Master thesis submitted for the academic degree of MSc. COOP Design Research – The one-year MSc. program conducted by Anhalt University of Applied Sciences and Bauhaus Dessau Foundation in cooperation with Humboldt Universität zu Berlin.
Abstract
Eastbound: Vietnamese Design through the Lens of Decoloniality explores the manifestations of coloniality of knowledge in design throughout the nation’s history of building, defence and formation. Even though Vietnam has a history of cultural richness and diversity that spans over 4,000 years, little has been written about Vietnamese design and its cultural ways of making. Within a global design discourse, it is effectively non-existent. Locally, Vietnamese design is known to have emerged as recent as the implementation of Đổi Mới, the country’s economic and political reform in 1986. This does not seem like a coincidence but rather as a feature of the ‘subjugated knowledge’–one that has characterised the condition of Vietnamese design better than the canon of design history and values dubbed as ‘universal’ and governed by the Western world. The history of Vietnamese design has been an untold story. Like many other kinds of knowledge(s) produced in the Far East or the Global South, it is often ruled out, deemed less significant. Decoloniality, however, has proven otherwise.
Entangled Curiosity 