that decolonisation requires critique and imaginative tools for rethinking design education