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02 DESIGN STRUGGLES

Nov 28, 202529 min read

AUTONOMOUS DESIGN AND THE EMERGENT TRANSNATIONAL CRITICAL DESIGN STUDIES FIELD

Arturo Escobar

Introduction

This paper examines the seeming repositioning of design as a central domain of thought and action concerned with the meaning and production of socionatural life. It suggests that critical design studies are being actively reconstituted – perhaps more clearly than many social and human sciences and professional fields – as a key space for thinking about life and its defense from increasingly devastating anthropogenic forces. There is a hopeful recognition of the multidimensional character of design as material, cultural, epistemic, political, and ontological, all at once. Design, in short, is being acknowledged as a decisive world-making practice, even if often found wanting in this regard. The mood seems to be settling in, at least among a small but possibly growing number of design theorists and practitioners, for playing a more self-aware, and constructive, role in the making and unmaking of worlds.

This means that the political character of design is being more readily acknowledged. New design lexicons and visions are being proposed as a result. The first part of this paper summarizes some of these trends, including the uneven but increasingly intersecting geographies from which they arise. Together, they are seen as constituting a transnational discursive formation of critical design studies. The second part shows the tensions, but also potential synergies and bridges, between approaches stemming from the Global South and those from the Global North, broadly speaking. The third part, finally, tackles the question of the relation between design and autonomy, examining autonomous design as a particular proposal within the transnational critical design studies field. While the analysis is offered as a hypothesis more than as a thoroughly substantiated argumentation, the paper hopes to contribute performatively to constructive articulations of the emergent trends.

On Critical Design Studies as an Interepistemic and Pluriversal Conversation

I believe we are witnessing a significant reorientation of design theory and practice at present. I am not suggesting that previous moments in design history have been immune to change; however, the current phase exhibits features that make this moment particularly transformative, theoretically, practically, and politically. I would highlight three of them:

The growing willingness on the part of a number of designers worldwide, although largely anchored in the Global North, to engage more deeply than ever with the interrelated crises of climate, energy, poverty, inequality, and meaning and the momentous questions they pose. These questions go well beyond the concern with the disappearance of species and the increasingly destructive effects of climate change, to involve the disruption of basic human sociality, the breakdown of social relations, the proliferation of wars and violence, massive displacement of people and nonhumans, abhorrent inequality, intensifying forms of intolerance, and the difficulty young people face today in crafting lives of meaning. I believe many designers are alert to this suffering and devastation and genuinely attuned to the Earth and to the fate of their fellow humans. They are more inclined than ever to consider design as central to the crisis and hence that it may be a crucial factor in confronting it imaginatively and effectively. Notions such as design for social innovation,1 transition design,2 design towards sustainment,3 and redesigning the human are perhaps the most compelling expressions of this critical awareness and disposition.

Related claims call for a more explicit engagement between design and a host of important issues, including democracy, the speculative imagination, activism, expanding design spaces to include heterogeneous communities and temporalities, and collaborative and participatory design, among other appeals.4 As Manzini unabashedly – and rightly, in my opinion – puts it, at stake in these new design orientations is nothing less than an emerging civilization. Design, succinctly, is about future-making.5 It is, at least potentially, about laying down conditions for postcapitalist, postpatriarchal, and posthuman societies, or social systems that nurture a responsible anthropocentrism beyond the modern human. It is, finally, about philosophical and political discourses on design through which design itself is redesigned.6

The emergence of a transnational space, anchored chiefly but not exclusively in the Global South, that problematizes anew design’s embeddedness in global historical relations of power and domination, variously explored in terms of design’s relation to histories of colonialism and imperialism, its functioning within the modern/ colonial matrix of power, the geopolitics of knowledge (Eurocentrism), racism, and patriarchal capitalist colonial modernity. This second feature is attested by novel framings of design praxes, such as those going on under the rubrics of decolonial design;7 designs of, for, by, and from the South;8 design by other names; the decolonization of design;9 indigenous and multicultural design and visual sovereignty;10 alter-design;11 design in the borderlands;12 and autonomous design.13 It should be stressed that these trends often overlap; they are diverse and heterogeneous, in some cases even within each trend.14 Taken as a whole, however, they can be seen as decentering design from Eurocentric accounts of the field, resituating it within larger histories of modernity and coloniality; making visible previously hidden or suppressed design histories and practices; redirecting design ontologically towards decolonial and pluriversal visions; and, very tellingly, addressing the implications of these repositionings of design for design education.

