01 DESIGN STRUGGLES

An Attempt to Imagine Design Otherwise

Claudia Mareis and Nina Paim

This book was born out of the desire to think, teach. and practice design otherwise¹. We believe that design, in its historical discourses, its pedagogies, and its practices, must come to terms with its troubling past and reimagine itself for the twenty-first century. Our volume foregrounds design’s problematic and violent legacies and makes palpable current struggles to rework its material and conceptual logics. This difficult labor stems from a recognition that design and its thinking is deeply complicit in many structural systems of oppression, serving to concretize, perpetuate, and disseminate power and privilege. This book does not intend to propose solutions; instead it brings together an urgent and expansive array of voices and views from those engaged in struggles with, against, or around design, whether as professionals, educators, activists, researchers, or otherwise.

Historically, Western design as a professional and academic field has been a narrow and exclusive domain that often imagines itself as universal. Striving to define ideals and norms, the modernist lineage of design has proved largely ignorant of its all-pervasive anthropocentrism and exclusionary assumptions, projecting a vision of the world largely defined by a small number of mostly white, male, cisgender designers in the Global North. Instead, the diversity of life-defining aspects – gender, sexual orientation, race, ethnicity, religion, class, social background, physical or intellectual ability, and more – is routinely flattened or ignored in design’s histories, pedagogies, practices, and objects. We believe that design is always a socio-material practice, one intimately linked to privilege and structures of inequality, white supremacy and heteronormativity, colonial power and epistemic violence, capitalist exploitation and environmental destruction. In order to rethink the discipline today, we must expand design’s definition while avoiding its past universalisms, always situating and particularizing its historical claims. Moreover, the agency of design needs urgent reappraisal, a process of elevating, recovering, and creating perspectives and imaginaries beyond the dominant Western solutionist and anthropocentric model of thought.

Design is, in our view, intrinsically linked to the (re-)invention and (re-)production of material culture and the creation of the corresponding concepts, methods, media, and tools. Of course, material culture does not only include physical things, but is to be seen as an interplay of perception and materialization, of individualization and socialization, of culturalization and naturalization. The concept of ontological design² , which we follow up to a certain point here, is based on the idea that we as humans do not only intentionally (and often unintentionally) design our habitats, but that this in turn affects our ways of becoming and being³ . Design can thus be seen as a “powerful ontological tool capable of transforming the social and cultural reality, and modeling human experience, subjectivity and life style, and environment and social events.”⁴ A tool, however, with both positive and negative effects and enmeshed in universalist concepts of the “human” in need of explanation. As the Columbian-American anthropologist Arturo Escobar says, design is a process of world-making, and we must embrace a pluriverse of world-makings within our world: “all design creates a ‘world-within-the-world’ in which we are designed by what we design as subjects. We are all designers, and we are all designed.”⁵

This book is the result of a collaboration between the Swiss professor and design researcher Dr. Claudia Mareis and the queer Brazilian curator and activist Nina Paim. It is an attempt to bring the generative potential of historical-critical, pedagogical, and activist approaches to design into dialogue and to make them productive in their similarities and differences. In what follows, we offer a partial but hopefully generative survey of issues and concerns that fueled our understanding and definitions of design struggles.

Despite a growing critical discourse, design today still struggles to acknowledge the complex interplay of mutually reinforcing social determinants and conditions, the dynamics of power and privilege that shape its role in everyday life. In the mid-1980s, British design historian Cheryl Buckley argued influentially that design history and practice is dominated by male worldviews and ideas, while women only play the role of consumers or advertising models⁶ . This critique likewise benefits from Black feminism’s subsequent articulation of intersectionality, recognizing the multiplicity of human experiences and ways of living. The term “intersectionality” was first coined by Black feminist scholar Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw in 1989 to describe how social identities, such as race, class, gender, and others, “intersect” and overlap⁷ . It describes “the complexity of the world, in people and in human experiences” and can be seen both as an “analytical tool” and a “critical inquiry and practice.”⁸ Intersectionality is a prism for understanding how various forms of inequality often operate together and exacerbate each other. This interlocking of analysis and intervention provides access for more inclusive, situated design histories, pedagogies, and practices that confront their own struggles.

