How can we stop colonizing the future?
A dialogue between Pupul Bisht, designer, futurist and founder of the Decolonizing Futures Initiative, and Laureline Simon, founder of One Resilient Earth, on futures thinking, design, craving for experts, indigenous peoples’ knowledge and multiverses.
Laureline: It’s a great pleasure and honor to have you today, Pupul. We had the chance to discover your inspiring work at UNESCO and have so many questions. But, to start with, could you tell us about you, the personal story that led to the creation of the Decolonizing Futures Initiative, and what the purpose of the initiative is?
Pupul: Sure, my name is Pupul Bisht. I am a designer and futurist from India. I’ve been based in Canada for the past four years, where I did my Masters in Strategic Foresight. That was my first formal introduction to futures, and a very important pivot point that changed my perspective of what design is and how we think about the future.
When I was studying design in India, I was already asking a lot of questions around what an Indian expression of design is. And I wrote a paper called “Finding Indian Design,” because even though the pedagogy of my university in India is rooted in learning by doing and local culture, when it came to ‘Design,’ most of the formalized techniques and frameworks I was learning, and even how design is defined, was extremely western. It borrowed heavily from the Swiss or the American School of Thought, and Bauhaus. And while I saw a lot of value in those methods, I did feel this tension of me sitting in India while this was shaping my approach to what design is. And I also felt that design schools do an insufficient job in sensitizing young designers towards the impact that their work has in the world.
Of course, there’s an irony in that statement, because designers, especially the ones that have formal training, often have this ego about their work. And sometimes we tend to overestimate our impact on the word but not in a critical, nuanced way unfortunately. I became very aware of the fact that what is conceptualized on my sketchbook goes on to live in the real-world, interact with real people, and has intended/unintended consequences. And I felt that, if I were to practice design meaningfully, I needed to equip myself with tools and methods that can tell me how to acknowledge this influence. I was fascinated by life cycles in design: how long does a design object continue to influence the world and how tiny things trigger bigger changes. And so, that was really the reason why I became interested in studying systems thinking and foresight. That’s what took me to Canada.
When I was in Canada, a part of me was very comfortable because even though I had lived in India all my life, English is my first language of expression, and being a millennial I have grown up consuming North American content. But then the parts of me that are shaped by my social-cultural upbringing in India and are so crucial to my identity had no space in the room. I didn’t find a lot of people like me in my reading list, for example. I didn’t find any women of color at all, actually. And those things bothered me.
So the Decolonizing Futures initiative is a project that aims to make room for marginalized perspectives, marginalized voices, historically marginalized epistemologies, and alternate ways of understanding the world in the futures discourse.
Because right now, there is little room for those expressions and for those knowledge systems in the practice.
Laureline: When you mentioned ways of looking at the world and at our future in the West, the first thing that came to my mind is our science-fiction, full of tech and galactic explorations. This can partly be explained by the fact that my parents found my name in a French sci-fi graphic novel of the 1960s, in which the heroine, Laureline, travels through time and space on her spaceship. Such images necessarily shape how we imagine the future and what we see as progress. Conversely, I remember you telling a story about how a few years ago you were asked to share a story about the future and could not find one in Indian literature. It would be interesting to discuss how both this experience and the different perspectives you encountered through your later work in India have shifted your representation of the future, including by questioning the western linear timeline.
Pupul: I think that’s a really good question, and some of what you said is a great segue into what that process of discovery was for me. You’re quoting me from this story that I often tell, which is that I was asked to write about my favorite story set in the future for a class assignment in grad school. I really wanted to write about an Indian story and I couldn’t find one. And so, my first reaction and well, the reaction of my peers and my tutor was: “Oh, that’s fascinating that there isn’t a story about the future in India.” But now that I’ve done this work for two years, I realized it’s not true. There are stories about the future. It’s just that the way we define what qualifies as a story about the future depends on the parameters we set.
To draw a parallel, it’s very similar to what I encountered during my time in design school. What do we define design as? This is generally based on a pseudo distinction between design and craft. A lot of what now I would call Indian design is very conveniently put in the bracket of craft and then stays outside of elitist worlds of design institutions. So the way I look at it, it’s just a matter of where we decide to draw the line — or who decides where the line is drawn. Now, this is design and then whatever falls outside is art or craft — and this happens everywhere. So, it is both a matter of gate keeping and of ontological limitations of how we define things.
