Conventional discipline-­based design education can not contribute to substantial change ­unless students are inducted into understanding theories of power, social structure and social change, and the like. If one were to design a postgraduate (or even undergraduate) degree course in, say Meta-D­esign or Transition Design, it might, on the surface, look more like Hu­manities than design. Anne-­Marie Willis, “Transition Design: The Need to Refuse Discipline and Transcend Instrumentalism”

By general consent [in anthropology] the organi­za­tions of production, distribution, governance, and knowledge that have dominated the modern era have brought the world to the brink of catastrophe. In finding ways to carry on, we need all the help we can get. But no one—no indigenous group, no specialist science, no doctrine or philosophy—h­olds the key to the f­uture, if only one could find it. We have to make the ­future for ourselves, but that can only be done through dialogue. Anthropology’s role is to expand the scope of this dialogue: to make conversation of h­uman life itself. Caroline Gatt and Tim Ingold, “From Description to Correspondence: Anthropology in Real Time”

Psychoanalysis and ethnology occupy a privileged position in our knowledge… ­because, on the confines of all the branches of knowledge investigating man, they form an undoubted and inexhaustible treasure-­hoard of experiences and concepts, and above all a perpetual princip­le of dissatisfaction, of calling into question, of criticism and contestation of what may seem, on other res­pects, to be established… Ethnology, like psychoanalysis, questions not man himself, as he appears in the ­human sciences, but the region that makes pos­si­ble knowledge about man in ­general… [It] is situated within the par­ticul­ar relation that the Western ratio establishes with all other cultures…[Ethnology and psychoanalysis] are directed ­towards that which, outside man, makes it poss­i­ble to know, with a positive knowledge, that which is given to or eludes his consciousness…One ­thing in any case is certain: man is neither the oldest nor the most constant prob­lem that has been posed for h­uman knowledge. Michel Foucault, The Order of ­Things

Design theory and design education take place at the edges of social theory, conventionally the province of the social science and the humanities. It thus makes sense to affirm that the development of an ontological approach to de sign, one that destabilizes its comfortable niche within naturalized modern ­orders, demands a recentering of design education in order to bring it fully into the critical social theory space. As Anne-­Marie Willis maintains, however, this task entails more than a straightforward extension or application of social theory to the design field. It is worth completing the above quote from her as we start this chapter to convey the sense of what is at stake. Such a program would teach on: Theories of Power, Change and the Po­liti­cal; Culture/ Sociality; History and Philosophy of Technology; Theories of Subjectivity, Mind/Mentalities; Theories of Making and Designing and contextual studies (“history”) such as Modernity/Enlightenment. But of course ­these subjects would not have this title; they would not be taught as conventional Humanities courses or “complementary studies.” The challenge would be how to make connections to design, but not in an appropriative way, reducing, decontextualizing, and hollowing out the radical nature of deep ideas, old and new…The framework for teaching from this body of knowledge would need to be meta-­designing along with an implicit, at times explicit, critique of the design professions: “­these are the historical forces that have created the context in which design has emerged as a par­tic­u­lar kind of delimited practice. This is what has designed design and is still designing design. This is what we need to understand so as to create a practice of counter- designing.” (2015, 73; emphasis added)

Herein lies an entire program for redesigning design education (see also Fry 2017), a task to which this chapter purports to make a modest, and clearly situated, contribution. It does so from the perspective of a cultural studies of design. By this, following Lawrence Grossberg (2010), we mean the examination of the ways in which ­people’s everyday lives are articulated with culture within and through par­tic­u­lar design practices. The cultural studies of design will also study design’s role in the current cultural-historical conjuncture—how design practices participate in fundamental processes of the production of real­ity and their articulation with forms of power. It does so “by taking culture as its starting point, its entrance into the complex balance of forces constructed out of the even more complicated relations of culture, society, politics, economics, everyday life, ­etc.” (24). Cultural studies’ radical contextuality implies its connection to transformative social practices and strug­gles. It is, fi­nally, about the cultural work that needs to take place for the creation of new ­futures. Design is no doubt a main player in the making of the modern onto-­epistemic formation, and hence a most appropriate subject for cultural studies.1

Many of the debates and contributions sketched in the previous chapter may be considered impor­tant contributions to the cultural studies of design. This chapter extends this investigation by looking at a number of trends arising from fields that, while not central to design practice or design education, nevertheless have a direct bearing on the conditions within which design theory and practice unfold, especially when one takes an ontological approach to design. ­These fields include anthropology, development studies, po­litical ecology, and feminist theory. These trends complement the discussion of ele­ments from the previous chapters, such as sustainability and digital culture. They are not presented as explicit content for design education but as ele­ments that may enter into educational and training strategies for design schools wishing to make forays into the ontological and transition design proj­ects. Conversely, students from the social sciences and the humanities might find in the notes that follow useful ideas for bringing social theory to bear on design-­related prob­lems, which I believe are often pres­ent in the situations in which we work.

The first, and main, part of the chapter focuses on the diverse engagements between anthropology and design, alternating between the more applied or action-­oriented “design anthropology” and the critical “anthropology of design.” The second part moves on to consider recent design inroads into the fields of development and humanitarian aid; it looks at the ways in which designers are attempting to position themselves within development proj­ects, including in the rapidly growing, and distinctive, space of humanitarianism.

Fi­nally, the third part discusses the scholarly transformation, known as the ontological turn, that ensued from the encounter between the field of po­litical ecology and the evolving concerns with ontology (objects, ­things, ­matter, the real, immanence, process) in postconstructivist social theory. Arising out of this intersection, the nascent field of po­litical ontology, this chapter suggests, constitutes a constructive space for rethinking design ontologically. Politi­cal ontology will be used in subsequent chapters to reframe two issues of importance for ontological and autonomous design: unsustainability, on the one hand, and the strug­gles of territorial-­based social movements, on the other. Thinking about design from the vantage point of po­liti­cal ontology ­will also enable us to ascertain its relation with the decolonial proj­ect of moving ­toward “a world where many worlds fit.” This reflection ­will be an impor­tant ele­ment in the notion of designs for the pluriverse, to be discussed in the last part of the book.

To anticipate a bit, an ontological approach to design ­will, on the one hand, show how modern design has been pivotal to the systematic creation of unsustainability and the elimination of f­utures—­bringing the world to the brink of catastrophe, as described in the epigraph from Caroline Gatt and Tim Ingold (2013, 147); on the other, it will put forward the question of whether design practices stemming from nondualist conceptions might be capable of leading to futuring strategies for transitions beyond the nature/culture rift, within a dialogical pluriverse. This is part of the big picture of design at pres­ent, but just the beginning. If the figure of Man as the foundation of all ­knowledge—­modern Man or, as Donna Haraway puts it, “Man the M­odern” (1997, 78)—emerged, in Michel Foucault’s (1970) argument, at the end of the eigh­teenth ­century, when a new configuration of knowledge (a new episteme) finally crystallized, this same Man is the design subject, “Man the Designer,” one might say. Design has had an easy and largely celebrated existence within what we usually refer to nonchalantly as the modern age. This age, however, is a complex constellation of coevolving proc­esses, including a par­tic­u­lar episteme, an ensemble of social forms among which patriarchal capitalism and coloniality occupy pride of place, and an ontological architecture structured around the founding dualisms of nature/culture and West/non-­West. It is this onto-­epistemic and social formation that is at the foundation of design.

Extricating “designer man” from this complex of forces so that ­humans can again play a more constructive role in the praxis of being alive is thus intimately entangled with the passing of Man as the center of all knowledge and as the mea­sure of life. It requires no less than a new notion of the human, a veritable posthuman understanding of what it means to be a living being in the age of climate change, generalized unsettlement, and a growing insurrection against the defuturing effects increasingly evident in the so-­called globalized world.

Between Design Anthropology and the Anthropology of Design

Social/cultural anthropology (in the Anglo-­American and Latin American usage; ethnology in French, as in Foucault’s quote above) is the science that, at the edges of but at the same time central to Western knowledge, makes evident the historicity of any and all cultural ­orders, their arbitrary and historically constructed character, including that of the West itself. This is why anthropology might be particularly useful to design studies, because it enables us to examine any social order as the result of design processes involving the interplay of materiality, meanings, and practices. Moreover, as Foucault says, “the general prob­lem of all ethnology is in fact that of the relations (of continuity or discontinuity) between nature and culture” (1970, 377). The relation between nature and culture—­its dif­fer­ent regimes, the multiple forms it takes, and the consequences of ­those vari­ous forms and regimes—will reappear per­sis­tently throughout this book, whether in the analysis of the ontological dualism between nature and culture that became consolidated at the time of the founding of Western modernity or, conversely, in the discussion of the relational ontologies under­lying the worlds of those ­peoples thought to be without history, for whom the relation between nature and culture has ­little to do with the sanitized modern ontology that keeps them separate. It will also resurface in the irrefutable emergence—­out of so many “unarchived histories,” to use the wonderful expression of one of the found­ers of the subaltern studies group in India, Gyanendra Pandey (2014)—of the multiple territorial struggles being waged by peoples in defense of their relational worlds. The concern with the nature/culture relation ­will resurface, finally, in the discussion of un/ sustainability from design perspectives.

