Beyond the Western canon

Needham (1956) described classical Chinese thought as “organic naturalism”. The world is a web of correlated processes, and things behave as they do because of their position in the whole, not because something outside pushes them. The Yijing (Book of Changes) sets this out as a grammar of transformation: sixty-four situations, each understood through its tendency to become another. Change, not substance, is the primary category.

Jullien’s (1995, 2004) comparative studies are the most useful bridge to practice. He contrasts a European model of efficacy (set a goal, build a plan, impose it) with one built around shi, the propensity held in a configuration. The skilled strategist reads a situation’s tendencies early and lets results come about by aligning with them. This sits close to Snowden’s advice to manage the evolutionary potential of the present rather than close the gap to an ideal future (Snowden & Rancati, 2021).

Wu wei is often mistranslated as “doing nothing”. Slingerland (2003) shows that it names skilled, unforced action: the expert’s responsiveness that no longer needs deliberate control. Ziran names the self-organisation of things when they are not over-managed. Together they amount to a theory of intervention in self-organising systems. Act lightly, early and with the system’s own dynamics, because heavy control produces the disorder it aims to prevent. Read carelessly, the same ideas can excuse doing nothing, or dress up manipulation as alignment.

The Buddhist doctrine of pratītyasamutpāda, dependent origination, holds that nothing exists independently. Every phenomenon arises in dependence on conditions, which are themselves conditioned. Macy (1991) made the most systematic comparison with Western systems thought. She argued that dependent origination describes mutual causality, the circular, reciprocal causation that cybernetics and general systems theory later formalised, and that early Buddhist texts treat it as the basis of both understanding and ethics. Hers is a sustained, text-based bridge rather than a loose analogy.

Huayan Buddhism, which developed in China from Indian Mahāyāna sources, offers the image of Indra’s net: an infinite net with a jewel at every node, each reflecting all the others (Cook, 1977). Its value is less as a model than as a reminder. In densely connected systems the local and the global are not separable levels.

Varela et al. (1991) brought Buddhist contemplative traditions into dialogue with cognitive science. They argued that cognition is enacted, brought forth through an organism’s interaction with its world, rather than a picture of a world given in advance. This is the most rigorous bridge of all. Complexity science says the observer is inside the system. Contemplative traditions offer trained methods for observing from there. The risk is that those methods get stripped of their ethics and sold back as a productivity technique.

Ubuntu is commonly glossed as “a person is a person through other persons”. It grounds identity in relationship. Menkiti (1984) argued that in many African traditions personhood is not given at birth but achieved through taking part in community. Metz (2007) developed ubuntu into a moral theory in which right action is action that honours communal relationships of identity and solidarity.

Ramose (1999) stressed that ubuntu is not a static communitarianism but a philosophy of process. His phrase is “be-ing becoming”: entities are never finished things but ongoing relational achievements. That is a process view of the social world, close to Stacey’s (2001) complex responsive processes, in which organisations and communities are patterns continually reproduced and changed in relating.

The implications are practical. Agency and leadership become distributed and relational, and the quality of relationships, not the design of structures, becomes the main place to intervene. Ubuntu also supplies an ethic for complex systems: if identity is relational, harm to the web is harm to the self. Its popularity carries a risk. It is easily romanticised, or reduced to a slogan on a corporate values poster.

Escobar (2018) draws on Latin American movements and on concepts such as buen vivir. He argues that conventional design assumes a single world, modern, market-based and universal, and in doing so reproduces the crises it sets out to solve. He proposes ontological design for a pluriverse, “a world where many worlds fit”. Every artefact and institution shapes ways of being, so design should support communities’ autonomy to design their own futures.

Escobar is the natural counterpart to Design Unbound. Both treat design as shaping conditions for emergence. Escobar asks a prior political question: emergence towards whose world? The difficulty is scale. An approach built on local autonomy is hard to roll out across a system without undoing the thing that made it work.