In India, there is so much fantastic imagination about times that are not present times, that are not necessarily past times either, but almost parallel time periods. Now in my expanded understanding of what futures thinking is about, I see all of it as future fiction, if not science fiction.
And of course, in contemporary India, there are writers who have written science fiction the way we understand it in the mainstream. But even if I look at traditional stories, anthologies or our folk stories, there are incredible imaginations about possibilities, other worlds, parallel timelines, and parallel time periods. There is a lot of literature and folk stories about our place in the universe, as well as planetary consciousness. I look at all of that as science fiction now. And some of them do have very scientific concepts about time travel, about physics, about biology and stretching the limits of all of those dimensions. But very conveniently, because of our colonial past, because of the politics of the world, all of that has been looked at with such an exotic gaze. And it all gets clumped in two categories that are fantasy and magical realism. So, if we look with a critical lens, these boundaries are not as hard edged as we think they are. And it just becomes a matter of what narrow parameters we look through.
Laureline: So how far shall we expand the definition of what ‘visions of the future’ encompass? Especially if, as you said, the future may be found in a parallel reality, and is no longer defined by the parameter of time. Should any vision that does not reflect today’s reality be taken into account in futures thinking. Shall we even try and expand the definition, or define negatively what ‘visions of the future’ are not?
Pupul: I think it’s important to think about why are we engaging in futures thinking in the first place. For me, the context of why we’re doing it dictates the definitions and the boundaries. At the same time, a big part of decolonizing futures is about opening up the definition. We are not trying to come up with one meta-definition that is all encompassing because I think that is a futile pursuit. It is about embracing diversity and seeing that multiple definitions can coexist and that one is not more legitimate than the other. This takes me back to the book Designs for the Pluriverse by Arturo Escobar, which I read at the start of this project. The concept of the Pluriverse implies transitioning to a world where a multitude of centers co-exist. It’s not about finding an alternate center, but about acknowledging, embracing and respecting the fact that multiple centers can exist in a world as dynamic and as diverse as ours. What is exciting for me is that, if we create space for these multiple centers to exist, what are the plural imaginations of autonomous futures that can emerge from each of these centers? A lot of the participants in my workshops are quite surprised that I’m interested in exploring what they think about the future. They don’t think that their imagination of the future is important.
That’s because we’re so used to second-hand futures. We’re so used to someone else imagining a grand attractive vision and then us just aspiring towards it.
A lot of my work is about how I can inspire local communities to start seeing themselves as active shapers of their own futures rather than just passive recipients of someone else’s grand ambition. I feel like so much of the future of the world is just being manufactured in the Silicon Valley and then shipped to all the other continents. But why? Acknowledging and celebrating diversity is at the core of my work. I really look up to the indigenous futures movement in Canada and to the Afro-futurism discourse as well. I think these discourses really do such a fantastic job of continuously using imagination, using storytelling as a tool really, or as a rigorous practice for challenging the status quo by maintaining one’s critical lens of how we imagine a time that is yet to come. This can look very different in different scenarios.
Laureline: What you say strongly echoes some work I have been engaged in with a local community in Canada. I recently facilitated a dialogue to craft a narrative for the region’s long-term climate-resilient future. One of the group’s objectives was to co-produce a vision of what they desire the future to look like, and even at this stage where no technical knowledge is required, there was a very strong drive to bring in “experts” that would tell the group what the future should or should not look like. What I also found fascinating was that the original idea of the group was to spread the newly drawn vision and narrative throughout the region as a new blueprint for action. Later on, the organizers agreed that the process of collectively producing the vision was as, if not, more important than the vision produced. Finally the group decided to only share their vision for inspiration purposes, giving up in a way the creation of a new hegemonic vision for the region. It was quite fulfilling to facilitate that process.
