Designs for the Pluriverse

Introduction

There is a difference between 1970 and Papaneks Design for the Real World and today. But designer today are following his call. This book is a politico-ontologic contribution. Design is everywhere and done by everyone. Especially ecology oriented fields see the importance of design. Design is to important to be left to designers.

From “Development” to the Pluriverse

The UN decided 1951 to throw the old ways overboard and created the category underdeveloped for the global south. It’s important to liberate and relocate design in the global south and its multiple onto-epistemic formations. Transition designers need to work together with those who protect and redefine relational and convivial autonomous communities from the south.

The Stakes

Can ‘they’ be stopped? Two takes on this question: Illich’s conviviality and radical feminists from South America and Europe. Technologies and specialized knowledge reached thresholds after which they became destructive. Illich proposed a radical turn, from industrial production to conviviality, to autonomous production and plural modes of production.

Claudia von Werlhof locates the problem within patriarchy that destroys this earth to hold power over women and their ability to give life. Matriarchy as a relational mode of being. Patriarchical ways deprive of spirituality. There is a need for feminist politics that respects and builds on interconnectedness. Modernity isn’t helping really because it’s deeply entangled and produced by patriarchy. So we need to leave or radical transform modernity.

Design with/out futures

Can design be decoupled from modernity? Queremos un Mundo do de quepan muchos mundos (we want a world where many worlds fit). The activists of the global south came off age 1992 when they renamed south America as Abya Yala. Since then even more initiatives and movements formed a autonomous and communale base. These are processes of matriarchalization.

Fry suggest transitioning to the Age of Sustainment and Dunne and Raby proposed critical, speculative design to counter the current future-less design. There is a spectrum between matriarchal and patriarchal (tech Posthuman) speculative fantasy. There is also the honest or intensified Auseinandersetzung with the aspect of the artificial.

The argument:

• A reflection on how to redesign design and move away from modernity
• Design is ontological but in the hands of patriarchy. An inquiry into I design that is relational.
• An outline on two different design theories. Autonomous design and design for transitions.
• A critical analyzes of design practices from contemporary Latin America epistemic and political experience.

Design for the real world

We live in a world surrounded and permeated by design. Design is everywhere, it’s a category beyond categories. But it also has been fully integrated into the neoliberal model of capitalism.

Designs arrival

There was a dialectic of wonder and disappointment, enthrallment and confusion, felt by the town’s people in response to so many modern inventions when design/technologies came to the undesigned communities. We in postmodern times don’t have that anymore. The story of Garcia Marquez and the authors are microethnographic examples of the complex entanglements of science, materials, technologies, capitalism and culture that make up the modern matrix of design. The second point is how design objects and practices make us who we are.

(Design) Fairs are bringing about coloniality, classifications of people in terms of race and culture. So the history of design is much more than just designed objects. Design is an everyday aspect came with modernity because of the rise of expert knowledge and state bureaucracy. social norms for now designed by those two and not by communities from within or political processes at the local level. the question of what kind of world we wants to build is essential to ontologically oriented design. The question is, how can we find solutions quick enough and outside of the already existing comfortable epistemology?

One path is to go from experts designing for the industry to human and environment centered design by the people.

Design as situated and interactive practice

There has been a shift in designing technology and the surrounding questions. Away from the early fascination with information tech to interaction design, in which tech is embodied, convival, conductive to care. This comes about from a new breed of design theorist, which can tackle wicked problems.

Architecture and Urbanism: Experimentation, Unsettlement, and the reinvention of the Vernacular

Three more areas need investigation to answer the question, if a critical design field is emerging: architecture, ecological design and design in politics. In architecture there is a tendon between design that helped to inflate design, like the architecture from Koolhaas and Gehry, and architecture which cares about a new kind of vernacular, like the half houses of Aravena. There are many indicators of a more human and ecology centered architecture, exemplified by the Venedig Biennale 2012. Juhani Pallasma said, that architecture now build houses, not homes. There is a poetry of home, which is lost and with it the ability to imagine alternative futures.