Collaborative Design Practice

This domain explores participatory design methodologies rooted in African knowledge systems, where authorship is shared and outcomes serve collective needs. We investigate how design practice can move beyond the extractive models that have dominated Western design education — models where the designer arrives, observes, and leaves with “insights” that benefit institutions rather than communities.

South Africa has a long history of community-based creative practice that challenges this extraction. The Community Arts Project (CAP), founded in Cape Town in 1977 as a direct response to the 1976 Youth Uprising, operated for over three decades as the Western Cape’s premier participatory arts organisation (South African History Online, n.d.). CAP merged with the Media Project in 2004 and closed in 2008, but its archive — now held at the University of the Western Cape — remains a foundational resource for understanding how collaborative art-making can function as civic infrastructure.

At AnthroWorks, we believe that the most meaningful design emerges from genuine collaboration. This means rethinking power dynamics, crediting contributions equitably, and measuring success not by aesthetic awards but by community impact.

Key Questions

“Can participatory design truly avoid extractive dynamics? Even with the best intentions, researchers enter communities with power. How do we design frameworks that genuinely redistribute authorship and benefit?”

How do we operationalise Ubuntu as a design methodology, rather than invoking it as a philosophical concept? Recent scholarship has begun to address this directly. Mekoa (2023) argues that Ubuntu philosophy can be mobilised to decolonise participatory research, moving beyond rhetoric towards practical methodological frameworks. At the ACM Participatory Design Conference in 2024, two papers explicitly mapped Ubuntu-informed approaches onto HCI practice — “Embracing Ubuntu: Mapping Communal Ecologies in Participatory Design” and “Transformative Narratives: Fostering Ubuntu-Inspired Participatory Design Practices” (ACM, 2024). These contributions signal that Ubuntu-informed design is an active and growing area of research, though practical frameworks remain in development.

What would assessment look like in a design curriculum that values collective authorship over individual brilliance? How do we build trust-based relationships with communities that have historical reasons to distrust researchers?

Our Approach

We work alongside communities as co-researchers, not subjects. Our workshops use creative practice — drawing, storytelling, material making — as research tools that are accessible regardless of formal education. We document processes as carefully as outcomes, because the relationships built during research are as valuable as the outputs produced.

We draw on traditions of community arts practice that have deep roots in South Africa — from CAP’s legacy in Cape Town to the Hasso Plattner d-school Afrika at the University of Cape Town, Africa’s leading design-thinking institute, which runs participatory and co-design projects grounded in local contexts. Contemporary initiatives in Durban and Johannesburg continue to position art-making as a form of civic participation, echoing what Ewing (2025) describes as the process of “upgrading public space” through community-centred design interventions.

Who This Is For

Design educators rethinking curricula. Cultural institutions seeking genuine community engagement. Brands that want to move beyond surface-level “co-creation” workshops. Researchers committed to ethical, reciprocal fieldwork. Anyone who believes that the best ideas come from the people closest to the problem.