Running with Scissors, 13th EAD Conference University of Dundee, 10-12 April 2019 “Use what you have to secure what you have not”1. On Design for and from Autonomy. Paola Pierria a Universtity of the Arts London *p.pierri@lcc.arts.ac.uk Abstract: This paper proposes a modality for engaging communities through design that is for, and from, autonomy. I will start by situating my experience using design in the social sector and introducing the concept of Autonomous Design, as proposed by Arturo Escobar. I will then unpack the three beliefs that Escobar says are historically embedded in the mainstream practices of design, to critic them and propose alternatives. I will then move to interrogate, by reflecting on an example from my own practice, how design could change, ontologically, when we move from a needs-based approach to one that focuses on strengths in groups and communities. I will then conclude by proposing a way to frame the design work with groups and communities, inspired by the work of Escobar. Keywords: Autonomous Design, Design for Communities, Asset-based 1. Introduction Since I have started knowing a little about design, coming from my background of social and political studies, I was impressed by the work of authors like Nigel Whiteley (1993) or Victor Papanek (1985), from whom I learned about the long history of design social engagement (from the work of William Morris, to Walter Gropius and the Bauhaus School, through the Italian design radicals, and others). I was pleased to see there was a long tradition of design’s entanglement with society and the social struggles. But I have to admit that after few years of using design in different projects for social inclusion, I started a personal and intellectual journey from being a “design enthusiast”, to become a more critical designer, in the sense that Dunne and Raby originally intended: exploring how to use design to offer alternatives to how things are; to embrace a more positive and idealistic stance in order to challenge and change values, ideas and beliefs (2014). This period also corresponded to when I 1 This is a quote taken from a paper from Alison Mathie: “Does ABCD deliver on social justice?” from the Coady International Institute Copyright © 2019. The copyright of each paper in this conference proceedings is the property of the author(s). Permission is granted to reproduce copies of these works for purposes relevant to the above conference, provided that the author(s), source and copyright notice are included on each copy. For other uses please contact the author(s). Paola Pierri started becoming at times critical of the design practice itself, questioning its capacity to really deal with the task of the programmatic transformation of social realities. I started seeing a friction between the overly optimistic tone of prevalent discourses around the use of design in the public realm (Design Commission 2015 and 2013, Mulgan 2014, Bason 2014), on one hand, and the reality of my direct experience of using design collaboratively with different actors in social projects in the UK, where funding had been squeezed to the minimum in times of austerity, conflicts and divergent visions of social care were evident, and diverse political views polarised and clashed. The more I looked at the new ideas that design was promoting in the community sector, the more I struggled to see where the value of design in reality was. Mainly based on technical rationality; often invoking acts of disruption for the sake of disruption; permeated of solutionism, which rarely questioned the ways problems were portrayed in the first place, design was rather designing out problems and their complexity by telling a single story of change and innovation. Moreover these examples of design never elaborated a critic of the founding conditions of the status quo (Julier, 2013) and consequently, they were “politically inert” and lacked the “ability to galvanise action against structural unsustainability.” (Kiem, 2011). From this moment onwards, my practice became focused on making visible what was often left out from mainstream design discourses, which meant taking an explicit political stance that aimed at listening to the voices of dissent, exposing the conflicts in the system, and try to reveal the root causes of the social problems (Prado de O. Martins & Vieria de Oliveira, 2016). This is the background in which I situate this paper, and a summary of my journey through using design in the social sector, to imagine new ways of living and making the social. 2. Towards Autonomous Design If the conditions ever existed for constructing a design agenda from within the theoretico-political space of the social struggles of the day, that moment is today. (Escobar 2018, 15) Drawing on the ‘pensamiento autonómico’, as it was developed among social movements and indigenous struggles in Latin America, the Colombian anthropologist Arturo Escobar (2018) develops the concept of ‘autonomous design’, which is design for, and from, autonomy. This practice of design, the author claims, highlights a sort of ‘natural design’, which happens in local communities independently from external ‘expert’ knowledge. It starts from the recognition that communities have always practiced the design of themselves, without designers even noticing it, by investigating and making their own reality. (Escobar 2016) But