What has also been fascinating for me in visioning exercises, beyond the fact that it enables people to realize the power of their imagination and how much the vision should be theirs, is to acknowledge that the vision may not be an end in itself. Visions help ask better questions. But then, it makes me wonder whether a community actually needs one set vision to act collectively. In other words, could we work without a vision but with values? Or shall the vision evolve continuously? Last, how do we build the comfort to live in a globalized world where multiple evolving visions coexist? How can we respond to this fear of diversity that I often sense?
Pupul: With regards to your first question about using visioning, different people treat visions differently in their work. If I were a futurist working with businesses, for example, the vision would perhaps boil down to commercial growth or resilience. So it has a very specific utility. But, if we’re talking about a community context, visions for me are like these windows that help communities imagine desirable possibilities and transformation.
I have begun to see my role in this work purely as that of a listener. Because I primarily use storytelling as a device, I am quite interested in that relationship between a storyteller and a story listener. In my workshops, when participants envision preferable futures through the Kaavad, these stories end up becoming these windows or doors to alternate worlds.
Interestingly, the word Kaavad comes from a Hindi word that literally means door. The Kaavad artefacts in my workshops act as tools for introspection because the community often has to walk through, in my experience, difficult, uncomfortable questions and answers and dialogues around what is preferable, and why.
I also have a section in my workshop where we talk about values. And I realized that often times people talk a lot about what a preferable vision of the future looks like to them. But when they talk about the kind of values that they have as a community or as a group of people, there is absolutely no alignment. And then there’s so much discomfort in letting go of some of the values that are so core to their identity. So, I think for me, what is exciting about visions is that they help surface these extremely latent internalized value systems, perceptions, world views that are hidden in our everyday lives, but have such a direct impact on the way we think about the future and the way we act in the present.
Visions are also great at being realistic, while keeping a sense of hope and agency. I think there’s a misconception and I won’t generalize, but I’ve heard this from a lot of people, who often criticize visions as being these over-idealistic, over-optimistic hopeful conversations about the future. Through my work, on the other hand, I have experienced that visions actually help being realistic. Because once people are telling stories of what’s preferable to them in the future, a space opens up for them to reflect on existent and emergent barriers to change. While, if we’re only talking about alternatives without really thinking about where we want to go, it becomes very difficult in my experience to ground that conversation in people’s reality.
I actually feel that visions are a great way of anchoring ourselves in reality because the reality is that as human beings, as communities, as a society, we have aspirations, we have dreams, we have hopes. We’ve always had them and they do have a bearing on what we value, what choices we make, and how we conduct ourselves.
And so, I think visions allow us to embrace that and say, ok, let’s put it all on the table and then let’s try and deal with this complexity rather than believing or pretending that it doesn’t exist at all.
Regarding your second question, in relation to your interesting story about Canada, I definitely think there is that tendency of wanting to replace one hegemonic vision with another. We get caught in binaries. It’s this or that. And that is exactly why this concept of pluriverses is appealing to me. It’s because for me, a big part of the future of futures thinking is to break our dependency on thinking in binaries and get into that mental space of embracing plurality, not multiplicity of number, but plurality and diversity. I have found in my interactions that it’s easier in certain communities, which ties back to their cultural worldviews. In other contexts, it’s extremely difficult.
Laureline: I guess binaries help sort things out neatly, which is the basis for control and hegemony. Ironically, binary thinking has been apparent lately in relation to indigenous peoples’ knowledge and environmental protection. In substance, I have heard and read that the West has been unable to conserve biodiversity and keep ecosystems healthy, while indigenous people have a track-record of millennia of success, hence we should now access existing indigenous peoples’ knowledge and use it widely. Although I absolutely agree that indigenous peoples who represent less than 5% of the world population and take care of 80% of the world biodiversity today are much better custodians of the Earth than we are, the idea of treating indigenous people’s knowledge as just another body of knowledge that could either surpass western scientific knowledge or be used to complement it deeply questions me.
I was recently asking some indigenous women how westerners could best integrate indigenous peoples’ knowledge on environmental stewardship. They basically answered that even if they shared traditional visions and techniques with me today, they would be useless to me.
