Arturo Escobar — Designs for the Pluriverse: Radical Interdependence, Autonomy, and the Making of Worlds (2018)
Escobar argues that design — in the broadest sense, the practice of making things and worlds — has been colonized by a single ontological frame: the Western modern dualism of subject/object, nature/culture, individual/society. This “one-world world” presupposes that there is only one reality and that Western modernity correctly describes it. Design within this frame is inherently universalizing — it imposes a single model of what a good life, a good city, or a good technology looks like.
Against this, Escobar advocates for ontological design: design that acknowledges that different communities inhabit genuinely different worlds, and works to strengthen those worlds on their own terms rather than integrating them into the universal modern framework. The pluriverse (from Zapatista cosmopolitics) names the project: not one world containing many cultures, but many worlds coexisting.
Key concepts:
- Transitional design: design practices oriented toward deep transformations in how we organize social and material life
- Relational ontology: worlds constituted by relations rather than substances; the political stakes of ontological choice
- Communal/territorial design: design rooted in specific communities and their autonomous projects
For OM: Escobar provides the political ontology behind “formalization without standardization.” Designing open protocols that respect ontological diversity requires precisely the autonomy and anti-universalism Escobar theorizes.