Autumn 2019
A new world of worlds
Designs for the Pluriverse: Radical Interdependence, Autonomy, and the Making of Worlds
By Arturo Escobar. Designed by Matthew Tauch. Cover art by Gabriel Orozco. Duke University Press, £20.99, $27.95
‘What would it take to construct a non-Eurocentric design imagination?’ This is the stark question posed by Colombian-American anthropologist Arturo Escobar a few chapters into Designs for the Pluriverse: Radical Interdependence, Autonomy, and the Making of Worlds, his sophisticated argument for design to reconstruct itself as an enabler of social and environmental justice, rather than driving the ‘devastation that has become so pervasive with neoliberal globalization and its vacuous notion of progress’. It is a question that frames the book’s striking central thesis. For Escobar, design has been central to the advancement of ‘the dominant form of Euro-modernity (capitalist, rationalist, liberal, secular, patriarchal, white …)’, which – with its insatiable appetite for economic growth – has ravaged the entire globe, giving rise to ‘interrelated crises of climate, food, energy, poverty, and meaning’.
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Top. Cover of Designs for the Pluriverse, showing Gabriel Orozco’s Piñanona 1, 2013. Book design by Matthew Tauch.
John-Patrick Hartnett, designer, writer, lecturer, London
Read the full version in Eye no. 99 vol. 25, 2019
Eye is the world’s most beautiful and collectable graphic design journal, published quarterly for professional designers, students and anyone interested in critical, informed writing about graphic design and visual culture. It is available from all good design bookshops and online at the Eye shop, where you can buy subscriptions and single issues.