Attention is also paid in some of these tendencies to questions of care and repair; opening up multiple futures attuned to diverse temporalities and worldviews; imagining concrete decolonial design projects; and conceptualizing design epistemologies arising from multiple ontologies beyond the dualisms inhabiting the dominant forms of modernity.

As a consequence of the previous two processes, one can posit the existence of a transnational critical design studies field; it is not far-fetched to state that this nascent field is interepistemic and intercultural (one could even argue: interontological); in other words – and this is one its most promising developments – critical design studies has ceased to be an intra-European conversation, in the ontoepistemic sense of the term (that is, one that remains confined within the configurations of knowledge and worldviews stemming from the European historical experience); it is becoming pluriversal.

In sum, what we are witnessing is the emergence of a domain of thought and action in which design might function as a political technology for a better, and different, world, or worlds. These trends reveal an open-ended attitude towards critique, reflected in a willingness to entertain radical ideas for the transformation of design; they infuse design with a more explicit sense of politics, even a radical politics in some cases; and they question anew readily accepted design solutions to contemporary problems, such as those on offer by mainstream discourses of development, sustainability, the green economy, social entrepreneurship, human-centered design, smart cities, technological singularities, and so forth.

As a discursive formation, this transnational field may be characterized provisionally in terms of three interrelated processes: interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary forms of knowledge, including newcomers in design studies, such as anthropology, geography, political philosophy, feminist and critical race theory, and political ecology, plus unprecedented engagements between long-standing design fields, such as architecture, and these other newly designrelated disciplines; new forms of subjectivity that widen significantly the positions available to design subjects; and relations of power that regulate, albeit in shifting manners, the practices within the field.

Bridging Design Discourses in the Global South/ East with Those from the Global North/West

Adopting the nomenclature suggested by Pakistani design theorist and activist Ahmed Ansari15 I suggest that there is a rapprochement between design discourses in the Global South/East with those from the Global North/West. While there are convergences and potential synergies, the tensions between the two discursive fields should not be underestimated. As Ansari puts it, “few texts within the lexicon of design studies or history have dealt with the question of what design in and of the Global South/East is and could be.” His call is for “a hybrid design that navigates, negotiates and bridges North/West and South/East without asserting any kind of either/or hierarchy between the two” – in other words, design conversations that do not privilege either design history a priori, albeit acknowledging the Northern/Western coloniality of design knowledge. In what follows, I discuss three thorny questions that often muddle this conversation, while making it perhaps more stimulating even as it stalls: the question of modernity; the location of the designer; and the understanding of the communal.

The understanding of modernity. The Latin American decolonial perspective is one of the most radical critiques of Western modernity to emerge in a long time. It posits the existence of radical difference in relation to dominant forms of Euro-modernity. Less known in critical design circles are the arguments in the nascent field of political ontology. A key idea here is that dominant and subaltern worlds can be partially connected, even coproduce each other, while remaining distinct; said otherwise, worlds can be part of each other and radically different at the same time. The decolonial notions of “exteriority” and “border epistemologies” and the political ontology notions of partial connections and of the “ontological excess” that subaltern worlds continue to exhibit in relation to dominant worlds are important in this regard. However, they are easily misunderstood as being against modernity, or as applying only to indigenous peoples. Neither of these claims is correct. At stake here, of crucial relevance for design, are the existence of worlds that do not abide completely by the separation between humans and nonhumans, even if the divide is also present in many of their practices.16

While it is true that critics of modernity sometimes homogenize the modern experience, failing to see the plurality that inhabits it, it is also the case that moderns, whether in the Global North or the Global South and including those on the Left, have a hard time facing the ontological challenge posed by the idea of the end of modernity as a civilizational project; it induces a type of fright that is deeply unsettling. Interepistemic design conversations need to articulate this civilizational anxiety in effective ways. After all, many other worlds have had to exist with the fright, if not the reality, of their vanquishing. An important strategy by nondominant or alternative modern worlds would be to effectively activate their specific critique of the dominant modernity, which would place them in the position of fellow travelers, not enemies, of those who uphold more explicitly the possibility of a pluriverse of social formations beyond modernity. Something similar could be said about the notion of change of civilizational model. This concept needs to deconstruct the dominance of Western civilization, pluralize critically other existing or potential civilizational models in open-ended ways, and be open to considering anew the critical retrieval of the history-making potential of multiple traditions, including the nondominant traditions that have existed within the West itself.

