Precedence, Earth, and the Anthropocene

decolonizing design

Abstract

Design came to name modernity's way of worlding the world. What is at stake in decolonizing design is our relation to earth, and the dignifying of relational worlds. The task of decolonizing design brings us to a three-folded path: to understand modernity´s way of worlding the world as artifice, as earthlessness, to understand coloniality´s way of un-worlding the world, of annihilating relational worlds and, to think the decolonial as a form of radical hope for an ethical life with earth. At a more fundamental level, the mode of precedence is introduced to challenge modernity´s metaphysics of presence and its reduction of experience to empty time. The question of precedence delinks from western's philosophy grounding dichotomy between immanence and transcendence. The mode of precedence brings to the fore a temporal relationality that is always already ahead of any formation in the field of immanence, in the surface of the present. Can we think of relational design as a decolonial form of being with earth and of worlding the world? Can we think of design as a mode of listening?