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

This book is about the current civilizational conjuncture, its implications for design theory and practice, and the practical potential of design to contribute to the profound cultural and ecological transitions seen as needed by a mounting cadre of intellectuals and activists if humanity is to face effectively the interrelated crises of climate, food, energy, poverty, and meaning. The book is based on the belief that this potential is real, as suggested by some trends within the design profession as a whole, particularly among a small but perhaps growing subgroup of designers who are actually already embarked on the project of “design for transitions.” Some of these designers claim that the crisis demands nothing less than a reinvention of the human. Bold claims indeed. The book finds its main epistemic and political inspiration and force, however, in the political struggles of indigenous, Afrodescendant, peasant, and marginalized urban groups in Latin America who mobilize with the goal of defending not only their resources and territories but their entire ways of being-in-the-world. Some of them do so in the name of their collective alternative “Life Projects,” a concept that is also finding a propitious home in transition design circles. The second wellspring of inspiration and ideas is the discourses and practices of the visionaries and activists who, in so many places and spheres of life, are engaged in bringing about the transitions. That’s at least how many of them see it. A main goal of the book is to ask whether design can actually contribute to enabling the communal forms of autonomy that underlie these transition visions and Life Projects. This is to say that one of the major goals of the book is to place cultural and political autonomy, as defined by the mobilized grassroots communities in Latin America, firmly within the scope of design, perhaps even at its center in the case of those wishing to work closely with communities in struggle.