Article - Designing Beyond One World: Introducing Pluriversal Design

The problem with universal design

In design, “universal” has often been synonymous with “good.” Universal design claims to be inclusive, creating solutions that work for everyone. The problem with universal design is that believing we can target ‘everyone’ means operating with generalising assumptions that mean certain demographics are marginalised or ignored. We also see a homogenisation of the world in which cultural nuances are flattened or erased entirely. Furthermore, the lens of universal design concerns the worldview of just one person - the designer - and overlooks the contributions of the users involved.

A different approach: Pluriversal design

Pluriversal design directly opposes the universal. Pluriversal design begins with the premise that there are many worlds, many ways of being, and many systems of knowledge, all co-existing simultaneously. In acknowledging this, it becomes clear that no single worldview can hold all of the solutions.

Pluriversal design de-centres the designer as the ‘expert’, or the main source of ‘truth’, and instead re-frames the designer as ‘facilitator’ or ‘researcher’ of the needs and desires of the users in question. While universal design operates from an “idealist” point of view, pluriversal design situates itself within the reality of the specific design context (Leitão, 2020).

Universal design perpetuates “the mythology of the designer as genius” (Soulellis, 2017), while pluriversal design acknowledges the autonomy and contextual knowledge of the people it designs with.

Pluriversal design in practice

To see this in practice, let’s imagine a small, community-based organisation that requires a visual identity. Ideally, this organisation would like to have a dedicated, in-house designer working on their communication materials, but the reality is that creating this role is beyond the limits of the organisation’s budget. The visual identity will therefore by various, ‘non-designer’ members of the team. To undertake this project from a pluriversal perspective means acknowledging the technical abilities of the organisation’s team, and designing a visual identity that is accessible to them. In this example, the pluriversal designer prioritises inclusivity and ease of use, over complex visual systems or aesthetics that might demonstrate the ‘exceptionalism’ of the designer’s work.

Because the professional field of design emerged during the Industrial Revolution (Leitão, 2020), concepts of universality carry heavy legacies of capitalistic, heteropatriarchal and colonial thinking. Pluriversal design is a rejection of this.

Pluriversal design creates space for typically marginalised communities to create their own representations and platform their own needs, leading to meaningful and unique design outcomes that counter dominant cultural forces.

Bye Bye Binary (BBB) is a French-Belgian network of typographers who research and design post-binary fonts: i.e., fonts featuring bespoke glyphs and ligatures that transform the otherwise gendered words of the French language into gender-neutral alternatives. For example, the French words “Le” (masculine) and “La” (feminine) may be written with a unique glyph created from e+a, concealing the traditional gender and inventing a new form of French communication that is ‘beyond’ gender. The collective shares their fonts in an open source library, and has released gender-anarchist versions of well-known typefaces such as Baskerville and Open Sans. BBB challenges dominant norms by “introducing non-binary glyphs into the normative places where knowledge is disseminated”, as well as creating communication systems for French-speaking queer people to authentically represent themselves.

How can we learn from organisations such as BBB in order to disrupt traditional design modalities? Operating within a pluriversal design framework allows us to see the nuances that exist even in a seemingly universal system such as an alphabet, and the unique outcomes that people can create when they are platformed as part of the design process.

As designers interested in social impact, we should consider the ways in which we can shed off the universal thinking of our formal educations and wider industry, and instead move towards pluriversal design practices.

By embracing pluriversal design, our work will be more meaningful, more unique, and more impactful for the communities we work with.

Further reading:

• From Needs to Desire: Pluriversal Design as a Desire-Based Design by Renata M. Leitão, 2020.
• What is Queer Typography? by Paul Soulellis, 2017.
• Check out BBB Typotheque