Reading :: Designs for the Pluriverse

Designs for the Pluriverse: Radical Interdependence, Autonomy, and the Making of Worlds
By Arturo Escobar

I saw this book cited in Huatong Sun's Global Social Media Design earlier this year and decided to pick it up. According to the back cover, the book "presents a new vision of design theory and practice aimed at channeling design's world-making capacity toward ways of being and doing that are deeply attuned to justice and the Earth"; it promises an "autonomous design" that is oriented to "collaborative and place-making approaches" rather than the demands of capitalism.

The book, as Escobar claims on p.1, seeks to contribute to the redefinition of design from a politico-ontological standpoint. It offers: 

1. "an outline for a cultural studies approach to design" (p.3)
2. "an ontological reading of the cultural background from which design emerges" (p.3)
3. a deep exploration of these propositions, examining "cultural and ecological transition narratives and discourses" (p.4) and concluding with potential frameworks for "an ontological reframing of design" (p.5)

Escobar begins with a Zapatista slogan, which translates as "We want a world where many worlds fit" (p.16)—i.e., a pluriverse. He argues that 

1. "The contemporary crisis is the result of deeply entrenched ways of being, knowing, and doing," so we must understand design historically and culturally (p.19);
2. "Today the most appropriate mode of access to the question concerning design is ontological," so we must understand the dualist ontology of capitalism (pp.19-20);
3. We're seeing "ecological and social devastation," so we must think about "significant cultural transitions" (p.20); and
4. This book specifically seeks to make "a Latin American contribution to the transnational conversation of design," one that "stems from contemporary Latin American epistemic and political experiences and struggles" (p.20).

Yet, he adds, the book belongs "to a long set of conversations in both Western philosophy and sociopolitical spaces in the West and beyond" (p.20)—an important qualification, as we'll see below.

In Part I, Escobar discusses an ontological approach to design. He argues that modern design has contributed to unsustainability and the elimination of futures, but perhaps non-dualist design practices could yield futuring strategies (p.52). To investigate, he draws from design anthropology, ethnography-as-design, and the anthropology of design—and he proposes a fourth alternative, that of "reorienting design on the basis of anthropological concerns" (p.54). To explore the latter, he turns to political ecology, discussing the ontological turn, which is defined by "a host of factors that deeply shape what we come to know as reality but that social theory has rarely tackled—factors like objects and things, nonhumans, matter and materiality ... emotions, spirituality, feelings, and so forth," factors that represent "the attempt to break away from the normative divides, central to the modern regime of truth, between subject and object, mind and body, reason and emotion, living and inanimate, human and nonhuman, organic and inorganic, and so forth" (p.63). He calls these perspectives "postdualism," and argues that in them we see "the return of the repressed side of the dualisms—the forceful emergence of the subordinated and often feminized and racialized side of all of the above binaries" (p.64). 

"The most important targets of a postdualist PE [political ecology] re the divide between nature and culture, on the one hand, and the idea that there is a single nature (or world) to which there correspond many cultures, on the other," he argues, citing scholars such as Ingold, Haraway, Law, and Latour (p.64). He goes on to explore the literature of feminist political ecology and political ontology. Specifically, he discusses the sociology of absences, in which "what doesn't exist is actively produced as nonexistent or as a noncredible alternative to what exists" (p.68). Thus, he says, we must step away from the limits inherent in the "mono-ontological or intra-European origin of such theories" (p.68), instead understanding the world in terms of "relational ontologies" with "complex weavings" based in a "rhizome-like logic" that "reveals an altogether different way of being and becoming in territory and place" (p.70). To be honest, I became a bit frustrated at this point in the book, since the discussion is based primarily in European and American authors (Ingold, Haraway, Law, Latour), the logic is described with the familiar term rhizome (cf. Deleuze and Guattari), and the author turns to handwaving phrases ("complex weavings") rather than more concrete argument. Latour and Woolgar's Laboratory Life was published in 1979; Deleuze and Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus was published in 1980; Haraway's Cyborg Manifesto was published in 1985. Why aren't we farther along here? Perhaps Escobar is attempting to describe these insights to a design audience that hasn't heard of them, but if so, I would like to see more precise phrases than "complex weavings" and a better transition from these Western authors to non-Western and specifically South American insights. However, to his credit, he does soon get to South American insights, specifically via Maturana and Vela, who discuss cognition as enaction (p.82). 

Later, Escobar argues that the problem isn't that dualities exist—it is that coloniality features the categorization and hierarchical classification of differences (p.94). He argues that "there is no modernity anywhere without this coloniality" (p.94). 

With this foundation in place, Escobar turns to the question of what a new design should look like, drawing on Winograd and Flores (pp.109-110). Long story short, it is ontologically oriented and aimed at sustainability. Sustainable design "requires fundamental changes in values and novel socioeconomic and institutional arrangements"; it "highlights interconnectedness and envisions the decoupling of well-being from growth or consumption, and the cultivation of new values (e.g., solidarity, ethics, community, meaning)" (p.142). Later in the book, he lays out the presumptions of autonomous design, which read like participatory design:

1. "Every community practices the design of itself"
2. "Every design activity must start with the strong presupposition that people are practitioners of their own knowledge"
3. "What the community designs, in the first instance, is an inquiring or learning system about itself"
4. "Every design process involves a statement of problems and possibilities that enables the designer and the group to generate agreements about objectives and to decide among alternate courses of action"
5. "This exercise can take the form of building a model of the system that generates the problem of communal concern" (pp.184-185)

He lists more features of autonomous design on pp.188-189, summarized in Figure 6.2 as related to Earth, Territories, Ancestrality, Un/Sustainability/Sustainment, Futurality, and Autonomy (p.189). Realizing this vision means "that all transition thinking needs to develop this attunement to the Earth. In the end, it seems to me that a plural sense of civilizational transitions that contemplates—each vision in its own way—the Liberation of Mother Earth as a fundamental transition design principle is the most viable historical project that humanity can undertake at present" (p.204). Earlier, Escobar described the idea that we live in a single underlying world as "imperialistic" (p.86), but when rallying the entire globe to undertake a project, it's useful to have a single underlying principle ("the Liberation of Mother Earth," a notion in which Escobar has packed a lot of ideas about an underlying shared reality). 

As you can tell, I'm not convinced by this argument, which seems to me to be seeking to replace one fundamental understanding with another, largely on the backs of 40-year-old ideas developed by Western philosophers. Sure, we could change the world as long as most of us decide to believe and act differently—to replace a shared set of assumptions about a shared world with a different set of assumptions about the same world. (That's what Lenin thought would happen in 1917.) But there's no roadmap from A to B. There's not even a roadmap to addressing the obvious scaling issues in the numbered list above, the list that looks so similar to the principles of participatory design, which itself has been around for 35 years and which has also not scaled due to the labor-intensiveness of achieving sustained buy-in from community members. I'd be more interested if Escobar, like participatory designers, had applied principles in a concrete way to specific cases in order to illustrate how at least part of the world could change with this new vision. That is, Escobar needs a UTOPIA project in which to prove these ideas—and it would help if he read beyond Winograd and Flores to the broader CSCW and PD literature. 

I've been a little hard on this book because I think it overpromises. However, it's still a useful book for thinking about how different ontologies might contribute to design. In particular, it functions well as a set of literature reviews that bridge design with object-oriented ontology (OOO) concerns. For that reason, I still recommend the book (with caution) to people who are interested in pluralist design approaches.