Pluriversality might help recognizing ways of designing and knowing that have been ignored by universal methods of design, such as vernacular and indigenous techniques. Looking at design methods through an ethical perspective, scrutinizing their intentions, and choosing alternatives beyond the universal may be called Critical Ontological Design. This philosophical idea can be summarized as such: the methods with which we design also design the kind of designers we become, so we better be critical about them. This talk features hybrid design methodologies developed as part of the designing for liberation research program.
This talk was recorded at the Disparate Cultures and World Viewpoints workgroup (later renamed to Pluriversal Design workgroup) meeting from the Future of Design Education initiative.
Full transcript
This session is about a pluriverse of design methods and content. I will divide the rest of the session into two parts since we have less than an hour. The first part will be a short problematization of the topic. We’ll discuss Global North and Global South methodological approaches. Then, if we have enough time, we will engage in a practical exercise on thinking about multiple ways of going from A to B and discussing the cultural values of each.
By the end, I will come to a new topic, which might sound a bit philosophical. It’s about critical ontological design. In a nutshell, it’s about how those methods shape the way we are and the designers we become. Pluriversality, a concept we use in our workgroup, is usually invoked to challenge universality. Universals, from the perspective of the pluriverse, have specific origins, scopes, and interests. It’s not that they don’t exist; they do. But they are not universal in an absolute sense—they are universal in a relative sense.
This is important because it helps us understand books like “Universal Methods of Design” by Bruce Hanington and Bella Martin. These methods aren’t used by everyone worldwide, nor should they be. Instead, it’s a compilation of methods typically found, practiced, nurtured, and cultivated in universities in the global north. There might be some exceptions representing smaller communities trying to universalize their methods. We must remain critical of this because, while universalizing something, we are constantly losing something else—other kinds of knowledge, other ways of doing design, which might not be recognized as methods or valid knowledge. The Global North typically ignores vernacular and indigenous ways of designing. You won’t find them in handbooks about global or universal design methods.
This picture is from Lina Bo Bardi’s exhibition curated at a museum in São Paulo about the hand of the Brazilian people. It shows how they created many exciting things just when the idea of Industrial Design came to Brazil, colonizing and ignoring this tradition of manual work. This tradition could have been a stepping stone to building a localized version of industrial design. Instead, we relied on reproducing German models that did not make much sense in Brazil then and still do not. This is part of our ongoing struggle.
I don’t want to reject the colonial legacy outright. Instead, my proposal, and that of pluriversality, is to find a way to hybridize Northern and Southern ways. Instead of joining the anti-method movement and rejecting design methods entirely, claiming they are all colonial and that the South has no methods, we should acknowledge that we have rationality. I prefer that we talk about design methodology of the South to differentiate them from the North. In forums like this, the future of design education, we should hybridize what is different and what is similar between these methodologies.
This is part of our broad research program called Designing for Liberation. I don’t have enough time to introduce the other parts of this equation. However, I’ll share a story about hybridizing the myths of the methodical designer. I’ll use a universalized global icon, like I mentioned before: Batman. This superhero has no superpowers but relies on external tools to fight crime. Batman carries only the tools he can master in his utility belt. He doesn’t go out with something he’s never tried before. He is always looking for new tools to fight crime, with assistance from Lucius Fox, his business partner who develops new technologies for him.
Batman knows there is a difference between a tool in a suitcase—a theoretical attitude—and a tool at hand—a practical attitude, in Heideggerian terms. You might know a tool in theory or practice. If you know it in practice, you can safely use it whenever needed. That’s why Batman is constantly training in his Batcave. Design students do similar things in design studios, learning to handle design methods as if they were tools from books to their utility belts.