The rapprochement between anthropology and design has gained force over the past de­cade. As Keith Murphy states in his retrospective look at this relation, “even though designed phenomena have received significant ­anthropological attention since the discipline’s earliest days, the basic fact that they are designed has not received much attention” (2016, 440). The changing attitude is seen as both promising and troublesome, and this is reflected in the three main forms that the relation has taken: bringing anthropological insights into design (design anthropology), bringing design insights into anthropology (ethnography as design), and applying critical social theory to design practice (anthropology of design). A fourth variation is proposed in this book, and this is the possibility of re­orienting design on the basis of anthropological concerns, broadly speaking, by which I mean infusing design with the perspective of the multiplicity of onto-­epistemic formations, or worlds, within which anthropological work often takes place (traditionally understood as “native” cultures). Whereas this also includes modern worlds, of course, this fourth option is particularly concerned with the knowledges and desires of subaltern subjects and the social movements they create.2

Design Anthropology

The most salient of ­these trends at pres­ent is design anthropology, involving the use of anthropological concepts and methods in design; positions range from applied (market-­driven) to activist (socially conscious) design. A good deal of the lit­er­a­ture on design anthropology advocates for the incorporation of anthropology into design practice based on an argument about relevance and professional opportunities. This is an in­ter­est­ing trend largely led by anthropologists practicing in the design world (see, e.g., Tunstall 2011; Whitemyer 2006; and some of the chapters in A. Clarke 2011a and Laurel 2003). The web-­based lit­er­a­ture on this trend is growing rapidly. While highlighting the necessarily action-­oriented character of the field, the more academic-­oriented versions of design anthropology emphasize the role of theory in informing action. Two recent volumes develop this design-­oriented theoretical and methodological perspective (A. Clarke 2011a; Gunn, Otto, and Smith 2013). The authors in t­hese volumes rearticulate the anthropological insight of the cultural embeddedness of all artifacts to suggest why design anthropology “is emerging as a methodology as much as a discourse” (Clarke 2011b, 10). Design anthropology should thus not be seen merely as an applied field (although this clearly happens as well, as in industrial or business anthropology); in fact, the thrust of the matter is the realization that con­temporary critical designers, combining anthropological-­style observation and speculation on emergent social practices, are developing a distinct style of knowledge (Gunn, Otto, and Smith 2013). This par­tic­u­lar way of ­doing both anthropology and design is yielding new methods, such as ethnographic approaches to design contexts that make it pos­si­ble to tack back and forth between action and reflection; participatory design orientations (Ehn, Nilsson, and Topgaard 2014); po­liti­cal preoccupations, including the decolonization of design practice (Tunstall 2013); and ethical discussions about the role of values in human-­centered design.

This trend has resulted in the creation of a dynamic and growing field with its own set of concerns that feed back into both anthropology and design. A case in point is the notion of prototyping the social as a means to critically look at, and construct, more inclusive worlds (A. Clarke 2011b, 11). A recent anthropological group proj­ect looked precisely at the rise of a “prototyping paradigm” in a variety of fields, including of course design but also art, science, software development, and engineering. “The experimental and open-­ended qualities of prototyping,” as one of the group’s conveners hypothesized, “have become a surrogate for new cultural experiences and proc­esses of democratization” (Corsín Jiménez 2013, 382). By examining prototyping as an emergent complex cultural practice, and by introducing a metareflection on “prototyping prototyping,” this proj­ect examined critically the historicity of this practice while highlighting the productivity of a design practice based on a logic of experimentation, imagination, user-­centeredness, and collaboration that, they argue, could fruitfully inform anthropological work (arc Studio 2010).3 Above all, ­these trends suggest that, while still nascent, the coming together of design and anthropology is creating a rich arena for a rapidly developing field (Chin forthcoming; Otto and Smith 2013).

Ethnography and Design

The attention to the relation between ethnography and design is a reflection of the evolving relation between anthropology and design (e.g., Bichard and Gheerawo 2011; Plowman 2003 for an early statement on interface anthropology and research on “the vibrant new villages of computing” [Laurel 1989, 93]; Suchman 2007 on the ethnography of human-­machine reconfigurations; plus the Clarke and Gunn, Otto, and Smith volumes already mentioned). This brings us to the second trend, which looks at the actual or potential contributions of design to anthropology—­how design thinking and research provide resources for ethnographic inquiry in par­tic­u­lar, within an overall framework conceptualized as the “anthropology of the con­temporary” (Rabinow and Marcus 2008; Suchman 2011). This development has been spearheaded by George Marcus’s proj­ect “Rethinking Ethnography as a Design Pro­cess” at the Center for Ethnography, University of California, Irvine.4 The basic insight—­that ethnography can be rethought as a design process on the basis of certain trends in design practice and education such as collaboration, diverse partnerships, and outcome orientation—has yielded insightful ethnographic tools beyond established methods such as participant observation and inf­or­mant interviews, thus making the field better equipped to understand con­temporary worlds and imagine constructive courses of action. This trend could be said to have an impor­tant pre­de­ces­sor in the work of Donald Schön and Martin Rein (e.g., Schön 1987; Schön and Rein 1994). Working in the field of urban studies from a Deweyian perspective, Schön developed an entire framework for dealing with the limitations of technical rationality that he saw (somewhat ethnographically) as dominant in architectural and craft design and moving ­toward a “reflection-i­n-­action” type of training for professionals. His conceptualization of the design process as reflection-i­n-­action, and of the studio as a model for it, remains relevant.

An original counterpoint to the relation between ethnography and design has been proposed by Gatt and Ingold (2013), who argue for a shift from anthropology and ethnography as design, or for design, to anthropology by means of design. Imbued in phenomenological tenets and relational perspectives, ­these authors elaborate a notion of correspondence that foregrounds the processual character of all living. “To correspond with the world, in short,” they suggest, provocatively, “is not to describe it, or to represent it, but to answer to it”; hence their corollaries: first, they consider a shift from anthropology and ethnography as description to “anthropology-­by-­means-­of-­design [as] a practice of correspondence” (2013, 145; see also Ingold 2011). Second, they argue that “design, in this sense, does not transform the world. It is rather part of the world’s transforming itself ” (Gatt and Ingold 2013, 146). ­Whether one considers this conception of design as merely poetic or a valid and clairvoyant response to how life actually works, this proposed framework offers rich insights into how phenomenologically minded designers, by working alongside the world as it unfolds, might think about issues such as improvisation, foresight, dwelling, and nondeterministic goals and directions for transformation. In fact, as ­these authors conclude, thinking about design in terms of correspondence affords paths for shifting anthropological practice from its emphasis on academic texts to collaboration with ethnographic subjects in their world-­making projects. We s­hall ask ­later ­whether this notion of anthropology-­by-­means-­of-­design offers insights for the explic­itly activist and po­liti­cal transition design and autonomous design conceptions to be developed in the context of collaboration with, say, indigenous communities.

The Anthropology of Design

The third tendency—­the anthropology of design—­entails the critical analy­sis of design as a domain of thought and practice, using con­temporary critical theories to this end (Suchman 2011). It looks critically at what goes on “­under the increasingly flexible banner of design,” as Finnish anthropologist and design theorist Eeva Berglund descriptively puts it.5 While it engages seriously with design fields, it is more cautious about what is taking place at the intersection of anthropology and design. Not all of the work in the anthropology of design takes the form of a distanced critique, however. As Berglund (2011, 2012) suggests in her analy­sis of Helsinki’s architecture and Finnish environmentalism and design, the crossovers between design and anthropology suggest room for intellectually stimulating engagement. This does not do away with all the prob­lems, such as the per­sis­tence of unquestioned binaries between nature (e.g., the forest) and culture (e.g., the city) in much environmentally oriented design, and a certain depoliticization of issues that comes from reliance on design discourse. This might feed into activist conceptions of design, which anthropologists, inside and outside academia, are in a particularly strong position to assess and contribute to developing. For Berglund, while the popularity of design and design thinking invites critique, it also calls for a cautious assessment of how the two fields might enrich each other and coimagine proj­ects in diverse areas of socionatural life. Elizabeth Chin brings out the tensions inherent to the rapprochement between anthropology and design: while design’s action-­oriented ethics questions anthropology’s inability to engage effectively with the actors with whom it works, the latter easily deconstructs the former’s often-­uninformed “first-world” sensibility and proclivity for “productification and marketing” (2017). ­These tensions notwithstanding, the search for mutual learning at the anthropology/design interface is on and is likely to continue in the near ­future.6

The depoliticization of much design work is, ­needless to say, real. As Lucy Suchman rightly states, anthropology may contribute to redressing this situation by “bringing into view the politics of design, including the systemic placement of politics beyond the limits of the designer’s frame” (2011, 4). A related inquiry, proposed by design theorists Fernando Domínguez Rubio and Uriel Fogué (2015), examines how objects and t­hings embed logics of power, leaning on Foucault’s analyses of the creation of disciplinary socie­ties through normalizing practices in schools, hospitals, armies, factories, and so forth. The disciplinary society, in Foucauldian terms, is indeed a designed society. This research program probes designers’ understanding of innovation and creativity, to the extent that ­these are often entangled with the reproduction of the (cap­ital­ist and colonial) status quo. In other words, how design can be infused with a more explicit sense of politics—aradical politics—is one of the most impor­tant questions critical theory can pose to design practice.