autonomous design is not simply a design from within, that aims at building and maintaining the traditional cultural practices of groups and communities. It is design that designs the change from within (“changing the way we change”), which could then imply the defence of some traditional practice, the transformation of others and the re-invention of totally new ones (Escobar 2018, 172). As Escobar himself summarises: (..) in lieu of state-driven development based on imputed needs and market-based solutions, autonomía builds on ways of learning, healing, dwelling, producing, and so forth that are freer from heteronomous commands and regulation. This is crucial for design projects intended to strengthen autonomy. Thus, autonomía means 2 “Use what you have to secure what you have not.” On Design for and from Autonomy living, to the greatest extent possible, beyond the logic of the State and capital by relying on, and creating, nonliberal, non-State and noncapitalist forms of being, doing and knowing. (…) Autonomía is anticapitalist but not necessarily socialist. If anything, it can be described in terms of radical democracy, cultural selfdetermination, and self-rule. (Escobar 2018, 181) From the reading of Escobar and other scholars, I propose the foregrounding of three problematic beliefs, which are inherent in the design philosophical and historical tradition, and which emerge as at odds with new practices of autonomous design. These beliefs are the following and I am going to expand on each of them in a bit more details: • • • The belief on the individual, as the centre of the design process and practice The belief in ‘one world’ and the objectivist stance The economic tradition. 2.1 Beyond the Individual Embedded in the more traditional practices of design, although often left implicit, is the question of the ‘individual’, considered as the main focus of the design work, both as the agent and the recipient of it. In a previous paper (Pierri, 2017) I did extensively explore the question of authorship in design, and the emergent trends that start highlighting how design happens more and more in systems of distributed agency, power and expertise. I would now like to focus on the other side of the coin, and explore a bit more what this ‘belief in the individual’ does to design, from the perspective of its users. Some scholars from the UK (Blyth and Kimbell 2011) have argued that it is precisely its focus on the individual that has made design chime so well with the conservative ideology of the Tories’ Government and their agenda (which is promoting increased citizens’ participation but only as a way to cover for the cuts in the public expenditures and the dismantling of the Welfare State). These authors call for design to take seriously its ‘social’ dimension and this at least on three levels: • Problem formation: as what is deemed to be framed as ‘problem’ and what is not (why, for instance, unemployment is a problem while London bankers’ bonuses are not) is not a given, but rather the result of a process of social construction; • Sense-making: as by framing problems as socially constructed we posit them as collective sites where meanings are created and contested and where action is possible, together with others with whom we have things in common, being these identities’ traits, matters of concern or dream and ambitions; • Public VS Private: a more social (rather than individual) lens in design would help us developing a more nuanced understanding of the relations between the private and the public dimensions of the issues at stake, like for instance in the framing of domestic violence either as related to interpersonal issues within the family – which then stresses personal dynamics and responsibilities - or as a criminal activity, which is the way in which feminist activists have framed the problem, that is embedded in the way society is built and maintained. 3 Paola Pierri The singling out of the individual in design, whether or not originally done with this intention, end up neglecting the social ties and the fact that we are immersed in a web of relationships and responsibilities. This microscopic view on who are the users and the audience of design raises the risk to confine women and men, for whom we design, to a particularistic mode of self-understanding and that the possibility to interconnect individuals, by constructing or unveiling the common interests, concerns, hopes and desires, does not take place. A change of direction, in the current design tradition that mostly focuses on users as individual agents (and mostly as consumers), would open up interesting discussions within more autonomous design practices around questions of, for instance, what does good design mean within a more holistic approach that encompasses societies, nature, and future generations as well? How do we come to term with the differences, in ways beyond the simplistic exercise of the synthesis? How do we deal with conflict and competing interests, among this expanded audience of design? A social dimension in design ultimately brings to the fore questions of power and politics that have been neglected for too long in our user-focused design practice (Donetto et al, 2015) 2.2 Towards the ‘Pluriverse’ A recent but fast-growing phenomenon in design is the opening up of debates that demand to decolonise design discourses, which seem to