Arturo Escobar and Oliver Vodeb: How Can We Reclaim Participation Again?
Oliver Vodeb and Colombian maverick anthropologist Arturo Escobar discuss the nature and politics of participatory design. They show urgent and hopeful potentials for true participation based on radical interdependence. How can we reclaim participation again?
Participatory design is often seen as a remedy for the world’s crises, as it aims to distribute power more equally. However, many of the challenges we face, including environmental degradation and power imbalances, are partly due to dominant, extractive design practices. While participatory design promises to democratize design and society, it struggles to fully realize its radical potential because it remains tied to neoliberal, managerial, and colonial projects and its radical hisory seems in current practice mostly forgotten.
We live in challenging yet hopeful times. The global extractive machine of neoliberal capitalism grinds relentlesly, while social movements like Black Lives Matter and food democracy offer encouraging resistance. These movements often reject design work that is not genuinely participatory. Radical parts of the design field recognize that design is integral to human existence, yet genuine participation is still rare in daily life.
Arturo Escobar’s ideas in the Designs for the Pluriverse book align in many ways with Memefest’s work, and this connection has inspired our dialogue at the “Other Ways of Participation” conference in 2020, hosted by Universidad Caldas in Manizales, Colombia. Despite the neoliberal destruction of universities, there remains a narrow space for critical dialogue, autonomous relations, and tactical networks. This opportunity resonated with Memefest's interests in autonomous, radical design education, and strategies for a non-extractive participatory design practice. This discussion highlights urgent questions about the politics of design knowledge and practice.
Read the whole discussion in Radical Intimacies, Designing Non-Extractive Relationalities, check it out here.
PODCAST CREDITS:
Hosted by: Oliver Vodeb/ Memefest
The podcast is a collaboration between Memefest and Intellect publishers.
Music: Thanks to Bait for their song Property Law.
Two best friends meeting seasonally in bucolic surrounds to generate improvised music. Property Law recognises the Indigenous peoples of the world's relationship to land. As in, "we don't own the land. The land owns us." Each of us is only passing through. Empires, Epochs come & go, but the spirit of the land persists.