Questions of class, gender, race, and coloniality are notoriously absent from most design theory and practice, and so is that of design’s dependence on capitalism (White 2015; Tunstall 2013; Chin forthcoming; Kalantidou and Fry 2015). We already mentioned Chin’s (2017) assessment of design as a white cultural practice. As she argues, looking at design in terms of the intersection of class, gender, race, coloniality, and other markers of identity must be an integral component of the decolonization of design (see also Tunstall 2013). ­These questions are being taken up explic­itly by designers working in intellectual-activist spheres, oftentimes with community-­oriented design organ­izations. For the Design Studio for Social Intervention group, led by Kenneth Bailey in Boston, “the designer’s stance is experimental and proactive. It helps propel us beyond merely addressing existing prob­lems with existing forms into imagining entirely new terrains of possibility. Equally impor­tant, design invites widely disparate ways of knowing into a single co-­creative practice.”7 This design studio, which is working ­toward social justice, is developing innovative methodologies at the interface of community, art, planning, and activism.8 Community-­level design is also being used to connect environmental justice, memory, per­for­mance, materiality (e.g., toxins in the soil), and land and landscape to keep alive, and renew, a community’s long-­standing experience of protest and re­sis­tance while reimagining its future, for instance, in the context of environmental justice strug­gles in North Carolina (Vasudevan 2011).

As ­these and other cases demonstrate, work being done with marginalized communities often ends up radicalizing participatory methods through interaction design research in which local knowledges and insights are genuinely taken as the starting point of the design proc­ess. Based on their teamwork with homeless youth in Southern California, Chin and collaborators note that most design work with the homeless results in proj­ects that are either a version of a tent or a shopping cart (Chin et al. 2016). The ability of this type of “do-­gooder,” socially oriented design to address questions of social justice and in­equality—l­et alone to take seriously the homeless’s voices and perspectives—is very limited, in t­hese authors’ view. What the latter requires is an epistemic “getting out of the way,” as Michael Montoya (2013) descriptively puts it in his work on acompañamiento (accompaniment) in the planning and design of health interventions with Latinas/os in the same part of the United States. Chin’s and Montoya’s teamwork approaches vividly demonstrate how difficult it is to quell sufficiently the designers’ or researchers’ own categories so that they can even begin to understand the often-­counterhegemonic categories of subaltern groups. Both researchers invoke Latin American traditions of participatory research in this endeavor. The notion of autonomous design to be developed in the last part of this book resonates with ­these proj­ects.

Discussions of the relation between design and politics reflect the fact that design has become a formidable po­litical and material force; the corollary is ­whether design is becoming, or can become, a promising site for the transformation of the entrenched cultures of unsustainability t­oward pluriversal practices. Reframing design practice ontologically is intended as a contribution to this discussion. It is also an attempt to locate design politics in its capacity to generate new entities and relations, that is, to unveil design’s capacity “to ‘propose’ new kinds of bodies, entities and sites as po­liti­cal” (Domínguez Rubio and Fogué 2015, 148), thus expanding established understandings of the pol­iti­cal.

Design in the Development and Humanitarian Field

International development is another field in which the presence of design debates and practices is growing noticeably. As already suggested by the quote from the United Nations report from 1951 in the introduction to this book, it can be argued that the entire proj­ect of development, in which the industrialized countries were to aid poor countries to adopt strategies for “modernization” and, eventually, join the ranks of the First World, was an immense design proj­ect. For seven de­cades, development discourses and strategies have kept in place the idea that much of Africa, Asia, and Latin Amer­ica is underdeveloped and that it is the duty of well-i­ntentioned governments and institutions to help them develop and modernize. That this dream turned into a nightmare for many has been sufficiently shown. The development discourse, along with the huge knowledge-­power apparatus it created (from the World Bank to national and local development agencies all over the Third World, nongovernmental organ­izations, and so forth), became instead a highly efficient mechanism for the economic, social, and cultural production of Asia, Africa, and Latin Amer­i­ca in par­tic­u­lar ways (Escobar 2011). It is intriguing that design, as an expert discourse, has had l­ittle explicit presence in development activities or their critique ­until recently.

The entry of design into development is both troublesome and hopeful, depending on how one looks at it. Peter Redfield has begun to map a particularly critical area, based on the examination of a number of “humanitarian goods” and “modest designs” when basic survival is at stake (including “ready-to-­use” therapeutic food such as Plumpy’nut, a personal water-­filtering system named LifeStraw, a ­simple ­human sanitation device called Peepoo, and inexpensive treatment for diseases such as Ebola and aids). Based on a de­cade of engagement with Médecins sans Frontières (Doctors without Borders), Redfield discusses the nexus of Enlightenment rationality, secularism, capitalism, and colonialism that constitutes the cultural and po­litical background of humanitarian aid. Redfield and colleagues (Redfield 2012, 2013; Redfield and Bornstein 2010) engage in a sustained analy­sis of the thorny issues raised by humanitarianism, including how to bear witness and practice “active neutrality” in contexts of massive dislocation where saving a few lives seems to be all one can do. The design of many humanitarian goods takes shape amid austere constraints such that durability, simplicity, and portability are essential. More critically, ­these goods circulate according to a new commodity logic; while the “approach remains openly commercial,” the producers are aware of what it means to work in “an explic­itly humanitarian market” (Redfield 2012, 175, 168). Consequently, Redfield shows how this design practice can neither be reduced to being an instrument of neoliberal globalization nor be assimilated into well-­established forms of governmentality or developmentalist intervention. Something ­else, potentially new, seems to be happening in this field of “minimal biopolitics” emerging at the intersection of anthropology, humanitarian practice, and design; this proc­ess is unfolding within a veritably sacrificial international order. H­ere, design questions not infrequently become a ­matter of life and death.9

Humanitarian design has opened the way for a still-­small but growing tendency, namely, the reframing of development and poverty alleviation in terms of innovation and design. Here, professional designers use collaborative “development design thinking” to develop poor-­appropriate interventions, with the poor participating as clients in the pro­cess of innovation. Big design firms, in this way, are getting into development as an expanded frontier for lucrative contracts and the application of expertise, whereas smaller organ­izations are more interested in socially conscious design. Design for development has thus become an in­ter­est­ing domain in which to investigate “the afterlives of development,” as anthropologist Anke Schwittay (2014, 31) puts it in a recent reflective piece on this trend. In her analysis of microfinance or “financial inclusion” schemes—­well known owing to the alleged success of the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh at “empowering poor ­women” to become microentrepreneurs—­she shows the tensions that arise in the codesign process; many of ­these stem from the fact that participation in ­these schemes still functions within a colonizing politics of development knowledge. She concludes, “Application of Western expertise and technology to solve the problems of development privileges outsider, technological, and often commercial solutions over po­liti­cal action or indigenous practice. In this way, humanitarian design constitutes a continuation of modernist development interventions and also shows their current embrace by global market forces. However… humanitarian design can begin to create alternative development figures within the existing apparatus. It acknowledges the messiness and complexity of any proj­ect of change and recommends proceeding with caution” (43).10

Schwittay’s caution is a wise one. To mention just two of the most recent incarnations of the development dream: first is the amazing machinery set in place to discuss and agree on the set of post-2015 sustainable development indicators ­after the fifteen-­year Millennium Development Goals expired in 2015, with questionable results.11 The second is the sad and, frankly, ludicrous framework proposed by the World Bank (2013) in World Development Report 2014: Risk and Opportunity—­Managing Risk for Development. The hardworking economists at this institution have just come to the realization that what keeps poor ­people in their poverty is that they have not yet learned how to manage the risks they face, so that they can then take advantage of their opportunities! Page ­after page of the report vividly describes and illustrates a world increasingly full of risks, all of which is presented as if risks just happen, and the report then goes on to propose schemes by which the poor can fi­nally learn to “manag[e] risk for a life full of opportunities” (2). It is hard to decide whether such an amazingly simplistic approach (which nevertheless, even more sadly, influences policy worldwide) is one more proof of the World Bank’s amazing capacity for cynicism or yet another sign of its incapacity to understand power dynamics and poor ­people’s lives, or both.

