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Author: John Wood
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 135194519X
Category : Design
Languages : en
Pages : 231
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Book Description
Everyone is already painfully aware of our predicament - ecological extinctions, dwindling fossil fuel reserves and economic chaos. The solutions are less obvious, despite the many opportunities that surround us. We have never had more access to resources, knowledge and technology but this is not the problem. What we lack most is creative thinking, fuelled by collective optimism. In a pragmatic world run by careerist experts this is hardly surprising. As voters and consumers we are trained to choose and complain, but not how to envisage what we really, really want. How can we design a better world unless we revive the art of dreaming? For without dreams we are lost. Perhaps it should be the duty of all citizens to imagine alternative futures; in effect, to think more like designers. After all, designers have always been dreamers, and have often found ways to realize their dreams. Design for Micro-Utopias does not advocate a single, monolithic Utopia. Rather, it invites readers to embrace a more pluralized and mercurial version of Thomas More's famous 1516 novel of the same name. It therefore encourages the proliferation of many 'micro-utopias' rather than one 'Utopia'. This requires a less negative, critical and rational approach. Referencing a wide range of philosophical thinking from Aristotle to the present day, western and eastern spiritual ideals, and scientific, biological and systems theory, John Wood offers remedies for our excessively individualistic, mechanistic and disconnected thinking, and asks whether a metadesign approach might bring about a new mode of governance. This is a daring idea. Ultimately, he reminds us that if we believe that we will never be able to design miracles we make it more likely that this is so. The first step is to turn the 'impossible' into the 'thinkable'.
Author: John Wood
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 135194519X
Category : Design
Languages : en
Pages : 231
Get Book Here
Book Description
Everyone is already painfully aware of our predicament - ecological extinctions, dwindling fossil fuel reserves and economic chaos. The solutions are less obvious, despite the many opportunities that surround us. We have never had more access to resources, knowledge and technology but this is not the problem. What we lack most is creative thinking, fuelled by collective optimism. In a pragmatic world run by careerist experts this is hardly surprising. As voters and consumers we are trained to choose and complain, but not how to envisage what we really, really want. How can we design a better world unless we revive the art of dreaming? For without dreams we are lost. Perhaps it should be the duty of all citizens to imagine alternative futures; in effect, to think more like designers. After all, designers have always been dreamers, and have often found ways to realize their dreams. Design for Micro-Utopias does not advocate a single, monolithic Utopia. Rather, it invites readers to embrace a more pluralized and mercurial version of Thomas More's famous 1516 novel of the same name. It therefore encourages the proliferation of many 'micro-utopias' rather than one 'Utopia'. This requires a less negative, critical and rational approach. Referencing a wide range of philosophical thinking from Aristotle to the present day, western and eastern spiritual ideals, and scientific, biological and systems theory, John Wood offers remedies for our excessively individualistic, mechanistic and disconnected thinking, and asks whether a metadesign approach might bring about a new mode of governance. This is a daring idea. Ultimately, he reminds us that if we believe that we will never be able to design miracles we make it more likely that this is so. The first step is to turn the 'impossible' into the 'thinkable'.
Author: Jonathan Chapman
Publisher: Earthscan
ISBN: 1849770964
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 177
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Book Description
Designers, Visionaries and Other Stories unpacks the complex and crucial debates surrounding sustainable design to deliver a compelling manifesto for change, at a time of looming ecological crisis, mounting environmental legislation and limited progress. This is a book about sustainable design, by the leading sustainable design thinkers, for creative practitioners, professionals, students and academics. This challenging work provides the reader with a rich resource of future visions, critical propositions, creative ideas and design strategies for working towards a sustainable tomorrow, today.The authors boldly present alternative understandings of sustainable design, to curate a challenging, sometimes uncomfortable and always provocative, collection of essays by some of the worlds leading sustainable design thinkers. The result is an impacting and polemical anthology that reinvigorates the culture of critique that, in previous years, has empowered design with the qualities of social, environmental and economic revolution.