reproduce colonial geographies of centre and periphery, exacerbating tensions within a binary understanding of categories like professionals and nonprofessionals, originators and receivers, disruption and incrementality, change and tradition. Bruce Nussbaum few years ago, from the columns of a popular design webzine, posed the question of whether or not humanitarian design was a new form of imperialism: "Are designers the new anthropologists or missionaries come to poke into village life, understand it and make it better - their modern way?' (Nussbaum, 2010). The article opened a fierce debate around key questions of who the generators are, what the underlying values and who are the beneficiaries in design innovation practices that deal with social issues, especially in non-western countries. These issues had been for long overlooked, as the hegemonic discourses around innovation and design were defined and assumed as a canon by the work of companies, like IDEO (IDEO, 2009), and thinkers like Tim Brown (Brown, 2009), which implicitly assumed a Silicon Valley inspired ideology of the future. Lucy Suchman, among others, has warned us toward the formation of this vanguard, which situates the Silicon Valley in a privileged spatiotemporal dimension, where the future is made that will subsequently be lived by others: “The future arrives sooner here” is the idea that materialises the concept of a ‘centre’ of innovation, in a world of ‘peripheries’ that are always lagging behind, in need of being brought up to date, a world in need of design (Suchman, 2011). Among these predominant discourses around design, Elizabeth Tunstall (2013) identifies three assumptive paradigms of the current design ontology of innovation: 1. Individual elites and companies are pictured as the ones who generate innovation; 2. Innovation promotes modernist values; 3. Innovation benefits individual companies and entrepreneurs. What is evident from this definition of innovation as a colonising practice is that, for instance, it leaves unquestioned a linear and progressive understanding of time, an epistemic hierarchy that sees objectivist values and methods at the top of it, and a specific ideology that privilege the market and the private interest over issues of sustainability, for instance, and social impact. 4 “Use what you have to secure what you have not.” On Design for and from Autonomy But the way discourses for decolonising design have been unfolding so far, has also attracted critics, which I believe are worth reflecting on to avoid the repetition of the same mistakes, dealing with symptoms and not addressing the root causes and entrenched behaviours: The first critique I have, of course, and this is a problem with the very nature of contemporary design practice, is in how designers see themselves, first and foremost, as problem solvers and therefore, of coloniality as a problem to be framed and solved, instead of as a condition of being modern that needs to be constantly negotiated with (…) .Trying to “solve” coloniality by producing a range of cultural artifacts without trying to change or at the very least, reimagine, the systems within which those artifacts are imagined, produced, distributed, and consumed, is like treating a severely ill person by merely alleviating their symptoms. (Ahmed Ansari 2017) 2.3 Design and Neoliberalism: a complicated relationship That design is historically situated within a specific knowledge system, mode of production and economic paradigm, should not take anyone by surprise as it was already in the 90s’ that Nigel Whitely raised his fierce accuse to consumerist design (Whitely 1993). He denounced designers’ responsibility in acting within consumeristic societies to produce, what he called, the want products rather than the need products. This kind of design, Whitely goes on, is part of a system, based on a specific political, economic and social ideology. Designers, in what Whitely calls ‘marketing-led design’ are for the most part white, middle-class and males, as the audience they design for. Much time has passed since the first critics were raised to the uncritical participation of design practices in the making and maintaining of the consumerist society, and since then many designers have developed a new consciousness of the ideology they work within. But the relationship between design and the neo-liberal economic paradigms, some scholars argue, still need unpacking as “design works within, and takes advantage, of neoliberalism’s structures, institutions and resources.” (Julier 2013), like for instance by shaping the business models that underpin most of the design industry and the design agencies ways of working. In an interesting paper from 2013, Guy Julier explores the deep relations that are at play between a neoliberal ideology and design culture, like for instance, among others: the sharing of common values and traits, as the extreme individualisation; the worship of entrepreneurialism; the quest for change and a future orientation that sees the future as a source of economic value. Most importantly, what Julier tells us is that neoliberalism is not new to misappropriate strategies and ways of doing even when these start at the edges, as counter-alternative practices to the neoliberal paradigm itself. Neoliberalism, in fact, is, as Julier says, “a process of change more than an endpoint”, like design. In