Exploring the Role of Pluriversality in the Transformation of Design

Jakobsen, Oskar Johan

4. Term

Sustainable Design (M.SC)

2023

2023-06-01

58 pages

This report presents the exploration of how pluriversal principles can support a transformation of design to further advance a sustainable transformation of society. The outset of the project has been that contemporary design practices partake in the reproduction of the unsustainable and oppressive dynamics that can be combined under the header of ‘modernity’. By predominantly designing for the supposed ‘one reality’ of what Law (2015) calls the ‘One-World world’, contemporary design is actively reproducing the entrenched ways of knowing, being, and doing of modernity and simultaneously oppressing the plurality of realities that exist as alternatives to this ‘the one reality’. The exploration was carried out by applying the methodological approach of participant observation in the development of a learning game as part of a project in the Danish environmental NGO of NOAH in the Spring of 2023. Through this report, I will present how pluriversal principles have been applied in NOAH’s project to actively decenter modernity in the design process and to simultaneously indicate the alternative ways of knowing, being, and doing that are being enacted by communities and movements existing within realities ‘at the edge of modernity’ (Escobar 2018). The application of the principles allowed the process to result in a learning game that seeks to challenge the destructive and oppressive nature of modernity while also indicating the sustainable and non-oppressive approaches that are being enacted throughout the multiple alternative realities of the world. The game and the insights that I have gained through my participation thus constitute my contribution to the transformation of design.

Pluriversality ; Design ; Transformation ; Sustainability

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