Seventeenth International Conference on Environmental, Cultural, Economic & Social Sustainability

Abstract

There is broad consensus that design has played a major role in bringing about the Anthropocene. Many scholars argue that design’s destructive force lies in it having morphed from a historical product of Western modernity into a mass reproducer of modern Western ontology on a global scale through European colonialism, capitalism and imperialism. In this modern Western ontology, humans are distinct from and superior to a ‘natural world’ which functions as a passive backdrop to human activity and which only has value in relation to its human utility. Accordingly, some scholars affiliated with the ‘decolonisation’ turn in design studies argue that transforming design from an anthropocentric, colonialist and extractivist practice into a sustainable one requires replacing design’s totalizing ontology with local, extra-modern ones. Their idea is that extra-modern ontologies, which see humans and the land as co-extensive, disrupt the modern Western ontology of division, mastery and conquest, and thereby enable the development of sustainable design. However, this paper contends that the championing of extra-modern ontologies in the service of sustainability runs the risk of re-inscribing an authoritative universalist story about the true nature of the world that ultimately excludes the very local ontological variabilities in design that it seeks to defend. In contrast, by drawing on the ethnographic record of extra-modern peoples, this paper develops an alternative approach to interpreting extra-modern design ontologies and how they can inform sustainable design.