this way, he warns us to embark cautiously in any attempts to design the alternatives to neoliberalism, because new practices and concepts, especially if they prove to be successful (like for instance the concept of resilience – which is key in my field-work as illustrated below – and also the practice of the Commons, or the sharing economy, and others) are all at risk of being defrauded from their original intentions. He suggests four tactics that could be put a play and explicitly used to counter balance the penetrating force of neoliberalism: 5 Paola Pierri Intensification – which describes here a density of designerly intervention; co-articulation – which describes the marrying up of concerns or practices in a way that strengthens both; temporality – which describes the way that speed, slowness, or even open-endedness may be dealt with; territorialization – which describes the scale through which responsibility is conceived. (Julier 2013, 227). 3. What could design learn from Ivan Illich? Ivan Illich is a philosopher born in Vienna, who spent most of his life travelling in South America. He was a fierce critic of Western ways of life and institutions, and wrote extensively in the fields of education, medicine, and development. The reasons for me to look at Illich and his work, as I explore the role of autonomous design in community development and social practices, are numerous. First, it is Escobar himself who refers to Illich work at various points in his book, as a critical voice of modernist values and a critic of the culture of expertise. Second, the thinking of Ivan Illich is the inspiration of the approach that underpinned my field work, as I will describe a bit more in a moment, and specifically his idea that we are living in “‘The Age of Disabling Professions’, an age when people had ‘problems’, experts had ‘solutions’ and scientists measured imponderables such as ‘abilities’ and ‘needs’.”. (Illich, 1977). Finally, in my personal formation his work has been at various points an invaluable source of inspiration and reflection, as a courageous and polemic author and a practitioner who made of his own life an example of his teaching and beliefs. So, what could design learn from Ivan Illich? I suggest that his work, like for Escobar, could be an inspiration for rethinking design for, and from, autonomy. More specifically, I see the work of Illich being relevant to designers to reflect critically about themselves as ‘professionals’ and the power they exercise when, for instance, they appropriate concepts like those of ‘problems’ and ‘needs’, and impose them on the people they work with, as a given: “When I learned to speak, problems existed only in mathematics or chess: solutions were saline or legal, and need was mainly used as a verb. The expressions, “I have a problem”, or, “I have a need”, both sounded silly. (…) As people become experts in the art of learning to need, learning to identify wants from experience becomes a rare competence. (…) To be ignorant or unconvinced of one’s own needs has become the unforgivable anti-social act.” (Illich 1977, 22:24) Illich’ work also speaks to design when he formulates his critic of the industrial society and the technical rationality, calling instead to reconstitute convivial modes of living, which are based on personal interdependence, where communities are allowed to design themselves by means and tools that are least controlled by others, and in which “technologies serve politically interrelated individuals, rather than managers” (Illich 73, 6). His reproach to be aware of the destructive effect of what he calls the ‘industrial tools’, that are out of the control of society, by becoming the monopoly of one profession, and that could instead be used to pursue individuals’ interest, also addresses loud 6 “Use what you have to secure what you have not.” On Design for and from Autonomy and clear the issues that are now becoming more prominent, for instance, in emerging practices of design for transition (Irwin et al 2015, Fry 2010): “Society can be destroyed when further growth of mass production renders the milieu hostile, when it extinguishes the free use of the natural abilities of society’s members, when it isolates people from each other (…), or when cancerous acceleration enforces social change at a rate that rules out legal, cultural, and political precedents as formal guidelines to present behaviour.” (Illich 1973, 5) 3.1 “Use what you have to secure what you have not” I have started my fieldwork working with the concept of ‘resilient communities’ in the UK, in November 2016. I was initially approached to do this work by a local mental health charity, which was funded by the local Council to run a three years’ long project to improve wellbeing and resilience within two local communities in southern England, which for different reasons where going through periods of intense transformation, by using an Asset Based Community Development approach (from now on ABCD). Originally inspired by Ivan Illich’ work, ABCD frames the role of professionals as ‘disabler’ that, in the language of the approach, de-activate people in communities by building the argument that they (the people in the community) are in need, and that them (the professionals) have the tools to ‘fix them’. The ABCD approach provides a theoretical framework which main characteristic is that, contrary