Hien Phan, Hien L. D. Phan, or Hiền Lê Diệu Phan (she/her/hers) is a Teaching Assistant Professor at the Boise State University, Idaho, USA. Her design pedagogy religiously follows her trajectory and MFA project in lieu of thesis Codesigning diversity alter/natively, which documented, speculated, and reflected on the diverse student body in the neoliberal multiculturalism turning conservative.
Within a cohort where 77% of the student body comes from Global South countries (n=13), she conducted a series of co/autoethnographic design experiments, through which the diverse student body explored their identities across various determining aspects of culture: biological, national, professional, (geo)political, and institutional. Engaging low-tech materials as highly accessible, democratic, and communal design objects and spaces, the diverse student body engaged in the dialogical, participatory design experiment, while diversity was negotiated beyond the assigned color skins, essentialize identities, and neoliberal languages. This collective trajectory to critical design consciousness encouraged Hien to revisit the collective design body’s disremembered ancestry, the Global South anticolonial histories.
With the support of critical design scholars, like Dr. Dori Griffin, Professor Maria Rogal, Victoria Gerson, and notably Dr. Frederick M.C. van Amstel who also chaired her MFA/MXD project in lieu of thesis, Hien approached critical consciousness in design research, suspiciously, hesitantly, but necessarily. She approached design as a collective creativity, social production, and contradiction that has been suppressed for the ease of design thinking framework. As she reflected on the diverse student body as a collective design body, diversity is designed culturally and institutionally as politically charged narrative and existential crises, both of which were ignored in her commercial design practices.
In her future practice, she seeks to continue the critical and speculative design approach in co/autoethnographic methods, through which she will continuously collaborate with like-minded critical designers, artists, and scholars. To her, design as a profession and education is a long-term commitment to critical pedagogy within and beyond the design classroom. She seeks to support students in raising design consciousness, as reflecting on the design body’s role in the handiness cycle of design object. This process hopes to support students in becoming responsible, creative designers who dares to criticize the unsustainable, unethical as well as thinking and making for the outside of that designerly box.
Hiền Phan 