Design Critique Supports Creative Scholarship

Last week, AADHum gathered with friends and colleagues to host a design critique of Sankofa’s Cosmic Adansikro, a creative/critical project by Lisa Abena Osei. Sankofa’s Cosmic Adansikro is an interactive gaming experience that twines together worlds from Afrofuturist and Africanfuturist literature. The project is supported by an MLA Edward Guiliano Global Fellowship and the Arts for All graduate student fellowship.

Throughout the course of the fall, Lisa has worked with Dr. Jeffrey Moro through an independent study on media studies, integrating ideas from the discipline into the project. We gathered together to learn about the intellectual and aesthetic aims and technical stack of the project-in-progress. Through the design critique format, we generated process-oriented feedback about the work.

The collective, polyvocal nature of the critique helped us raise the kind of questions necessary to address work that is not only scholarly and critical, but also exploratory and creative. How do we understand the audience of a project? How do we articulate a project’s goals, and appropriately scope for them? How do we conceptualize and share work that is itself polyvocal, but also needs to speak with a coherent thread?

These process-oriented questions resonate through much of our work here at AADHum. It was thrilling to experience a preview of Lisa’s thoughtful and adept work, and to engage collectively with a creative feedback process. We can’t wait to run more design critiques in the future, and to see where Sankofa’s Cosmic Adansikro goes next.