However, in “The Dark Knight” movie, Batman couldn’t find a proper action to stop the Joker, who didn’t follow any preconceived notions of bandit behavior. Alfred tells Bruce Wayne a story from when he worked for the British colonial military in Burma. He was trying to buy loyalty from tribal leaders with precious stones, a standard colonial strategy. A bandit raided the caravans, but they never found anyone who traded with him. One day, Alfred saw a child playing with a ruby the size of a tangerine. The bandit had been throwing them away. Bruce Wayne asked, puzzled, why? Alfred answered, “Because he thought it was good sport. Some men aren’t looking for anything logical like money; they just want to see the world burn”.
Later, Bruce Wayne asks if they caught the bandit. Alfred says they burned the forest down. This illustrates how colonization employs rational methods that cover up irrational, dehumanizing intentions. When rational plans fail, irrationality becomes the default strategy, leading to severe damage, like the genocide of Indigenous and Black people in Brazil. Rational methods may start the process, but the outcomes are disastrous if intentions aren’t scrutinized.
Batman just took the advice from Alfred. He saw Lucius showing him a new app that would surveil people without their knowledge and get a 3D scan of a particular place where the mobile app was running. Batman installed this app, invading the privacy of Gotham’s citizens to surveil everyone and, finally, find the Joker. Lucius Fox asked to resign because he thought this move was unethical, but Batman didn’t care. He kept doing his business. This shows Batman’s colonial mindset if he followed Alfred’s advice. Batman would never understand the Joker because he is a privileged billionaire. He didn’t have to go through life problems, conflicts with justice, or the issues of neoliberal governmental policies that left the Joker alone with his madness and without proper treatment.
The 2019 movie “Joker” shows how a normal person becomes mad and then becomes a bandit, with Joaquin Phoenix portraying the character. I think we should not stick with dichotomies between good and bad, rational and irrational, Joker and Batman. If we hybridize those two poles, we might develop something much more original. For example, El Chapulín Colorado, recognized by friends from Latin America, is an anti-hero who resisted capitalist logic in Latin America without becoming a murderer like the Joker. He resisted his rival, Super Sam, whose greatest power was using money to always bribe people. Chapulín is authentic; he doesn’t sell himself for money and doesn’t ask for anything else when helping people.
We don’t need to train design students to perform like Batman, Joker, or Chapulín. We can train them to discover who they want to become in the worlds they produce. That’s how I approach critical ontological design, and that’s how I share it with my students here in Brazil. We have a marvelous card deck called Bakka, the Archetype Library, currently only in Portuguese. It has 64 different archetypes representing different ways of being in Brazilian culture. It provides materials to discuss who you want to become after your thesis.
An interesting question often overlooked in Americanized discourse is: What’s hindering you from becoming the person you want to be? And what’s hindering people like you from becoming that? Usually, people find that some form of oppression prevents them from becoming who they want to be. For example, a student who wanted to become an activist but, because she was a Black woman, couldn’t afford it or wasn’t expected to, at least in her family and society.
Design education can teach universal or pluriversal design methods, but above all, it should teach how tools affect the way we design ourselves and the way we become someone in society. That’s critical ontological design. I developed UX cards ten years ago, a tool for students to devise their own methodology for each project. These cards must be used in a group to co-create the methodology with co-designers and users of the project. They also connect to an online platform called Corais through a QR code. Every method has a wiki where people can share their experiences, bridging novices and experts.
Initially designed for designers, the platform has since been used by non-academic groups to share knowledge about social movements, organizing groups, hacking, cultural heritage, and more. I’ll end with these words from Augusto Boal, a Brazilian dramaturg who wrote about the theater of the oppressed and had quite interesting critical ontological thoughts:
“Fatalistically, we can determine that we are what we are. Creatively, we can imagine that the same playing cards can be redistributed.”
Pluriversal design education should help students see that they can become someone else and reinvent themselves depending on the situation. They should understand that their problems are not individual but collective because they are always considered part of certain social groups. Some will have more privileges, and some will have fewer, but design methods can contribute to both groups to develop in the ways they would like and in ways that benefit society.
