Place-Based Transcultural Practices: Designing Reciprocity

Abstract

This position paper locates designing reciprocity as grounded in place-based knowledge systems and transcultural practices. We interweave two dialogues drawn from work in Borneo and Gaelic Scotland, acknowledging the participation of all authors and collaborators, Indigenous and non-Indigenous. This approach is open to learning with and from Indigenous communities and highlights that ontological turns often do not go far enough to attend to people, practices, and place. The “moments of encounter,” presented as dialogical accounts, prioritize shared understandings of landscape, calling for cultural and ecological consciousness―knowing, being, and becoming―in reimagining what it means to be emplaced. We offer seven emerging dimensions of reciprocity as a means of sharing this work with design practitioners and researchers, and describe the conditions for practicing them through relations cognizant of living histories, ethical issues of power, dispossession, displacement, and justice.