What if there is no world, nor design, outside the West and modernity, what if the many worlds within the world turn out to be others (worlds that are not) and with other names? Although in all of them there are practices equialtervalent (equal and different) to design, untranslatable "fabricative" modes, coming from all directions (polycardinal), and unpluralizable ones that are not design at all, even if they are passed off as such.
As a hypertrophied local invention, the design universalized (in a universe that is also designed) is thus confined to a linguistic, etymological and meaningful framework, smaller than that presupposed by those who use design to "project" their constructive prejudices on the creative paths of other "cultures" (another form of hegemonic knowledge to equalize otherness by converting it into discrete comparable units: societies, cosmoses, universes).
This lecture by Alfredo Gutiérrez Borrero, Professor, Industrial Design at Jorge Tadeo Lozano University in Bogotá, Colombia, will be about what returns when design travels south, to many and unparalleled souths (plural), and turns out to be the other from untranslatable multiplicities that it leaves behind, places below, suppresses, denies or incorporates as adjectives to its own name (indigenous design, decolonial design, pluriversal design, etc.).
To derive to the south, and souths, implies that the enunciating design becomes enunciated, that it travels through territories disobedient to its historicity, its vocabulary, and its practice, that it renounces to define, divide, hierarchize, and configure otherness (to turn it always into the same). From time to time, design can be diluted in many "there" where it cannot monopolize all the creative paths, where its name summons nothing, and the words concept, design or project do not even exist, but still "artifacts" are thought and made. Then, what possibilities does it offer to creation and innovation, when the design strategy is to renounce itself?
The Stephan Weiss Lecture Series is made possible by an endowment established by the Karan-Weiss Foundation, Donna Karan, Gabrielle Karan, Corey Weiss, and Lisa Weiss.
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Interested in pasts that lead to other futures, and futures that come from other pasts. Zootechnician from La Salle University, Colombia. Specialist in University Teaching from the Military University Nueva Granada, Colombia. Master in Gender Studies - Women and Development Area, National University of Colombia and Doctor in Design and Creation from Caldas University, in Colombia, with highest honors thesis. Born in Bogota. He began teaching design in 1993 at the Jorge Tadeo Lozano University, in the Colombian capital, where he has consolidated his entire career and in which he serves as Professor in the area of Degree Project of the Industrial Design Program.
Interested in what fulfills the role of design within polycardinal traditions (coming from all directions, rather than non-Western) of human groups outside the Western world, and on approaches to design from wisdoms of the souths (in plural), theories of the south, decolonial thoughts, ontological designs, indigenous, pluriversal and autonomous "designs", declassification, feminisms and the intersection between the fields of archaeology and design. In his research he studies the accumulation of "practices" that he calls the DESSOBONS: (a word that condenses and overflows the ideas of the designs of the south, of the souths, others, with other names), those "practices" and "skills", he points out, for which in diverse human groups: "design is the other".
