Designs for the Pluriverse

Radical Interdependence, Autonomy, and the Making of Worlds

Arturo Escobar | March 2018, Duke University Press

In this book, Arturo Escobar – a Colombian-American anthropologist and professor emeritus of Anthropology – presents a new vision of design theory and practice aimed at channelling design’s world-making capacity toward ways of being and doing that are deeply attuned to justice and the Earth.

The author rethinks the entire concept of design. Pluriverse, in fact, is the coexistence of plural meanings and connotations. So, the design should be built within practices situated in plurality: participatory, socially oriented, and open-ended.

Escobar elaborates on the contrast between a modernist definition of design driven by functionalist and semioticist views and a new age-inclusive design definition centred around experience and meaning.

Noting that most designs—from consumer goods and digital technologies to built environments—currently serve capitalist ends, Escobar argues for developing an “autonomous design” that eschews commercial and modernizing aims in favour of more collaborative and placed-based approaches.

Such design attends to questions of environment, experience, and politics while focusing on the production of human knowledge based on the radical interdependence of all beings.

Escobar shows how refiguring current design practices could create more just and sustainable social orders by mapping autonomous design principles to the history of decolonial efforts of indigenous and Afro-descended people in Latin America.

Bibliography

Escobar, A. (2018) Designs for the Pluriverse: Radical Interdependence, Autonomy, and the Making of Worlds. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press.