Introduction

In 1971, as industrialism and U.S. cultural, military, and economic hegemony ­were coming to their peak, Victor Papanek opened Design for the Real World with the following caustic indictment of the field: “­There are professions more harmful than industrial design, but only a very few of them…Today, industrial design has put murder on a mass-­production basis”; even more, “designers have become a dangerous breed” (1984, ix). Reflecting on the watered-down governmental agreements at the much-­talked-a­bout summits on the environment and sustainable development (Rio +20 in June 2012 and the Paris cop 21 in December 2015), just to mention two prominent recent attempts at “redesigning” global social policy, one might think that not much has changed, but this would be too quick a judgment. To be sure, much of what goes on ­under the guise of design at pres­ent involves intensive resource use and vast material destruction; design is central to the structures of unsustainability that hold in place the con­temporary, so-­called modern world. But despite crucial continuities, t­oday’s social and design contexts are significantly dif­fer­ent than in the 1970s. Informed by a rich international experience in “Third World development,” which enabled him to witness failure ­after failure in design, Papanek called for taking the social context and responsibility of design with utmost seriousness. A growing number of con­temporary designers are heeding this call ­today. This book can be seen as a contribution to this ongoing redefinition of design; it ­will do so from a par­tic­u­lar vantage point, ­here referred to as ontological or, more precisely, politico-­ontological.

The global boom of design with postmodernism and globalization has certainly had its ups and downs, its high and low moments. Reflections on design by its theorists and pract­i­tion­ers over the past de­cade, however, converge on some realizations and novel emphases. The first is the ubiquity of design—design is literally everywhere; from the largest structures to the humblest aspects of everyday life, modern lives are thoroughly designed lives. Second, social context is impor­tant for successful design, well beyond products’ functional or commercial applications, or for effective ser­vices. Third, ecologically oriented fields in par­tic­ul­ar have realized design’s vital role in creating a more livable world, with the concomitant need to come up with types of design that make a difference. The fourth signals what is perhaps the most radical change: the need to take seriously the notion that every­body designs, leading to a ­whole range of proposals for ethnographic, participatory, and collaborative design, and indeed a rethinking of the entire concept of design, “when everybody designs,” as Italian design theorist and practitioner Ezio Manzini (2015) pronounced in the very title of his most recent, and compelling, book. Similarly, the spread of digital technologies has pushed designers into embracing unpre­ce­dented rules for design, based on interactivity and user participation; design comes to be seen as collaborative, plural, participatory, and distributed. In short, as Tim Brown—­a design guru from the famed San Francisco firm ideo—­puts it, design “has become too impor­tant to be left to designers” (2009, 8). All of the above is seen as requiring new methods, approaches, and ways of thinking—­a novel “design thinking” (T. Brown 2009; Cross 2011), a manner of approaching not only the task at hand but the world that is more ethnographic and relational. Designers discuss the changing status of “the object” (Lukic and Katz 2010) and “­things” (Ehn, Nilsson, and Topgaard 2014), echoing current debates in science and technology studies, anthropology, and geography. Fi­nally, as exemplified by Anne Balsamo (2011) for the case of technological innovation, ­there is an impor­tant focus on the relation between design and culture: the fact that design is about creating cultural meanings and practices, about designing culture, experience, and par­tic­ul­ar ways of living (see also Manzini 2015; Julier 2014; see Laurel 2001; Suchman 2007; and Sparke 2004 for impor­tant pre­ce­dents on this relation). W­hether all of this warrants claiming that a new design culture has emerged remains a ­matter of debate, although the acute sense of change in critical design studies is itself a ­factor to be considered.

One ­thing should be clear from the outset: while any design discussion inevitably summons established design imaginaries, it should be clear that in this book design refers to much more than the creation of objects (toasters, chairs, digital devices), famous buildings, functional social ser­vices, or ecologically minded production. What the notion of design signals in this work—d­espite design’s multiple and variegated meanings—is diverse forms of life and, often, contrasting notions of sociability and the world.

The Argument and the Book’s Outline

The book is divided into three main parts. Part I introduces some ele­ments from the design lit­er­a­ture at pres­ent and offers an outline for a cultural studies approach to design. I pay par­tic­u­lar attention to ­those works that imagine a new social role and modes of operation for design (chapter 1). ­There are abundant ideas about how design is being transformed in practice, and how to hasten the change, although as we shall see few of these works question the cultural-­philosophical armature from which design practice itself emerges (broadly, patriarchal cap­i­tal­ist modernity). Taken as a whole, ­these trends reveal the existence of a critical design studies field ­under construction. In chapter 2, recent theoretical trends and design debates in anthropology, ecology, architecture and urbanism, digital studies, development studies, po­liti­cal ecol­ogy, and feminist theory are reviewed to ascertain their contribution to an understanding of the nexus among design, culture, and the construction of real­ity specific to the current historical conjuncture. The aim of this part is to introduce diverse lit­er­a­tures to diverse audiences: design lit­er­a­tures to nondesign readers and, conversely, up-t­o-­date social theory approaches to design experts with ­little background in the social sciences and the humanities.¹

Part II proposes an ontological reading of the cultural background from which design emerges, and it goes on to outline an ontological approach to design. Chapter 3 pres­ents a par­tic­u­lar analy­sis of the background that enables a unique answer to the question of design’s re­orientation. Inspired by a “minor” perspective within the biology of cognition (spearheaded by the original work of Chilean biologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, 1980, 1987), this chapter develops a reading of the background in terms of the “rationalistic tradition,” often associated with the objectifying epistemology of Cartesianism. It summarizes well-­known arguments about the dualist ontology that, linked to such a tradition, characterizes the prevailing versions of Western modernity. What is new ­here is the idea that such a critique of dualisms (mind/body, self/ other, subject/object, nature/culture, matter/spirit, reason/emotion, and so forth) is arising from many dif­fer­ent intellectual and activist domains, not just academic critiques. My argument is that the convergence of t­hese tendencies is fostering the creation of an ontological-­political field that questions anew, and goes beyond, ­these dualisms. The multisited emergence of such a field is making progressively perceptible-t­heoretically and politically—­a range of alternatives, increasingly conceptualized in terms of the notion of relationality. This concept offers a dif­fer­ent, and much-­needed, way of re/conceiving life and the world, and a potential new foundation for design.