The identification of the epistemic location of the designer. Critical perspectives from the Global South/East share with feminist theory their decided emphasis on the situated character of all knowledge, against the claims of neutrality based on universal science.17 For decolonial theorist María Lugones,18 subaltern peoples always inhabit a “fractured locus” of enunciation. This politics of location is often found excessively politicized by scholars anchored in Northern/Western ontoepistemic locations, for whom the analysis of their own location would entail a deep understanding of eurocentrism and a decentering of all forms of modernity. At the same time, scholars and activists occupying Southern/Eastern positions (myself included) at times fall into the trap of limiting the complexity of their own historical positionalities or the hybrid historicity of those groups with whom they work. Effective interepistemic dialogues across the entire range of positionalities requires more clarity and debate on these issues, including an ethics of generous listening and mutual care.

Understandings of community and the communal. Many transition narratives today acknowledge the deleterious effects of intensified liberal individualism and the spread of this model to most corners of the world via capitalist-induced consumption. Next to the relocalization of activities such as food, energy, transportation, and housing to the extent possible,19 transition visions emphasize the need to recommunalize social life, taking nonhumans explicitly into account. In Latin America, new languages of the communal, such as comunalidad, aim to reinvigorate debates on the communal dimension of all social life20 Yet each society, perhaps even each locality or region, has to invent a practice of the communal that might work best for them. Appeals to the communal are often resisted because they might resuscitate old ghosts thought long-ago discarded in some societies, such as the impingement on the rights of the individual, negative aspects of so-called traditional communities (including the predominance of elders and men), and so forth. But this need not be the case. In fact, recent debates in Latin America envision postpatriarchal, nonliberal, postcapitalist, and place-based but not place-bound forms of community.

Worldwide, groups need to grapple with the re/constitution of the communal in a pluriversal manner; they need to do so in ways appropriate to the specific conjuncture in which they are enmeshed within a domineering globalization. Manzini’s call in this issue for a new view of communities, understood as open-ended spaces where individuals participate from their position of autonomy in conversations about possibilities, with an eye towards designing coalitions, is an instance of constructive rethinking of communities appropriate to a particular social and ontoepistemic formation. In his view, these communities imply forms of cosmopolitan localism coupled with distributed meshworked agencies.21

These are just three of the areas of tension but also potential synergies that inhabit the transnational critical design studies field. There are other important areas that are beyond the scope of this paper, such as contrasting views of power and politics; the interplay between reformist and radical alternatives; the role of nonhumans in design frameworks; the tension between secularism, religion, and novel forms of earth spirituality, still scantly discussed in all-too-secular design and academic circles; the role of nonexperts; and so forth. In the last part of the paper, I explore a few of these open questions by discussing a current that brings the relation between design and politics to the fore, namely, the proposals for autonomous design that are at the heart of this special issue.

On Bringing Together Design and Autonomy22

The idea of bringing together design and autonomy is not readily apparent. Is autonomous design not an oxymoron? To posit the idea credibly requires seeing a new design’s dependence on modernist unsustainable and defuturing practices and redirecting it towards collective world-making projects, in all of their heterogeneity and contradictions. Design for autonomy thus springs out of an ontological design framework; it is centered on the struggles of communities and social movements in defense of their territories and worlds from the ravages of neoliberal globalization. Thinking ontologically about the current conjuncture implies examining the contemporary crisis as the result of deeply entrenched ways of being, knowing, and doing and their instantiation by patriarchal capitalist modernity; conversely, it implies nourishing design’s potentiality to support subaltern struggles for autonomy, by opening up design to rationalities and practices attuned to the relational dimension of life, particularly those present among groups engaged in territorial struggles against extractive globalization. From this perspective, what we are witnessing is a veritable political activation of relationality. Relationality is also present, in the last instance, in the Earth itself, in the endless and ceaselessly changing weave of life on which all life depends.