to many social work and community approaches, it focuses on building on what is already strong rather than what is wrong in groups and communities and has a strong ethos around issues of social justice. As part of my design practice I aim at providing people in communities with design tools and techniques for them to use in making sense of their own contexts, priorities, dreams and wants. Together with colleagues I have in fact developed a series of training materials and resources to introduce design to non-trained-designers for them to use according to their own sensitivity, understanding and capacity. In the example I bring here, residents from the two local areas involved were included in the design team from the beginning, as they took part into a 1-day research methods’ training and did carry out design interviews and activities to explore and learn more about their neighbours’ motivation to act. These team of co-researchers was involved subsequently in all the design phases of our project. More than the design work in itself, though, my practice of giving design tools to non-designers is interested in addressing three aspects: challenging the assumptions about experts and non-experts’ knowledge; reclaiming tools for a different kind of knowledge production that happens in context and from the perspective of the people that will be affected by it; creating a sense of the ‘collective’ in groups and communities that comes from the shared understanding and knowledge production and that could ultimately motivate people to act. The team from the community organisation that was running the project used what they called ‘assets-mapping conversations’ to engage with residents in the community. By hanging out in the communities these members of staff just used convivial opportunities to approach residents and start conversations on all sorts of topics. Although following a natural flow, these conversations where mainly of two sorts: motivation-conversations and concern-conversations. So, conversations around motivations were usually trying to teas out people’s passions, focusing on the skills and gifts that people could see in themselves, their neighbours or in the community, and 7 Paola Pierri which they were open to share or interested to receive. These were things more common like language skills, baking or gardening, a space for a post-school event for children, but also learning more about the history of the community, or how to apply for funding from the local council, were all gifts that people mentioned as important to have and to share. Motivation based conversations then moved on to a second level, starting to probe people to share their dreams and visions, to encourage residents to imagine what a ‘self-determined’, rather than ‘service-determined’, community would look like. People who were asked to share their dreams for their community talked about a variety of things they would have liked to see happening: from outdoor cinema, to pop-up film nights, to toddler groups, to night games or music festivals. Many times, conversations also addressed residents’ concerns about scarcity of local resources, or practical issues like parking or lack of school support. These concern-based conversations, within the ABCD approach, are particularly significant, as they aim to open up and make visible a direct link from what does not work, to what could be done differently. By letting the community recognise its own strengths and resources, in fact, ABCD conversations construct the belief in people’s own capacity to act, which could inspire the confidence to start taking control over their communities and to bring about conversations about social justice (Mathie 2006). What I learned (and what I think design could learn) from working with resilient communities with an Asset based approach, is that by changing the narrative based on needs, with one based on assets and strengths, one can generate a ripple effect that influences our thinking about design in many ways (from who does the design, to what we design for, to what knowledge is valued in the process, to how long is the design process going to last, etc). As most design practices are rooted in (and perhaps justified by) the existence of needs, deficit, social problems, when we formulate explicit portrait of individuals, or communities, based on these language of needs, we become responsible of the damaging implications for the self-perception of those communities and individuals involved. “Use what you have to secure what you have not” (which also gives the title to this paper) is the inspirational principles that comes from Alison Mathie when she claims that the more the community can mobilise its own resources and build that sense of authority from within, the more it can do to attract investment from the outside, to leverage resources that are needed in order to claim the assets (and the rights) to which the community is entitled (2006). In the spirit of autonomous design and inspired by the work of Ivan Illich and the principles of ABCD, my role as a professional designer with the resilient communities was peripheral (with intention) to the core of the work that the community and the staff were doing, and receptive, as I allowed myself to be enriched by listening to the lived experience of the residents and the staff involved. I learned the importance to open up