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title: 'Book Club Notes: Designs for the Pluriverse - Radical Interdependence, Autonomy, and the Making of Worlds'
tags: [Book Club]

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# Book Club Notes: Designs for the Pluriverse - Radical Interdependence, Autonomy, and the Making of Worlds

### Contents

- Preface and Acknowledgments  ix
- Introduction  1
- I. Design for the Real World: But Which "World"? What "Design"? What "Real"?
- 1. Out of the Studio and into the Flow of Socionatural Life  25
- 2. Elements for a Cultural Studies of Design  49
- II. The Ontological Reorientation of Design
- 3. In the Background of Our Culture: Rationalism, Ontological Dualism, and Relationality  79
- 4. An Outline of Ontological Design  105
III. Designs for the Pluriverse
- 5. Design for Transitions  137
- 6. Autonomous Design and the Politics of Relationality and the Communal  165
- Conclusion  202
- Notes  229
- References  259
- Index  281

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### Introduction

- The contemporary moment needs design more than ever. This book will focus on **politico-ontological design**.
- Design is ubiquitous. Design is literally everywhere.
- Social context is important for successful design.
- Ecologically oriented fields understand designs vital role for successful worlding.
- *Everybody designs.* - Ezio Manzini from his book [*Design, When Everybody Designs: An Introduction to Design for Social Innovation*](https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262028608/design-when-everybody-designs/)
- Design is too important to be left solely to designers.
- Design is about creating cultural meanings and practices, about designing culture and particular ways of living.
- In this book, design refers to more than the creation of material stuff or material production. Rather, design here signals "diverse forms of life and often contrasting notions of sociability and the world."

#### Outline of the Book
- **Part 1** will introduce some elements from critical and cultural design studies. New social roles and rules for operation.
- **Chapter 2** explores design debates from anthropology, ecology, architecture and urbanism, digital studies, development studies, political ecology, and feminist theory are reviewed.
- **Part 2** proposes an ontological reading of the background from which design emerges.
- **Chapter 3** presents an analysis of design reorientation in relation to the rationalistic tradition and Cartesianism, towards a post-dualist relationality.
- **Chapter 4** outlines the concept of ontological design: "In designing tools we are creating ways of being." We design our world and our world designs us back. ie: *Design designs.* Transition from sustainability to sustainment. Ontological design allows us to transition from the hegemony of a one-world ontology towards a pluriverse of multifarious configurations.
- **Part 3** explores this proposition in-depth, presenting a pluriversal context for exploring design possibilities. Cultural and ecological transition narratives in the global north and global south. Degrowth, commoning, conviviality, and other transition initiatives. Well-being, the rights of nature, communal logics, and civilizational transitions as instances of the pluriverse (re)emerging. Transitional imaginations that lead to radical transformations as an ontological reframing of design:
    - transition design
    - design for social innovation and transition to a new civilization
- **Chapter 6** develops autonomous design as an onotological design approach in dialogue with transition visions and frameworks. Every community practices the design of itself. Communities are thrown into the need of designing themselves in the face of ever-deepening manifestations of crises and the inescapable techno-economic mediations of their worlds. The current crises points towards a deeper civilizational crisis, and this is a theoretical-critical-transitional design project.
    - Autonomous design leads to the rethinking of community and the communal. Autonomy is at the center of design, as it is the most fundamental feature of the living and the key to autopoiesis: self-replicating living systems.