First because I do not understand their indigenous languages, and thus I cannot really understand the concepts that underpin them. Second, because they cannot share through words alone how they grew up feeling about nature, and this is more important than the techniques. And third, because that knowledge is only relevant to the specific ecosystems their communities live in. Knowing that, a few of them wondered about the motivation for westerners like me to access indigenous peoples’ knowledge in general. What are we trying to get out of it? This raised numerous questions for me: is indigenous peoples’ knowledge our new frontier, stemming from our old quest for ever more? Instead of working hard to collectively re-invent our local ways of living in harmony with nature, are we trying to find an easy fix by copying solutions implemented elsewhere? Are we uncomfortable recognizing that we may not be able to grasp some of the concepts developed by peoples under our control for centuries, so that we want to master those today, now that we understand their value? What is in the way of accepting diversity fully and with humility?
Pupul: I love these question because I think that a lot of times, when we talk about decolonization and we talk about alternate knowledge systems, we’re all guilty, and I am also guilty, of talking about it as an abstract conceptual thing. The reality is that colonization is a real historical event that happened. And it continues to be present in extremely concrete, tangible forms in systems of oppression in our societies today. I think the hesitation or the reluctance to share knowledge today is a direct result of historical colonial trauma, of previous extractive practices. A lot was taken and only taken. So that extraction has left generational trauma. To build those relationships of trust is a big challenge today.
How do we go about it once we acknowledge that that’s the problem?
Decolonization, therefore, to me is so much about power. It’s not just about indigenous communities and their practices and their knowledge systems. Are those who hold power currently or have held power historically ready to relinquish their power?
If indigenous peoples are the custodians of knowledge, they also have to be the ones that lead the way. We can’t continue be the leaders, while using their knowledge. They have to be the leaders. I see this as a revolution. So, the day we’re ready to relinquish our power and let these communities lead and be comfortable in our role as followers for a change, this would be for me a very big first step for us as a world. It has to go beyond us learning but still hoping to hold all that knowledge in our hands.
Laureline: True, and this does raise the question of what we really know about the role of indigenous peoples, or of other community members in conserving nature locally on a daily basis. If we have no idea, what does it say about our biases? In a given region, are we able to recognize today that the indigenous people’s (or other community members’) ways of thinking and acting are critical in terms of reconnection to nature, protection of biodiversity, climate change mitigation or adaptation? If yes, should we publicly acknowledge that this group of people has been doing a better job than the group who holds power in caring for the local ecosystem? Are we then ready to become followers, as you said, and maybe even students of indigenous knowledge holders, for instance, if this makes any sense according to the rules set by this indigenous community? Then, shall western science and technology only be mobilized as tools to support the work of nature’s custodians, if and when they express a need for it? This would be a total reversal of positions, which doesn’t match the power structures that are in place today at all. And having critical knowledge on one side and power on the other is a very interesting configuration if we think about the transformational shift we need today. How can we work through that situation so that we address the root causes of inequality and benefit as a collective?
Pupul: We cannot separate practices or ideologies from the people. If we truly want to address the root causes then we have to let go of our control over the places of power and, as you said, assume a new role as students. And in relation to your earlier point, which is that certain things are relevant only in certain contexts, and we just have to accept that, I’m not saying that applies to everything, but I think there’s maturity in recognizing that some things may not be transferable. I think it’s an important point.
Laureline: And this may feel uncomfortable at first, as it really goes against the western assumption that knowledge is a resource that should be accessible worldwide for the benefits of all. This in turn raises the question of communication. In a decolonized world, which exchanges would be beneficial between communities living in different places?
If we imagine a multiverse where different places have different visions and knowledge-systems, shall we focus on nurturing our own universe in this multiverse? Or do we still need to ensure continuous flows of communication to guarantee some level of coordinated change?
Pupul: Our imagination of what is possible often tends to be limited by what we know has already happened in some form before. In 2020, in a hyper-globalized world that is collapsing on many fronts, it indeed feels extremely challenging and almost unbelievable that different worlds retaining their diversity can coexist in a harmonious way. But that doesn’t mean that it’s impossible or at least I would like to believe that it’s not impossible because there are examples of diverse cultures and communities coexisting not as isolated bubbles but as living dynamic systems that interact with each other. To think about the future differently, we need to start telling different stories and start telling stories differently than we’ve done before.
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This dialogue is part of One Resilient Earth’s Tero Magazine publications.