The basic insight of autonomous design is seemingly straightforward: that every community practices the design of itself. This was certainly the case with traditional communities (they produced the norms by which they lived their lives largely endogenously), as it is today with many communities, in both the Global South and the Global North, that are thrown into the need of designing themselves in the face of ever-deepening manifestations of the crises and the inescapable techno-economic mediation of their worlds. If we accept the thesis – voiced by social movement activists, transition visionaries, and some designers – that the current crises point at a deeper civilizational crisis, autonomously designing new forms of life appears to many communities as an eminently feasible, perhaps unavoidable, theoretico-political project; for some, it is even a question of their survival as distinct worlds.

Theoretically, the question of autonomy in relation to design can be grounded in the view, articulated by Maturana and Varela,23 that autonomy is the most fundamental feature of the living; in these authors’ jargon, autonomy is the key to the autopoiesis or self-creation of living systems. This proposition serves as a partial anchor for autonomous design. As Varela says, “in fact, the key to autonomy is that a living system finds its way into the next moment by acting appropriately out of its own resources.”24 This resonates with Gustavo Esteva’s definition of autonomy, based on the Zapatista experience, as the ability to create the conditions that enable communities to change their norms from within, or the ability to change traditions traditionally.25 It involves the defense of some practices, the abandonment or transformation of others, and the invention of new ones.

The autonomous design framework may be considered a Latin American contribution to the transnational conversation on design sketched above. There is a range of forms of autonomous thought in Latin America at present. Together with the recrafting of communal forms of knowingbeingdoing, these notions – autonomía and comunalidad – may be seen as laying down the ground for an autonomous design thought. The emergent concept of Buen Vivir (good living or collective wellbeing) as an alternative to development is an expression of such thought, and so are the planes de vida (life projects) being crafted by some indigenous, Afrodescendant, and peasant groups, and in some urban spaces. Experiences embodying the search for autonomy can be witnessed in many corners of the subcontinent where brutal forms of extractive globalization are taking place: in struggles for the defense of seeds, commons, mountains, forests, wetlands, lakes, and rivers; in actions against white/mestizo and patriarchal rule; in urban experiments with art, digital technologies, neoshamanic movements, urban gardens. Taken as a whole, these expressions of multiple collective wills manifest the unwavering conviction that another world is possible.

A fundamental aspect of autonomous design is the rethinking of the communal, in vogue in critical circles in Latin America and in transition movements in Europe. The realization of the communal can be said to be the most fundamental goal of autonomous design. Communal thought is perhaps most developed in Mexico, based on the experiences of social movements in Oaxaca and Chiapas. For Esteva, la comunalidad (the condition of being communal)

constitutes the core of the horizon of intelligibility of Meso-American cultures… It is the condition that inspires communalitarian existence, that which makes transparent the act of living; it is a central category in personal and communitarian life, its most fundamental vivencia, or experience.26

It is important to mention that that in the context of many grassroots communities any type of design would take place under conditions of ontological occupation. But it is precisely in those cases where the idea of autonomy is flourishing and where the hypothesis of design for autonomy takes on meaning. Autonomía often has a decided territorial and place-based dimension; this applies to rural, urban, forest, and all kinds of territories in different ways. The place-based dimension of autonomía often entails the primacy of decision-making by women, who are historically more likely than men to resist heteronomous pressures on the territories and resources and to defend collective ways of being. There is often, in autonomía-oriented movements, the drive to re/generate people’s spaces, their cultures, and communities and to reclaim the commons. It could be said that autonomía is another name for people’s dignity and for conviviality; at its best, autonomía is a theory and practice of interexistence and interbeing, a design for the pluriverse.