With ­these pieces and a renewed mode of access to the question of reorienting design in place, chapter 4 moves on to outline the concept of ontological design. Initially proposed by Terry Winograd and Fernando Flores in the mid-1980s, it has remained l­ittle developed, with the few exceptions featured prominently in this book. Ontological design stems from a seemingly ­simple observation: that in designing tools (objects, structures, policies, expert systems, discourses, even narratives) we are creating ways of being. A key insight here is what Anne-­Marie Willis (2006, 80) has called “the double movement of ontological designing,” namely, that we design our world, and our world designs us back—in short, design designs. The ontological design approach is found at the basis of Tony Fry’s proposals for a transition from sustainability to “Sustainment,” as well as a handful of recent transition design proposals. In this chapter I pres­ent ontological design as a means to think about, and contribute to, the transition from the hegemony of modernity’s one-­world ontology to a pluriverse of socionatural configurations; in this context, designs for the pluriverse becomes a tool for reimagining and reconstructing local worlds.

Part III explores this proposition in depth. Chapter 5 brings to the forefront the cultural-­political background within which a pluriversal design practice arises as a tangible possibility and as more than just a figment of the intellectual imagination. This chapter takes a sweeping look at the rich production, over the past de­cade, of cultural and ecological transition narratives and discourses in both the Global North and the Global South. It summarizes emergent notions and movements in the Global North, such as degrowth, commoning, conviviality, and a variety of pragmatic transition initiatives. For the Global South, it examines current debates and struggles around Buen Vivir (well-­being), the rights of nature, communal logics, and civilizational transitions, particularly as ­these debates are taking place in some Latin American countries, pondering ­whether they can be seen as instances of the pluriverse re/emerging. The argument ­here is that these transition imaginations, which posit the need for radical transformations in the dominant models of life and the economy, might constitute the most appropriate framework for an ontological reframing of design. Two interconnected reframings are then presented: an evolving “Transition Design” framework being developed as a gradu­ate training and research program at Car­ne­gie Mellon University’s School of Design, and Manzini’s conceptualization of design for social innovation and transition to a new civilization.

Fi­nally, chapter 6 develops the notion of autonomous design as a par­ticu­lar ontological design approach in dialogue with the transition visions and design frameworks. The basic insight is, again, seemingly straightforward: that ­every community practices the design of itself. This was certainly the case with traditional communities (they largely endogenously produced the norms by which they lived their lives), as it is today with many communities, in both the Global South and the Global North, that are thrown into the need of designing themselves in the face of ever-­deepening manifestations of the crises and the inescapable techno-­economic mediation of their worlds. In other words, if we accept the thesis—­voiced by social movement activists, transition visionaries, and some designers—t­hat the current crises point at a deeper civilizational crisis, then the autonomous design of new forms of life and their own life proj­ects appears to many communities as an eminently feasible, perhaps unavoidable, theoretico-political proj­ect; for some, it is even a question of their survival as distinct worlds. I ­will illustrate this notion of autonomous design with a transition exercise for a par­tic­ul­ar region in Colombia’s southwest, envisioning a transformation from the ecologically and socially devastating model that has been in place for over a hundred years to a codesign process for the construction of a life-­enhancing regional pluriverse.

A fundamental aspect of autonomous design is the rethinking of community or, perhaps more appropriately, the communal; this rekindled concern with the communal is in vogue in critical circles in Latin Amer­ica and in transition movements in Eu­rope concerned with the relocalization of food, energy, and the economy and with transition towns and commoning, among ­others.² Hence, this chapter attempts to place autonomy and the communal at the center of design. (That this has nothing to do with the individual autonomy ­imagined by liberalism ­will become clear throughout the book. In fact, the opposite is the case.) The inspiration for this proposition comes from the view that autonomy is the most fundamental feature of the living; in Maturana and Varela’s terminology, to be explained in chapters 3 and 6, autonomy is the key to autopoiesis, or the self-­creation of living systems. This proposition will serve as a partial anchor for proposing a par­tic­u­lar practice and way of thinking about the relation among design, politics, and life, to be called autonomous design.

