Many Worlds Meeting
The original thesis set out to study a small group of globally mobile designers in a transnational design community in Bali, Indonesia, to highlight co-existing perspectives in the decolonising debate by examining how geo-political historicity permeates throughout epistemologies and ontologies and manifests through creative practices such as design. This practice-led research project is based on my working life and transcultural experiences as a nomadic subject (Braidotti, 1994). As a design practitioner living and working in Bali, I recognised patterns in the expressions of the community of designers, whom I have named Designer Beyonders for the pragmatic reasons of selection and to draw upon the creativity research of Paul Torrance (1993) from the adjacent field of psychology. This study's Designer Beyonders demonstrated significant sensibilities that have implications for decolonising design epistemologies and practices.
Sustainable futures can emerge through these global conversations, living stories, ecologies, and genealogies.
Embracing difference
Embracing difference is both intercultural and inter-epistemic as it translates as being sensitive to culture, it requires the trust of (and with) others and represents practices of bringing together. As a regenerative and decolonising designer, I work with the possibility of restoring value in living through the strengthening of social bonds through design. This direction insists on moving beyond consumer culture in favour of that which places an environmental and social responsibility directly into design work such as that of qualitative relations that redirect design practice towards presence, shared livelihoods, and creating cultures of repair. A relationality paradigm is a system that is mutually co-creative, dialogical, and intersubjective.
Engaging wonder
As a designer and researcher, this concept can best be understood as an attitude and method to face the world that places significance on stepping back and letting things speak to us, a radical passive receptivity that receives the ways humans and more-than-humans present in their own terms. It is a way of working with life as a connective aesthetic and social learning praxis; language, things, people, and experiences that act as instruments of awareness and change. Through wonder, there is potential for a change in worldview making oneself sensitive to alterity and to Others, feeling- thinking with Others, A mental evolution, that eludes polarity, through material participation that opens and expands understanding of both the social and natural world.
Enhancing integration
Integration affects the way we relate and connect; it is a taxonomy of language, thoughts, and actions that have a purpose for wholeness, liberation, and justice. How do I enhance integration as a designer? This translates to an integration [rather than the separation] of social, material, and psychological elements of our living experiences. It means that our encounters 'with' difference are not something merely tolerated but seen as part of necessary polarities and inter-epistemic movements through which creativity can spark and perspectives can be bridged. Understood in this way, designing becomes a mode of reciprocal empathy and a metaphor for relationships of repair through active participation as global citizens with spiritual intelligence that are relational, emotional, intuitive, and experiential.
The twelve thematic networks represent an emerging cosmology and worldview born of fieldwork, collective sensibilities and living experiences of transnational practitioners, contributing to a recentring of the design knowledge enterprise.
Nomadic [inter]subjectivity within my research extends Rosi Braidotti's [1994] nomadic theory by understanding knowledge ecologies through a generative lens; both the circulation of knowledge and an ecological perspective negotiated alongside others. It is a critical metaphor for design that can embed new patterns of interculturality into design philosophy and practice. Some of the key concepts from Many Worlds Meeting can be understood through the practices of the Designer Beyonders of my study [examples in the diagram] such as beekeepers, fermenters, plastic eradicators, indigo growers, designers of waste management, beach cleaners, clay players, body mappers, game makers, anti-trend writers, and heritage preservers.