Despite the broader social visibility of womxn and LGBTQIA+ people, the field of design is still predominantly white and suffers from deeply entrenched heteropatriarchal institutional structures of education and practice, failing even modest targets for diversity among staff and students. Particularly in continental Europe, most professorships and teaching positions are still held by white cisgender men, leaving an absence of role models and a strong sense of a “glass ceiling” for historically marginalized genders in the field. In these contexts, it is still all too common to speak of the supposedly objective qualities of student portfolios, despite the long-standing recognition that “objectivity” is neither natural or neutral.⁹

Design’s professed objectivity serves to make its subjective knowledge-power relationships appear self-evident and universal. In addition, its supposed forward-looking perspective and innovative thinking have proven enduring cultural myths surrounding its practices, even while design education clings to outmoded modernist paradigms. For too long, design educators have refused to understand modernist design as situated and thus restricted, rather than timeless and universal. An awareness of modernism’s historical dissemination – starting from institutions like the Bauhaus (1919–33), the Ulm School of Design (1953–68), or the International Council of Societies of Industrial Design (founded in 1957), and moving into the Global South and postcolonial contexts – makes evident how its methods and pedagogies often failed to adapt to local conditions, thus undergoing modification or rejection. Nonetheless, the problematic narrative survives that design is an essential, developmental building block for a desirable (post-)industrial modernity. Since the postwar period, in many countries of the Global North, such as Germany, Great Britain, and the USA, a view of design as a generalist planning or problem-solving activity – capable of scaling to problems of any size and context – has developed and established itself.

In the late 1960s, the US-American sociologist Herbert Simon redefined design with the belief that its logics could be applied across various disciplines and professions. His oft-quoted formulation states that “everyone designs who devises courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones.”¹⁰ Likewise for his colleague, the German design scientist Horst W. J. Rittel, design should not be seen as “the monopoly of those who call themselves ‘designers.’”¹¹ Instead, he framed design as a plan-making activity. “Planners, engineers, architects, corporate managers, legislators, educators are (sometimes) designers,” he believed. “They are guided by the ambition to imagine a desirable state of the world, playing through alternative ways in which it might be accomplished, carefully tracing the consequences of contemplated actions.”¹² While expanded from its narrow, modernist definition, this postwar notion of design still excluded the vast majority of the world’s peoples and lent increased authority to the policymakers and bureaucrats of the Global North.

Simon and Rittel certainly intended to broaden and democratize design with their definitions, and their work did foster cross-disciplinary collaboration and open up new perspectives on the very things that can be designed, including systems, services, and processes. Yet, as the field’s sphere of action expanded from industrial goods to general problem solving, design took on an all-powerful agency and ever-more expanded universality, one that dovetailed with Cold War politics, military-industrial research, early computerization, and the heyday of cybernetics.¹³ This constellation proved extremely pervasive and influential, and it is precisely this power that must be challenged and critiqued today. In particular, the idea of design as a method for dealing with intricate, “wicked problems” (problems for which there are no standard solutions due to their uniqueness) gained momentum far beyond the previous bounds of the field.¹⁴ Today, supposedly universal “design thinking” methods are not only applied in management and business consulting, but also in the field of humanitarian aid, prompting the US-based author and professor Bruce Nussbaum to provocatively ask: “Is Humanitarian Design the New Imperialism?”¹⁵ Somewhat more cautiously and optimistically, but pointing in the same direction, this concern was formulated as follows by Arturo Escobar: “is design not always about human projects and goal-oriented change, about an analytics and ethics of improvement and an inescapable ideology of the novum, that is, of development, progress, and the new?”¹⁶ There are different answers to these questions – optimistic and pessimistic, hopeful and cynical – but certainly no unambiguous ones.