From “Development” to the Pluriverse

At the dawn of the development age, a group of reputable United Nations experts characterized the proj­ect to come as follows: “­There is a sense in which rapid economic pro­gress is impossible without painful adjustments. Ancient philosophies have to be scrapped; old social institutions have to disintegrate; bonds of caste, creed, and race have to burst; and large numbers of persons who cannot keep up with pro­gress have to have their expectations of a comfortable life frustrated. Very few communities are willing to pay the full price of economic pro­gress” (United Nations, Department of Social and Economic Affairs 1951, 15). In hindsight, we can consider this pronouncement as a daring, albeit utterly arrogant, design vision. The notion of underdevelopment was just being concocted, and the “Third World” had not yet been born. A new design dream was overtaking the world; we are still engulfed by it, even though, for many, as for the Earth itself, the dream has increasingly turned into a nightmare. What the United Nations envisioned was a sweeping “elimination design” (Fry 2011) of its own, aimed literally at scrapping the vernacular design and endogenous practices that for centuries had nourished, for better or worse, the lives of millions throughout the centuries. Almost overnight, a diverse range of rich and vibrant traditions ­were reduced to being worth, literally, nothing: nondescript manifestations of an allegedly indubitable fact, “underdevelopment.” Yet this dream made perfect sense to millions and was embraced by elites almost worldwide. Such was the power of this design imagination. Not only that, the discourse still holds sway t­oday, as witnessed by the newest round of self-­serving debates and policy maneuvers set in place in 2015, and for the next fifteen years, ­under the rubric of the post-2015 development agenda and the scuffle over a new set of sustainable development indicators. As Fry puts it, “the world of the South has in large part been an ontological designing consequence of the Eurocentric world of the North” (2017, 49). Thus, it is necessary to liberate design from this imagination in order to relocate it within the multiple onto-­epistemic formations of the South, so as to redefine design questions, prob­lems, and practices in ways more appropriate to the South’s contexts.

Today, faced with the realities of a world transformed by a changing climate, ­humans are confronted with the irrefutable need to confront the design disaster that development is, and hence to engage in another type of elimination design, this time of the structures of unsustainability that maintain the dominant ontology of devastation. The collective determination t­oward transitions, broadly understood, may be seen as a response to the urge for innovation and the creation of new, nonexploitative forms of life, out of the dreams, desires, and strugg­les of so many groups and peoples worldwide. Could it be that another design imagination, this time more radical and constructive, is emerging? Might a new breed of designers come to be thought of as transition activists? If this ­were to be the case, they would have to walk hand in hand with ­those who are protecting and redefining well-­being, life proj­ects, territories, local economies, and communities worldwide. These are the harbingers of the transition ­toward plural ways of making the world. The order is rapidly fadin’ / And the first one now will l­ater be last / For the times they are a-changin.’ Perhaps the pluriverse is indeed rising, as the Zapatista of Chiapas and ­those engaged in so many other popu­lar struggles have been saying for over two de­cades now.

The Stakes

In 1980, as neoliberalism and unfettered market-­led globalization were coming firmly into place with the conservative regimes of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, elected with seemingly overwhelming popu­lar support, Bob Marley sent a power­ful message in the perfect rhythm of Jamaican reggae:

Check out the real situation: Nation war against nation. Where did it all begin? When ­will it end? Well, it seems like: total destruction the only solution. And ­there ­ain’t no use: no one can stop them now.­ Ain’t no use: nobody can stop them now.³

Where did it all begin, indeed? What are the stakes? Can “they” be stopped? ­There are scores of answers to ­these questions, of course. I would like to consider two par­tic­ul­ar takes on them, far from the current limelight of critical analyses, but perhaps more radical, to end this introduction. The first, by cultural critic Ivan Illich, involves as much a theory of crisis as a transition framework. The second, by several Latin American and Eur­opean feminists, lucidly unveils the longest historical roots of the con­temporary malaise, locating patriarchy at the center of it. Besides their farsighted vision, which makes them particularly appropriate for thinking about transitions, they have the additional value of embodying a strong dissenting design imagination. Reading the feminists’ critical theory of patriarchy and Illich’s acerbic but enlightening analyses of t­oday’s machine-­centered civilization, one could reach the conclusion that indeed ­Ain’t no use: nobody can stop them now. Yet, at the same time, their insights about transitions to relational and convivial ways of being, knowing, and ­doing are concrete and real, as in many other transition narratives on which we ­will draw.

Illich is best known for his trenchant criticism of the deleterious character of expert-­based institutions, from medicine and education to energy and transportation, and of the disempowering effects of the feminization of work and the narrowing down of gender strug­gles to a matter of individual economic and po­litical equality. Published in 1973, Tools for Conviviality summarized many of his critiques, setting them in the context of a po­liti­cal vision, namely, the reconstruction of convivial modes of living, or what he termed conviviality. The book was self-­consciously written as “an epilogue to the industrial era,” in the conviction that “in the advanced stage of mass production, any society produces its own destruction” (2015, 7, 9).⁴ His key concept, that of the industrial mode of production, enabled him to conceptualize the threat to the human that arises when tools, broadly understood, reach thresholds beyond which they become irremediably damaging to ­people and the environment. The steady erosion of limits started in the seventeenth ­century with the harnessing of energy and the progressive elimination of time and space, gained force with the Industrial Revolution, and accomplished a complete restructuring of society in the twentieth ­century. Many technologies or “tools” based on specialized knowledge, such as medicine, energy, and education, surpassed their thresholds sometime in the early to mid-­twentieth ­century. Once ­these thresholds ­were passed, the technologies became not only profoundly destructive in material and cultural terms but fatally disabling of personal and collective autonomy. The concentration of power, energy, and technical knowledge in bureaucracies (the State) resulted in the institutionalization of ­these tools and enabled a tight system of control over production and destruction. Illich referred to this process as instrumentation and showed how it systematically destroys convivial modes of living. The result was a mega-t­ooled society embedded in multiple complex systems that curtail ­people’s ability to live dignified lives.

