Challenging the dominant design paradigm that centres humanity in its
practice, Designing for Interdependence puts forward an ecocentric
mode of designing that privileges a harmonious relationship between all
life forms that share our planet. This book is about the practice of
designing and design's capacity to relate (or not) to beings of all
kinds, human and others, in ways that are life-affirming.
Sensitive to power differentials and the responsibility that this
entails, Martín Ávila develops the notion of alter-natives, a concept
that exposes the alterity of artificial things and the potential of
these things to participate in the sustainment of natural environments.
He proposes a design practice that encompasses humans, artificial things
and other-than-human species in a 'poetics of relating', and provides
methods that support the rewilding necessary for maintaining cultural
and biological diversity and the stabilization of planetary dynamics.
The book features real-life project case studies that illustrate some of
the political-ecological implications of an ecocentric paradigm, which
can help us to imagine alternative modes of relating to local
environments and alternative modes of inter-species cohabitation.
Avoiding dualistic thinking and the dichotomies harmful-benefit,
construction-destruction, natural-artificial and life-death, Ávila
pursues the work of caring for how our mattering through design can
become constructive in creating more-than-human ecologies.
