• Imagine Otherwise

    Imagining Otherwise encompasses current and past projects at the FHNW Academy of Art and Design, and strives toward socially transformative educational and design practices and more equitable futures.

    The project started in October 2018, against the backdrop of massive feminist mobilizations, such as NiUnaMenos, Women's March, and Feminist Strike; and the rising demands from the students for design education that counters patriarchal-colonial narratives. Inspired by the research and activism of Palestinian design educator and researcher Danah Abdulla, we joined forces to start imagining design otherwise—a practice that is critical, situated, reflexive, and socially transformative.

    Believing in the transformative potential of design and echoing Colombian anthropologist Arturo Escobar's words, we began asking ourselves: “How can design be infused with a more explicit sense of politics?” How can we participate in the recentering of design education by specifically situating it in relation to structures of inequality, sexism, racism, and colonialism? And how can we disrupt hegemonic epistemologies, ontologies, and systems from within a Eurocentric institution, and strive toward more equitable, pluralistic futures?

    On this website, you can delve into different projects realized since 2018. They do not attempt to answer the aforementioned questions, nor to provide universally replicable solutions. Instead, they invite you to open your mind to alternatives, and to open up spaces of potential for change—as expressed by feminist activist and writer bell hooks: “a space where there is unlimited access to the pleasure and power of knowing, where transformation is possible.”

    Team
    Co-directors: Mayar El-Bakry, Maya Ober and Laura Pregger

    Imagining Otherwise was co-conceived by Maya Ober and Laura Pregger. In 2019, Mayar El-Bakry joined the team to co-curate Educating Otherwise, a continuing education program.




    Elise Connor
    (she/they)



    ELISE CONNOR is a franco-anglo-indian Artistic Director, Photographer and Graphic Designer based in Lausanne Switzerland. She holds a BA in Cultural Mediation from the Sorbonne, Paris and is completing a BA in Visual Communication specialized in Graphic Design from ECAL, Lausanne. She started the project « Good for a Gxrl » in 2018 with Mathilde Avogadro as a way to question design practices and design education with an intersectional perspective. As of 2019 she and Mathilde Avogadro are artistic directors for the Fête du Slip festival in Lausanne. Her practice is focused on community and multiculturalism as a way to observe and question society.