In short, design today struggles to confront this modernist and postwar heritage, which rests on colonialist and imperialist foundations. As a practice deeply linked to the rise of capitalism, industrial mass-culture,¹⁷ and the exploitation of both natural resources and human labor (what Jason W. Moore calls “capitalism in the web of life”),¹⁸ design contributes to the logic of Western modernity as both enlightening and oppressive, both productive and extractive. Right up to the present, the economic prosperity of the Global North is enabled through an exploitative capitalism that relies heavily on cheap labor and natural resources in the Global South. Nigerian curator Okwui Enwezor, for example, has pointed out that the image of an asymmetric production cycle still prevails, in which Africa is the recipient of the used, obsolete, and unmodern, while its valuable raw materials are taken abroad.¹⁹ Moreover, as Clapperton Chakanetsa Mavhunga has shown, Westerncentric notions of science, technology, and innovation hardly take into account the fact that Africa follows genuinely different, especially pre-colonial logics and approaches: “Today, our definitions of science, technology, and innovation (STI) originate from countries and cultures that have acquired their dominance of others through global empires — military, capital, and media — and are able to purvey to or even impose upon those without such power their definitions.” Instead, he calls for different ways of thinking: “Imagine a positive Africa — creative, technological, and scientific in its own way.”²⁰

Design feeds this asymmetrical globalization in its production and thought. Modernity’s apparent progress, from the Enlightenment to the Industrial Revolution, was only possible via far-reaching colonization – not only of natural resources, but also of subjectivity and knowledge, bodies, gender, and sexuality, cultural practices and aesthetics. The assertion of a “colonial matrix of power” was, as Walter Mignolo, Aníbal Quijano, and others have argued, fundamental to the success of the “Western code” of modernity.²¹ Colonialism, followed by imperialism, spread and installed Eurocentric epistemologies, ontologies, and aesthetics over centuries by claiming them to be “universal,” and this power has by no means disappeared.

Decolonization, in part, means wrestling with the full breadth of such violence. Black Portuguese writer, psychologist, theorist, and interdisciplinary artist Grada Kilomba defines the term as the “undoing of colonialism,” most often understood in political terms as “the achievement of autonomy by those who have been colonized and … the realization of both independence and self-determination.”²² But as the Puerto Rican sociologist Ramón Grosfoguel emphasizes, a decolonial epistemology should not simply replace Western universalism with another abstract universal, but instead aim for a “critical dialogue between diverse critical epistemic/ethical/political projects”; in so doing, decolonial thinking embraces “a pluriversal as opposed to a universal world” and “take[s] seriously the epistemic perspective/cosmologies/insights of critical thinkers from the Global South thinking from and with subalternized racial/ethnic/sexual spaces and bodies.”²³

In the same way, a decolonial approach to design seeks to delink its practices from the modernist tradition, not to do away with this lineage entirely but to situate it as just one practice among a multitude, capable of providing insights while necessitating extensive critique. Design is still broadly regarded as something that belongs “naturally” to the Global North. As is argued at several points in this book, it is time to address the absences that colonial and imperialist entanglements still produce in the field of design.

Lastly, in tandem with these efforts, the field of design is likewise undergoing a thorough reassessment of its traditional ontology, stemming in part from the urgent discourse of the Anthropocene. The design historian Richard Buchanan has drawn attention to the idea that design research has been part of a tradition since the modern era in which “nature would be molded by art and human ministry in the creation of ‘artificial things.’”²⁴ From an ontological perspective on design, however, it becomes clear how much both the touched and untouched habitats impact their designers. Representatives of ontological design, such as Anne-Marie Willis or Tony Fry, have argued that design is not just a unidirectional form of world-making, but a reciprocal mode “of coming into being,” a process of co-constitution that troubles notions of causation and nonhuman agency.²⁵ As Willis puts it,

designing is fundamental to being human – we design, that is to say, we deliberate, plan and scheme in ways which prefigure our actions and makings – in turn we are designed by our designing and by that which we have designed.²⁶

But also from such an ontological perspective it is necessary to problematize on the one hand the universalistic idea of “the human”²⁷ and on the other hand to shift away from a human-centered perspective on design towards a posthuman or more-than-human perspective.²⁸

