On decolonizing design

Abstract

Design is regarded in the article as an ontological instrument that is able to transform the social and cultural reality, and model human experience, subjectivity and environment. I focus on the intersections between Tony Fry’s understanding of ontological design and the decolonial interpretation of modernity/coloniality as an overall design determining relation between the world, the things and the humans. The article attempts to draw a division between the positive (re-existent) and negative (defuturing) ontological designs. It addresses the coloniality of design that is control and disciplining of our perception and interpretation of the world, of other beings and things according to certain legitimized principles. The coloniality of design has accompanied the predominant modern universalist utopias such as Marxism or Liberalism and has been resisted internally and externally through various manifestations of border thinking and existence. I analyze Fry’s concept of defuturing in relation to the decolonial concept of pluriversality. This allows to address in more detail the dynamic correlational principle as central to decolonial ontological design. Among specific decolonial tools of positive ontological design I focus on Sumak Kawsay, Earth Democracy, and a few more specific initiatives originating in the indigenous social movements from Eurasian borderlands. The article also addresses decolonizing of the affective sphere as ground for a positive ontological design. Finally I argue for the necessity of provincializing the Western/Northern design and allowing the decolonial design in the Global South develop its positive border “both and” positionality, a negotiating transcultural stance starting from the local geopolitics and corpo-politics put into dialogue and dispute with the modern/colonial defuturing design premises.