Caution is thus definitely in order when considering the expansion of design into development. It is frequently the case that development design recycles colonialist representations—­for instance, the notion that “Africa has ­little to offer, but much to receive” (Pereira and Gillett 2015, 118), which obscures the incredibly resourceful everyday design agency of Africans—or ends up endorsing strategies in which the “values of design thinking draw from a progressive narrative of global salvation that ignores non-­Western ways of thinking rooted in craft practices that predate yet live alongside modern manufacturing techniques” (Tunstall 2013, 236). A decolonial perspective on development is thus essential for approaching codesign with subaltern groups in ways that strengthen, rather than undermine, their collective autonomy. Only by attending to the entrenched geopolitics of development knowledge can designers become more critical of how design operates within unequal world ­orders and in the borderlands of the modern/colonial world system and become a force for change alongside those groups most negatively affected by modern designs, ­grand or small.

Po­litic­al Ecolo­gy, Feminist Po­litic­al Ecolo­gy, and the Emergence of Po­liti­cal Ontology

­There is a certain clarity about the po­liti­cal economy of design—d­esign’s dependence on, and contribution to, capitalism, exploitation, and other forms of power, both broadly speaking and in specifically in terms of design’s contribution to maintaining par­tic­u­lar forms of work and divisions of l­abor, an issue that design theorist Damian White (2015) has examined with insight. There is also a po­liti­cal ecol­ogy to it, stemming from design’s fundamental role in the exploitation of natu­ral resources, its participation in energy-­intensive and consumerist lifestyles, and its propagation of specific ideas about nature and the built environment, among other areas. ­There is not much con­temporary design that is done “with nature,” to put it mildly. It thus befits this field to develop a sophisticated po­liti­cal ecol­ogy of its own practice; for this task, it is useful to consider the main ele­ments—t­heories, concepts, and issues—with which this field has dealt since its inception.

There are many ways to define [[po­liti­cal ecol­ogy]] (PE) and tell its genealogy.12 ­There is broad agreement about its starting point in the 1970s, when a number of social scientists began to analyze the relation between society and nature by combining ecological frameworks (largely from the cultural and human ecol­ogy schools of the 1950s-1970s, centered on the analy­sis of the relation between ­humans and the environment) with social theory frameworks, particularly ==Marxism and systems theory==. Some of the early critiques of sustainability were influential in this early PE.13 Since then, the field has remained intensely interdisciplinary, with geography, anthropology, ecological economics, sociology, and environmental history playing the most prominent roles. Since the 1990s, poststructuralism has favored a shift in focus toward the vari­ous regimes of repre­sen­ta­tion and power through which nature has been culturally constructed, historically and in place (science, patriarchy, whiteness, and colonial narratives). In general terms, what came out of t­hese two very productive phases was an understanding of PE as the field that studies the multiple intersections among nature, culture, power, and history. Emphases oscillated between ==“the social production of nature” (more prevalent in Marxist geography)== and ==“the cultural construction of nature” (in poststructuralist-i­nflected anthropology)==. Ecological economics centered on reframing economic theory through material-­energetic analyses and questions of valuation. It became explic­itly linked with PE through its concern with environmental struggles, chiefly in terms of what Joan Martínez-­Alier (2002) calls ecological distribution conflicts (see also Healy et al. 2013; Escobar 2008). All of t­hese inquiries are useful for crafting the types of hybrid po­liti­cal ecologies appropriate to design’s concern with enabling dif­fer­ent socioecological f­utures (White 2015; White, Rudy, and Gareau 2015).

These approaches or phases overlap t­oday in the work of many authors; a certain ==theoretical eclecticism== characterizes PE. The current moment can nevertheless be considered a distinct third phase. This phase can broadly be described as postconstructivist and neomaterialist. While it incorporates many of the insights of the ==constructivist moment (nature is historically and culturally constructed)== and continues to pay attention to the social production of nature by capital ­under globalizing conditions, the center of attention is now an entire range of aspects that were largely bypassed by the social and human sciences as a ­whole. ==The category that perhaps most aptly captures ­these diverse tendencies is the ontological turn;== it has become salient in geography, anthropology, and po­litical theory during the past de­cade. What defines this turn is the attention to 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 (soil, energy, infrastructures, weather, bytes), emotions, spirituality, feelings, and so forth. What brings together ­these very disparate items is 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. This is why this set of perspectives can properly be called postdualist. More colloquially, it can be said that what we are witnessing with postdualist, neomaterialist critical theories is 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.14

The most impor­tant targets of a postdualist PE are 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. The deconstruction of the first divide started in the 1980s, with the works of Tim Ingold, Marilyn Strathern, Philippe Descola, Donna Haraway, John Law, and Bruno Latour (and many ­others in other parts of the world). The more recent scholarship, however, makes a concerted effort at reconnecting nature and culture, and ­humans and nonhumans, through a rich variety of theoretical and ethnographic proposals and investigations. This task of reconnection may take the form of visualizing networks, assemblages, naturecultures, or socionatures, or through and analyzing the composition of the more-t­han-­human worlds always in the proc­ess of being created by all kinds of actors and proc­esses. Distributed agency (e.g., Bennett 2010) and relational ontologies are key concepts ­here. ­Whether ­these postdualist trends finally manage to leave ­behind the anthropocentric and Eurocentric features of modern social theory and their par­tic­u­lar accentuation in the Anglo-­American academy is still a ­matter of debate. In the remainder of this section, I discuss two lines of work that are tackling this problematic: feminist po­liti­cal ecolo­gy (FPE) and po­liti­cal ontology.

It is not a coincidence that the most in­ter­est­ing research taking place at the interface of the ontological turn and PE is being done by feminist geographers, anthropologists, and po­liti­cal theorists.15 Perhaps it could be said that they are the “most consistently relational” among the academics working across the nature/culture divide, while being mindful of not “re-worlding every­thing into one lens,” as Paige West puts it (as many of us academics are prone to do).16 Feminists from the Global South are particularly attuned to the manifold relational politics and ways of being that correspond to multiple axes of power and oppression.17 Though not strictly located within PE or FPE (but see some of the contributions in Harcourt and Nelson 2015; Harcourt 2016; Salleh 2009b), their relational writings are very impor­tant for radicalizing the insights of postdualist FPE. Carolyn Shaw (2014) proposes the African feminist notion of negofeminism—­a feminism that is not ego based—as a basis for relational thinking and writing, a notion that recalls that of the “expanded ecological self” of deep ecolo­gy. Something similar can be said of the potential contributions to FPE and postdualist PE by decolonial Latin American feminists, for whom an essential part of any feminist work is the deconstruction of the colonial divide (the us-­versus-them divide that was introduced with the conquest of Amer­i­ca, slavery, and colonialism and is alive and well t­oday with modernizing globalization and development; see Espinosa, Gómez, and Ochoa 2014; Lugones 2010a, 2010b; von Werlhof 2015). Whether the concept of gender is even applicable to preconquest socie­ties, or even to con­temporary non-Western and nonmodern socie­ties, remains a ­matter of debate, given the relational fabric that, to a greater or lesser extent, continues to characterize such socie­ties, which admits of no strictly separate and preconstituted categories of masculine and feminine (Lugones 2010a, 2010b; Paredes 2012).

Of course, feminists have a strong living genealogy on which to construct their theoretical-p­olitical proj­ects in a “high-­relationality” mode, from their willingness to ask questions about the situatedness of knowledge, the historicity of the body, and the intersectionality of forms of oppression, to the salience of emotions and affect and the relevance of the voices of w­omen from the Global South. This heritage is reflected t­oday in the feminist commitment to and creativity in exploring other ways of worlding, including new insights about what keeps the dominating ontologies in place. ­Today FPE can be said to be a transnational practice space of understanding and healing (e.g., Harcourt and Nelson 2015; Baksh and Harcourt 2015). It builds on the realization that attachments (to body, place, and nature) have ontological status. In some versions, t­here is an explicit aim to build effective bridges across worlds by bringing to the fore community, spirituality, and intimacy with places as ways to repair the damage inflicted by the ontology of disconnection and oppression. Gloria Anzaldúa’s (2002) power­ful call for all of us ­humans to be nepantleras—bridge builders and reweavers of relationality—is shared by some of ­these new orientations. All of t­hese feminist concerns pose challenges to design practice and provide useful concepts for a feminist and relational rethinking of design. One might extend Wendy Harcourt’s (2009) consistent concern with the body politics of development to the design field in order to direct designers’ attention to the ways in which the multiple actual or pos­si­ble design/body intersections do or might play out in the kinds of worlds we end up inhabiting.

