ABSTRACT
This chapter shares a collective reflection on a collaborative design process with the Asoyarcocha community in Colombia. Applying Arturo Escobar’s principals of Design for the Pluriverse, as well as Indigenous practices, this chapter argues for social organizing as design practice. The Investigative Minga represents a foundational dimension of the transitions made possible for the community and the surrounding environment. The work leading to these changes has required, at multiple steps, joint action across actors within wide-ranging diversity. In turn, this kind of collective effort calls for strategies to work through these differences. In other words, strategies to make it possible to instantiate the pluriverse. In the case of the Minga Asoyarcocha, these differences have taken place in the context of historically rooted differences and views on land ownership. It has also taken place in the realm of epistemology, where contact with Western science remains a sensitive topic. What we offer here is the possibility of social organizing to be part of a designer’s practice. From a historical point of view and from the way it takes place, social organizing seems better positioned to facilitate the encountering of difference the pluriverse calls us upon. The Asoyarcocha experience makes it clear that you can design without engaging Design. Perhaps most thrillingly, this account underscores the obligation for designers to engage in respectful curiosity and deep appreciation of the work that grassroots collectives around the world have been and continue to do. Ultimately, we have a debt in learning about and considering the work of organizations like Asoyarcocha as models for sustainable design, particularly in response to the planetary crisis we collectively face. Our hope is that our portrayal of Asoyarcocha’s organizational model, historical achievements, and continued commitment to (re)imagine better futures for all, can serve as inspiration to designers and practitioners alike.
