1.
Powerful
Questions
from:

2.
Design for the Real World
But Which “World”? What “Design”? What “Real”?

3.
Can design’s modernist tradition be reoriented from its
dependence on the life-stifling dualist ontology of patriarchal
capitalist modernity toward relational modes of knowing, being,
and doing? Can it be creatively reappropriated by subaltern
communities in support of their struggles to strengthen their
autonomy and perform their life projects?

4.
Can design be reoriented from its dependence on the
marketplace toward creative experimentation with
forms, concepts, territories, and materials, especially
when appropriated by subaltern communities
struggling to redefine their life projects in a mutually
enhancing manner with the Earth?

5.
Queremos un mundo donde quepan muchos mundos (We
want a world where many worlds fit)
Is it possible to read in these popular slogans the seeds of a
radical design imagination?

6.
Are these masculine
imaginaries of creation —
design imaginations for
sure— really universal, or
unavoidable, as their fathers
pretend? Have these tawdry
fathers, with their narrow
vision of innovation, robbed
us of different visions of the
future?

7.
The question of modernity or modernities, including
the seemingly simple question, is life better today
than it has ever been for the human majorities?
Or has modernity’s ability to even imagine the
questions that need to be asked to effectively face
the contemporary ecological and social crisis been so
fatally 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 possibilities?

8.
The claims about design’s potential new roles range
from the significant to the earth shattering. A key
question becomes: how does one design for a
complex world? Instead of keeping on filling the
world with stuff, what design strategies will allow
us—humans—to lead more meaningful and
environmentally responsible lives?

9.
If we start with the presupposition, striking perhaps but not totally
farfetched, that the contemporary world can be considered a
massive design failure, certainly the result of particular design
decisions, is it a matter of designing our way out?

10.
Is design at present inextricably tied to capitalism and a liberal
conception of politics? Conversely, can design be infused with a
more explicit sense of politics, even a radical politics?

11.
Do design practices participate in the sociology of absences by
overlooking nonexpert subaltern knowledges or by treating them
as unable to provide the basis for other designs and design
otherwise? Or by measuring productivity and efficiency through
the monocultural yardstick of market economics? Conversely, can
design practice contribute to broadening, and drawing on, the rich
spectrum of experiences that should be considered viable
alternatives to what exists?

12.
More generally, what would it entail to construct a
non-Eurocentric design imagination? What kinds of
epistemic and ontological platforms would this
project require? What would it take for design
practitioners to search for repertoires of design ideas
from the perspective of social and cognitive justice
(including, but going beyond, the more easily
detectable forms of vernacular design)?

13.
The question for design remains, what would it take
for designers to operate without a purely objectivist
and single vision of the real? To embrace the notion
that design practices, too, might contribute to
creating multiple notions of out-thereness,
rather than a single one? And, moreover, to take
seriously the view that reality is an ongoing and
continuous flow of forms and intensities of all kinds?

14.
If not dualism, if life is always in connection, then
what? The immediate, obvious answer to
disconnection, isolation, and so forth is, of course, to
reconnect—with each other, with our bodies, the
nonhuman world, the stream of life. One rising
answer to the problematic of disconnection /
reconnection is thus relationality. There are many
ways to understand relationality.

15.
Is it possible to develop a deeper notion of
relationality, one in which the relational
basis of existence radically pervades the
entire order of things?

16.
What would it mean to develop a personal and
collective practice of interbeing? How do we innovate
with postdualist ways of inhabiting the planet that
are more amicable to the continued existence of all
sentient beings, ways in which humans become
present to the planet in a manner that is mutually
enhancing?
Can these be fostered in the most modern-driven
contemporary settings?

17.
Is it possible to reorient such a tradition and to
redirect the journey into an altogether different
direction? Is this what the planetary ecological and
social crisis is all about, or at least one of its
important dimensions? Can design play a role in such
a reorientation of both the cultural background and
the journey itself?

18.
Are the rematerialization of the body and
the reterritorialization of place still possible?
Or are they already historically foreclosed
possibilities?

19.
So, do you now see why ontology—actually, political
ontology—is important? Can design contribute to
fulfilling the historic, perhaps vital, task of catalyzing
forms of collective intelligence that attend to the
kinds of choices confronting us, including design’s
own role in creating them?

20.
Thinking sustainability through design brings forth
the challenging question, “How do you translate a
new cognitive paradigm into material environments
and everyday practices?” (Manzini 2015,10;
Tonkinwise 2013)

21.
Can design be more attuned to these realizations? To
inhabiting spaces of nonduality, nonliberalism,
noncapitalism? To finding sources of the nonself in
the most contemporary struggles and situations?
These are questions for an anthropology and cultural
studies of design.

22.
Care should be taken of course not to fall into an
uncritical defense of traditions that might shelter one
form of oppression or another (e.g., patriarchy).
But one can legitimately ask, can some types of
tradition not be used today as tools for criticism,
futuring, and sustainment?