From this brief theoretico-political discussion we can propose the following elements for thinking about autonomous design. Autonomy-oriented design:

has at its main goal the realization of the communal, understood as the creation of the conditions for the community’s ongoing selfcreation and successful coupling with their “increasingly globalized” environments;

embraces ancestrality, as it emanates from the history of the relational worlds in question, and futurality, as a statement about futures for communal realizations;

privileges design interventions that foster nonliberal, non-state-centered, and noncapitalist forms of organization;

creates auspicious spaces for the life projects of communities and the creation of convivial societies;

always considers the community’s engagement with heteronomous social actors and technologies (including markets, digital technologies, extractive operations, and so forth) from the perspective of the preservation and enhancement of the community’s autopoiesis;

takes seriously the demerging design imperatives of place-building, relocalization, renewed attention to materiality and nonhumans, and the creation of interepistemic collaborative organizations;

gives particular attention to the role of commoning in the realization of the communal;

it devises effective means to foster diverse economies (social and solidarity economies, alternative capitalist and non-capitalist economies);

articulates with the South American trends towards Buen Vivir and the Rights of Nature and with related trends elsewhere (e.g., degrowth, commons, postdevelopment);

fosters pluriversal openings; it is, to this extent, a form of design for the pluriverse, for the flourishing of life on the planet;

creates spaces for strengthening the connection between the realization of the communal and the Earth (its relational weave at every place and everywhere), in ways that enable humans to relearn to dwell in the planet in mutually enhancing manners with nonhumans;

takes seriously the inquiry into, and design of, borderlands as the spaces par excellence where novel understandings and practices of design from ontological and autonomous perspectives might most effectively and radically take place.

Conceived in this fashion, autonomous design can be considered a response to the urge for innovation and for the creation of new forms of life arising from the struggles, forms of counterpower, and life projects of politically activated relational ontologies.

Conclusion

As a theoretico-political proposal, autonomous design may be considered as a particular trend within the emergent transnational critical design studies field. It suggests that design can be creatively reappropriated by subaltern communities in support of their struggles to strengthen their autonomy and perform their life projects, and that designers can play constructive roles in the ontological and political reorientation of design as an element in struggles for autonomy.

To restate the question in a way that might apply to communities and social groups in many parts of the world: how do we make effective weavings and foster mutually enhancing entanglements of worlds in the face of the catastrophe visited upon the planet by the current global capitalist world order? Earth’s territories, including cities, is where we, humans and not, go on weaving life together. Design can thus become an open invitation for us all to become mindful and effective weavers of the mesh of life. To do so, design needs to contribute to creating conditions that dampen our compulsion to think and act like modern individuals in favor of an ethics of autonomous interexistence, albeit without negating our capacity to operate in modern worlds at the same time – this, too, might be a question of survival. This entails designs that foster convivial reconstruction beyond the cultures of expertise and that promote a pluriverse of partially connected worlds in which all worlds strive for justice and craft autonomous relational ways of being, while respecting the ability of other worlds to do the same. This is a vision for sustaining the pluriverse.

Coda

In mid-April 2014, Francia Márquez, one of those struggling to defend the Afro-Colombian community of La Toma in Colombia’s southwest against aggressive illegal gold mining, penned two brave and lucid open letters to the government and the public at large. “Everything we have lived,” she said in her first letter,

has been for the love for our territories, the love we feel when we see germinate the plantain, when we have a sunny fishing day, of knowing your family is close by … our land is the place where we dream of our future with dignity. Perhaps that’s why they [armed actors, including the army, paramilitaries, and guerrillas] persecute us, because we want a life of autonomy and not of dependency.27

Acknowledgments

Arturo Escobar’s text is a reworked version of an article first published in Strategic Design Research Journal 11 (2018): 139–46, originally published under Creative Commons 4.0.

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Footnotes

  1. Ezio Manzini, Design, When Everybody Designs: An Introduction to Design for Social Innovation (Design Thinking, Design Theory) (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2015). ↩

  2. Terry Irwin, Gideon Kossoff, and Cameron Tonkinwise, “Transition Design Provocation,” Design Philosophy Papers 13, no. 1 (January 2, 2015), 3–11, doi.org/10.1080/ 14487136.2015.1085688. ↩

  3. Tony Fry, Becoming Human by Design (London: Berg, 2012), doi.org/10.5040/ 9781474294041; Tony Fry, “Design for/by ‘The Global South,’” Design Philosophy Papers 15, no. 1 (January 2, 2017), 3–37, doi.org/10.108 0/14487136.2017.130324 2; Tony Fry, Clive Dilnot, and Susan C. Stewart, Design and the Question of History (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015), doi.org/10.5040/ 9781474245890. ↩