Along with decolonial FPE, po­litic­al ontology (PO) examines pol­iti­cal strategies to defend or re-­create ­those worlds that retain impor­tant relational and communal dimensions, particularly from the perspective of t­oday’s multiple territorial struggles. The term po­liti­cal ontology was coined by anthropologist Mario Blaser (2009, 2010, 2014) and continues to be developed by him along with de la Cadena and myself (de la Cadena 2010, 2015; Escobar 2014; Blaser, de la Cadena, and Escobar 2014), as well as by ­others (e.g., Jackson 2014). The emphasis is on worlds and ways of worlding in two senses: on the one hand, PO refers to the power-­laden practices involved in bringing into being a par­tic­u­lar world or ontology; on the other hand, it refers to a field of study that focuses on the interrelations among worlds, including the conflicts that ensue as dif­fer­ent ontologies strive to sustain their own existence in their interaction with other worlds. It should be emphasized that PO is situated as much within critical trends in the academy as within ongoing struggles for the defense of territories and worlds. It is this active and profound commitment to thinking from the space of strug­gles involving ecological-­ontological conflicts that gives PO its specificity at pres­ent. The notion of ontological struggles, in this context, signals a problematization of the universalizing ontology of the dominant forms of modernity—what John Law (2011) has descriptively called the “One-­World World” (oww). In addition, PO is intended to make vis­i­ble the ontological dimension of the accumulation by dispossession that is ­going on t­oday in many parts of the world through extractivist development models, principally large-­scale mining, agrofuels, and land grabbing linked to commercial agriculture (McMichael 2013). Against the ­will to render the world one, PO asserts the importance of enhancing the pluriverse, and to this end it also studies the conditions for the flourishing of the pluriverse.

While PO is very much influenced by the more-­than-­human trend of late (de la Cadena 2015; Tsing 2015), it also seeks to scrutinize human-­centered assemblages. By placing PO deeply (ethnographically and po­liti­cally) within worlds that are not constructed solely on the basis of the nature/culture divide, even if partially connected with the OWW and hence also making themselves in terms of the divide, PO scholars and intellectual-­activists hope to render visi­ble ­those heterogeneous assemblages of life that enact nondualist, relational worlds. Also, PO has a deci­ded decolonial orientation in that it rearticulates the colonial difference (the hierarchical classification of differences created historically by the oww’s domineering ontology) into a vision of multiple onto-­epistemic formations, ineluctably coconstituted within power relations. This rearticulation exposes anew the oww’s epistemic inability to recognize that which exceeds it, and renovates our understanding of the ­human.

The historicity of PO at the pres­ent moment, fin­ally, is given by the utter necessity, as gleaned from mobilizations in Latin Amer­ic­a, of defending re-lational territories and worlds against the ravages of large-­scale extractivist operations, such as mining and agrofuel production (but one could mention as well the Sioux strugg­le against the Dakota Access Pipeline and surely other indigenous struggles in North Amer­i­ca). Against the ontological occupation and destruction of worlds effected by the globalization proj­ect, PO emphasizes the importance of thinking from, and within, ­those configurations of life that, while partially connected with the globalizing worlds, are not fully occupied by them (Escobar 2014; de la Cadena 2015).

PO and Epistemologies of the South

­There is one more social theory framework I would like to review before shifting to an explic­itly applied register. This framework could prove to be particularly useful for critical and cultural design studies given that it involves a sustained inquiry into how social change happens. This is the framework of Epistemologies of the South (ES), developed by one of the architects of the World Social Forum, the sociologist and l­egal scholar Boaventura de Sousa Santos (2014), possibly one of the most compelling and practicable proposals for social transformation to emerge at the intersection of the Global North and the Global South, theory and practice, and the acad­emy and social life. It outlines trajectories for thinking other­wise, precisely ­because it carves a space that enables thought to reengage with the amazing diversity of forms of knowledge held by ­those groups whose experiences can no longer be rendered legible by academic Eurocentric knowledge, if they ever could. Ontologically oriented design proposals such as transition design and design for social innovation ­will also find es valuable in their determination to develop non-­Eurocentric practices.

The ES framework is based on a series of premises and strategies, often effectively summarized by its author in compact and seemingly straightforward formulations—­insightful reversals—­which nevertheless point at crucial prob­lems within con­temporary social theory (Santos 2007, 2014).18 Perhaps the best starting point for our purposes is the maxim that we are facing modern prob­lems for which t­here are no longer modern solutions. Ontologically speaking, one may say that the crisis is the crisis of a par­tic­u­lar world or set of world-making practices, the dominant form of Euro-­modernity (cap­it­al­ist, rationalist, liberal, secular, patriarchal, white, or what have you), or, as already mentioned, the oww—the world that has arrogated for itself the right to be “the” world, subjecting all other worlds to its own terms or, worse, to nonexistence. If the crisis is largely caused by this OWW ontology, it follows that addressing the crisis implies transitioning ­toward the pluriverse. This is precisely another of the major premises of es, that the diversity of the world is infinite; succinctly, the world is made up of multiple worlds, multiple ontologies or reals that are far from being exhausted by the Eurocentric experience or being reducible to it.

The invisibility of the pluriverse points at one of the major concepts of ES, namely, the sociology of absences. ­Here again we find an insightful formulation: what ­doesn’t exist is actively produced as non­ex­is­tent or as a noncredible alternative to what exists. The social production of nonexistence signals the effacement of entire worlds through a set of epistemological operations concerning knowledge, time, productivity, and ways of thinking about scale and difference. Conversely, the proliferation of strug­gles in defense of territory and cultural difference suggests that what emerges from such struggles are entire worlds, what in this book we call relational worlds or ontologies. This gives rise to a sociology of emergences. ­There are clear ontological and design dimensions to the two main strategies introduced by ES, namely, the sociology of absences (the production of nonexistence points at the nonexistence of worlds) and the sociology of emergences (the enlargement of t­hose experiences considered valid or credible alternatives to what exists involves the forceful emergence of relational worlds through strug­gle).

Another princi­ple of ES brings up the connection between theory and ontology. This is that the understanding of the world is much broader than the Western understanding of the world. This means that the transformation of the world, and the civilizational transitions adumbrated by many indigenous, peasant, and Afrodescendant activists, might happen along pathways that might be unthinkable from the perspective of Eurocentric theories. Said differently, ­there is a glaring gap between what most Western theories ­today can glean from the field of social struggles, on the one hand, and the transformative practices actually ­going on in the world, on the other. This gap reveals a limit faced by mainstream and leftist theories alike, a limit that stems from the mono-­ontological or intra-­European origin of such theories. To think new thoughts, by implication, requires stepping out of the epistemic space of Western social theory and into the epistemic configurations associated with the multiple relational ontologies of worlds in strug­gle. It is in ­these spaces that we might find more compelling answers to the strong questions posed by the current conjuncture of modern prob­lems with insufficient modern solutions.

We may draw some implications for design praxis from es. Do design practices participate in the sociology of absences by overlooking nonexpert sub-altern knowledges or by treating them as unable to provide the basis for other designs and design other­wise? Or by meas­ur­ing productivity and efficiency through the monocultural yardstick of market economics? Conversely, can design practice contribute to broadening, and drawing on, the rich spectrum of experiences that should be considered v­iable alternatives to what exists? More generally, what would it entail to construct a non-­Eurocentric design imagination? What kinds of epistemic and ontological platforms would this proj­ect require? What would it take for design pract­i­tion­ers to search for repertoires of design ideas from the perspective of social and cognitive justice (including, but ­going beyond, the more easily detectable forms of vernacular design)? Tackling these questions might require a significant re­orientation of the rationalist and modernist cultural background from which design emerged and within which it continues to operate.

Design ­under Ontological Occupation: The PO of Territorial Strug­gles

From a PO perspective, it can be argued that globalization has taken place at the expense of relational and nondualist worlds worldwide. ­Today, eco­nom­ically, culturally, and militarily we are witnessing a renewed attack on anything relational and collective. Indeed, the twin forces of expulsion (Sassen 2014) and occupation can be said to constitute the chief logic of the current pattern of global domination.19 The occupation of p­eople’s territories by capital, the State, and at times armed actors implies economic, technological, cultural, ecological, and often military aspects, but its most fundamental dimension is ontological. From this perspective, what occupies territories is a par­tic­ul­ar ontology, that of individuals, expert knowledge, markets, and the economy. This is the merciless world of the 1 ­percent (or, say, 10 ­percent) denounced by the Occupy and Spain’s indignados movements, foisted on the 90 ­percent and the natu­ral world with ever-i­ncreasing virulence, cynicism, and illegality, since more than ever ­legal signals only a self-­serving set of rules that imperialize the desires of the power­ful (from the World Trade Organ­ization and the invasion of countries with the acquiescence of the so-­called international community of occupiers, to the ­legal ongoing police occupation of poor ethnic neighborhoods, as the case of Ferguson and ­others fi­nally made clear to many ­people in the United States).

