On decolonizing design

AbstractDesign is regarded in the article as an ontological instrument that is able to transform the social and cultural reality, and model human experience, subjectivity and environment. I focus on the intersections between Tony Fry’s understanding of ontological design and the decolonial interpretation of modernity/coloniality as an overall design determining relation between the world, the things and the humans. The article attempts to draw a division between the positive (re-existent) and negative (defuturing) ontological designs. It addresses the coloniality of design that is control and disciplining of our perception and interpretation of the world, of other beings and things according to certain legitimized principles. The coloniality of design has accompanied the predominant modern universalist utopias such as Marxism or Liberalism and has been resisted internally and externally through various manifestations of border thinking and existence. I analyze Fry’s concept of defuturing in relation to th...