tools for questioning the implications of digital tools in the re-turned hybrid design education spaces

Derived from autoethnographic observations, this paper reflects on the possibilities, limitations, and implications of digital tools present in between digital, physical, and hybrid teaching. The mapping initiated from a period of fully remote learning and immense reliance on technological structures to share and discuss creative work. Serving not as how-tos but as tools for questioning, the map deconstructs the virtual learning environment prescribed, strategies employed, and conventions formed in digital classrooms. The project asks what conditions the choreography of teaching and learning: When the digital classroom function simultaneously as a space of simulation, space of access and communication, and documentation and representation, what are inherited from the tools and platforms, such as the idea of professionalism? How to frame critique as a social process, when educators and students are navigating the spectrum of private and public, various senses of temporalities and ownership, and issues of accommodation and consent? After returning to in-person learning for one academic year, digital space is still used as an extension of physical classrooms. Digital tools stay in pedagogical practice, and many questions remain relevant. What and how are we making visible or invisible for pedagogical and administrative assessment? What additional learning opportunities does the inclusion of digital platform creates, such as integrating platform literacy, consciousness about viewing condition and representation of work, and creative and subversive use of technology? This paper presents questions and provocations to chart a discussion on how to continue negotiating and situating pedagogical practice in relation to digital tools.

Li, Xinyi, Gaia Scagnetti. “Mapping the Critique in Digital Space” in Mid-America College Art Association panel “Digital Tools in Classroom.”Paper presented at the College Art Association (CAA) Annual Conference, Online, February 16, 2023

Post-Radical Pedagogy questions the design of curricular apparatus and explores alternatives to syllabi, grading rubrics, classroom conventions, and presence of authority. Reflecting on the wall with exemplification of the hostile and colonial aspects of administration in education, invited guests and passersby will generate content, which will thicken the walls as an act of on-site publishing and exhibition.

This project sapce is a collaboration between Post-Radical Pedagogy and Thick Press

Situateing a platform education within and beyond communication design to help develop understandings of the mechanisms of platforms, values influenced by platformization, and design implications. 

Li, Xinyi. “Teaching Design in the Age of Platforms: A Framework for Platform Education.”  Paper presented at Cumulus Conference Design Culture(s), Sapienza University, Rome, June 9–11, 2021

Post-Radical Pedagogy was convened as a space to explore, antagonize, challenge, and interrogate institutional values and legacies. “Post” prompts a reflection on what happened, where we are because of, or in spite of an inherited (institutional) pedagogical situation that limits radical potentials, and where we go from here. “Post” is implicitly an acknowledgment of struggle in search of language for articulating what a radical pedagogy in design might entail, where its boundaries are, and where it stakes a position in relation to the many limiting forms of institutional inertia.

Co-PI with Nida Abdullah and Chris Lee, 2020–

Funded by the Strategic Initiative Grant, Provost’s Office and the Strategic Plan Oversight Committee, Pratt Institute, 2020–2021

This project uses cases from the early days of the pandemic to frame the concept of everyday digital resistance, unpacking the factors that contributed to its domination. While capitalism prioritizes digital platforms’ marketing values, online platforms are also venues for activism across borders. Everyday digital resistance is characterized as tactics of micro-interventions integrated into life, standing opposite from radical confrontations on the continuum of activism. Often spontaneous and unorganized, the actions collectively create impact and the potential to undermine power, while individuals can remain relatively disguised and unnoticed, which is especially valuable for actors in high-risk contexts.



Li, Xinyi. “Framing Everyday Digital Resistance” Message Journal: Covid-19 Special Edition, edited by Colm, Dunne, Åse Huus, Dóra Ísleifsdóttir, Lynda Cooper, Mark James, Peter Jones, and Victoria Squire (2021). University of Plymouth Press, https://pearl.plymouth.ac.uk/handle/10026.1/18929, February  2022. 

Li, Xinyi. “Tactic as art: everyday digital resistance and COVID-19 in China.” in Jilly Traganou (Chair), Panel “Affective and Generative Dimensions in Covid 19 Activism.” presented at the College Art Association (CAA) Annual Conference, Online, February 10–13, 2021.