ABSTRACT
Western Design education and Design practice discourse is beginning to express a need for greater diversity and inclusion. However, this desire to engage by merely including alternative voices or those pushed to the margins, potentially deflects from the critical examination and reset required of Designs epistemic foundations. For design to be inclusive, this must also beg the questions: Who has been excluded from Design, what are these practices of exclusion and what is revealed of Designs privilege to assume the position of host and includer? Modern iterations of what design has created; the centralised human is not sustainable or conscionable, which is evident by its own admission, through the desire to be more humane by including people of diverse backgrounds. However, when approached through Designs problem, solution mindset diversity and inclusion is at risk of being an answer motivated by offering a more broadly transactional reach and ‘usefulness’. It is important to recognise that the shift to Inclusion as a policy emphasis does not erase past exclusions. Instead, the desire for diversity and inclusion can lead to Design positioning itself as benefactor, in a state of white virtue, rather than recognising itself as dominant discipline and system which politely adapts and consumes the invited other. The author writes this on unceded Indigenous lands on the continent also known as Australia. In Australian design contexts, there is an enthusiastic desire to engage with and include Indigenous peoples and knowledges within Western design education institutions. However, I contend that the inability to recognise and be in relation to Indigenous sovereignty, as the basis of the Australian state, has resulted in Design being ill-equipped and perhaps incapable of practicing in relation to Indigenous knowledge systems (sovereignty). In Designs for the Pluriverse, Columbian Design and anthropology scholar Arturo Escobar eloquently critiques neoliberal modernity, patriarchy, individualism and colonialism. In this important work, Escobar hopes to move towards designs for a ‘pluriverse of sociocultural configurations’. This chapter explores this proposition while contending that it is necessary to identify and disrupt (white) racialised logics within design lest it consume pluriversal thinking as a ‘value add’. I argue that the white racialised logics in design are illusive, adaptive and an exclusive disciplining practice. I draw upon critical race whiteness and indigeneity theory along with the seminal work of the Decolonising Design Group to explore a critical reset of the design episteme in relation to Indigenous sovereignty by knowing its ontological and epistemic boundedness.
