Embracing contingencies
Why is the design discipline in particular challenged to question its own epistemologies, its methods of knowledge production, its logics and its historiographies?
I wouldn’t say this is particular to the design discipline itself, although it is remarkable how, in the past few years, a specific kind of resistance to that questioning surfaced and still refuses to go away. That being said, I believe a lot of it relies on the ways in which what counts as “knowledge” is constituted and perpetuated, namely as a discrete, mappable, and always measurable set of metrics through which what is considered to be reproducible and verifiable has precedence over the subjective, the serendipitous, the intuitive, the relational and the spiritual. That, which is named “design”, is in fact only displaying what is elicited by its methods. In other words: in its desire to constrain, map, measure, quantify, and reproduce, design can only account for its own designs and its ontological and epistemological limitations. Hence, it might be difficult to let go, to do away with the idea that designing, even in its (historical) attempt to free itself from the stark separation between hard and soft sciences, is still very much bound to extractive and measurable ways of producing and reproducing the colonial episteme. This is not separated from a certain degree of disciplinary narcissism, that is, the fear that by challenging the knowledge produced by design methods, we might dissolve the boundaries that distinguish design from other fields and methods and complicate the hubris of mastery that its own disciplinarity (or commitment to it) holds dear.
How can design be freed from its entanglement with Western notions of universality?
First and foremost, by acknowledging its own role in not only reproducing, but also perpetuating these notions of universality in its own ethos. In the introduction to Black Skin, White Masks, Frantz Fanon has delineated the limits of methods, their inadequacy in addressing the social and psychological causes and consequences of a racialized way of being and doing in the world. For him, methods eventually “devour themselves”. But I believe that what he said next is even more important: that this should be our only next logical starting point.[1] Designers have much to learn by engaging in non-extractive modes of doing that acknowledge local cosmologies and imaginaries. While it can be argued that recent attempts to “decolonize” or “pluriversalize” design have in a way begun to enact that, I have yet to see approaches that do not try to “correct” or “design” them anew. I say this because in my view (and that of many of my colleagues engaged in the same struggle) this requires a strong rejection of universality in favor of minor localisms, in favor of contingencies that are always already responding in relation to (and not referencing) the colonial episteme. Let me be clear: “universality” is not a vector, but an enmeshed network, a fiction with material consequences that, like every other fiction, needs to be dealt with as such. So, the question we have to grapple with becomes: how do notions of universality complicate the designs of minor localisms, and how can other, minor, local, contextual and positional designs complicate – and eventually dismantle – colonial notions of universality?
How can we rethink the agency of design beyond the Western solutionist and anthropocentric models?
Often it is the anxiety of the new that compels much of design thinking and doing, while I believe that there is a lot of work to be done to undo what buzzwords such as “innovation” have brought about, which have silenced other voices and ways of being and doing. This takes us beyond questions of the “human-centeredness” so inherent to design knowledge over the past decades. I think that attention must be given not only to the anthropocentric ways of design, but also to design’s own contribution to (and entanglement with) racial and racialized frameworks. It is, indeed, the very notion of a “center” that drives the thinking of “centeredness” to begin with, and that is so pervasive within the design discourse that we seldom question its own logics and grammar. But if design were considered from a relational standpoint, we would not only decenter (and dethrone) the “human” and thus expose its construction as a referent to “being” (or, if we follow Sylvia Wynter, the “overrepresentation of Man”[2]) but also simultaneously undo the exclusions that design has enacted on those who have not, historically and contemporarily, partaken in the notion of “humanity”.
What alternative emancipatory approaches are addressed by practices and discourses on the decolonization of design knowledge and design education?
I strongly believe that possible answers to this question – or engagements, because perhaps there is no way of giving a fixed or stable “answer” – are not to be found in design. In fact, these might be answers that have been already given long ago, and we designers were simply not listening. Answers that were given to us by indigenous knowledges, by anticolonial struggles, by feminist revolutions, and so on. From the moment that we do away with the idea that “decolonization” is something new to design – or to any form of knowledge production for that matter – we begin to acknowledge what the epistemic devices of colonialism have sought to erase: namely, the idea that knowledge is not fixed, stable, not always measurable, not always universally applicable, and not always reduced to a short-term, packable sets of “tools” or “methods” that can be applied and exchanged, devoid of context and at will.
Thus, an emancipatory approach to design is committed to the forging of new alliances, ones that are intrinsically bound to the preservation of land, water, food, language, communities,[1] and to the larger project of decolonization, that is, to paraphrase Denise Ferreira da Silva, to the restitution of the total value extracted from bodies, land, and knowledge.[2] While this might seem an impossible project, its incommensurability should not be a precondition for not trying, for not enacting the minor gestures we need to move towards that direction.[3] These alliances have, necessarily, to enact the work of listening, the work of renewing, unsettling, and to remain ever incomplete, to productively engage with vulnerability and the relationality that weave this world together. This has to be a way of thinking that is liberated from any desire to fill gaps or to see knowledge as something to be extracted because even when “learning from,” designers often believe their work is to translate and/or compartmentalize that into a reproducible, publishable (i.e., sellable) method. So, in short, allow me to answer by being opaque: an emancipatory approach to designing demands a non-designerly approach to design.