Socially-Engaged Design: From Care for the Environment to Pluriversal Politics

Regenerating environments damaged by extractivist economies has preoccupied Euro-American designers since industrialization. Despite international efforts to shift to environmental sustainability, the forestry and mining industries continue to erode the natural environment. This paper reflects on two design strategies that inform our practices in environmental remediation through socially-engaged design. We propose that the speculative tales of what it will mean to live with polluted landscapes in Toxicity Distributed (2023) by AHORA presents productive insights for environmental care. We compare Ahora’s strategy to the speculative socially-engaged  research in design across three projects by Brave New Alps; the identification of collective models of labour in Precarity Pilot (2014-2018), the studio’s interventions in social and environmental stewardship in La Foresta
(2017-ongoing) and the internationally scaled consortium Station for Transformation (2024-2027). We analyse these approaches to speculative socially-engaged design through María Puig de la Bellacasa’s matters of care and
Arturo Escobar’s pluriversal politics, broadening territories of design activism via creative interventions in eco-social degradation. We contend that engaging communities through more radical imaginaries increases the  diversity of localised environmental design and pluralises the possible worlds to come.