The corollary is that society has to be reinstrumentalized to satisfy the twin goals of conviviality and efficiency within a postindustrial framework. This goal requires facing head-on the threats that accelerated growth and the uncontrollable expansion of tools pose to key aspects of the ­human experience, including the following: humans’ historical localization in place and nature; ­people’s autonomy for action; ­human creativity, truncated by instrumentalized education, information, and the media; ­people’s right to an open po­liti­cal process; and ­humans’ right to community, tradition, myth, and ritual—in short, the threats to place, autonomy, knowledge, po­liti­cal pro­cess, and community. Anticipating degrowth debates (chapter 5), Illich spoke about the need for an agreement to end growth and development. To a world mired in ever-i­ncreasing production, while making this production seem ever easier, Illich counterposed not only the fallacy of the growth imperative, thus making its costs visi­­ble, but the cultivation of a joyful and balanced renunciation of the growth logic and the collective ac­cept­ance of limits.⁵

What Illich proposed was a radical inversion, away from industrial productivity and ­toward conviviality. “To the threat of technocratic apocalypse, I oppose the vision of a convivial society. Such a society ­will rest on social contracts that guarantee to each person the broadest and freest access to the tools of the community, on the condition of not hampering ­others’ equal freedom of access…A plurality of limited tools and of convivial organi­zations would foster a diversity of modes of living that would acknowledge both memory and the inheritance from the past as creation” (2015, 26-28; emphasis added). This ethical position involves an alternative technical rationality; as we s­hall see, it lends support to the emphasis by social movements on ancestrality as the basis for autonomy, and by transition designers on futurality, or the creation of ­futures that have a ­future, as a fundamental design princi­ple. As Illich adds, convivial tools will have to be efficacious in fostering people’s creative autonomy, social equity, and well-­being, including collective control over energy and work. This means that tools need to be subjected to a po­liti­cal pro­cess of a new kind. As science and technology create new energy sources, this control becomes all the more impor­tant. To achieve ­these goals, in Illich’s view, it is imperative to impose limits on the expansion of production; ­these limits have the potential to enable the flourishing of a dif­fer­ent kind of autonomy and creativity. At the end of the process, t­here might emerge a society that values sobriety and austerity, where people relearn dependence on others instead of surrendering to an altogether power­ful economic, po­litical, and technocratic elite. The pro­cess is eminently po­litical:

Convivial reconstruction implies the dismantling of the current industrialmono­poly, not the suppression of all industrial production…A continu ous pro­cess of convivial reconstruction is pos­si­ble on the condition that so ciety protects the power of persons and collectivities to change and renewtheir lifestyles, their tools, their environments; said other­wise, their powerto give their real­ity a new face…W e are talking about a society that di versifies the modes of production. Placing limits on industrial productionhas for us the goal of liberating the ­future…A stagnant society would be asuntenable as a society of endless acceleration. In between the two, ­therelies the society of convivial innovation…Threatened by the omnipotenceof the tool, the survival of the species thus depends on the establishmentof procedures that enable every­body to clearly distinguish between ­thesetwo forms of rationalizing and using tools, thus inciting ­people to choosesurvival within freedom. (94-97)

Let us leave Illich for a moment and consider Claudia von Werlhof ‘s account of patriarchy as the source of the con­temporary civilizational model that is wreaking havoc on humans and nature. If one were to ask people on the street to name the main crisis sources, very few would name patriarchy. Why, then, go ­there? ­There is no doubt that, for von Werlhof, the roots of the Western civilizational crisis lie in the long development, over the past five thousand years, of patriarchal cultures at the expense of matriarchal ones. For this author, patriarchy goes well beyond the exploitation of women; it explains the systematic destruction of nature. Conversely, matriarchy is not defined by the predominance of ­women over men, but by an entirely dif­fer­ent conception of life, not based on domination and hierarchies, and respectful of the relational fabric of all life. This is why, for all cultures, it can be said that “in the beginning, t­here was the mother” (in the last instance, M­other Earth), that is, the relation, as tends to still be the case t­oday for many indigenous p­eoples, who retain a range of matriarchal practices. Progressively, however, men undermined this fundament of life in their attempt to usurp ­women’s power to create life through what von Werlhof labels “the patriarchal alchemy.” While in its original connotation alchemy referred to a mode of knowledge based on observation of the natu­ral rhythm of life, for the patriarchs it became a practice of destruction, the fragmenting of the ele­ments of matter to eventually produce, out of the isolated ele­ments, what was considered most valuable, such as gold or the phi­los­opher’s stone. Destruction progressively became the program to be advanced, contradictorily in the name of creating life; eventually, with modernity and the dominance of the machine, the program transmuted into the search for endless pro­gress and the promise of a ceaselessly better world. Mono­the­istic religions have been a main component of this program, with the pater as a godlike figure. ­After more than five hundred years of patriarchal Western modernity, this “alchemic civilization” based on “creation through destruction” has seemingly become global, always at war against life. From von Werlhof ‘s perspective, capitalism is the last phase of this patriarchal civilization.⁶