By understanding human intelligence and creativity, as well as the very notion of the “human,” not as natural givens but as products of socio-material engagement and contingent assemblages of nonhuman and human actors, further questions about design’s responsibility emerge. As in the humanities and natural sciences, we must develop in the field of design “sympoietic practices for living on a damaged planet.”²⁹ Such a rethinking is increasingly urgent for grasping design’s complicity with the global climate crisis and its role as a motor of extractive capitalism, mass-industrialization, and waste production. So-called design thinking routinely treats animals, plants, and the organic and inorganic environment as endlessly replenishable resources, devoid of agency and value beyond utilitarian ends. In so doing, it fails to understand the earth itself as a vulnerable, incredible, precious meshwork of nonhuman and human beings. It is imperative to find ways to learn from indigenous ways of knowing, without again exploiting them as a mere resource for design’s continued conquest. Brazilian indigenous leader, environmentalist, and writer Ailton Krenak proposes manifold ways of relating oneself to the world, suggesting a process of “listening, feeling, smelling, inhaling, exhaling those layers of what was left out of us as ‘nature,’ but which for some reason is still confused with it.”³⁰

The critical picture of design that we have drawn is a pointed yet incomplete one. Design has a lot more to answer for, and many more ways to be understood and read. With the collection of essays in this book we want to provide a critical response to the tendency of seeing global crisis first and foremost as a worldwide design competition – without criticality, and without questioning underlying modernist biases and anthropocentric ignorance. In the face of today’s political crises – the rise of fascist and nationalist regimes, social inequality, and environmental problems on a planetary scale – designers (and not only designers) are now more than ever confronted with the question of how they can contribute to the creation of a just and sustainable world. Against this background, we feel compelled to ask: How can design truly contribute to a more just society and more sustainable forms of living without compromising bottom-up initiatives and marginalizing the voices of those who are most directly affected? How can we reimagine design as an unbounded, queer, and unfinished practice that approaches the world from within instead of claiming an elevated position? How, for once, can we see design as a situated practice instead of turning it into the Global North’s escapist, problem-solving strategy? Our conviction: Design cannot change anything before it changes itself.

The essays in Design Struggles deal with many struggles, some in dialogue with the aforementioned critical framings, or entangled in their histories. Others take different framings completely. The essays deal with the struggles design must fight against, but also those that it produces and engenders. And struggle is not just our thematic focus, but also behind this project’s very making and production. Gathering these essays – and supporting those involved, or who couldn’t be involved due to precarious situations – has not been an easy or perfect undertaking, but one strewn with emotional and financial struggles relating to the structures of power in which we ourselves are embedded. That struggle is an invisible part of the story of this book, the underlying structure forming it as much as its glue and card or pixels, giving palpable rise to its shape and absences.

This book is organized in three sections: “Histories,” “Pedagogies,” and “Perspectives.” These sections do not claim to be categorical or exhaustive, but represent an attempt to bring the contributions into a meaningful and lively dialogue. They also reflect the priorities and pressing issues Design Struggles stands for: How can we write design histories otherwise? How can we teach design differently? And how can we think and practice design in new ways?

The first section, “Histories,” explores well-known design histories – i.e., the design canon – from a variety of critical perspectives. For instance, Cheryl Buckley revisits her influential “Made in Patriarchy” essay from 1986 from an intersectional perspective. Elsewhere, Alison J. Clarke reflects critically on the history of social design advocate Victor Papanek. These essays do not retell the same stories with the same restricted pair of glasses, but develop new, interdisciplinary, intersectional, and decolonial perspectives. They’re written from the ground up, and seek to change how and by whom design histories are seen and told.

The second section, “Pedagogies,” brings together contributions from design educators who, in different ways, open up slant perspectives on how design can contribute to a more just, inclusive, and sustainable society. The contributions in this section are often individual reports, narratives, or stories around experiences which do not claim to be generalizable, as there is no “one solution fits all” formula for learning and teaching. Many of these essays point to what design educators Danah Abdulla and Pedro Oliveira define as “minor gestures,”³¹ those small, localized, and potentially subversive acts of kindness made in an enclosed system – such as a higher-education institution – which chip away to form a pathway towards structural change. Particularly inspiring are the stories from educators in Brazil and Argentina, from which we have much to learn through transcultural solidarity.

