Special Forum: Designing a World of Many Centers

Abstract

What is pluriversal design? For us, the co-convenors of the Pluriversal Design Special Interest Group (SIG) of the Design Research Society (DRS), it involves redesigning the terms and forms of interaction between different modes of being for mutual understanding and appreciation. A pluriverse is not a world of independent units but a world based on radical interdependence (Escobar 2020; Mignolo 2018). This special forum emerged from Pivot 2020, a virtual conference organized by the DRS Pluriversal Design SIG and the Phyllis M. Taylor Center for Social Innovation and Design Thinking at Tulane University. Three authors deepened their reflections on pluriversality and submitted new papers for this special forum. Two years ago, we launched a call for papers inviting design researchers to jointly reimagine a world of many centers. We intended to go beyond the critique of modernity and colonialism, encouraging people to consider a thought-provoking set of questions: What does a world of many centers look like? What is needed to create this reality? Who is needed to create this? How does it operate? In prompting authors to respond to our call, we Renata M. Leit~ ao is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Human Centered Design at Cornell University and an Adjunct Professor at OCAD University. rml273@cornell.edu