Warming Up to the Pluriverse #7: On designing otherwise

In Search of the Pluriverse

In this talk we meet Arturo Escobar himself, author of ‘Designs for the Pluriverse. Radical Interdependence, Autonomy and the Making of Worlds’ (2018, Duke University Press), the book we use as a guide for our pluriversal search. Escobar is Emeritus Professor of Anthropology and Political Ecology at the University of North Carolina. As early as 1987, he criticised the downside of ‘development’ from a Western perspective. His search for plural ways to co-inhabit this planet is inspired by Afro-Colombian social movements, and their plea to realise ‘a world in which many worlds fit’. In this personal conversation design is approached both as a system, and as a language and praxis to activate the notions of radical interdependence and – communal – autonomy.

References

• Kothari Ashish, Salleh Ariel, Escobar Arturo, Demaria Federico and Acosta Alberto Pluriverse: A Post-Development Dictionary, Delhi: Tulika/AuthorsUpfront (AUF), 2019. License: Creative Commons. Accessible online.
• Escobar, Arturo. 2020. Pluriversal Politics: The Real and the Possible. Durham: Duke University Press.
  www.dukeupress.edu/pluriversal-politics
• Osterweil, Michal, Kriti Sharma, and Arturo Escobar. Designing Relationally: Mankind and Restor(y)ing Life. Bloomsbury Press, forthcoming.
• Rising inequality: Red Handkerchief Protests in Colombia
  www.arte.tv/fr/videos/097615-00…-rouges-de-la-faim/
• Protests of Nasa indigenous people against the government’s handling of the pandemic
  distribution.arte.tv/fiche/ARTE_REP…_LA_TRIBU_NASA
• Escobar Arturo. Autonomía y diseño. La realización de lo comunal, Universidad del Cauca, 2016
  www.slideshare.net/delDespojoCrnic…-arturo-escobar
• Why the Philodendron Monstera has holes!
  www.sciencemag.org/news/2013/01/sc…ss-cheese-plant
• The book by Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics (1982) first directed Escobar’s thinking on "development" towards a Foucauldian interpretation of development as a "discourse".
• For more details on the 1998 river basin workshop that Escobar co-designed, particularly its contribution to conceptualizing "the territory" and the Pacific region as a "region-territory of ethnic groups", see Escobar Arturo, Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World (1995/2011).
• The term diseño de culturas (design of cultures) emerged in the mid-80s within the work that the foundation Fundacion HablaScribe (set up by Alvaro Pedrosa, professor at Universidad del Valle, Cali) did on research and activism with grassroots groups all over the Colombian South West.
• Winograd Terry and Flores Fernando. Understanding computers and cognition. A new foundation for design. Addison-Wesley Professional, 1987
• Margulis Lynn, Sagan Dorian. What is Life? University of California Press, 1995/2000.
• Maturana Humberto and Gerda Verden-Zöller. The Origin of Humanness in the Biology of Love. Charlottesville, V: Imprint Academic, 2008.
• Nhat Hanh, Thich. The World We Have: A Buddhist Approach to Peace and Ecology. Berkeley, CA: Parallax, 2008.
• Ferreira da Silva, Denise. 2015. “Before Man: Sylvia Wynter’s Rewriting of the Modern Episteme.” In K. McKittrick, ed. Sylvia Wynter. On Being Human as Praxis. Durham: Duke University Press.
• “Design/ing Paths towards Post-Covid Transitions: Reimagining socio-human systems on a pluriversal key, Design PhD 2020 Summer School, Polimi PhD programme in Design, Politecnico di Milano, June 22, 2020
  www.youtube.com/watch?v=3d2jXRs7L8I&t=600s
• The idea to move away from institutional concepts of health, education and agriculture to the active forms of engagement with and in the worlds we inhabit through healing, learning, and growing food was first articulated by Gustavo Esteva, Universidad de la Tierra, Oaxaca, México.

For more information about In Search of the Pluriverse visit hnix.nl/pluriverse and follow @insearchofthepluriverse on Instagram.