Design Futuring

Abstract

Sustainability is now a buzzword both among professionals and scholars. However, though climate change and resource depletion are now widely recognized by business as major challenges, and while new practices like ‘green design’ have emerged, efforts towards change remain weak and fragmented. Exposing these limitations, Design Futuring systematically presents ideas and methods for Design as an expanded ethical and professional practice. Design Futuring argues that responding to ethical, political, social and ecological concerns now requires a new type of practice that recognizes design’s importance in overcoming a world made unsustainable. Illustrated throughout with international case material, Design Futuring presents the author’s ground-breaking ideas in a coherent framework, focusing specifically on the ways in which concerns for ethics and sustainability can change the practice of Design for the twenty-first century. Design Futuring - a pathfinding text for the new era - extends far beyond Design courses and professional practice, and will also be invaluable to students and practitioners of Architecture, the Creative Arts, Business and Management.

Welcome to the anthropocene

“…In Tony Fry's book on design futuring global dysfunctions are viewed as symptoms of an underlying condition -the unsustainability of the current civilisational project [8]. Fry's purpose, therefore, is to identify, question and critique these deeper issues that, in his view, blind us to the nature of the world we've collectively created.…”

“…Very fortunately, the author places these challenges in the context of real world projects in which he has participated and these helpfully flesh out what he wants some of these notions to convey. He enumerates a number of redirective practices such as 'elimination design' (basically getting rid of the whole plethora of damaging and ill-designed materials and products -such as cheap umbrellas that break after a couple of uses) and what he calls 'the erasure of need' (exposing fabricated wants over promoted by marketing), functional substitution, product multipurposing, de-, and re-materialisation [9].…”

“…Overall, Fry wants to see the design professions re-configured in depth to tackle the range of systemic faults he has identified. In this future designers need to become thorough going cultural innovators who are willing and able to be 'independent agents outside conventional models of service provision' [10].…”

Second-hand interactions

“…We argue for the value of looking at invested reacquirers as potential experts in sustainable, ethical and meaningful consumption of and with technology. This perspective shares much in common with arguments for studying non-uses of technology [25], studying non-mainstream even marginalized communities for sustainability (e.g., [7]), and various challenges to values of ease and efficiency in technology design (e.g., [3,4,10,12,26,29,30]). discussed [2,8,10,16,18,30].…”

“…This perspective shares much in common with arguments for studying non-uses of technology [25], studying non-mainstream even marginalized communities for sustainability (e.g., [7]), and various challenges to values of ease and efficiency in technology design (e.g., [3,4,10,12,26,29,30]). discussed [2,8,10,16,18,30]. Attention has been drawn not only to the high rate of consumption of new goods but also the high rate at which still functioning goods are disposed of prematurely [2,8,16,18,29].…”