Conversely, however, the perseverance of communities and the commons, and the strug­gles for their defense and reconstitution—­particularly, but not only, ­those that incorporate explic­itly ethnoterritorial dimensions—­involve re­sis­tance and the defense of territories that, at their best and most radical, can be described as pluriversal, that is, as fostering the coexistence of multiple worlds. By resisting the neoliberal globalizing proj­ect, many marginalized communities are advancing ontological strug­gles for the perseverance and enhancement of the pluriverse. Let me mention a few examples to make this point more tangible (we ­will return to ­these and other examples in chapter 6).

A striking case of ontological occupation of territories comes from the southernmost area of the Colombian Pacific, around the port city of Tumaco. ­There, since the early 1980s, the mangrove and rain forests have been ­under progressive occupation by outsiders, and communities have been displaced, giving way to oil palm plantations and industrial shrimp cultivation. None­xis­tent in the 1970s, by the mid-1990s oil palm plantations had expanded to over thirty thousand hectares, and the industry projected that the area would double in a few years. The monotony of the plantation—r­ow ­after row of palm as far as you can see, a green desert of sorts—h­as replaced the diverse, heterogeneous, and entangled worlds of forest and communities. ­There are two impor­tant aspects of this dramatic change to note: first, the plantation form effaces the relations maintained with and by the forest-­world; emerging from a dualist ontology of ­human dominance over nature, the plantation is one of the most effective means to bring about the ontological occupation of local relational worlds. Second, plantations are unthinkable from the relational perspective of forest-­worlds; within ­these worlds, forest practices take on an entirely dif­fer­ent form that ecologists describe in terms of agroecolo­gy and agroforestry. Not far from the plantations, industrial shrimp companies were also busy in the 1980s and 1990s, transforming the mangrove-w­orld into a disciplined succession of rectangular pools, “scientifically” controlled. A very polluting and destructive industry, especially when constructed on mangrove swamps, this type of shrimp farming constitutes another clear example of ontological occupation and politics at play (Escobar 2008).

Mangrove forests are primary examples of relational ontologies. The mangrove-­world is enacted minute by minute, day by day, through an infinite set of practices carried out by a multiplicity of beings and life forms, involving complex weavings of water, minerals, degrees of salinity, forms of energy (sun, tides, moon), ­human activity, spiritual beings, and so forth. ­There is a rhizome-­like logic to ­these entanglements, very difficult to map and mea­sure, if at all; this logic reveals an altogether dif­fer­ent way of being and becoming in territory and place. Said other­wise, t­hings and beings are their relations; they do not exist prior to them.20 From a cap­it­al­ist perspective, transforming them from “worthless swamp” to agroindustrial complexes is a laudable aim (Ogden 2011). In ­these cases, the insatiable appetite of the OWW spells out the progressive destruction of the mangrove-w­orld, its ontological capture and reconversion by capital and the State (Deleuze and Guattari 1987; Escobar 2008, 2014). The OWW, in short, denies the mangrove-­world the possibility of existing as such. Local strug­gles constitute attempts to re/establish some degree of symmetry to the partial connections that the mangrove-­worlds maintain with the OWW.

Elders and young activists in many territorial communities worldwide passionately express why they defend their worlds even at the price of their lives. In the words of an activist from the Afrodescendant community of La Toma, in the Norte del Cauca region of Colombia, south of Cali, who has been waging a courageous strug­gle against illegal gold mining for over five years, “It is patently clear to us that we are confronting monsters such as transnational corporations and the State. Yet nobody is willing to leave her/his territory; I might get killed ­here, but I am not leaving.”21 Such re­sis­tance takes place within a long history of domination and re­sis­tance, and this is essential for understanding territorial strug­gles as ontological po­liti­cal practices and as the background for autonomous design. La Toma communities have knowledge of their continued presence in the territory since the first half of the seventeenth century. It is an instructional example of what activists call ancestrality, referring to the ancestral mandate that inspires ­today’s strug­gles and that persists in the memory of the elders, amply documented in oral traditions and scholarly studies (Lisifrey et al. 2013). This mandate is joyfully celebrated in oral poetry and song: Del Africa llegamos con un legado ancestral; la memoria del mundo debemos recuperar (From Africa we arrived with an ancestral legacy; the world’s memory we need to recuperate).22 Far from being an intransigent attachment to the past, ancestrality stems from a living memory directly connected to the ability to envision a dif­fer­ent ­future—a”futurality” (Fry 2012) that strug­gles for the conditions that will allow them to persevere as a distinct world.

Back to La Toma: from November 17 to 27, 2014, a group of twenty-t­wo ­women marched from La Toma to Bogotá, a distance of 440 kilometers, to protest the continued illegal and destructive gold mining in their territories, despite the agreements to stop it that the government had signed from 2009 on. Many people joined in along the way or offered solidarity, in small towns and larger cities such as Cali and Ibagué. Upon arriving at the cold Andean sabana, the high-­altitude plateau where Bogotá is located, and facing the indifference and dilatory tactics of the bureaucrats of the Ministry of the Interior, the ­women deci­ded to occupy the building, which they proceeded to do for close to two weeks, despite threats of forced eviction and the intense frío sabanero, or the region’s cold (which affected the occupiers, especially at night), ­until they finally reached a new signed agreement with the government. The agreement called for, among other ­things, the removal of all the retroexcavadoras (large backhoe-t­ype excavating machines) used for gold extraction and a plan to protect the communities from threats by the backhoe ­owners and other armed actors. By mid-­January, however, and despite timid attempts by vari­ous government agencies, it was clear that the agreements were not ­going to be fulfilled. In mid-­April Francia Márquez, one of the main leaders of the march, penned two brave and lucid open letters to the government and the public at large. “Every­thing we have lived,” she said in her first letter, “has been for the love for our territories, the love we feel when we see the plantain germinate, when we have a sunny fishing day, of knowing your ­family is close by…Our land is the place where we dream of our f­uture with dignity. Perhaps that’s why they [armed actors, including the army, paramilitaries, and guerrillas] persecute us, ­because we want a life of autonomy and not of de­pend­enc­y.”23

Written in the context of the tense peace negotiations between the government and the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (farc) guerrillas, the letter also contained a direct indictment of the government’s national development plan, one of whose pillars, or locomotoras (locomotives), is precisely mining. For Márquez, this model can only generate hunger, misery, and war. The implication is clear: without transforming this model radically, and without conditions of autonomy for the territories, peace will be illusory. ­There can never be peace, she had said in an earlier letter, “if the government is not able to create the conditions to take care of life, if it does not privilege the life of all beings above all private interests and the interests of the transnationals.” As she reminded every­one in the letter, “we started on this march to let you all know that illegal mining is leaving us without our families, robbing from us the possibility of continuing to live in the territory where our umbilical cords are buried.”24 Addressed “to ­those ­women who take care of their territories as if they were their daughters and sons. To the women and men who care for a Dignified, ­Simple, and Solidary Life,” the letter ended with the march’s slogan: “The territory is our life, and life is not sold—it is loved and defended” (El territorio es la vida y la vida no se vende, se ama y se defiende).

A third example comes from the strugg­le of the indigenous Nasa and Misak peoples, also from the Norte del Cauca region, who describe the goal of their struggle as the Liberación de la Madre Tierra (the Liberation of Mother Earth).25 Both groups have maintained a steady re­sis­tance to colonization from the time of the conquest; this re­sis­tance has experienced a sharp resurgence since the early 1970s with the creation of regional indigenous organ­izations. Ever since, their strategy to recover their ancestral territories—­expropriated by sugarcane plantation barons beginning in the middle of the nineteenth ­century and by other interests more recently—­has met with relative success, even if at a high cost in terms of lives lost and violent repression on the part of the State and armed actors. The strategies and “cosmoactions” of t­hese pueblos (­peoples) have been centered on the recovery and defense of territories and their Planes de Vida (Life Plans). As they put it, the territory is “the vital space that ensures our survival as a ­people and as a living culture in harmony with nature and the spirits. The territory is our true history book, since it keeps alive the traditions of ­those who inhabit it. As the collective space of existence, it also makes pos­si­ble the harmonious coexistence among the pueblos. It grounds the indigenous cosmovision as the raison d’être of our survival” (Consejo Regional Indígena del Cauca [Cric], quoted in Quijano 2012, 219). Their strategy is motivated by the following princi­ple: “to recover the land in order to recover everything: authority, justice, work; this is why we need to think with our own heads, speak our language, learn our history, and analyze and pass on our experiences as much as t­hose of other peoples” (257). Similarly, the Life Plan of the Misak ­people is explained in terms of “the construction and reconstruction of a vital space in which to be born, grow, persist, and flow. The Plan is a narrative of life and survival, the construction of the path that enables the transit through life; it is not a ­simple planning scheme” (Cabildo, Taitas, y Comisión de Trabajo del Pueblo Guambiano 1994, quoted in Quijano 2012, 263).

