Participatory design for resistance: The making of pictograms with indigenous youth in the Ecuadorian Amazon

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School of Arts, Design and Architecture | Doctoral thesis (article-based) | Defence date: 2025-12-12
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Authors

Date

2025

Department

Muotoilun laitos
Department of Design

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Mcode

Degree programme

Language

en

Pages

154 + app. 91

Series

Aalto University publication series Doctoral Theses, 245/2025

Abstract

Participatory design research and practice are increasingly engaging in efforts to reformulate and contest dominant codes in the field. This involves reassessing structures shaped by productivist logics, centralized institutions, and extractivist-capitalist worldviews that reproduce inequalities oppressing communities and territories at the margins. Responding to the pressing need to grapple with resistance by historically marginalized communities via participatory design (PD) with indigenous peoples, the thesis introduces a research and production framework grounded in emerging research/participation processes from Latin America, particularly practices of indigenous community communication. Through developing this framing – anchored in learning from and connecting with epistemologies and socio-cultural infrastructures that, though historically excluded from dominant narratives, offer vital insight and approaches to knowledge and material production – the project as a whole emphasize structuring the work for resistance as a creative and transformative force, to expand conventional design approaches and challenge extractive research logics. The study drew on a long-term collaborative project in the Ecuadorian Amazon with indigenous youth, communities, and organizations, centered on the making of pictograms to represent and reactualize situated knowledges and practices with indigenous peoples. Pictograms were mobilized as knowledge systems and political, counter-hegemonic devices grounded in heterogeneous histories, rather than as objects of prevailing “modern” design. Developing pictograms sustains collective praxis of learning from the diverse knowledges of the communities and their territories, while tying in with situated histories of collective struggle. The findings are outlined through four peer-reviewed publications, each looking at the participatory research and at the collaborative design journey from one particular perspective. Together, the findings indicate that the project moved beyond dominant modern design paradigms (which frame pictograms as extrinsic, standardizing devices for universal information/communication), positioning them instead as a living process and as situated technological and cognitive devices for collective knowledge-building. Aligning their creative practice with indigenous community communication via a crucial indigenous framework marks a path forward from conventional understandings of participation in design research and production, thereby helping shape popular, communal, and intercultural participatory approaches to design. In sum, this PD is design practice that considers the relational fabric in which it is embedded, involving diverse forms of labor beyond the designer–computer dyad. Thus, it radically challenges notions of individual authorship when production is social and communal rather than merely collective. Insight from the concept and practice of resistance with indigenous communities and territories provided a foundation for collaborative design at the margins, considering local–global ethical cum political dimensions, researcher positionality, and the histories of situated participatory praxis. The work embraces tensions as dialogical spaces that benefit the research, leveraging North–South dialogue and the material conditions that enable fruitful engagement with Amazonian nationalities. Building on this foundation, it articulates commitments to collectivity and to tensions as guiding principles for design research and production, both as a site of contestation and as a means of strengthening emancipatory practices. Committing to collectivity spotlights how co-appropriation of design efforts between the communities and the design researcher, in so called mundane and strategic work especially, decentralizes practices, with effects that configure alternative design relationships and deepen understandings of redistribution of participation – across knowledge, production, and burdens. The second framing, in turn, positions contradiction as a space for action. The necessary different positioning of the design researcher, exemplified in militant design research, expresses situated historical theorizing and enacting of political action while actively avoiding research practices that dislocate or appropriate knowledges and practices with indigenous communities/territories. The PD research and production framework proposed for resistance with indigenous communities in the Amazon opens a space for creative theoretical and material approaches to learning from and supporting other ways of being, knowing, and doing. In broader terms, it contributes to reimagining, doing, and thinking for PD otherwise. It calls on design researchers, whether working from the margins or acting across these and other boundaries/borders, to produce knowledge on terms that serve diverse communities and territories.

Description

Supervising professor

Julier, Guy, Prof., Aalto University, Department of Design, Finland

Thesis advisor

Botero, Andrea, Prof., Aalto University, Department of Design, Finland
Minoia, Paola, Prof., University of Turin, Italy

Keywords

participatory design, diverse communities

Other note

Parts

  • [Publication 1]: Pinto, N., Vertiz, B., & Botero, A. (2022). Resistance, social reproduction and emerging commitments for collaborative design from the margins. In D. Lockton, S. Lenzi, P. Hekkert, A. Oak, J. Sadaba, & P. Lloyd (Eds.), DRS2022: Bilbao (proceedings of a conference held on June 25 – July 3 in Spain).
    Full text in Acris/Aaltodoc: https://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi:aalto-202208174877
    DOI: 10.21606/drs.2022.648 View at publisher
  • [Publication 2]: Pinto, N., Botero, A., & Julier, G. (2024). Politicizing the pictogram: PD approaches within indigenous community communication. International Journal of Design, 18(1), 77–93.
    Full text in Acris/Aaltodoc: https://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi:aalto-202406124277
    DOI: 10.57698/v18i1.05 View at publisher
  • [Publication 3]: Pinto, N., Julier, G., & Tapia, A. (2023). Pictograms for resistance: Historicity and militant design research in Amazonian Ecuador. Journal of Visual Culture, 22(2), 176–201.
    Full text in Acris/Aaltodoc: https://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi:aalto-202403202870
    DOI: 10.1177/14704129231196442 View at publisher
  • [Publication 4]: Pinto, N., & Nango, E. (2025). Designing together in multi-crisis times: Effects of mundane and strategic work with indigenous communities in the Ecuadorian Amazon. In B. Feher & J. Csernak (Eds.), Designing transformative change: The potential of collaboration and creativity in crises – proceedings of the Social Design Network’s Conference »On the Verge: Design in Times of Crisis«. Transcript.
    Full text in Acris/Aaltodoc: https://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi:aalto-202503042691
    DOI: 10.14361/9783839476031-013 View at publisher

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https://urn.fi/URN:ISBN:978-952-64-2870-3

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[diss] Taiteiden ja suunnittelun korkeakoulu / ARTS