ABSTRACT
The research designers are carrying out today is a far cry from the commercial practices that characterized their field in the mid-to-late twentieth century. It’s compelling to imagine design fields realizing, after over a century of contributing to social, environmental, and economic inequality, that they need redesigning. The breadth and depth of social design as a field and philosophy of practice varies: from broad definitions, where social reality is itself designed and redesigned; if broad definitions of the field. Decolonial design, influenced by decolonial and postcolonial theory, post-development anthropology, ontological design, and environmental justice, has made significant waves in the design community. Ontological design proposes nothing short of a complete overhaul of the Western metaphysics of design. Far from championing an ontological frame that disavows radical exteriority, pluriversal design allows the heterogenous world-building capacities of the nonhuman world to have equal weight, in an effort to redress the ecological suffering and devastation wrought by a metaphysics dominated by rational individualism.