The third section, “Perspectives,” is dedicated to both theories and practices dealing with design struggles. This section brings together a variety of topics and approaches related to reflecting and practicing in the midst of design struggles, and brings these differing activities into dialogue. These essays include critical examinations of contemporary issues, open-ended theoretical reflections, and practice-oriented models or pointers that gesture toward new futures. These perspectives, as we call them, have a special significance regarding the topic of this book: dealing with struggles is in theory and practice not only particularly complex and wicked, but also rich in experiential knowledge. Practice cannot merely be understood as the “execution of previously conceived or existing drafts, plans, ideas, routines, rules, structures, in short: as the representations of actions”;³² rather, practice is created by both “sayings” and “doings,” by the direct interaction of spaces, bodies, and artifacts. In this sense practice is in no way opposed to theory or analysis. It is only in their interplay that situated, critical perspectives on design unfold, providing orientation but also calling for new directions to be taken.

The essays in this book were spurred by the lectures, workshops, and conversations that took place at “Beyond Change: Questioning the Role of Design in Times of Global Transformation.”³³ By introducing people and bringing them together through various programs, we hoped to learn from each other and build networks of solidarity.³⁴ In short, we sought to stray together from the path most trodden, to carve out new routes completely by “cutting the bush with the machete,” as the Brazilian saying goes; to build a movement, to form an ocean, while simultaneously reflecting on our different and varying positions and becoming all the stronger for it. As Ailton Krenak writes, “we are definitely not the same, and it is wonderful to know that each one of us here is different from the other, like constellations. The fact that we can share this space, that we are traveling together does not mean that we are the same; it means exactly that we are able to attract each other through our differences, which should guide our life paths.”³⁵

We hope that Design Struggles will prompt even more discussions and alliances. Editing this volume became an attempt to bring the perspectives and experiences of individuals geographically disconnected together in one space – this time not the space of a conference room, but the space of digital and printed pages. Thinking about and discussing the possibilities and limits of design should not be confined to the enclosed boundaries of the discipline and its institutions. For this reason this book is available to download for free, and its printed version has been resourcefully produced to limit the price tag. Moreover, while it is peer-reviewed and has been produced from the knowledge of a greater research community, it has simultaneously been compiled and edited in a way that hopefully allows for a larger, nonacademic readership to participate in its discussions. In particular, design has much to learn from activism, including what it means to struggle and the recognition that political work requires long-term goals rather than short-term, solutionist thinking. It also has a lot to learn about hope. As the Mexican activist Gustavo Esteva explains: “Hope is not a conviction that something will happen in a certain way. We have to nurture it and protect it, but it is not about sitting and waiting for something to happen, it is about a hope that converts into action.”³⁶

This book is dedicated to those who fight against the difficulties and struggles of design, knowing that there will be no easy solutions or unambiguous answers. But it’s also dedicated to those who are held back due to the struggles design creates. The struggles of design are daunting. They are especially daunting for isolated individuals working against powerful institutions. But limitations can also spur us to think otherwise together, and imagine futures beyond the present. As we prepare this book for publication, new struggles are emerging as a consequence of the COVID-19 pandemic, which is disproportionally affecting the poorest and most vulnerable populations. In that, historian of science Edna Bonhomme reminds us that pandemics are not isolated phenomena, but “part and parcel of capitalism and colonisation”.³⁷ At the same time, the recent brutal killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Tony McDade, amongst other unarmed African-Americans by the police, has ignited a global wave of antiracist protests and calls for institutional reforms. To think, teach, and practice design otherwise takes on a new urgency. It has become clear that we are one shared planet, our bodies networks just as much as our digital selves. We’ve also seen the power of coming together across borders, through the vital sharing of voices, resources, and research. Canadian author and activist Naomi Klein has written of the importance of the ideas lying around, which become those we most depend on when a crisis occurs.³⁸

The ideas lying around in this book are radical, open, generous, caring; they’re antiracist, antisexist, dedicated to abolition and liberation and imagining a pluriverse of worlds: we must lay them wide open, because these are ideas that can be used – and need to be used – right now.