According to several Latin American feminists, the origin of this last phase is found in the Conquest of Amer­ica and the instauration of the modern/ colonial world system. Looking at this historical process from the perspective of patriarchy is essential to understand the transformations ushered in by modernity. To this end, Argentinian feminist anthropologist Rita Segato (2015) introduces a distinction between the “world-­village” (mundo-­aldea) of communal worlds, with their dual-­gender ontology (based on complementary dualities, or­ga­nized on the basis of relations of reciprocity, and not on a binary between intrinsically in­de­pendent pairs), and the “world-­state,” with its dualist ontologies, which progressively occupies communal worlds through the constitution of a public sphere dominated by men and an increasingly subordinated feminine private sphere. It was thus that the low-­intensity patriarchies of communal worlds gave way to what Segato calls the high-i­ntensity patriarchy of cap­i­tal­ist modernity. From this perspective, patriarchy is at the root of all forms of subordination, including racial, colonial, and imperial domination, along with the resulting pedagogy of cruelty, as Segato names it, imposed on all socie­ties. There is agreement among the growing cadre of Latin American autonomous, decolonial, and communitarian feminists, as Aymara intellectual-­activist Julieta Paredes (2012) puts it, that it was on the bodies of ­women that humanity learned how to dominate. The corollary is to always analyze historically the entanglement of diverse forms of patriarchy, from the autochthonous and indigenous to the modern.⁷

Patriarchal alchemy engulfs most aspects of life; a individuals, we see ourselves in terms of a type of self-­realization that is also a proc­ess of self-a­lchemization, of always re/making ourselves through production and self-i­mprovement. Our spirituality often gets impoverished, trapped in the separation between matter and spirit; the body is debased by patriarchal religions, far from the spirituality of Earth. Progressively, humans start to experience a distancing from all life, which includes, unwittingly, ­those claiming equality within the same life-destroying patriarchal regimes. Once in the modern period, the world comes to be increasingly built without attachment to place, nature, landscape, space, and time—in short, without reference to the hic et nunc (the ­here and now) that has shaped most human existence throughout history.⁸ From t­hese feminist perspectives, what is thus needed is a politics for an other civilization that re­spects, and builds on, the interconnectedness of all life, based on a spirituality of the Earth, and that nourishes community because it acknowledges that love and emotion are impor­tant ele­ments of knowledge and of all of life.

The notion of the interconnectedness of all life is central to ecol­ogy, to most transition narratives, and to the theoretical currents discussed in this book in terms of relationality (chapter 2). All living, ­human or not, takes place within a relational matrix. The forgetting of this fact led to the development of patriarchal cultures. North Carolina ecologist and theologian Thomas Berry (one of the transition thinkers discussed in chapter 5) echoes von Werlhof ‘s analy­sis in a profound sense. For him, “a new interpretation of Western historical development is emerging through the concept of patriarchy…T he entire course of Western civilization is seen as vitiated by patriarchy, the aggressive, plundering, male domination of our society” (1988, 138-140). This expanded role ascribed to patriarchy, he adds, has yet to reach the public so that it becomes pos­si­ble to imagine a postpatriarchal, genuinely ecological (“omnicentric”) world. Emerging from the analy­sis is the need for a new historical mission, that of ushering in “a period when a mutually-­enhancing human-­earth relationship might be established” (145). This can be arrived at only by working against the grain of the four key establishments that support the modern patriarchal vision: governments, corporations, universities, and orga­nized religion.

These lessons resonate with the systematic comparison of “Eur­o­pean patriarchal culture” and “matristic cultures” by Humberto Maturana and German psychologist Gerda Verden-­Zöller (1993). Like the feminist writers just discussed, ­these authors adopt an ontological conception of the cultures of matriarchy and patriarchy: “In a patriarchal culture both ­women and men are patriarchal, and in a matristic culture, both men and women are matristic. Matristic and patriarchal cultures are dif­fer­ent manners of living, dif­fer­ent forms of relating and manners of emotioning, dif­fer­ent closed networks of conversation that are realized in each case by both men and ­women” (2008, 112).⁹ Placing the rise of Indo-­European patriarchal culture within a historical and evolutionary context, t­hese authors arrive at some seemingly startling conclusions within an overall perspective they call “the biology of love.” Patriarchal culture is defined as characterized by actions and emotions that value competition, war, hierarchies, power, growth, procreation, the domination of others, and the appropriation of resources, combined with the rational justification of it all in the name of truth. In this culture, which engulfs most modern ­humans, we live in mistrust and seek certitude through control, including control of the natu­ral world.

Conversely, historical matristic cultures ­were characterized by conversations highlighting inclusion, participation, collaboration, understanding, respect, sacredness, and the always-­recurrent cyclic renovation of life. With the rise of pastoral socie­ties, the transition from one culture to the other started and has not ceased ever since. Matristic modes of being persist in cont­emporary cultures, despite the prevailing patriarchal approach. They survive, for instance, and however partially and contradictorily, in mother-­child or parent-child relations, in love relations, in science, and in participatory democracy. Of crucial importance in this conception is the recognition that the basis of biological existence is the act of emotioning, and that social coexistence is based on love, prior to any mode of appropriation and conflict that might set in. Patriarchal modern socie­ties fail to understand that it is emotioning that constitutes human history, not reason or the economy, b­ecause it is our desires that determine the kinds of worlds we create.¹⁰

Matristic thought and culture arise and thrive within this biology of love; they take place “in the background of the awareness of the interconnectedness of all existence; hence, they can only be lived in the continuous implicit understanding that all ­human actions have implications for the totality of existence” (Maturana and Verden-Z­öller 1993, 47). In this view, the change in ­human emotioning from interconnectedness to appropriation and control thus emerges as a crucial cultural development justified, with the advent of modernity, by a certain rationality. Hence, it is necessary to cultivate again the harmony of coexistence through the equality and unity of all living beings within the ongoing, recursive, and cyclical renovation of life. The ethical and po­liti­cal implications are clear:

Hence, if we want to act differently, if we want to live in a dif­fer­ent world,we need to transform our desires, and for this we need to change our con versations…T his is pos­si­ble only by recovering matristic living…T hematristic manner of living intrinsically opens up a space for coexistencewhere both the legitimacy of all forms of existing and the possibility of agreement and consensus on the generation of common proj­ects of coex istence are accepted…It allows us to see and to live within the interactionand coparticipation of every­thing that is alive in the living of all the living; patriarchal living [on the contrary] restricts our understanding of life andnature b­ecause it leads us to search for a unidirectional manipulation ofevery­thing, given the desire to control living. (105)

Retaking this “neglected path” implies reversing the devaluing of emotioning in relation to reason, which inevitably undermines social coexistence. For von Werlhof, the implications are equally momentous:

It turns out that—w­hether we want to or not—we cannot continue living within modernity ­because it robs us of the very basis for life, including our mere survival!…T­here are two alternatives: to go deeper [within modernity] or to exit from it, to reform it or to revolutionize the situation, ­toward an alternative to modernity rather than of modernity. But we know well that this is the greatest taboo all over the world, that is, to leave ­behind the so-­called Western civilization, b­ecause it means leaving patriarchy as suchbehind. This rupture is almost unimaginable anywhere, except within the indigenous worlds. (2015, 159)

“­There is only one solution,” she continues, considering the Zapatista experience: “the reconstruction of a nonoccidental civilization not only in Mexico but also in the West and throughout the entire planet” (195). We will have to wait ­until the last chapters of this book to ascertain whether this seemingly utopian call has any purchase with concrete social actors. Suffice it to say for now that this notion of civilizational change is being seriously entertained by many transition theorists and visionaries, from ecologists and climate activists to spiritual teachers. Overcoming patriarchy requires an internal cultural healing, the revitalization of traditions and the creation of new ones, the realization that a civilization based on the love of life is a far better option than one based on its destruction. Some indigenous peoples in the Amer­i­cas see themselves as engaged in the Liberación de la Madre Tierra (the Liberation of ­Mother Earth), well beyond the traps of the alchemic civilization of corporate and market globalization, which they often refer as the “proj­ect of death.” For them, it is time to abandon “the superstitious belief in pro­gress and in the modern epoch as the best of all worlds, that is, in the alchemic proj­ect” (von Werlhof 2015, 85). This is also the meaning of the “new matriarchies” that von Werlhof and others intuit, t­hose that while inspired by matriarchal princip­les of the past are becoming transformative forces appropriate to the worlds of ­today.

It bears emphasizing that the importance of this long-­term analysis of patriarchy and Western modernity as the background of the con­temporary crisis lies in the fact that ­these authors see patriarchy as an active historical real­ity; it is not a ­thing of the past. Patriarchal ways of being are central to the historicity of our being-­in-­the-­world at pres­ent. This awareness needs to be brought to bear in any significant re­orientation of design. As Susan Stewart remarks, “the excision of history from design thinking isolates the understanding that informs the design act from any understanding of the temporal trajectories in which it participates” (2015, 276). Recognizing t­hose historical aspects of our historicity that seem buried in a long-­gone past—­which requires paying attention to the realm of myth and story in shaping our worlds—is part and parcel of design’s coming to terms with the very historicity of the worlds and t­hings of ­human creation in the current tumultuous age.

Design with/out ­Futures?

Readers might rightly won­der what ­these ideas about autonomy, relational living, and so forth have to do with design, ontological or other­wise. Moreover, is autonomous design not an oxymoron? The possibility I am trying to ascertain is quite straightforward in principle: whether some sort of ontologically oriented design could function as design for, and from, autonomy. Here again we confront one of the key issues of this book: can design be extricated from its embeddedness in modernist unsustainable and defuturing practices and redirected ­toward other ontological commitments, practices, narratives, and per­for­mances? Moreover, could design become part of the tool kit for transitions t­oward the pluriverse? What would that imply in terms of the design of tools, interactions, contexts, and languages in ways that fulfill the ontological design princi­ple of changing the ways in which we deal with ourselves and ­things so that futuring is enabled?

We find distinct yet complementary clues to ­these questions in the activist and scholarly worlds. If the conditions ever existed for constructing a design agenda from within the theoretico-political space of the social struggles of the day, that moment is t­oday. In 2001 the World Social Forum already announced this historical possibility in the Brazilian city of Porto Alegre; its call to action still reverberates: Another world is poss­i­ble. The World Social Forum echoed what the Zapatista of Chiapas had already voiced with amazing lucidity and force: Queremos un mundo donde quepan muchos mundos (We want a world where many worlds fit). Is it pos­si­ble to read in ­these popu­lar slogans the seeds of a radical design imagination? “Queremos ser nosotros los que diseñemos y controlemos nuestros proyectos de vida” (We ourselves want to be ­those who design and control our life proj­ects), says the Mapuche poet Elicura Chihuailaf (quoted in Rocha 2015, 97). One can see instances of this determination up and down Latin Amer­ica, from the Zapatista of Chiapas and the autonomous communities in Oaxaca to the nasa and misak in Colombia’s southwest and the Mapuche in Chile and Argentina, but also among a growing number of campesino and Afrodescendant communities in a number of countries and equally in some urban settings. This determination experienced a veritable takeoff around 1992, coinciding with the five-­hundredth anniversary of the so-­called discovery of Amer­ica and the renaming of the continent by indigenous movements as Abya Yala.¹¹ With this renaming, the indigenous ­peoples achieved a madurez telúrica, or civilizational coming-­of-­age, as their activists put it.

