1st Edition
Design for the Unthinkable World Strange Ecology and Unwelcome Change
This edited book contests that if design’s raison d'être is to make things better, then the object of design has always been, remains and can only be a changed world and our relationship to it – the world-for-us.
Each chapter was written by carefully selected researchers and practitioners who span geographical, disciplinary, and methodological boundaries in their work. Contributors skilfully examine the case that, while this once might have been seen to be a worthy objective (how else to effect a preferred state and/or pursue the project for the better world?), now the role of designing must cease to service design for change in the manner in which it has been doing. Chapters explore how designing itself might change to explore the possibilities that might exist for the design of what-might-not-become in an unthinkable-world; what Eugene Thacker calls a world-without-us. This world-without-us does not mean a world devoid of humans or an interstellar world, but a world we project that continues to revolve around the sun but no longer revolves around us.
This book will be of interest to scholars working in design research, design ecology, product design, service design, experience design, architecture, and information design.
Foreword Introductory Words 1. From Forests to Futures: Making and Mapping for Strange Ecologies 2. The Institute of Speculation: Radical Futures & Unthinkable Worlds 3. A Not Too Comfortable Future 4. Cautionary Tales: Speculative Design as Moral Fable 5. The Polygenetic Disorder 6. Not in My Backyard: Supply Chain Experimentation in Critical Design and Craft 7. Be-ing in Place on Unceded Land: Considerations for the Designer Practicing Design on Lands where Sovereignty has Never been Ceded 8. Weird Planet, Weirindg Design 9. Dark Objects: A Theology of the Unseen and the Everyday 10. Hyperobject Design 11. Feral Design
Biography
Craig Bremner is Professor of Design at Charles Sturt University, Australia.
Paul A. Rodgers is Professor of Design at the University of Strathclyde, Department of Design Manufacturing & Engineering Management, Scotland.
Giovanni Innella is Associate Professor of Design at VCUarts, Qatar.