  4. For a fuller treatment and references on these trends, see Arturo Escobar, Designs for the Pluriverse: Radical Interdependence, Autonomy, and the Making of Worlds (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018). On design and democracy, see the ardent plea to the design community from Ezio Manzini and Victor Margolin, “Democracy and Design: What Do You Think?,” DESIS network (website), www.desisnetwork. org/2017/04/11/democracyand-design-what-do-you-think; and Virginia Tassinari’s talks on “Regenerating Democracy” (DESIS Philosophy Talks), www.desis-philosophytalks. org/. ↩

  5. Susan Yelavich and Barbara Adams, eds., Design as Future-Making (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014), doi.org/10.5040/ 9781474293907. ↩

  6. Klaus Krippendorff, “Redesigning Design; An Invitation to a Responsible Future,” in Design: Pleasure or Responsibility, ed. Pävi Tahkokallio and Susann Vihma (Helsinki: University of Art and Design, 1995), 138–62; Betti Marenko and Jamie Brassett, eds., Deleuze and Design (Deleuze Connections) (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015). ↩

  7. Tristan Schultz, “Design’s Role in Transitioning to Futures of Cultures of Repair,” in Research into Design for Communities, Volume 2: Proceedings of ICoRD 2017, ed. Amaresh Chakrabarti and Debkumar Chakrabarti (Singapore: Springer Singapore, 2017), 225–34, doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10- 3521-0_19; Tristan Schultz et al., “What Is at Stake with Decolonizing Design? A Roundtable,” Design and Culture 10, no. 1 (January 2, 2018), 81–101, doi.org/10.108 0/17547075.2018.1434368. ↩

  8. Alfredo Gutiérrez Borrero, “El Sur del del diseño y el diseño del Sur,” International Colloquium Epistemologies of the South: South-South, South-North and North-South Global Learning Coimbra (July 10, 2014); Alfredo Gutiérrez Borrero, “Resurgimientos: Sures como diseños y diseños otros,” Nómadas, no. 43 (2015), 113–29, doi.org/10.30578/nomadas. n43a7; Ahmed Ansari, “Towards a Design of, from, and with the Global South,” Carnegie Mellon University School of Design (unpublished paper, Pittsburgh, USA, May 2016); Tony Fry, “Design for/ by ‘The Global South,’” Design Philosophy Papers 15, no. 1 (January 2, 2017), 3–37, doi.org/10.1080/14487136. 2017.1303242; Arturo Escobar, “Response: Design for/by [and from] the ‘Global South,’” Design Philosophy Papers 15, no. 1 (January 2, 2017), 39–49, doi.org/10.108 0/14487136.2017.1301016. ↩

  9. Elizabeth (Dori) Tunstall, “Decolonizing Design Innovation: Design Anthropology, Critical Anthropology, and Indigenous Knowledge,” in Design Anthropology: Theory and Practice, ed. Wendy Gunn, Ton Otto, and Rachel Charlotte Smith (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013), 232–50; Ansari, “Towards a Design of, from, and with the Global South”; Madina Tlostanova, “On Decolonizing Design,” Design Philosophy Papers 15, no. 1 (January 2, 2017), 51–61, doi.org/10.1080/1 4487136.2017.1301017; Rolando Vazquez, “Precedence, Earth and the Anthropocene: Decolonizing Design,” Design Philosophy Papers 15, no. 1 (January 2, 2017), 77–91, doi.org/10.1080/14487136. 2017.1303130. ↩

  10. See, for instance, the work of the Lakota-Dakota graphic designer, Sadie Red Wing, available at: www.sadieredwing. com/. ↩

  11. Hernán López-Garay and Daniel Lopera Molano, “Alter Design: A Clearing Where Design Is Revealed as Coming Full Circle to Its Forgotten Origins and Dissolved into Nondesign,” Design Philosophy Papers 15, no. 1 (January 2, 2017), 63–67, doi.org/10.1080 /14487136.2017.1303974. ↩