Footnotes

1. 1. The concept of otherwise has been making its way into design and design education most notably through designer, researcher, and educator Danah Abdulla and her Ph.D. dissertation “Design Otherwise: Towards a Locally-Centric Design Education Curricula in Jordan.” The author and editors of this book are indebted to her framing. The concept of otherwise comes from Arturo Escobar’s article “Worlds and Knowledges Otherwise” (2007), where, Abdulla says, he “discusses how decoloniality crosses borders of thought to craft another space for the production of knowledge. Thinking otherwise is another way of thinking that runs counter to the great modernist narratives. It locates its own inquiry in the very borders of systems of thought and reaches towards the possibility of non-Eurocentric models of thinking.” Danah Abdulla, “Design Otherwise: Towards a Locally-Centric Design Education Curricula in Jordan” (Ph.D. diss., Goldsmiths, University of London, 2018), 16-17, research.gold.ac.uk/23246/1/ DES_thesis_AbdullaD_2018. pdf. Most recently, this term has appeared in “Imagining Otherwise,” a year-long “collaborative attempt to create an intersectional, fluid design laboratory,” conceptualized by Maya Ober and Laura Pregger with the generous support of Claudia Mareis and Jörg Wiesel at the FHNW Academy of Art and Design in Basel, which fosters student-centered pedagogy through diverse learning and teaching formats. The further iteration of the program, titled “Educating Otherwise,” curated by Mayar El-Bakry, Maya Ober, and Laura Pregger, addresses design educators at the school, exploring emancipatory forms of learning and teaching design open to epistemic diversity.
   ↩

2. Terry Winograd and Fernando Flores, Understanding Computers and Cognition: A New Foundation for Design (Norwood, NJ: Ablex Publishing Corporation, 1986); Tony Fry, A New Design Philosophy: An Introduction to Defuturing (Sydney: UNSW Press, 1999); Anne-Marie Willis, “Ontological Designing,” Design Philosophy Papers 4, no. 2 (2006), 69–92. ↩

3.  In contrast to other authors in the field of ontological design who take a distinctly phenomenological position, we pursue the project of a Foucauldian “archaeology of knowledge,” which questions the conditions of our becoming from a discourse-historical, genealogical perspective. In this sense, we would like to see a stronger problematization and historicization of some of the main sources of ontological design theories, e.g., with regard to Heidegger’s anti-Semitism or the proximity of ontology and computer technologies in the work of Winograd and Flores. ↩

4. Madina Tlostanova, “On Decolonizing Design,” Design Philosophy Papers 15, no. 1 (2007), 51. ↩

5. Arturo Escobar, Designs for the Pluriverse: Radical Interdependence, Autonomy, and the Making of Worlds (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018), 133. ↩

6. Cheryl Buckley, “Made in Patriarchy: Toward a Feminist Analysis of Women and Design,” Design Issues 3, no. 2 (1986), 3–14. ↩

7. Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics,” The University of Chicago Legal Forum 1 (1989), 139–67; Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color,” Stanford Law Review 43, no. 6 (1991), 1241–99. See also bell books, Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center (Boston, MA: South End Press, 1984). ↩

8. Patricia Hill Collins and Sirma Bilge, Intersectionality (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2019 [2016]), 2, 31ff. ↩

9. On objectivity, see Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, Objectivity (New York: Zone Books, 2010). ↩

10.  Herbert A. Simon, The Sciences of the Artificial (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1969), 55. ↩

11. Horst W. J. Rittel, “The Reasoning of Designers,” Arbeitspapier zum International Congress on Planning and Design Theory in Boston, August 1987 (Stuttgart: Schriftenreihe des Instituts für Grundlagen der Planung, Universität Stuttgart 1988), 1. ↩

