black aesthetics: decentering white aesthetics
Name(s) of graduate(s):Zion Vic Junge
2026
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Description
Making Black Aesthetics visible in design means critically questioning existing power structures and opening up new perspectives. The Western design canon is shaped by Eurocentric, modernist, and minimalist norms that often exclude everything that exists outside this framework. But design is not universal – it is shaped by culture, gender, environment, and ‘race’. In my project, I pursued a decolonial, pluralistic approach: I worked autoethnographically, using my own experiences and positionings as a source of knowledge, and paired this with archive research on Black designers and artists as a reference library.
The insights gained were scientifically processed in a publication. This is accompanied by a series of aluminum stools called Y3N, whose collaged surfaces were individually processed using a laser method and each carry their own visual language.
Zion Vic Junge
2026
Description
Making Black Aesthetics visible in design means critically questioning existing power structures and opening up new perspectives. The Western design canon is shaped by Eurocentric, modernist, and minimalist norms that often exclude everything that exists outside this framework. But design is not universal – it is shaped by culture, gender, environment, and ‘race’. In my project, I pursued a decolonial, pluralistic approach: I worked autoethnographically, using my own experiences and positionings as a source of knowledge, and paired this with archive research on Black designers and artists as a reference library.
The insights gained were scientifically processed in a publication. This is accompanied by a series of aluminum stools called Y3N, whose collaged surfaces were individually processed using a laser method and each carry their own visual language.