This coming-­of-a­ge is foregrounding a range of forms of pensamiento autonómico, or autonomous thought. Together with the recrafting of communal forms of knowing, being, and doing, ­these notions—a­utonomía and comunalidad—and their associated practices may be seen as laying the ground for a new design thought with and within communities. Experiences embodying the search for autonomy can be witnessed in many corners of Latin Amer­i­ca and the Ca­rib­bean, particularly in locations where brutal forms of extractive globalization are being resisted: in struggles for the defense of seeds, commons, mountains, forests, wetlands, lakes, and rivers; in actions against white/ mestizo and patriarchal rule; in urban experiments with art, digital technologies, neoshamanic movements, urban gardens, alternative energy, and so forth. Taken as a ­whole, ­these manifestations of multiple collective ­wills evince the unwavering conviction that another world is indeed pos­si­ble. Many of t­hese social movements can be seen as processes of “matriarchalization,” of defending and re/creating relational and cooperative modes of living with ­humans and nature.

Let us shift to the world of design scholarship. Australian design theorist Tony Fry speaks of the “defuturing effects” of modern design, by which he means design’s contribution to the systemic conditions of structured unsustainability that eliminate pos­si­ble ­futures. It is thus impor­tant to recover our future-­imagining capacity, for which he proposes a transition from the Enlightenment to a new horizon of “Sustainment,” a new age capable of nourish-

16Introduction ing ­those relational ways of being-i­n-­the-­world capable of countering the ontology of defuturing. Design theorists Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby (2013) likewise argue for design practices that enable collective discussion about how ­things could be—what they term speculative design. “Design speculations,” they write, “can act as a catalyst for collectively redefining your relationship to real­ity” by encouraging—­for instance, through what-if scenarios—­the imagination of alternative ways of being (2). Such critical design can go a long way, in their view, against design that reinforces the status quo. “Critical design is critical thought translated into materiality. It is about thinking through design rather than through words and using the language and structure of design to engage ­people…All good critical design offers an alternative to how ­things are” (35; emphasis added). That we are in the age of “speculative every­thing” is a hopeful thought, assuming it fuels the kinds of “social dreaming” (169) that might result in “the multiverse of worlds our world could be” (160). The ontological impetus of speculative design ­will be explored at length in subsequent chapters, particularly through the notion of design for transitions to the pluriverse.

Speculation is rampant in all kinds of directions. It is useful to identify two opposing design fictions as a heuristic, with a ­whole range in between. At one end we find matristic, convivial, futuring, and, broadly speaking, relational visions that highlight the re/creation of worlds based on the horizontal relation with all forms of life, respecting the ­human embeddedness in the natural world. At the other end of the spectrum t­here lies the dream, held by the flashy techno-­fathers of the moment, of a posthuman world wholly created by Man. This is the world, for instance, of synthetic biology, with its gene-­centric view of life; of booming techno-alchemies for ge­ne­tic enhancement and the prolongation of life; of robotics, cyborgian fantasies, space travel, nanotechnology, unlimited 3-­d printing, and much more; of the bizarre geoengineering schemes concocted in corporate boardrooms as solutions to climate change; and of ­those advocating for the “­Great Singularity,” a technologically induced transformation “when humans transcend biology,” in which life would finally be perfected, perhaps as in the world-without-­mothers of artificial intelligence fictions such as ­those portrayed in the film Ex-­Machina, where ­women’s ability to give life is fi­nally completely usurped since wo/man is wholly created by man through the machine.¹² Are t­hese masculine imaginaries of creation—design imaginations for sure—really universal, or unavoidable, as their f­athers pretend? One ­thing is certain: ­were it to succeed, this world would cease to have any resemblance to the original nature from which all life stemmed (Plumwood 2002). ­Here we find the possibility at least of a bifurcation between two design paths, between two modes of civilizational regulation, matriarchal and patriarchal.

Have ­these tawdry f­athers, with their narrow vision of innovation, robbed us of dif­f er­ent visions of the ­future? Given that their views stem from centuries-old civilizational narratives and practices, they capture most of the po­liti­cal force and media attention. Yet in between the Silicon Valleys of the world and struggling communities, one finds all kinds of instrumentations and technological developments, including ­those informed by an ecological awareness of planetary limits and global climate change. These will be crucial for a design imagination that avoids the traps of capitalistic industrial instrumentation and goes beyond the ontology of separation that thrives on hierarchy, competition, aggression, and the control of ­humans and nature. Coming to terms anew with “the question concerning technology” (Heidegger 1977) is indeed one of the greatest challenges faced by any kind of critical design practice. As Clive Dilnot (2015) puts it, we need to address head-on the exponential increase in the destructive capacity of technology but in ways that do not cede humans’ ability to construct an entirely dif­fer­ent set of relations with other living beings through technology.¹³ To the naturalized destructiveness that has accompanied the anthropocene, and faced with the emergence of the artificial as the ineluctable mode of human life, he argues, we need to oppose the cultivation of qualitatively new modes of becoming through the very futuring potential offered by the artificial. Possibility ­here means “the negotiation with actuality and not the escalation of what is” (Dilnot 2015, 169), as in the techno-alchemic imaginations just mentioned. As he adds, this implies “negotiation of the possi­ble through the artificial, just as it is also negotiation with the conditions of natu­ral existence” (169; emphasis added); t­hese are crucial distinctions. This offers the only chance to overcome “the abject capitulation to what-is [that] is maintained by our inability to grasp what is emerging” (170). The current conjuncture brought about by the full emergence of the artificial confronts us with the need to think anew about the intersection of ethics, design, and politics. We ­shall take up these vital questions again in the book’s conclusion.