#### From Development to the Pluriverse

- The world of the south has been a developmental consequence of the agenda of the north, under the banner of *under development*.
- We are confronted by the design disaster of *development*. We must remove the unsustainable structures to innovate new non-exploitative ways of living.
- This points to an alternative design imagination: transitional designers, pluriversal designers.
- Where did it begin? What are the stakes?
    - 1. Ivan Illich: theory of crisis and a transition framework.
    - 2. Patriarchy at the core of millenial malaise, towards a strong feminist dissenting design ethos.
- Illich: [Tools for Conviviality](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tools_for_Conviviality#:~:text=Tools%20for%20Conviviality%20is%20a,his%20previous%20book%20Deschooling%20Society.) summarized many of his critiques, towards a convivial way of living. 
    - An epilogue to the industrial era. Any society produces its own distruction. Industrial production allows us to conceptualize the rise of tools beyond thresholds to become harmful to individual autonomy (towards bureaucratic control) and society.
    - Instrumentation systematically controls autonomous ways of living.
    - Society needs to be re-instrumentalized, to retool for the shifting dynamics of the current moment:
        - Humans' place within space and nature
        - Peoples' autonomy for action
        - Human creativity truncated by institutionalized education and the media
        - Peoples' right to an open political process
        - Humans' rights to community, myth, and ritual
    - Anticipates degrowth debates: growth is a fallacy. We should collectively and joyfully accept our own limits. Away from productivity and towards conviviality.
    - We must impose limits on the expansion of production, to value sobriety and austerity.
    - Convivial reconstruction requires the dismantling of the monopoly of production. We must protect the power of persons and collectives to change their tools and means of production, to diversify the modes of production to "liberate the future."
- Patriarchy:
    - The roots of the western civ crisis are the long development of patriarchal cultures against the development of matriarchal ones.
    - Leads to the systematic destruction of nature, from a totally different conception of life.
    - Men undermine the fundament of the mother to shift the societal alchemy, a practice of destruction and fragmenting the elements of matter to focus on the most valuable. Destruction became the program to advance under the banner of endless progress and a ceaselessly better world.
    - "Creation through destruction" has become global
    - Capitalism is the last phase of a patriarchal civilization.
    - Modernity is an extension of this global project: perpetuating dualist ontologies that subbordinate the feminine private sphere.
    - Patriarchy is at the root of all forms of subbordination: racial, colonial, and imperial domination along with the resulting pedagogy of cruelty imposed on all societies.
    - It is upon the bodies of women that humanity learned how to dominate.
    - Self-realization = self-alchemization: remaking ourselves through infinite production
    - The body is debased by patriarchal religions, resulting in a distancing from all life, including the idea of equality.
    - Thre world is built without attachment to place, space, time, the *here and now*.
    - We need a politics for an alternative civilization *that respects and builds on the interconnectedness of all life based on a spirituality of the earth that nourishes community because it acknowledges that love and emotion are emotion elements of knowledge and all life.*
    - All living takes place within a relational matrix. Forgetting this lead to the development of patriarchal cultures.
    - A new historical mission: ushering in a period where a mutually enhancing human-world relationship might be established: beyond corporations, universities, and organized religions.
    - Patriacrchal culture is defined as characterized by actions and emotions that value **competition, war, hierarchy, 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.** This cultivates distrust, to seek certitude via control, including control of the natural world.
    - Historical matristic cultures are characterized by conversations highlight **inclusion, participation, collaboration, understanding, respect, sacredness, and the always recurrent cyclical rennovation of life.**
    - The basis of biological existence is the act of emotion-ing. Social coexistence is based on love prior to any mode of appropriation or conflict that might set in. Patriarchal modern societies fail to understand this. Desires determine the kinds of world we create.
    - If we want to act differently, if we want to live in a different world, we need to transform our desires. For this, we need to change our conversations. This is possible by recovering an understanding of matristic living that opens up a space for coexistence.
- Modernity robs us of the basis for life, even our mere survival:
    - We can go deeper, to reform it
    - or we can exit from it
    - Leaving behind western civ is a rupture, almost unimaginable anywhere except within indigenous worlds.
- One solution: the reconstruction of a non-occidental civilization throughout the entire planet.
- For now, we will take serious the idea of civilization change through cultural healing and the revitalization of traditions (and the creation of new ones).
- The alchemic corporate innovation project = *the project of death*
- Design with or without futures: *can design be extracated from its embeddedness in modernist, unsustainable, and defuturing practices and redirected towards other ontological commitments, practices, narratives, and performances? Can design become part of our tool kit for transitions?*
    - Changing the way we deal with ourselves and things so that *futuring* is enabled!
- Autonomy and communality and their associated practices lay the ground for a new design thought within communities.
- Examples:
    - Struggles in the defense of seeds, commons, mountains, forests, wetlands, lakes and rivers
    - Actions against patriarchal rule
    - Urban experiments in art, digital tech, neo-shamnic movements, urban gardens, alternative energy, etc.
- Multiple collective willful project expresses the conviction that other worlds are possible, as processes of "matriarchal-ization."
- Modern rational design has been historically in service to de-futuring civ programs.
- Speculative design: collective conversations of how things could be, the imagination of alternative ways of being that goes against design that reinforces the status quo. Critical thought translated into materiality: thinking-through design rather than through words and structure. All good critical design provides an alternative to how things are.
- Two opposing design fictions as a heuristic:
    - 1. Matristic, convivial, futuring, relational visions that highlight the creation and/or re-creation of worlds based on the horizontal relation to all forms of life, respecting the human embeddedness in the natural world. ie: the Pluriversal.
    - 2. The dream held by the flashy techno fathers of the moment of a post-human world wholy created by man. The world of synthetic biology, robotics, cyborgian fantasies, space travel, nano tech, unlimited 3D printing, geo engineering schemes as solutions to climate change, advocating for the great singularity as a transcendance of biology (as a world without mothers). ie: the Universal
- Negotiation of the possible through the artificial as a negotiation of the limits of natural existence.
- Beyond analytical design to explore how design hardwires particular social, political, cultural habits of mind and body. Towards exploring through a wide spectrum of imaginations.
- **Will there still be modern solutions to modern problems, or has modernities ability to even imagine the questions that need to be asked to effectively face the contemporary ecological and social crisis been so fataly 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 possibilties?** Are these alternatives still viable, or considered impossibilities?

#### 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 designs embeddedness within this history.
2. Today, the most appropriate mode of access to the question concerning design is ontological. We must understand dominant dualist ontology and inquire into modes of being that emphasize profound relationality.
3. The contemporary conjecture of widespread ecological and social devastation summons critical thought to think actively about significant cultural transitions. Two hopeful forms emerge: design for transitions and design for autonomy.
4. This book seeks to design discourse by elaborating the tradition of design. This book is part of a long series of conversations within latin cultural studies, western philosophy, socio-political spaces in the west and beyond. The book exists at the intersection of:
    - Ontology
    - Design
    - Politics

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