Extending temporalities in design: designing pluriversal futures

This article addresses the challenges of designing pluriversal futures in complex and contested sociopolitical contexts by extending the temporal scope of design to address future imaginaries. Opening up spaces in which difficult colonial 'pasts' can be addressed alongside everyday narratives and memories of marginal voices also opens up possibilities for imagining and designing otherwise. We conducted a series of codesign interventions with a group of young Namibians who were struggling to find their voice in ongoing decolonial dialogues. The interventions experimented with multiple temporalities in which young people were able to use everyday narratives of Namibia's colonial pasts alongside their own future imaginaries to design pluriversal futures. The article presents our three participatory and interventional pathways to extend the temporal scope of design. We highlight the importance of collaboratively identifying interrelations between presents, pasts, and futures, and of creating collaborative sites in which to imagine pluriversal futures supported by participatory and design anthropology.