Designs for the Pluriverse
Excerpts and Insights from Part II: The Ontological Reorientation of Design
Starting from the local histories in some corners of Europe, the journey evolved into a “global design.” Is it possible to reorient such a tradition and to redirect the journey into an altogether different direction? Is this what the planetary ecological and social crisis is all about, or at least one of its important dimensions? Can design play a role in such a reorientation of both the cultural background and the journey itself?
As Escobar argues in this section of the book, designers are susceptible to building on notions of “tradition” — which in today’s world translates to a Western model of design aesthetics and processes. He also calls this Euro-modernity, characterized by framing concepts into dualisms, and often considering one of any dichotomy invalid. This form of thinking disregards other forms of tradition, where reality and dreaming, science and economy, individuals and the greater collective are not discrete dualities.
The notion that we exist as separate individuals (the possessive or autonomous individual of liberal theory, endowed with rights and free will) continues to be one of the most enduring, naturalized, and deleterious fictions in Westernized modernity.
[The belief in the real] is at the basis of much design practice and needs to be tempered in a nondualist ontological conception of design. [It] leads to an ethos of human mastery over nature, a pillar of patriarchal culture. It disempowers us for partnering with nature and other humans in a truly collaborative, earth-wise, and stream-of-life manner.
Looking to other cultures for more sustainable futures
What would it take for designers to operate without a purely objectivist and single version of the real? To embrace the notion that design practices, too, might contribute to creating multiple notions of out-thereness, rather than a single one? And moreover, to take seriously the notion view that reality is an ongoing continuous flow of forms and intensities of all kinds?
Escobar describes the difference between indigenous and other cultures as non-moderns and moderns, respectively. Moderns have a one-world world view—one where the world was already formed before our arrival and we observe and act upon it. He argues that we should rather aspire to a view more aligned to non-moderns—one where, citing Tim Ingold, we are participants of the world, and we constantly form it simply by existing within it.
Dualisms are destructive because they incentivize disconnection from the rest of the world, and societies seek to de-isolate through various means to combat this disconnection.
“A culture with a developed, assertive language of dialogue often dominates the process of dialogue and uses the dialogue to cannibalize the culture with a low-key, muted, softer language of dialogue.” (Nandy)
Escobar implores that scholars engage with worlds where nature and culture cannot be extracted from one another.
Technology swaps place’s importance for time
Escobar calls out technology, namely digital devices, explicitly for being of the moderns and exacerbating individualism. He describes them being sold to us under the premise that they will free us by unlocking limitless interactions, but in reality, they force us into conformity, isolation, and a reinforcement of the notion of a singular reality.
They also replace senses of place with time. Rather than existing in both place and time, the ability to connect over distances means that we no longer depend on place, and as a result, are hypersensitive to time—that real-time media leads to the “synchronization of emotion on a global scale.”
Opportunities define interactions
“In designing tools, we are designing ways of being.” — Winograd & Flores
He talks about how dwellings built in collectivist cultures are large and house many, defining communal interactions, and how the suburban home is the opposite, defining isolated interactions.
Music as a model for transculturation
This section of the book also addresses mixing musical styles from different parts of the world as an act of design. Music often referred to as “fusion” takes place-based musical traditions and incorporates any and all technologies and inspirations to make new, outstanding rhythms, allowing for “sonic transculturation.” It is an act of aural design.
Escobar then goes on to call design analogous in the way it can compose:
“Contemporary music adds novel elements to Attali’s compositional principle, including open-endedness, working across musical and cultural difference, collaborative creation, and so forth. If so, perhaps one can say design is the compositional model appropriate for the pluriversal age.”
So… can/does digitally-expressed fusions compose the sorts of powerful experiences that “fusion” musical forms do?
Key Takeaways
Much of the modern world is built on Western traditionalist thinking, which divides perception of the world into dualities—prioritizing the real, the scientific, the individual, and the economy. By imposing singular systems on the world, modernity defutures, by depriving the world of possible futures. However, such dualities are not reflective of the thinkings of many non-modern cultures. Such thinkings should be regarded as no less true or valid, because they contain wisdoms that could address many of the modern issues we face. One major tenet of decoloniality is that we must preserve a sense of the pluriverse — that multiple views of the world coexist and are equally valid.
But one way of thinking should not replace the other—rather, there is opportunity in creating fusions, which take combine ideas from both modern and non-modern forms of thought to create something new and powerful.
Some things I’m wondering about are:
- Can technology help to break people away from a singular reality by exposing them to the values of other cultures in a tangible way?
- Are there forms of technology that prioritize some form of “place” over “time” (games, perhaps?), and what can be learned from them?
- My question, then, is that if physical structures can represent and define collectivist cultural interactions, can the same be said for digital spaces? Or, as the digital infrastructures are inherently rationalist/Western/ modern/of dualist mentalities, is this impossible? Currently, I really, really, really don’t know.