  12. Eleni Kalantidou and Tony Fry, eds., Design in the Borderlands (New York, NY: Routledge, 2014). ↩

  13. Escobar, _Designs for the Plurivers_e. ↩

  14. For instance, there is a clear overlap between those trends using a decolonial framework and the decolonization of design. On decolonial design, see “Decolonizing Design,” ed. Decolonising Design Group (Tristan Schultz et al.), special issue, Design__and Culture 10, nos. 1–3 (2018), and the Decolonising Design group’s website (www.decolonisingdesign. com/). There are related but independent efforts at decolonizing design that appeal to other subaltern experiences and concepts, particularly indigenous and Afro-diasporic, such as the work of Elizabeth (Dori) Tunstall and Sadie Red Wing; see, for instance, Elizabeth (Dori) Tunstall, “Respectful Design: Decolonizing Art and Design Education” (lecture in the Decolonizing Design Lecture Series, University of Minnesota College of Design, November 15, 2017, www.youtube.com/ watch?v=iEUyGrgqaAM); and Elizabeth (Dori) Tunstall et al., “AIGA Respectful Design Video,” October 17, 2016, www.youtube.com/ watch?v=sESVWI5aAHA&list= PLh-_JsB24Hqz3Y3U3Z992- UDmg5zhU7-K. There is also overlap between decolonial design and design for/by the Global South. On the latter, see “Design and the Global South,” ed. Tony Fry, special issue, Design Philosophy Papers 15, no. 1 (2017). ↩

  15. Ansari, “Towards a Design of, from, and with the Global South,” 3–4. ↩

  16. Marisol de la Cadena, Earth Beings: Ecologies of Practice across Andean Worlds (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), doi.org/10.1215/ 9780822375265; Mario Blaser, “Ontological Conflicts and the Stories of Peoples in Spite of Europe: Toward a Conversation on Political Ontology,” Current Anthropology 54, no. 5 (October 1, 2013), 547–68, doi.org/10.1086/672270; Mario Blaser, “Is Another Cosmopolitics Possible?,” Cultural Anthropology 31, no. 4 (November 6, 2016), 545–70, doi.org/10.14506/ca31.4.05; Escobar, Designs for the Pluriverse. ↩

  17. Sandra Harding, “One Planet, Many Sciences,” in Constructing the Pluriverse, ed. Bernd Reiter (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018), doi.org/10.1215/978147800 2017-003. ↩

  18. María Lugones, “Toward a Decolonial Feminism,” Hypatia 25, no. 4 (October 2010), 742–59, doi.org/10.1111/ j.1527-2001.2010.01137.x; and “The Coloniality of Gender,” in Globalization and the Decolonial Option, ed. Walter D. Mignolo and Arturo Escobar (London: Routledge, 2010), 369–90. ↩

  19. See, for instance, Manzini’s helpful concept of “SLOC” (small, local, open, connected) scenarios in Ezio Manzini, Design, When Everybody Designs: An Introduction to Design for Social Innovation (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015), 178–82; but also the Transition Town Movement. ↩

  20. Escobar, Designs for the Pluriverse, 176–85. ↩

  21. Manzini, Design, When Everybody Designs, 241. ↩

  22. This section draws from Escobar, Designs for the Pluriverse, especially Chapter 6. See this book for an extended list of references. ↩

  23. Humberto R. Maturana and Francisco J. Varela, Autopoiesis and Cognition (Boston, MA: Reidel Publishing Company, 1980); Humberto R. Maturana and Francisco J. Varela, The Tree of Knowledge: The Biological Roots of Human Understanding (Berkeley, CA: Shambhala Publications, 1987). ↩

  24. Francisco J. Varela, Ethical Know-How: Action, Wisdom, and Cognition (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999). ↩

  25. Gustavo Esteva, “Celebration of Zapatismo,” Humboldt Journal of Social Relations 29, no. 1 (2005), 127–67; Gustavo Esteva, “The Hour of Autonomy,” Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies 10, no. 1 (January 2, 2015), 134–45, doi.org/10. 1080/17442222.2015.103 4436. ↩

  26. Gustavo Esteva, “La noción de comunalidad” (unpublished manuscript, Oaxaca, n.d.). ↩

  27. Francia Márquez, “Situación que carcome mis entrañas: A propósito de la orden de bombardear el Cauca” (open letter, April 18, 2015). Francia was awarded the 2018 Goldman Environmental Prize for her actions on behalf of her community. ↩