Dean’s Lecture Series: Arturo Escobar (Major Lecture & Reception)

In the face of deepening social and ecological crises, design is emerging as a vital domain of praxis that engages these crises by imagining and organizing alternative life worlds. This confers upon design/ing an ineluctable ontological-political dimension. This lecture outlines the constructive reorientation of design as a praxis meant to heal the web of life, and describes the early stages of application of what we are calling “autonomous transition design” in the Cauca River Valley in Southwest Colombia.