By Rashid Owoyele (February 13, 2025)

Linguistic Barriers to World-Making

Often when people hear about the work that I do, they react with a “yeah, but…” and that really really gets my neurospicy brain in an uproar. They might say something like, “but, you have to be pragmatic.” Or, “but democracy takes too long.” Maybe even just out right rejection, but in less abrasive words, “but, (insert normalized exploitation) is the best system we’ve got.” This is a wonderful example of how the life of words in the fabric of social consciousness can facilitate and/or hinder the process of transformational world-making.

Let’s take an example, for instance: when you read the word “Design.” What comes to mind? If you are a visual thinker you might see Eames Chairs, Le Corbusier buildings, a Dior dress, or a Rolex. If you are conditioned to think of the world through the lens of academia, you might think, “oh, what do you design? Buildings? Furniture? Fashion? Websites? Products?” What I think of as someone who took on a WHOLE LOT of debts to attend a private university and get a Terminal Art Degree, is the many ways in which humans create systems to mitigate our relationships to the world. What I imagine is a whole lot of agency: power and capabilities shaped through intention towards a specific aim.

What is Design/design?

I like to quote a former Lecturer and advisor for my master thesis (if not haphazardly paraphrase) Clive Dilnot. What I recall as a big take away from his thinking is that design and Design are different things, and there is quite a bit of nuance. Design with a capital “D” as he would say has a linguistic and practice-based construct of a variety of meanings and applications, and design with a lowercase “D” its own. The noun, the verb, the adjective. All of these have different uses, but the clearest concept which I recall him synthesizing about design is that, “it is a process of discovering how things ARE, and then implementing a process of deciding what OUGHT to be, and implementing interventions to make it so.” Now, I am sure that I made it longer and more complicated, but it is with the intention of attempting to capture an important system.

That system is one of the NOW, the FUTURE, and the Past-Future (or, OUTCOME — which arguably could be the Future-Past depending on which side of the thought exercise you reflect on the Design from). 

Disambiguation

What does all of this have to do with pragmatic and Pragmatism? Great, glad we are on the same page. So, Pragmatism, the American philosophy which approaches the “ought” part of the agency of Design/design through “evaluation(ing) theories or beliefs in terms of the success of their practical application.” (You may have heard of this guy named Dewey… he created this decimal system that all the knowledge management people seemed to love as they archived historical documents of humanity’s acumen. Or maybe you heard of the three guys named Richard… or that Hannah lady — the original Exiles of The New School in NYC) This is where my very expensive degrees come to have some value, albeit (so far) not the price tag which I was forced to accept. This formulation is significantly different from how the word pragmatic is used in less-formal language. The operative point of divergence and departure from the assumption that “pragmatic = realistic” is when “pragmatic = success.” 

What does it mean for how we make the world?

Let’s talk about success — what is implied by success? Well, that would heavily depend on the culturally situated concept of The Good which you carry. I capitalize these so that we do not get lost in a dichotomy; I do not mean to imply good and evil. Here, I mean more in the agape love sense: “the common good.” If you are socialized in a Western-Capitalist-“Democracy” you might have been taught to believe that a narrative of success is “winning.” The nature of this form of success is one situated in competition — in order to be successful, someone else has to lose (one or many someone elses). If your success is predicated on the defeat of another, is it really The Good?

Let’s suppose another framing of the game theory guiding global economic systems — what if the lens through which we recognized success was on Cooperative Game Theory? This is to say, “what if we defined success by degrees of collaboration instead of degrees of competition?” Let’s not get ahead of the rest of the class here — don’t name that economic system just yet. Let this thought experiment play out, please. 

What might be the metrics of success and the means of evaluating its outcomes? Well, for the competitive model we often use GDP (Gross Domestic Product), right? What say you if for the cooperative game model we take GIR (Gross International Relationships): a system in which the volume of flow across and around the system is what defines success. This feedback loop would embody a positive evaluation of the agent actor who most freely and frequently exchanged value with other agent actors. 

Closing Statement and Call to Action

The shift might feel small or incomprehensible, but I will try to flesh it out a bit here. In the system where GDP is the goal the extraction of goods is how we observe that success has occurred. When we compare that to GIR we see that the EXCHANGE of goods with the GREATEST number of entities is how we identify success. In the first example the production is linear from one place to another. In the second, there is a reciprocal nature in the metric which implies give and take, a full feedback loop. A proper closed loop system. Before I get prioritized on some watchlist, I am going to stop my analysis short — but maybe you see the opportunity here. If not, maybe look into Donna Haraway’s work on Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective. Let’s say for now that “being realistic” isn’t really unleashing creativity in industry, and from my view — the design of the institutions in which industry legitimates Design could more humbly adopt a greater scope of possibility if we are ever going to resolve SDGs or prevent catastrophic climate disaster. 

Feel free to engage us in dialog! Happy to learn in exchange with others and further our ideas!