The defense and recovery of their territories is thus actively seen and pursued by ­these groups as the necessary means for the reconstitution of their worlds, and involves the articulation of cultural, economic, environmental, and spiritual processes. The Misak Life Plan “posits a type of development based on our distinct culture and cosmovision, or­ga­nized ­under five rubrics: Our Territory; Our People (Mamuy misak); Culture and the Cosmovision; Authority; and Our Customary Law (derecho mayor). ­These are rendered concrete through programs along four axes: Territory, Land, and Territoriality; Education and Culture; Economy (economía propia); Health and Food Autonomy” (Cabildo Indígena Guambía 2007, quoted in Quijano 2012, 208).

The Life Plans and the autonomous economy, just as much as the defense of the territory, are strategies of relocalization, that is, strategies for the per­sistence of the place-­based and communal weave of life. These are strategies for ontological difference and against the modern capitalism’s pretension of rendering all communities delocalized and economized consumers. Autonomy is a counternarrative to the ongoing pressures to delocalize. One of the most notable regional indigenous organi­zations, for instance, the Regional Indigenous Confederation of Cauca (Consejo Regional Indígena del Cauca), has maintained the banner of “Unity, Land, Culture, Autonomy” since its inception in the early 1970s. For the other major regional organ­ization (the Association of Northern Cauca Indígenas Cabildos [Asociación de Cabildos Indígenas del Norte del Cauca, acin]), “the Life Plan seeks to consolidate the construction of our ancestral pro­cess with full freedom and autonomy, ensuring the participation of every­body in the community” (acin 2009, quoted in Quijano 2012, 236). The organ­izing princi­ple of this association, tellingly, is tejer en libertad la vida (to weave life in liberty), and it is enacted through five Tejidos de Vida (Life Weavings) concerning economy and the environment, people and culture, justice and harmony, the defense of life, and communications and external relations that support truth and life. In this perspective we find the other main ele­ment to be developed as part of the concept of autonomous design, namely, the community or the communal.

The last example comes from an altogether dif­fer­ent region of Colombia and constitutes another incredibly inspiring instance of autonomous and territorial indigenous strug­gle in the country. It concerns the Kogui, Arhuaco, Wiwa, and Kankuamo peoples of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta in Colombia’s northeast, by the edge of the Ca­rib­bean Sea. ­These groups have also maintained a radical struggle for their cultural difference, based on a relational ontology founded on the notion that “the territories are living entities with memory” (Ulloa 2012, n.p.); it is in them that “the geographies of ­people’s relations with nature are inscribed, through the exercise of territoriality and the articulation of symbolic, po­litical, economic and social relations” (Ulloa 2010, 81). ­These groups’ po­liti­cal strategies are geared to the defense of their territories, which they describe in terms of Madre Tierra (­Mother Earth), ancestral territories, and sacred territories. In short, the territory is seen and felt as the existential space for the sacred and the everydayalike, for their knowledge and customary law and the relation with otherbeings, including the management of relations with other ­humans…The territory is comprehended in an integral fashion, as the space where thephysical and the spiritual are articulated and where all actors [­human andnot] have their own unique place and set of relations. The territory is cog nized in terms of the interpretation of ancestral marks inscribed in long-­standing sacred sites; this perception orients present-­day actions and theintegrated management of the entire territory in order to ensure its envi ronmental and cultural preservation. (Ulloa 2010, 81)

The contrast between these “other territorialities,” constructed on the basis of relational ontologies, and the ontology of separation and fragmentation maintained by mainstream economic actors and the State could not be sharper. In fact, the ultimate goal of the mobilization of the ­peoples of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta is none other than ensuring the circulation of life, as Colombian anthropologist and geographer Astrid Ulloa has admirably shown through her sustained ethnographic research with ­these communities. The circulation of life is enacted through a series of practices involving knowledge, sacred sites, seeds, rituals, and customary law. A well-known fact in the Colombian and Latin American ethnology of the Kogui and Arhuaco ­peoples is that they see themselves as the elder ­brothers of all other ­humans and as such are charged with the mandate of keeping universal equilibrium through the circulation of all life, starting with their own territory. It is on the basis of this ontology of life circulation—agenuine framework for sustainability—­that they elaborate their proj­ect for autonomy, ­under very adverse conditions and extreme pressures on their territories (Ulloa 2011; chapter 6, this volume).

­These examples demonstrate the continued existence of socially significant experiences that do not conform to the mainstream Euro-­Latin American modern ontology. They can be properly seen as instances of economic, cultural, and epistemic insurgency that aim to re/create and maintain practices of cultural, economic, and ecological difference (Walsh 2009, 2012). The difference is, in the last instance, ontological, and it is expressed most eloquently with the meta­phor and practices of weaving. Weaving, it goes without saying, can also serve as an organ­izing meta­phor for life-­centered design. Toward the end of the book we ­will introduce the idea of transition design as one that enables us to become effective weavers of the mesh of life, with the Liberation of ­Mother Earth as one of its central principles.

­There are many such examples worldwide, involving almost every territorial community where the extraction of natur­al resources is taking place. The key design question, to be tackled in chapter 6, is ­whether it is pos­si­ble to even

a cultural studies of design 75 think about a design praxis ­under conditions of ontological occupation. Given that occupation is a worldwide phenomenon, and bound to become more acute as the living conditions of large numbers of ­people on the planet worsen and as their territories become ever more the target of expulsion and occupation by extractive forms of capital, this question is of utmost importance. As ­will be argued, an ontological approach to design provides paths ­toward imagining design practices that contribute to ­people’s defense of their territories and cultures. We ­will call this approach autonomous design.

We haven’t strayed too far from where this chapter started, namely, the investigation of the relation among design, culture, and power specific to the current conjuncture, as the examples from this section are instances of this intersection and point at how we might think about it other­wise. This is why we defined this conjuncture, from a cultural studies perspective, in terms of the ontological occupation of relational worlds by a dominant world, on the one hand, and the limitations of modern social theory and the modern sciences to provide compelling solutions to ­today’s wicked prob­lems, on the other. As I hope to have shown, one can find ele­ments for rethinking design culturally and ontologically in a number of scholarly trends in anthropology, geography, development studies, po­liti­cal ecol­ogy, feminist theory, and po­liti­cal ontology, among other fields. Some of the insights they afford ­will come in handy in subsequent chapters, as we go on to consider design frameworks intended to support transitions t­oward sustainability and communal autonomy within a pluriversal perspective.

Notes

Epigraphs: Anne-­Marie Willis, “Transition Design: The Need to Refuse Discipline and Transcend Instrumentalism” (2015), 72-73; Caroline Gatt and Tim Ingold, “From Description to Correspondence: Anthropology in Real Time” (2013), 147; Michel Foucault, The Order of ­Things (1970), 373, 378, 386.

1 Following Grossberg, too, I differentiate this proj­ect from cds, as discussed in the previous chapter. As Grossberg (2010) underscores, the proj­ect of cultural studies goes beyond critique to embrace the specificity of the concrete. It examines design’s intricate location within formations of culture and power but also ways it might contribute to other world-­making proj­ects. A cultural studies of design also differs from cds because of the centrality of culture and, as we shall add in this book, ontology in the former.

2There are parallel trends in geography, which I cannot review ­here; one of the more noted is GeoDesign, as a practice that brings geographic analy­sis (ecological, spatial, gis, modeling) into design.

3 The preconference publication prototype in 2010 was coordinated by Christopher Kelty, Alberto Corsín Jiménez, and George Marcus. On the history, concept, and uses of prototypes from design (rather than anthropological) perspectives, see the contributions by Michael Guggenheim, Alex Wilkie, and Nerea Calvillo in this collection of short essays (arc Studio 2010).

4 See the proj­ect’s website, “Rethinking Ethnography as a Design Pro­cess,” Center for Ethnography, uci School of Social Science, http://­www.ethnography.­uci.­edu/­programs /design. ­php, and Murphy (2016) for a more satisfactory review of this trend.

5 Introductory remarks for the session, “Design for the Real World: But Which World? What Design? What Real?,” American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting, San Francisco, November 14, 2012.

