Juan Montalván Lume and Camila Guzmán Lúcar
In face of the planetary polycrisis challenging the continuity of current predominant human systems, the field of systemic design, which has been historically influenced by and based on modern and Western worldviews, has progressively opened up its gaze towards pluriversal modes of practice and relationality belonging to diverse cosmo-ontologies and geographies in search for alternatives to—and a plurality of—possible futures. In practice, however, such encounters between systemic designers and pluriversal populations might still find gaps and limitations in terms of the variety of methods and tools available for enacting relationality, transversality, and the balancing of power relations. In this article, possibilities for continuing this process of transculturalization within the discipline are explored in order to enable the formation of conceptual and practical bridges for fostering transversal collaborations between systemic designers and pluriversal populations with alternative or mixed modes of world-seeing-and-making. More specifically, this paper reflects on findings from ongoing research that engages with Latin American critical thinking as a means to consciously approach cultural hybridity in systemic design practices. Initial enquiries towards a theoretical and practical approach were drawn from long-term systemic entanglements in Peru, from which initial steps towards a Situated Systemic Design practice are explored in terms of its potential for co-creating agentic, rooted and enduring systemic interweavings.
Keywords: Relationalities, Pluriversal Design, Situated Systemic Design, Latin American Critical Thinking