12. Rittel, 1. ↩

13. See Claudia Mareis, Design als Wissenskultur (Bielefeld: transcript Verlag, 2011). ↩

14. See West C. Churchman, “Wicked Problems. Guest Editorial,” Management Science 4, no. 14 (1967), B-141–42; Horst W. J. Rittel, “On the Planning Crisis: Systems Analysis of the First and Second Generations,” Bedriftsøkonomen 8 (1972), 390–96; Horst W. J. Rittel and Melvin Webber, “Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning,” Policy Sciences 4 (1973), 155–69; Richard Buchanan, “Wicked Problems in Design Thinking,” Design Issues 8, no. 2 (1992), 5–21. ↩

15. Bruce Nussbaum, “Is Humanitarian Design the New Imperialism? Does Our Desire to Help Do More Harm than Good?,” www. fastcompany.com/1661859/ is-humanitarian-design-thenew-imperialism/ (accessed June 29, 2020). ↩

16. Escobar, Designs for the Pluriverse, 213. ↩

17.  Richard Buchanan, “Education and Professional Practice in Design,” Design Issues 14, no. 2 (1998), 63–66. See also Guy Julier, Economies of Design (London: Sage Publications, 2017). ↩

18. Jason W. Moore, Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital (New York, NY: Verso Books, 2015). ↩

19. Okwui Enwezor, “Eine neue Sprache erfinden: Die Dimensionen afrikanischen Designs und ihre Dekodierung,” in Making Africa: A Continent of Contemporary Design, ed. Mateo Kries and Amelie Klein (Weil am Rhein: Vitra Design Museum, 2015), 25. ↩

20. Clapperton Chakanetsa Mavhunga, “Introduction: What Do Science, Technology, and Innovation Mean from Africa?,” in What Do Science, Technology, and Innovation Mean from Africa?, ed. Clapperton Chakanetsa Mavhunga (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017), 1–27, here 1f. ↩

21. Walter D. Mignolo, “Introduction,” Cultural Studies 21, no. 2–3 (2007), 155–67; Aníbal Quijano, “Coloniality and Modernity/Rationality,” Cultural Studies 21, no. 2–3 (2007), 168–78. See also Aníbal Quijano, “Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America,” trans. Michael Ennis, in Nepantla: Views from South 1, no. 3 (2000), 533–80, muse. jhu.edu/article/23906; Walter Mignolo, The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 8. ↩

22. Grada Kilomba, Plantation Memories: Episodes of Everyday Racism (Münster: Unrast Verlag, 2008), 138. ↩

23. Ramón Grosfoguel, “Decolonizing Post-Colonial Studies and Paradigms of Political-Economy: Transmodernity, Decolonial Thinking, and Global Coloniality,” in TRANSMODERNITY: Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the Luso-Hispanic World 1, no. 1 (2011). ↩

24. Richard Buchanan, “Design Research and the New Learning,” Design Issues 17, no. 4 (2001), 4. ↩

25. Tony Fry, Becoming Human by Design (Oxford: Berg Publishers, 2012), 91ff. ↩

26. Anne-Marie Willis, “Ontological Designing,” Design Philosophy Papers 4, no. 2 (2006), 70. ↩

27. Anthropologist Tobias Rees has described the problem behind the idea of “the human” as follows: “‘The human’ – just as well as the category of ‘humanity’ – is not a universal, a timeless ontological category that has always existed. Instead it is a recently invented concept that emerged in Europe about 250 years ago and that became subsequently universalized.” Tobias Rees, After Ethnos (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018), 40. ↩

28. Laura Forlano, “Posthumanism and Design,” She Ji: The Journal of Design, Economics, and Innovation 3, no. 1 (2017), 16–29; Paul Coulton and Joseph Galen Lindley, “More-Than Human Centred Design: Considering Other Things,” The Design Journal 22, no. 4 (2019), 463–81. ↩

29.  Donna J. Haraway, “Symbiogenesis, Sympoiesis, and Art Science Activisms for Staying with the Trouble,” in Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene, ed. Anna Tsing et al. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017), M31. See also Donna J. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), Chapter 3. ↩

