Reflect, Reproduce, or Challenge? Decolonisation and the Future of Irish Product Design Education

This paper examines how Irish Product Design education continues to reflect, reproduce, or challenge the colonial and industrial epistemologies that underpin Western design pedagogy. Drawing on a polyphonic positionality methodology, the authors analyse their three Irish university programmes to understand how design knowledge is shaped, taught, and questioned. Across all programmes, familiar Western design models and teaching traditions continue to guide how students learn and how “good design” is defined. These structures remain in place even as educators increasingly acknowledge their limits and the narrow worldview they often promote. At the same time, each programme shows efforts to push back against these inherited frameworks. Lecturers introduce new perspectives, challenge universal assumptions, and create opportunities for students to see design as culturally situated rather than neutral. In some cases, institutional constraints unexpectedly create space for experimentation, alternative voices, and more diverse approaches to emerge. However, these changes tend to rely on individual educators rather than systemic shifts. Ireland’s own complex position as both formerly colonised and firmly embedded within Western knowledge systems creates a unique and sometimes tense environment for this work, revealing opportunities for alternative ways of knowing while highlighting the persistence of structural constraints. This paper aims to open up opportunities for further conversation, that may at times prove challenging and uncomfortable, about how Irish Product Design education can grow toward more inclusive, reflective, and culturally grounded futures.