the design process and tools to new and diverse actors, and let them use the tools through their sensibility and the expertise they bring, allowing people to tinker with them, to bend them, or even to ignore them as they grew in their confidence about their natural design skills and resources, and started to use them in more convivial ways, when and if they wanted. I learned about exercising patience, as time was diluted, as much as this is possible within the constraint of a design project, to follow the pace of the busy life in the community and to not interfere by imposing the different pace of the design work. 8 “Use what you have to secure what you have not.” On Design for and from Autonomy 4. Design as social circles Arturo Escobar book is ultimately exploring the question of whether design could be “creatively reappropriated by subaltern communities in support of their struggles to strengthen their autonomy and perform life projects.” (Escobar 2018, xi). Although on one hand, he traces a practice of design for and from autonomy, where the conditions exist for change to happen from within; on the other, he does not put forward a clear blueprint by giving us the definitive answer and a model, but rather he raises more questions and doubts, as it always happens as a result of an honest intellectual wondering into complex matters. One that I found particularly sincere and provocative, is the question that he poses towards the end of his book which asks why to use the word design at all, to describe what he is doing in the Latin-American context? “Would it not make more sense – Escobar continues - to declare these communities “design-free” territories?”. I have been interrogating myself for long time with similar questions, and although still grappling with the use of design, its meanings and limitations, in the community development context, I think I have come to understand my practice as one that is peripheral, receptive, and respectful, as exemplified above, but that it is still an offer – a gift in the language of ABCD - that I could bring alongside others, that the community could or could not take. It is in this way, by doing design with attention and humbleness, that I have come to see the meaning of my practice not through what it produces (as the design outcomes and ideas that we brought to life in the project, briefly presented above), but through what it enables. Following the work of Andrea Botero on the concept of expanding the design space (Botero 2013) I have started framing my practice as being about the creation of a social assemblages – or perhaps social circles – where different actors are invited, time is made, voices and silences are respected, and everyone brings a gift that they feel like sharing with the others. Those social circles, made by design, could be the fertile ground for design seeds, as Botero called them, to be planted. As the author describes in her case studies, in fact, long-term engagement in collaborative design and making activities meant that ideas took shape and evolved outside of the formally acknowledged “design space” (like for instance, the space of a workshop) – and I would add, outside of the design ‘time’ - but within the communities, after the design project had ended and with the resources at hand. But social circles, like any other space of design, do not emerge by chance. They are a result of design, and as such are not neutral, but themselves shaped by many of the dynamics that are at play in design, as described above, and power dynamics as well. Drawing on the work of John Gaventa on power (2006), I conceptualise the design space as a first step, an “invited space”, which aims at widening participation, toward a space that is claimed or created anew: “Finally, there are the spaces which are claimed by less powerful actors from or against the power holders, or created more autonomously by them (..) these spaces are ‘organic spaces which emerge’ out of sets of common concerns or identifications (…).” (Gaventa 2006, 27) So as an attempt of coming to a close, as I started framing my practice as being one of design for, and from, autonomy, I developed some criteria to choose (when this is possible) on which projects I want to be involved, based on whether or not I can cultivate my practice as a version of autonomous 9 Paola Pierri design. I look at instances where design could be explicitly used as an approach to critic existing modes and roles within current system of social relationships, and where the design work could at least move towards more autonomous practices of design, which means: 1) to have a place-based dimension, 2) to foreground the social dimension of design (beyond the individual), 3) to challenge established points of view, by promoting a vision of multiple worlds that co-exist, and finally 4) to be aware of the struggles (and the inextricable contradictions) of doing the design work in communities that are part of a certain economic paradigm. Although I am not so naïve to not see the limitations of these attempts, and to think that these choices and practices could easily be done and easily moved into the mainstream design, I do nonetheless believe, together with others, that this is exactly what needs to happen. That we need, more and more, to think and practice ways of bringing these discourses from edges into the mainstream. For instance, by engaging practitioners outside of academia (and I do not mean only designers here) that work extensively in projects that might be recognised as projects of social design, design for social innovation and design in public services, to start discussing some of the values that I have illustrated before, and to reflect together on some of the dilemmas. While I am very aware that these attempts are not new and that they are fraught with risks and frustrations, I still consider it worth trying, at least as a way to become more aware, as designers, or our responsibilities, and the consequences of our actions. As Whiteley said (1993), when it comes to our design practices, we can no longer plead ignorance or innocence. 