Design as Future-Making

Design as Future-Making brings together leading international designers, scholars, and critics to address ways in which design is shaping the future. The contributors share an understanding of design as a practice that, with its focus on innovation and newness, is a natural ally of futurity. Ultimately, the choices made by designers are understood here as choices about the kind of world we want to live in. Design as Future-Making locates design in a space of creative and critical reflection, examining the expanding nature of practice in fields such as biomedicine, sustainability, digital crafting, fashion, architecture, urbanism, and design activism. The authors contextualize design and its affects within issues of social justice, environmental health, political agency, education, and the right to pleasure and play. Collectively, they make the case that, as an integrated mode of thought and action, design is intrinsically social and deeply political. Design As Future-making Is A Collection Of Essays By An International Roster Of Leading Designers And Theorists Who Share A New Understanding Of Design As A Socio-material Practice Embedded Within A Multiplicity Of Ways Of Making The World. Issues Such As Social Justice, Environmental Health, Political Agency, Education, And Even The Right To Pleasure And Play, Are Customarily Thought Of As Dematerialised Ideas And Values. Yet, Each Of Those Realms Of Daily Life Are Affected By - Indeed, Determined By - Their Physical And Virtual Contexts. Design As Future-making Argues That Design Is Not Only Integral To Social Issues, But It Is Also An Integrated Mode Of Thought And Action - One That Variously Draws On And Informs Disciplines Such As Philosophy, Sociology, Anthropology, Political Science, And Psychology-- Section I. Crafting Capacities -- Introduction / Barbara Adams -- Thinking Differently About Life: Design, Biomedicine, And Negative Capability / Elio Caccavale And Tom Shakespeare -- Unmapping / Sean Donahue -- Fashion Hacking / Otto Von Busch -- Digital Crafting And The Challenge To Material Practices / Mette Ramsgard Thomsen -- Petrified Curtains, Animate Architextiles / Susan Yelavich -- Section Ii. Shifting Geographies -- Introduction / Susan Yelavich -- Urban Ecologies: Quatre Systèmes De Conception Pour La Fabrication De La Cite / William Morrish -- Architecture Of Informality / Ivan Kucina -- The Trans/local Geography Of Olympic Dissent: Activism, Design, Affect / Jilly Traganou And Grace Vetrocq Tuttle -- Garments As Agents Of Change: Lucia Cuba / Hazel Clark -- Returning Duchamp's Urinal To The Bathroom? On The Reconnection Of Artistic Experimentation, Social Responsibility And Institutional Transformation / Teddy Cruz -- Sze Tsung Leong And Susan Yelavich Interview -- Section Iii. Up-ending Systems -- Introduction / Barbara Adams -- Reasons To Be Cheerful, 1, 2, 3 ... (or Why The Artificial May Yet Save Us) / Clive Dilnot -- Design Away / Cameron Tonkinwise -- Pace Layers / Bruce Sterling -- Forms Of Space And Time / Anna Barbara -- When We Understand That Slide, We'll Have Won The War: Systemic Complexity And The Irregularities Of Scale / Jamer Hunt -- Afterword / Tim Marshall. Edited By Susan Yelavich And Barbara Adams. Includes Bibliographical References (page 250) And Index. Cover; Table of Contents; Acknowledgments; Foreword; Introduction; CRAFTING CAPACITIES; Thinking Differently about Life: Design, Biomedicine, and "Negative Capability"; Unmapping; Fashion Hacking; Digital Crafting and the Challenge to Material Practices; Petrified Curtains, Animate Architextiles; SHIFTING GEOGRAPHIES; Urban Ecologies: Quatre systèmes de conception pour la fabrication de "la Cité"; Architecture of Informality; The Trans/Local Geography of Olympic Dissent: Activism, Design, Affect; Garments as Agents of Change: Lucia Cuba