Becoming Resonant in Design

The latest developments in design theory especially in the areas of Participatory Design, Transition Design, Design for Social Innovation, and Pluriversal Designs call for designing that is localized, relational, and takes the sustainment and healing of the web of life as a matter of care. Yet, current expressions of design theory in practice expose missing threads between concepts and lived experience, particularly in nuanced understandings of ways-of-being as designers entangled in socioecological work. 

Situated in the desert city of Hermosillo, Mexico, this practice-based inquiry aims at weaving new threads between design practice and theory to cultivate attunement for specificities in our designing. This Global South context—located in the borderlands between Mexico and the USA—is undergoing a 150 year-long pursuit of modernity aimed at endless economic growth, competitiveness, and accumulation of capital. Powered by logics of extraction, design has reproduced the goals of modernity, resulting in the exclusion of women and plants from public spaces and detonating socioecological degradation. Attuning to the context of women and plants in Hermosillo, I refocus my design praxis to center women-plant relations and the setting of conditions for creative autonomy i.e., people’s capacities to change their own ways of living. To do so, I developed a methodological approach I call convivial making. Convivial making imbues logics of conviviality, embodied and affective reasoning, and time-space situatedness and rhythms. Using convivial making in Hermosillo, I incorporated embroidery practices, in which as women, we formed embroidery circles and occupied the public space with plants; we reflected narratively on our past and present relations with plants and the desert and contemplated our future relations with plants in the city. 

As a result, women-plant relations expose tensions in Hermosillo-Sonoran desert dynamics. Much of these tensions are consequences of the city’s pursuit of modernity. In contrast, amidst exclusion, women-plant relations bear seeds of resilient hope. Those seeds of resilient hope are experiences that may include hope, but also fear, rage, grief, solace, and healing. As such they manifest, and make as we go, non-exclusionary ways-of-being in the city and the territory. 

Therefore, I call for a new way-of-being as a designer, one that cultivates design sensibilities that attune and correspond with forms of worldmaking like the ones found in women-plant relations in Hermosillo. For this new way-of-being as a designer, I propose a design philosophy I characterize as resonant, as it involves a back-and-forth between intentionality and attentionality from the designer. In this resonant design philosophy I bring to the fore three design sensibilities: sensing conditions for healing and living; sensing relations for mutual dependability; and sensing situated materials for conviviality. Thus, the resonant design philosophy’s positions the design endeavor in a paradigm of caring for relations through designing for conditions of creative autonomy. As part of it, this resonant design philosophy invites designers to engage in caring for our designing.