The expansion of the artificial also challenges us to “unfold the po­liti­cal capacities of design” by ­going against the analytical tendency in critical design studies to examine primarily how design, through its very materiality, “hardwires” par­tic­u­lar kinds of politics into bodies, spaces, or objects (Domínguez Rubio and Fogué 2015, 143). In contrast, one might focus on design’s ability to broaden the range of pos­si­ble ways of being through our bodies, spaces, and materialities. This unfolding may be seen as based on “designers’ acquired orientation to the pursuit of attentive and open-­ended inquiry into the possibilities latent within lived material contexts” (Stewart 2015, 275). It thus becomes appropriate, as suggested here, to think about design’s capacities and potentiality through a wide spectrum of imaginations—in terms of matristic cultures with feminists; in terms of autonomy and communal modes of living with t­hose struggling to defend landscapes and territories worldwide; or in terms of the artificial, with design thinkers striving to steer a course between the prevailing defuturing practices and the futuring potential of science and technology.

These debates signal a still-­unresolved issue in social theory, and a source of tensions and contradictions in activist worlds: the question of modernity or modernities, including the seemingly ­simple question, is life better ­today than it has ever been for the ­human majorities?, as medical advances, the rights of ­women, life expectancies, communication technologies, and improvement in livelihoods for many seem to suggest. Will t­here still be “modern solutions to modern prob­lems”? Or has modernity’s ability to even imagine the questions that need to be asked to effectively face the con­temporary ecological and social crisis been so fatally compromised, given its investment in maintaining the worlds that created it, as to make it historically necessary to look elsewhere, in other-t­han-­modern world-­making possibilities? But are ­these other possibilities, as far as we know them (e.g., ­those that emerge from relational and place-­based forms of living), still viable alternatives? Or have they become, rather, historical impossibilities given their relatively small scale and scope when compared with the globalization juggernaut? We ­will take up ­these questions again in the conclusion.

­Here, then, is the argument in a nutshell:

1 The con­temporary crisis is the result of deeply entrenched ways of being, knowing, and ­doing. To reclaim design for other world-­making purposes requires creating a new, effective awareness of design’s embed dedness in this history. By examining the historical and cultural back ground from within which design practice enfolds, the book aims to con tribute to the collective reflection on that practice. To this end, the book is a contribution to the cultural studies of design.

2 ­Today the most appropriate mode of access to the question concerning design is ontological. Designing this mode of access involves both under standing the dualist ontology of separation, control, and appropriation that has progressively become dominant in patriarchal cap­i­tal­ist moder nity, on the one hand, and inquiring into existing and potential rational ities and modes of being that emphasize the profound relationality and interconnectedness of all that is, on the other. This book contributes to developing this ontological approach to design.

3 The con­temporary conjuncture of widespread ecological and social devastation summons critical thought to think actively about significant cultural transitions. Two hopeful forms of transition thinking within design theory and practice are arising as a result: design for transitions, with a broad view of transition (“civilizational,” or “the ­great transition”); and design for autonomy, centered on the strug­gles of communities and social movements to defend their territories and worlds against the rav ages of neoliberal globalization. This book contributes to outlining the fields of design for transitions and autonomous design.

4 This book, fi­nally, seeks to contribute to design discourse through the elaboration of the cultural background of design, at a time when designers are rediscovering people’s ability to shape their worlds through relational and collaborative tools and solutions. It is, however, a Latin American contribution to the transnational conversation on design, that is, a con tribution that stems from con­temporary Latin American epistemic and po­liti­cal experiences and strug­gles.¹⁴

I would like to add one final caveat. This book should be read as belonging to a long set of conversations in both Western philosophy and sociopo­litical spaces in the West and beyond. The preoccupation with relationality and with the limitations of binary thinking was not in­ven­ted with the “ontological turn,” ­needless to say; on the contrary, they have received a lot of attention in modern philosophy, at least from the time of Immanuel Kant’s humanism and Hegelian and Marxist dialectics, if not before. At the same time, the recent thinking on relationality makes vis­i­ble the limitations of previous approaches to escaping dualism, particularly how far past authors were willing to push dualism’s implications in terms of envisaging significant transformations from the perspective of radical interdependence. ­There are also genuinely new emphases, particularly the concern with the agency of nonhumans and a certain renewed attention to materiality. ­These have opened fresh paths for moving intellectually, socially, and po­liti­cally beyond dualisms and, perhaps, decolonizing Western thought. To put it in Western academic terms, I would say that this book is more anthropological Heideggerianism than deconstructive post-humanism or relentless Deleuzian deterritorialization. This is so ­because of its commitment to place, the communal, and other practices of being, knowing, and ­doing, and no doubt also ­because of its critical approach to technology and its commitment to notions of the ­human capable of harboring a genuine care for the world.

I also believe ­there is greater clarity ­today than in the recent past that the notion of relationality involves more than nondualism; that reimagining the ­human needs to go beyond the deconstruction of humanism (still the focus of most posthumanist thought) in order to contemplate effective possibilities for the human as a crucial po­litical proj­ect for the pres­ent; and that to the awareness of how we live in a world (or worlds) of our own making (again, a prevalent theme in Western philosophy) we now need to add a sharper consciousness of how t­hose worlds make us—sometimes with deeply troubling results.

The book should thus be read as constructed along three axes: ontology, concerned with world making from the perspective of radical interdependence and a pluriversal imagination; design, as an ethical praxis of world making; and politics, centered on a reconceptualization of autonomy precisely as an expression of radical interdependence, not its negation.

Notes