5. References Ansari, A. (2017). The Work of Design in the Age of Cultural Simulation, or, Decoloniality as Empty Signifier in Design. Post published on Medium and retried on January 2017 from https://medium.com/@aansari86/the-symbolic-is-just-a-symptom-of-the-real-or-decoloniality-asempty-signifier-in-design-60ba646d89e9 Bason, C. (2014). Design for policy. England: Gower. Blyth, S. and Kimbell, L., (2011). Design Thinking and the Big Society: From solving personal troubles to designing social problems An essay exploring what Design can offer those working on social problems and how it needs to change. Taylor Haig Botero, A, (2013). Expanding Design Space(s). Design in communal endeavour. Aalto University Publication series Design Commission, (2015). Designing Democracy: How designers are changing democratic spaces and processes. London, retrieved on November 2015 from http://www.policyconnect.org.uk/apdig/sites/site_apdig/files/report/497/fieldreportdownload/d esigningdemocracyinquiry.pdf Donetto, S., Pierri, P., Tsianakas, V. and Robert, G. (2015).‘Experience-based Co-design and Healthcare Improvement: Realizing Participatory Design in the Public Sector’. The Design Journal, 18(2), pp. 227–248. Dunne, A. and Raby, F. (2014) Speculative everything: design, fiction, and social dreaming. [S.l.]: MIT. Escobar, A. (2018). Design for the Pluriverse. Radical Interdependence, Autonomy, and the Making of the Worlds. Duke University Press Escobar, A. (draft) Notes on the Ontology of Design, Retrieved on December 2016 from http://sawyerseminar.ucdavis.edu/files/2012/12/ESCOBAR_Notes-on-the-Ontology-of-DesignParts-I-II-_-III.pdf on June 2016 Fry, T. (2010). Design as Politics, Oxford, Berg 10 “Use what you have to secure what you have not.” On Design for and from Autonomy Gaventa, J. (2006). Finding Space for Change: A Power Analysis. Institute of Development Studies Bulletin, Vol 37. n6 IDEO (2009). Design for social impact. The Rockefeller Foundation. Illich, I. (1973) Tools for Conviviality, London: Marion Boyars Publishers. Illich, I. (1977). Disabling professions. London: Marion Boyars Publishers. Irwin, T., Kossoff G. and Tonkinwise C. (2015). Transition Design Provocation, Design Philosophy Papers, 13:1, 3-11 Julier, G. (2013). ‘From Design Culture to Design Activism’. Design and Culture Design and Culture, 5(2), pp. 215–236. Kiem, M. (2013). Designing the Social, and the Politics of Social Innovation. Design Philosophy Papers, 9, 3, 207-216 Mathie, A. (2006). Does ABCD deliver on social justice?. Panel Discussion for the International Association of Community Development CIVICUS conference – Glasgow. Retrieved September 24, 2016, from https://coady.stfx.ca/wpcontent/uploads/pdfs/resources/publications/Does_ABCD_deliver_on_so cial_justice.pdf. Mulgan, G. (2014). Design in Public and Social Innovation. What works and what could work better. London: NESTA, retrieved on March 2014 from, https://www.nesta.org.uk/sites/default/files/design_in_public_and_social_innovation.pdf. Nussbaum, B. (2010), Is Humanitarian Design the New Imperialism? Does our desire to help do more harm than good?. on Fast Co-design, Retrieved on October 2017 from https://www.fastcodesign.com/1661859/is-humanitarian-design-the-new-imperialism Papanek, V. (1985), Design for Real World. Human Ecology and Social Change. Thames and Hudson Pierri, P. (2017), Decentralising Design. Raising the Question of Agency in Emerging Design Practice, The Design Journal, 20:sup1, S2951-S2959, DOI: 10.1080/14606925.2017.1352805 Prado de O. Martins, L. and Vieira de Oliveira, P.J.S. (2016). If Not Tomorrow, Then Today. Paradigms of Latin American Design, in van Helvert, M. (ed), The Responsible Object. A History of Design Ideology for the Future, Amsterdam Valiz. Suchman, L. (2011). ‘Anthropological relocations and the limits of design.’ Annual review of anthropology, 40, pp. 1–18. Tunstall, E. (2013) Decolonizing Design Innovation: Design Anthroplog, Critical Anthropology, and Indigenous Knowledge, in Design Anthropology by Gunn et al. Whiteley, N. (1993). Design for society. London: Reaktion Books. About the Authors: Paola Pierri has 15 years’ experience working across issues of social justice and inclusion, exploring the politics pf participation. She is a Lecturer at University of the Arts London, where she is undertaking a doctoral program on Design Anthropology. Acknowledgements: As all my work is collaborative I want to acknowledge and thank all the people whose contribution has made my research work possible. They know who they are. My research is supported by the Arts & Humanities Research Council, through the London Doctoral Design Centre (LDoC). 11