ABSTRACT
This chapter considers development, and its earlier implications in modernity and colonialism. As such, ‘development’ will shown to be an agent of ‘defuturing’. A process of negation that arrives by design, serving socio-cultural, economic and environmental forms of unsustainability that combine to diminish planetary biological futures. Thereafter, various ways design has been an instrument of more recent forms of colonialism will also be considered. In particular, connections will be made to design and technology, epistemological colonialism and, more provocatively, the colonisation of consciousness. The final part of the chapter will outline how design is ontologically prefigurative of futures, and as such has specific links to postdevelopment, decoloniality, border thinking and the epistemological/political spaces where contemporary colonialism meets Indigenous cultures – ‘the borderland’. Finally, design will be more directly placed in the context of advancing postdevelopment by introducing the emergence of two important critical forms: ‘design and/in the Global South’ and ‘autonomous design’. Both can be regarded as delivering and supporting practices able to extend an emergent agency of postdevelopment.
