Introduction

Replacing questions of scale with concerns about distance, Ballestero’s talk asks how people make sense of their planetary condition by thinking geologically. She explores the role that movement — movement of an aquifer and movement as analytic — plays as people navigate the force-fields of their daily lives an already changed planet. Bringing together the work of geologists, local residents, and artists, Ballestero proposes choreographic thinking as a way of changing the terms of engagement in the midst of an increasingly authoritarian and populist planetary climate.

Andrea Ballestero is an anthropologist interested in political and legal anthropology, STS, and social studies of finance and economics. She is a faculty member in the Anthropology Department at USC. Her work looks at the unexpected ethical and technical entanglements through which experts understand water in Latin America. She is particularly interested in spaces where the law, economics and techno-science are so fused that they appear as one another. Her first book, A Future History of Water (2019) asks how the difference between a human right and a commodity is produced in regulatory and governance spaces that purport to be open to different forms of knowledge and promote flexibility and experimentation. She has worked with regulators, policy-makers, and NGOs in Costa Rica and Brazil where she traces how techno-legal devices embody moral distinctions, pose questions about the foundations of liberal capitalist societies, and help people inhabit non-linear and generative futures.

Today, many people are experiencing the uneven impacts of climate change, pandemics, wars, market crashes, biodiversity loss, and supply chain disruptions on a global scale. That a shared planetary future is, at best, uncertain is widely accepted. Governments, corporations, consultancies, and design firms are trying to tackle this uncertainty by envisioning various future scenarios and ways to get there. They are developing policies, strategies, and cutting-edge technologies to anticipate and prepare for potential future challenges while minimizing damage and maximizing profits. In response, a growing number of activists and intellectuals invest hope in design to foster political alternatives grounded in radically different ways of being and speculating on futures.

The conference Planetary Design: Reclaiming Futures brings together critical thinking and doing around the role of design in making, unmaking and remaking worlds. Starting from the intersection of design, infrastructure, and the planetary environment, it offers a generative platform open to artists, academics, and activists for rethinking design’s role in producing the present and for developing alternative planetary futures. Reflecting on how design makes worlds in the 21st century requires an interdisciplinary effort that addresses it as an intersectional, multi-faceted phenomenon. Design becomes not only an object of empirical study but also a conceptual lens that might open up new ways of articulating transdisciplinary critique.

A central goal of this conference is thus to open up a novel field: the planetary study of design. This aspiration motivates studying design as an expansive field of socio-material processes and place-based practices with planetary implications. The conference aims to delineate this field by focusing on how epistemological and ontological aspects of design inform our understandings of planetary change, environmental management, coloniality, governmentality, and the climate crisis but also democratic reconstruction. The insistence on ‘planetarity’ comes from a recognition that these are world-historical conditions, without overlooking the locally situated, contested, and contingent nature of their manifestations. Planetarity evokes the concepts of synchronicity, discontinuity, and friction.

Supporting historically, conceptually, and ethnographically rich inquiries, the conference hopes to develop a new conversation about design that spans diverse disciplines, geographies, and methodological orientations that straddle the poetic and the pragmatic, the critical and the constructive. Thus, this gathering is at once looking ahead while also reckoning with inherited and continuing injustices that still haunt collective planetary futures.