Lecture | When Design Proliferates as “The Other”

What if there is no world, nor design, outside the West and modernity, what if the many worlds within the world turn out to be others (worlds that are not) and with other names? Although in all of them there are practices equialtervalent (equal and different) to design, untranslatable "fabricative" modes, coming from all directions (polycardinal), and unpluralizable ones that are not design at all, even if they are passed off as such.

As a hypertrophied local invention, the design universalized (in a universe that is also designed) is thus confined to a linguistic, etymological and meaningful framework, smaller than that presupposed by those who use design to "project" their constructive prejudices on the creative paths of other "cultures" (another form of hegemonic knowledge to equalize otherness by converting it into discrete comparable units: societies, cosmoses, universes).

This lecture by Alfredo Gutiérrez Borrero ofJorge Tadeo Lozano University in Bogotá, Colombia will be about what returns when design travels south, to many and unparalleled souths (plural), and turns out to be the other from untranslatable multiplicities that it leaves behind, places below, suppresses, denies or incorporates as adjectives to its own name (indigenous design, decolonial design, pluriversal design, etc.).

To derive to the south, and souths, implies that the enunciating design becomes enunciated, that it travels through territories disobedient to its historicity, its vocabulary, and its practice, that it renounces to define, divide, hierarchize, and configure otherness (to turn it always into the same). From time to time, design can be diluted in many "there" where it cannot monopolize all the creative paths, where its name summons nothing, and the words concept, design or project do not even exist, but still "artifacts" are thought and made. Then, what possibilities does it offer to creation and innovation, when the design strategy is to renounce itself?