30. Ailton Krenak, “A humanidade que pensamos ser” in Ideias para adiar o fim do mundo (Companhia das Letras, 2019), 69–70 (our translation). Original text: “Esse contato com outra possibilidade implica escutar, sentir, cheirar, inspirar, expirar aquelas camadas do que ficou fora da gente como ‘natureza,’ mas que por alguma razão ainda se confunde com ela. Tem alguma coisa dessas camadas que é quase-humana: uma camada identificada por nós que está sumindo, que está sendo exterminada da interface de humanos muitohumanos. Os quase-humanos são milhares de pessoas que insistem em ficar fora dessa dança civilizada, da técnica, do controle do planeta. E por dançar uma coreografia estranha são tirados de cena, por epidemias, pobreza, fome e violência dirigida.” ↩

31. Pedro Oliveira and Danah Abdulla in an email conversation with the editors, December 2019. ↩

32. Gregor Bongaerts, “Soziale Praxis und Verhalten: Überlegungen zum Practice Turn,” Zeitschrift für Soziologie 36, no. 4 (2007), 249 (our translation). ↩

33. The conference was held in March 2018 at the FHNW Academy of Art and Design in Basel, organized by Claudia Mareis and Nina Paim on behalf of the Swiss Design Network. For the conference program, see [www.beyondchange.ch/](file:///D:%20DOCUMENTENDesign Struggles.beyondchange.ch). Of special importance here was the Building Platforms program, cocurated by Nina Paim and curator and journalist Julia Sommerfeld, which brought together three independent design platforms – the Decolonising Design group, depatriarchise design, and Precarity Pilot – to occupy the FHNW Academy’s entrance hall. However, this book is not a conference report. Rather, it seeks to continue, expand, deepen, reroute, extend, and further the conversations started there. It includes selected conference contributions that were revised, as well as new contributions by voices not present at the “Beyond Change” conference. Also included are previously published articles that we think make a fundamental contribution to the concept of “design struggles.” The inclusion of two interviews complements the unidirectional communication of singly authored texts. In this way, we hope to expand the network and broaden the knowledge first shared at the conference. ↩

34. As Black Brazilian feminist, journalist, and philosopher Djamila Ribeiro says: “Waking up to the privileges that certain social groups have and practicing small perception exercises can transform situations of violence that before the awareness process would not be questioned” (our translation). Djamila Ribeiro in Pequeno Manual Antirracista (Companhia das Letras, 2019). Original text: “Acordar para of privilégios que certos grupos sociais tem e praticar pequenos exercícios de percepção pode transformar situações de violência que antes do processo de conscientização não seriam questionadas.” ↩

35. Ailton Krenak, Ideias para adiar o fim do mundo (Companhia das Letras, 2019), 33 (our translation). Original text: “Definitivamente não somos iguais, e é maravilhoso saber que cada um de nós que está aqui é diferente do outro, como constelações. O fato de podermos compartilhar esse espaço, de estamos juntos viajando não significa que somos iguais; significa exatamente que somos capazes de atrair uns aos outros pelas nossas diferenças, que deveriam guiar os nossos roteiros de vida.” ↩

36. From Gustavo Esteva’s speech at “Planet Earth: Anti-systemic Movements,” the Third International Seminar of Reflection and Analysis, San Cristóbal de las Casas, 2013, upsidedownworld.org/ news-briefs/news-briefsnews-briefs/gustavo-estevarecovering-hope-the-zapatistaexample/. ↩

37. council.science/current/ blog/covid-19-and-inequalitythe-racialization-ofpandemics/. ↩

38. Naomi Klein, “Coronavirus Capitalism – and How to Beat It,” The Intercept, March 16, 2020, last accessed June 29, 2020, theintercept. com/2020/03/16/ coronavirus-capitalism/. See also Tony Fry and Madina Tlostanova, Democracy and Crisis: Recasting the Political Now (Launceston: Design Philosophy Provocation Press, 2020). ↩