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Abstract
The aim of this essay is to contribute to the development of a paradigmatic shift in how design is understood, transformed and practiced in the Global South. It does this by establishing the case for building a strong contextual relation between design, colonialism, and the mobilised counter-agency of decoloniality. Thereafter, design for/by the Global South is presented within a critical epistemological reframing subordinate to a situated imperative of the ‘Sustainment’.
Notes
1. From the Introduction to the 2009 reprint of Tayeb Salih’s seminal novel Season of Migration to the North first published in Beirut in 1966.
2. In this context, oikos is defined as ‘ecological home.’
3. Famed for his remarks on the ‘Clash of Civilization’ (Citation2003),
4. The Crusades lasted nearly two years, with the last (the ninth) ending in 1291.
5. At a different moment, there was a massive Chinese contribution to the assent of scientific knowledge, as Joseph Needham’s immense multivolume, more than 50-year study of ‘Science and Civilisation in China’ comprehensively showed.
6. The work of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716) is a case in point. A great deal of his mathematical knowledge was gained from a Jesuit missionary returning from many years in China (knowledge that laid the mathematical foundation of computing), but this source went uncited (Perkins Citation2008).
7. Postmodernity itself refers to a critique of modernity, rather than a moment after it. In contrast, postmodernism was an accompanying pluralistic culture that partially occupied the lacuna exposed when the temporal ambition of modernity, as a unified global order, was abandoned. Arriving at the same moment as the break-up of the old Eurocentric world order (with its geopolitical fragmentation, making the formation of a new world order, not withstanding rhetorical claims, impossible), globalization amplifies the exploitative character of modernity and projected consumerism globally as if it were a means of cultural unification. In reality, it was just another, and more virulent, form of cultural imperialism.
8. currently it is 60 million plus and growing.
9. While unable to create a universal culture, a great deal of cultural, psychic and environmental damage is done by consumerism, the structures it promotes and ways of life it enables. Likewise, in concentrating capital, corporations and advanced technologies into post-national mega-regions, it adds to the fragmentation of the global geospatial order, with corporatism overriding nationalistic and cosmopolitan modes of sociopolitical organization and ontologies.
10. This ‘third space’ needs to be distinguished from the more problematic third space of translation discussed by de Sousa Santos (Citation2014, 217–19).
11. Stambaugh is the most recent translator of Being and Time (1966).
12. The term poses a problem of translation endlessly argued over. It appears in Macquarrie and Robinson’s translation of Being and Time without a hyphen but in Stambaugh’s with one. More significantly, its meaning is contested. The literal mean is Da (here)-sein (being), thus Dasein is literally translated in English as ‘being here’, however, Heidegger’s use of the term is nuanced. It can mean, ‘the being of the self as an entity’, but equally as ‘a mode of being-in-the-world’. What is implied in the latter is that it is not possible to be in the world without being situated. Hence, there is a circling back to ‘being here.’ There is no consensus. The form of the term in quotations matches that of the author/editor.
13. These disorders include technological anxiety, inverted care obsession, compulsive disorder, depression, attention deficit disorder, narcissism, antisocial disorder, schizo disorder, hypochondriasis, and body dysmorphic disorder.
14. This folds into the process wherein the anthropos (our primordial species being) evolved in difference, with the human becoming dominant and the creator of an anthropocentric ethos and operational material environment: the Anthropocene (wherein as one among many, the human became dominant and thereafter hegemonic).
15. Not only is that veneer which is our humanity very thin, it is easily removed: a clear example is those discourses of combat that transform the same into the other as enemy.
16. Traditional craft workers across cultures globally depend upon a mix of sensory knowledge – the blacksmith illustrates this point: sight, smell and sound are all in play when working and tempering ferrous metal. Certainly, in the North, such knowledge was given little status.
17. A thousand years ago, the Chou Empire of China placed itself at the middle point of all other nations and peoples as a center of civilization surrounded by the uncivilized.
18. ‘Event’ is a contested philosophical idea of some complexity – a discussion of which is beyond the remit of this essay. So said, colonialism as a ‘designing directional event’ refers to colonialism as a carrier of imposed epistemic conditions of dissonance, and equally as the instigator of an ontology prefigurative of everyday life. Both dimensions of such an event converge to form colonial(ized) subjects.
19. A number of exceptions have been noted and referenced in this text,
20. the notion of the world as constituted from structural elements (realized in atomic theory
21. As often happens, ‘the best available explanation at the time’ myth lives on, but in a contemporary mode of enunciation presented with reason (as a rhetorical trope).
22. A clear current example of such a position is evident in Nadir Z. Lahiji’s (Citation2016), collection of essays, Can Architecture be an Emancipatory Process?
23. Its has been estimated that Homo sapiens arrived 160,000 years ago, by which time, the archaeological evidence suggests, about 70 stone tools were in use, plus all the wood and bone utensils these tools were used to help make (Fry Citation2012).
24. This is a topic beyond the scope of this essay; however, it is one the reader needs to be aware of.
25. El Orden que se ha de Thener en Descubrir y Poblar,’ transcripción de las Ordenanzas de descubrimiento, nuevo población y pacificación de las Indias dadas por Felipe II, el 13 de julio de 1573, en el Bosque de Segovia, según el original que se conserva en el Archivo General de Indias de Sevilla. Ministerio de la Vivienda, Madrid, 1973.
26. The concept of the parergon came from the Greeks, was revived by Kant, and was given contemporary salience by Derrida.
27. English translation of the “The City Planning Ordinances of the Laws of the Indies” by Axel Mundigo and Dora Crouch reprinted by The New City Town Planning Review, vol. 48, July 1977, pp 247–268 with permission from the Ministerio de la Vivienda, Madrid).
28. One of the most celebrated of idiosyncratic taxonomies is of the ‘certain Chinese encyclopaedia’ of which Borges wrote, as famously cited by Foucault in the Preface to The Order of Things (Foucault Citation1973).