I Am Pleased To Have The Opportunity to respond to Josina Vink's rich paper on “Designing for Plurality in Democracy by Building Reflexivity.” Vink suggests that design has its roots in pragmatism and that by returning to them, design can improve itself by becoming more pluralistic and less colonizing in its effects. Focusing on health care systems in particular, Vink emphasizes reflexivity as crucial for the decolonizing of design. As Vink argues, reflexivity can help cultivate epistemic humility on the part of designers, acknowledge the important role of embodiment in design practices and outcomes, reject allegedly universal approaches to solving design problems, and recognize that the tools of design are not value-neutral.
Because of time constraints—and the wealth of insights and examples provided in Vink's paper—I will limit my response to two particular concepts that are important to Vink's analysis: (i) the uncommons, and (ii) ontological occupation. These...
