The modern/colonial design is a perfect and pure manifestation of modernity’s objectifying principle of perception and interpretation of the world, of other human and nonhuman beings, of manmade objects and knowledge. Decolonial thinker Santiago Castro-Gómez called it ‘the hubris of the zero point’ (Castro-Gómez 2005), meaning that the sensing and thinking subject, which is Western/Northern by default, occupies a delocalized and disembodied vantage point that eliminates other possible ways to produce, transmit and represent knowledge, allowing for a worldview to be built on a rigid essentialist modern/colonial model that hides its locality and represents itself as universal and natural or, in Neil Curtis’ formulation, ‘views the established beliefs and institutions of our modern heritage as not only real but true, and not only true but good’ (Curtis 2012, 74). Decolonizing design, then, requires problematizing the affective and conceptual operations that form the basis of our relations with the world, and questioning the essentialist or instrumentalist approaches that have been naturalized previously.
Tlostanova, M. (2017) ‘On decolonizing design’, Design Philosophy Papers, 15(1), pp. 51–61. doi:10.1080/14487136.2017.1301017.