10 — The Office For Ulterior Research

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The fundamental relations between people, the world and things, have until recently been defined within the frame of normalized modernity/coloniality through its vectoral time and progressivist teleology; the rigid and absurdly rationalized managerial strategies applied to the spheres of knowledge and subjectivity production; the preference of urbanism over rurality; and the sanctification of technological development and applied forms of ecology aiming only at nature’s preservation for its more successful exploitation in the future, the cult of the future and the dismissal of the negatively marked traditional past, particularly if this is a spatially alien past, with regular lapses into exoticism and antiquarianism.

Tlostanova, M. (2017) ‘On decolonizing design’, Design Philosophy Papers, 15(1), pp. 51–61. doi:10.1080/14487136.2017.1301017.

Coloniality of design is a control and disciplining of our perception and interpretation of the world, of other human and nonhuman beings and things according to certain legitimized principles. It is a set of specific ontological, epistemic and axiological notions imposed forcefully onto the whole world, including its peripheral and semiperipheral spaces in which alternative versions of life, social structures, environmental models or aesthetic principles have been invariably dismissed.

Tlostanova, M. (2017) ‘On decolonizing design’, Design Philosophy Papers, 15(1), pp. 51–61. doi:10.1080/14487136.2017.1301017.

Part design research repository, part other-thing studio, part zero-plus-zero publisher: working with entangled systems through graphic language and ontological archiving.

Tags:
Adversarial Design, Agonism, Democracy, Political Design, Education, Neoliberalism, Homo Economicus, Global North/Global South, Power, Modernism, Ontology, Coloniality/Decoloniality, Techno-Positivist, Publics/Counterpublics

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