Learning About Design’s Colonial Pasts and Narrative Games

In this paper, I reflect on a learning project developed with students to make the complex history of the work of Sri Lankan architect Minnette De Silva accessible to a broader audience through narrative games. The project becomes a case study to reflect on significant themes related to much needed changes in the ways histories of practice from the colonial peripheries are narrativized and taught within design history education, particularly in ways that empower all those who encounter these histories to think critically about the complex relationships between design, modernity, colonialism, and questions of difference. Like many other female design practitioners working on and beyond peripheries of modernity, where colonial relationships played out in multiple ways, De Silva's approach is marked by what Chela Sandoval identifies as a differential consciousness, which is a particular form of oppositional consciousness. A differential consciousness is associated with a many-valued logic that potentially leads to a more radical rethinking of design. Narrative games provide a better way of interacting with and learning about how this differential consciousness emerges in relation to De Silva’s building projects, because they allow for ways of enacting the issues and connecting them to present and future concerns