Author: Anthony Dunne
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262019841
Category : Design
Languages : en
Pages : 235
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Book Description
How to use design as a tool to create not only things but ideas, to speculate about possible futures. Today designers often focus on making technology easy to use, sexy, and consumable. In Speculative Everything, Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby propose a kind of design that is used as a tool to create not only things but ideas. For them, design is a means of speculating about how things could be—to imagine possible futures. This is not the usual sort of predicting or forecasting, spotting trends and extrapolating; these kinds of predictions have been proven wrong, again and again. Instead, Dunne and Raby pose “what if” questions that are intended to open debate and discussion about the kind of future people want (and do not want). Speculative Everything offers a tour through an emerging cultural landscape of design ideas, ideals, and approaches. Dunne and Raby cite examples from their own design and teaching and from other projects from fine art, design, architecture, cinema, and photography. They also draw on futurology, political theory, the philosophy of technology, and literary fiction. They show us, for example, ideas for a solar kitchen restaurant; a flypaper robotic clock; a menstruation machine; a cloud-seeding truck; a phantom-limb sensation recorder; and devices for food foraging that use the tools of synthetic biology. Dunne and Raby contend that if we speculate more—about everything—reality will become more malleable. The ideas freed by speculative design increase the odds of achieving desirable futures.
Author: Wolfgang Jonas
Publisher: Birkhäuser
ISBN: 3035606536
Category : Design
Languages : en
Pages : 288
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Book Description
“Transformation design” is looking for new ways to change our behavior and society through new forms of innovation. The existing user-oriented approach of design must therefore be extended to one that is society-oriented. The concept of transformation is based on the anthropologist Karl Paul Polanyi and his book The Great Transformation (1944), which described the emergence of the now almost undisputed and globally widespread western market logic: the transformation of societies with markets into market societies, which he calls “dislodgment of the markets”. Meanwhile, leading think tanks are referring to Polanyi. They are calling for a new social contract and the “re-embedding” of the market into society. What are the possible instruments and contributions of design for this new “Great Transformation”? The variety of the above questions, answers, theories, methods, ideas, and projects suggests that “transformation design” is not in fact a discipline in itself, but that it will lead to a fruitful discourse. The book attempts to form an initial position in terms of this ambitious and ethical design perspective. It also seeks to inspire the international debate to push for a project of responsible design.
Author: Jennifer L. Allen
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674249143
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 369
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Book Description
To reclaim a sense of hope for the future, German activists in the late twentieth century engaged ordinary citizens in innovative projects that resisted alienation and disenfranchisement. By most accounts, the twentieth century was not kind to utopian thought. The violence of two world wars, Cold War anxieties, and a widespread sense of crisis after the 1973 global oil shock appeared to doom dreams of a better world. The eventual victory of capitalism and, seemingly, liberal democracy relieved some fears but exchanged them for complacency and cynicism. Not, however, in West Germany. Jennifer Allen showcases grassroots activism of the 1980s and 1990s that envisioned a radically different society based on community-centered politicsÑa society in which the democratization of culture and power ameliorated alienation and resisted the impotence of end-of-history narratives. BerlinÕs History Workshop liberated research from university confines by providing opportunities for ordinary people to write and debate the story of the nation. The Green Party made the politics of direct democracy central to its program. Artists changed the way people viewed and acted in public spaces by installing objects in unexpected environments, including the Stolpersteine: paving stones, embedded in residential sidewalks, bearing the names of Nazi victims. These activists went beyond just trafficking in ideas. They forged new infrastructures, spaces, and behaviors that gave everyday people real agency in their communities. Undergirding this activism was the environmentalist concept of sustainability, which demanded that any alternative to existing society be both enduring and adaptable. A rigorous but inspiring tale of hope in action, Sustainable Utopias makes the case that it is still worth believing in human creativity and the labor of citizenship.
Author: Alastair Fuad-Luke
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136568484
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 270
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Book Description
Design academics and practitioners are facing a multiplicity of challenges in a dynamic, complex, world moving faster than the current design paradigm, which is largely tied to the values and imperatives of commercial enterprise. Current education and practice need to evolve to ensure that the discipline of design meets sustainability drivers and equips students, teachers and professionals for the near-future. Design Activism reveals the power of design for positive social and environmental change, design with a central activist role in the sustainability challenge. Design activists seek to fu.