6There are several in­ter­est­ing groups working at the anthropology/design intersection (for instance, a three-­day workshop at Aberdeen in 2009 on design anthropology, convened by James Leach and Caroline Gatt, and an interdisciplinary group bringing together scholars from the Parsons School of Design and Cornell University on the subject of Ecology, Critical Thought, and Design). The next few years will surely see a number of new volumes at the intersection of anthropology, ecol­ogy, and design.

7 Design Studio for Social Intervention, http://­www.ds4si.­org/­.

8 See the website for the Boston-­based Design Studio for Social Intervention, http://­ds4si.org/­storage/d­s4si_­whatwedo.pdf (accessed September 1, 2012). Another in­ter­est­ing group in this vein is the School for Designing a Society (http://­www.d­esigningasociety.­net/­). See also Chin’s “Laboratory of Speculative Ethnography” (http://­elizabethjchin.c­om/­projects-­2/­).

9 A number of in­ter­est­ing ngos are working hands-on on design for development and sustainability, again with various degrees of self-a­wareness of “poking at the edges,” largely in Eu­rope or with an international scope (see, e.g., the Center for Sustainable Design, http://­cfsd.org.u­k; the International Development Design Summit, http://­iddsummit.­org/­; the Social Design Site, http://­www.­socialdesignsite.­com/­content/­view/­30/­58/­; Design That ­Matters, http://­www.­designthatmatters.­org/­; and Design for the World, http://­www.d­esignfortheworld.o­rg).

10 Schwittay’s article examines codesign experiences promoting financial inclusion and savings among poor communities that have been spearheaded by the Institute for Money, Technology and Financial Inclusion at the University of California, Irvine. As she reports, staff at the institute ­were very much aware of the tensions in the programs. While microfinance is still touted by many as an effective solution to poverty, the critiques are mounting. For a critique of microfinance and of the approach created by Muhammad Yunus, founder of the Grameen Bank, see the well-­documented book by Bangladeshi anthropologist Lamia Karim (2011). One of Karim’s main findings is that the loans contribute to undermining communal mechanisms of self-­reliance, which are precisely what needs to be strengthened from an autonomous design perspective.

11 Linked to the Millennium Development Goals was the high-­profile but patently dubious Millennium Village Proj­ect concocted by Jeffrey Sachs—­the darling of neoliberal privatizers in Latin Amer­i­ca and eastern Eu­rope in a previous era, now turned “savior” of “Africa’s poor”—­the outrageous claims of which have been heavi­ly criticized, even by the World Bank! (e.g., Munk 2013).

12 This is not a comprehensive review by any means. T­here are many schools of PE (sometimes not earmarked as such), g­oing back to the 1970s, in many parts of the world, including Latin Amer­i­ca and South Asia, Catalonia, France, Germany, Scandinavia, North Amer­i­ca, and the United Kingdom. Most reviews in En­glish to date focus on the Anglo-American traditions. See Escobar (2010b) for additional references; and Bryant (2015) for an excellent comprehensive international collection on con­temporary pe. See also Dove, Sajise, and Dolittle (2011); Harcourt and Nelson (2015); Biersack and Greenberg (2006); and Robbins (2004).

13 For instance, see the early and influential critiques of the concept of sustainable development by Michael Redclift (1987) and Enrique Leff (1986).

14 I ­will not review ­here the debates on the ontological turn, particularly in Anglo-­American anthropology, but rather give my own sense of what it is from the perspective of my joint work on po­liti­cal ontology with Mario Blaser and Marisol de la Cadena. As de la Cadena says, more than being an already-­accomplished “turn,” political ontology is interested in the theoretical and po­liti­cal openings that appealing to ontology might perform. ­Those wishing to peruse the debates might refer to recent fora in journals such as Cultural Anthropology, hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, and American Ethnologist involving writers such as Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, David Graeber, Martin Holbraad, Morten Pedersen, Lucas Bessire, and David Bond.

15 Think, for instance, of the works of Dianne Rocheleau, Paige West, Laura Ogden, Wendy Harcourt, Sarah Whatmore, Anna Tsing, J. K. Gibson-­Graham, Susan Paulson, and Jane Bennett, among ­others. In retrospect, one may also argue that materialist ecofeminists like Vandana Shiva, Maria Mies, Ariel Salleh, and Mary Mellor were attuned to some of the ontological dimensions of ecol­ogy among capital, gender, and nature through their attention to embodiment and ­women’s knowledges. Salleh’s emphasis on embodied materialities, from which she derived her original concept of embodied debt (the debt owed to ­women worldwide for their unpaid reproductive and care work), is a case in point (Salleh 2009a). A similar argument could be made about the cultural ecofeminists of the 1970s and 1980s with their attention to culture and spirituality (think of Susan Griffin and Carolyn Merchant).

16 Remarks made as discussant in the panel on Con­temporary Theory in Environmental Anthropology, at the American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting, Washington, DC, December 2014.

17 I am grateful to María Lugones and Yuderkis Espinosa for bringing this point to my attention with par­tic­u­lar insight (conversation in Buenos Aires, November 2012).

18 In what follows I use a number of es formulations from vario­us sources; I have amended them slightly in some cases, which is why I do not pres­ent them as exact quotations. This section is not intended as a comprehensive or systematic pre­sen­ta­tion of es; rather, I highlight a few of its princi­ples that ­will allow me to underscore the ontological and design implications of the framework.

19 In her most recent book, Saskia Sassen (2014) identifies the expulsion of p­eoples, places, enterprises, and the biosphere from their locations as the fundamental worldwide logic of con­temporary global capitalism. Expulsions, in her compelling analy­sis, unveil a set of novel subterranean trends driving the systemic forces of brutality and complexity at play in global capital. She adamantly argues that ­these pro­cesses can no longer be understood with conventional social science categories, a point also underscored in the pres­ent book. Expulsion and occupation are, I believe, articulated logics. What is expelled, as much as what is occupied, is often an entire way of worlding. The paradigmatic case of the logic of occupation is of course the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories, yet the modalities and types of occupation are quite diverse. On occupation as a main logic of globalization, see Visweswaran (2013).

20 I have in mind ­here, of course, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s (1987) discussion of rhizomes and Laura Ogden’s (2011) remarkable extension of this concept to the human/ nonhuman assemblages in the Florida Everglades.

21 Statement by Francia Márquez of the Community Council of La Toma, taken from the three-­minute trailer for the documentary La Toma, by Paula Mendoza (2010), accessed May 20, 2013, http://­www.youtube.­com/­watch?­v=BrgVcdnwU0M. Most of this brief section on La Toma comes from meetings I participated in with La Toma leaders in 2009, 2012, 2014, and 2015, as well as campaigns to stop illegal mining in this ancestral territory and accounts of the march to Bogotá in November 2014. All translations are mine.

22 From the trailer of Mendoza’s documentary La Toma.

23 Francia Márquez, “Situación que carcome mis entrañas. A propósito de la orden de bombardear el Cauca,” open letter, April 18, 2015. An En­glish version of this letter is found on the website of the First Afro-­Diasporic Gathering of Black ­Women Defenders of Rights and their Territories, http://­www.blackwomensmarch.­org/­news/­letter-­from-­francia-­marquez.

24 Francia Márquez, “A las mujeres que cuidan de sus territorios como a sus hijas e hijos. A las cuidadoras y los cuidadores de la Vida Digna, Sencilla y Solidaria,” open letter, April 14, 2015. Content related to this letter is found on the website of the Latin Amer­i­ca Working Group; see “We Are Defenders of Life—Francia Elena Marquez Mina,” http://www.lawg.­org/action-­center/lawg-­blog/69-­general/1607-­qwe-are-­defenders-­of-lifeq-franciaelena­marquezmina. I should note that the reference to the umbilical cord refers to the long-­standing practice among rural and forest Afrodescendant communities of burying the placenta and umbilical cord to create an indissoluble link with the territory, so that ­humans become an integral part of it, and a bit more than ­human, too.

25 The Nasa are the second-­largest indigenous group in the country (about 140,000 ­people). Their territory involves seventy-t­wo resguardos (collective lands), most of which date back to the colonial period (seventeenth and eigh­teenth centuries). They have maintained a radical militancy in relation to the State. The Misak inhabit the Ancestral Resguardo of Guambía, most of which is located in the Silvia municipality), although their collective territory is discontinuous. They total about twenty-­three thousand members, with a strong and distinct language and cultural identity. This means that the Norte del Cauca is an intensely intercultural region made up of indigenous, Afrodescendant, and mestizo communities. Their territories have always been coveted ­because of their resources, and this is even more so ­today. Over the past three de­cades, the region has been one of the most intense scenes of the armed conflict between the State, left-­wing guerrillas, and right-­wing paramilitaries. It is in this adversarial context that indigenous and black communities are struggling for their territories, Life Plans, and autonomy.