23.
What does it mean to take seriously the
insights of relationality in design work?

24.
How can designers become newly aware of the fact
that design careers often result in the use of vast
amounts of materials that contribute to ecosystem
destruction and pose risks to fellow humans?
That “designers do a lot of material destroying on
their way to being creative” (Tonkinwise 2013)?

25.
Is autonomous design not an oxymoron? To
state it prospectively, the possibility I am trying
to ascertain is whether ontologically oriented
design could be design for, and from, autonomy

26.
Given a model of the system that generates the
problem of communal concern, the question that
every autonomous design project must face is: what
can we do about it? The answer will depend on how
complex the model of reality is. The concrete result is
the design of a series of tasks, organizational
practices, and criteria by which to assess the
performance of the inquiry and design task.

27.
Problem statements need to address the question,
“Why do we/I see this as a problem?,” and to follow
each “because . . .” with another “why” until
participants’ values are made explicit.

28.
The design process also needs to broach the
questions, What/who needs to change? Why is this
change not happening now? What consequences
would follow if such changes were to happen?
And these inquiries must be repeated at various
scales, including the household, community, the
region, and beyond.

29.
For those of us without an ancestral mandate to help
our worlds persevere, the question becomes, how do
we recreate and recommunalize our worlds? How do
we develop forms of knowing that do not take words
and beings and things out of the flow of life —forms
of knowing and being that do not recompose nature
as external to us, as dead or unsentient matter?
What kinds of rituals might we develop to this end?

30.
How do we render our inevitable existential condition
of being entre mundos, between worlds, into a hopeful
praxis of living, a space for contributing to stitch worlds
together within a pluriversal ethics?

31.
To paraphrase: it is easier to imagine the end
of the world than the end of modernity. This is a question
that does not go away completely. As Maturana and
Verden-Zöller say, “our human existence is one in which
we can live whatever world we bring about in our
conversations, even if it is a world that finally destroys us
as the kind of being that we are” (2008, 143). Might the
civilizational conversation called modernity be at risk of
reaching this point? If modernity is ineluctably all we have
to go on, then this book’s propositions could legitimately
be qualified as romantic or utopian.

32.
Is technoscience even partially adaptable or reversible,
as all transition narratives implicitly assume? Is this not
also a rather baseless and naive desire? Any redesigned
design philosophy must articulate a critique of the
rationalistic tradition and reconstruct its own mode of
rationality, open to the plurality of modes of
consciousness that inhabits the pluriverse. But is this
really possible? This does not mean an antiscience
position; in fact, none of the authors invoked in these
pages sustains such a position.

33.
Do “Traditional Communities” Design?
Toward a Practice of Disoñar (Designing-Dreaming)

34.
Is nondualist design not an oxymoron, for is design
not always about human projects and goal-oriented
change, about an analytics and ethics of
improvement and an inescapable ideology of the
novum, that is, of development, progress, and the
new? Moreover, why use the word design at all,
especially for nonmodern contexts?

35.
Is it advisable to use the concept of design in
connection with struggles for autonomy by
communities and collectives struggling precisely to
keep dualist ontologies and instrumentalizing
technologies at bay?
Would it not make more sense to declare these
communities “design-free territories”?

36.
I believe the issue of whether indigenous
communities design should remain an open
question. But from this provisional discussion we
can rearticulate the question in a way that applies to
communities and social groups in many parts of the
world: How do we make effective weavings and
foster mutually enhancing entanglements of worlds
in the face of the catastrophe visited on the planet
by the current global capitalist One-World order?

37.
Does the concept of the pluriverse, and the field of
political ontology that attends to it, have a future
with futures? Or will these concepts, and ontological
design itself, become yet one more academic
endeavor, interesting but defuturing in relation to
enabling worlds, knowledges, and lives otherwise?

38.
Design, it is often stressed, is about (preferred)
futures. But is not the notion of future, and even
futures and the futural, inevitably modern?

39.
Will designers be able to contribute to dissuading
unreflective publics from succumbing to the virtual
realities offered by the patriarchal and capitalistic
technological imaginations of the day?
Is the fundamental question of design today then about
diverging imaginations of the future?

40.
Can one bring back beauty and harmony
into the world, so undermined in the name
of urban comfort and efficiency?

41.
One final question: does the university have any positive role to
play in relation to transition and autonomous design?
Is the university not irremediably ensconced within the
Enlightenment project, with its liberal, anthropocentric, and
capitalistic trademarks? Is the university not one of the most
effective occupying forces of people’s lives and territories, along
with the State, the police, and the army? [and religion]

42.
Can academic knowledge be made less
hierarchical and elitist?
Is not this book also part of the same academy?
No doubt it is, in both its language and its mode
of construction. Could it also be part of the
decolonizing effort?

43.
What are the best ways of going about the redesign
of those institutions that keep unsustainability,
growing inequality, and odious, unacceptable levels
of injustice in place?