Author: Jonathan Chapman
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317435923
Category : Design
Languages : en
Pages : 701
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Book Description
As a cultivated form of invention, product design is a deeply human phenomenon that enables us to shape, modify and alter the world around us – for better or worse. The recent emergence of the sustainability imperative in product design compels us to recalibrate the parameters of good design in an unsustainable age. Written by designers, for designers, the Routledge Handbook of Sustainable Product Design presents the first systematic overview of the burgeoning field of sustainable product design. Brimming with intelligent viewpoints, critical propositions, practical examples and rich theoretical analyses, this book provides an essential point of reference for scholars and practitioners at the intersection of product design and sustainability. The book takes readers to the depth of our engagements with the designed world to advance the social and ecological purpose of product design as a critical twenty-first-century practice. Comprising 35 chapters across 6 thematic parts, the book’s contributors include the most significant international thinkers in this dynamic and evolving field.
Author: Iryna Kuksa
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317152433
Category : Design
Languages : en
Pages : 214
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Book Description
The principle of personalisation appears in a range of current debates among design professionals, healthcare providers and educationalists about the implications of new technologies and approaches to consumer sovereignty for 'mass' provision. The potential of new technologies implies systems of provision that offer bespoke support to their users, tailoring services and experiences to suit individual needs. The assumption that individual choice automatically increases wellbeing has underlain the re-design of public services. Ubiquitous personalisation in screen-based environments gives individuals the sense that their personality is reflected back at them. Advances in Artificial Intelligence mean our personal intelligent agents have begun to acquire personality. Given its prevalence, it is appropriate to identify the scope of this phenomenon that is altering our relationship to the 'non-human' world. This book presents taxonomy of personalisation, and its potential consequences for the design profession as well as its ethical and political dimensions through a collection of essays from a range of academic perspectives. The thought-provoking introduction, conclusion and nine chapters present a well-balanced mixture of in-depth literature review and practical examples to deepen our understanding of the consequences of personalisation for our professional and personal lives. Collectively, this book points towards the implications of personalisation for design-led social innovation. This will be valuable reading for professionals in the design industry and health provision, as well as students of product design, fashion and sociology.
Author: Keith Tester
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317002970
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 267
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Book Description
In the light of globalization's failure provide the universal panacea expected by some of its more enthusiastic proponents, and the current status of neo-liberalism in Europe, a search has begun for alternative visions of the future; alternatives to the free market and to rampant capitalism. Indeed, although these alternatives may not be conceived of in terms of being a 'perfect order', there does appear to be a trend towards 'utopian thinking', as people - including scholars and intellectuals - search for inspiration and visions of better futures. If, as this search continues, it transpires that politics has little to offer, then what might social theory have to contribute to the imagination of these futures? Does social theory matter at all? What resources can it offer this project of rethinking the future? Without being tied to any single political platform, Utopia: Social Theory and the Future explores some of these questions, offering a timely and sustained attempt to make social theory relevant through explorations of its resources and possibilities for utopian imaginations. It is often claimed that utopian thought has no legitimate place whatsoever in sociological thinking, yet utopianism has remained part and parcel of social theory for centuries. As such, in addition to considering the role of social theory in the imagination of alternative futures, this volume reflects on how social theory may assist us in understanding and appreciating utopia or utopianism as a special topic of interest, a special subject matter, a special analytical focus or a special normative dimension of sociological thinking. Bringing together the latest work from a leading team of social theorists, this volume will be of interest to sociologists, social and political theorists, anthropologists and philosophers.
Author: P John Williams
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 9811031061
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 323
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Book Description
This book addresses notions of critique in Design and Technology Education, facilitating a conceptual and practical understanding of critique, and enabling both a personal and pedagogical application to practice. Critique can be a frame of mind, and may be related to a technology, product, process or material. In a holistic sense, critique is an element of a person’s technological literacy, a fundamentally critical disposition brought to bear on all things technological. This book provides a reasoned conceptual framework within which to develop critique, and examples of applying the framework to Design and Technology Education. The book builds on The Future of Technology Education published by Springer as the first in the series Contemporary Issues in Technology Education. In the 21st century, an ‘age of knowledge’, students are called upon to access, analyse and evaluate constantly changing information to support personal and workplace decision making and on-going innovation. A critical Design and Technology Education has an important role to play, providing students with opportunities to integrate economic, environmental, social and technological worlds as they develop and refine their technological literacy. Through the design and development of technology, they collaborate, evaluate and critically apply information, developing cognitive and manipulative skills appropriate to the 21st century. Critique goes beyond review or analysis, addressing positive and negative technological development. This book discusses and applies this deeper perspective, identifying a clear role for critique in the context of Design and Technology Education.
