Abstract

Reading lists in design education are often treated as finished objects — authoritative, closed, and shaped by institutional power. Diversifying them adds voices but leaves intact the question of who decides what counts as knowledge. This talk reframes the reading list as a living archive: a site where power, knowledge, and agency can be reshaped through student contribution and curation. It introduces a staff and student-curated Community Resources List developed within BA Graphic Communication Design at Central Saint Martins as a counter-archival pedagogy that redistributes authorship. Drawing on counter-archive theory and participatory pedagogy, it asks: what becomes possible when tutors and students are equal contributors, and students have a say in what design knowledge matters?

Session and activities

The talk distils a longer paper that considers how community-curated infrastructures represent a meaningful structural shift in how knowledge is produced and shared in design education — and interrogates what is at stake when the counter-archive becomes, itself, part of the curriculum.

The session opens with a provocation: who is named in your course’s reading list, and who decides? From there, the talk unfolds in three movements. First, a critique of the reading list as a closed, authoritative object — situating diversification as a strategy that adds voices but leaves epistemic gatekeeping intact. Second, a presentation of the Community Resources List as a living archive: a WordPress-based, ungraded space where tutors and students appear as equally named contributors, organised through emergent, contributor-generated tags. Third, a theoretical framing through counter-archive theory and participatory pedagogy, arguing that student curation matters not as representation but as a redistribution of authority that centres the student.

The session foregrounds perspectives often underrepresented in design pedagogy discourse: students as epistemic agents, care as infrastructure, and curation as authorship. It contributes to and activates contemporary conversations on decolonising the curriculum, structural equality in teaching, and the practical conditions that enable participation.

Attendees will leave with a model of counter-archival pedagogy they can interrogate against their own reading lists, and a set of structural principles — equal contributorship, emergent tagging, care infrastructure — for shifting who decides what counts as knowledge in their own teaching.

Prompts for discussion: Can participation genuinely shift knowledge-making from authority-controlled to collective? What conditions must exist for students to submit non-normative knowledge? What other tools and processes can be enabling for student participation and active contribution in design education?