1st Edition

Designing through Planetary Breakdown Locating Material Knowledge and Practical Skill

Edited By Jesse Adams Stein, Chantel Carr Copyright 2025
224 Pages 11 Color & 10 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

224 Pages 11 Color & 10 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

224 Pages 11 Color & 10 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

In an era of profound environmental and geopolitical uncertainty, Designing through Planetary Breakdown offers fresh perspectives on design’s evolving role in the face of planetary change. This unique collection emphasises practices and perspectives at the edges of conventional design, encompassing craft, material knowledge, repair, manual skills, creative practice and non-professional design,... Read more

Climate transition possibilities at design’s edges: Labour, skill, care and repair
Jesse Adams Stein and Chantel Carr

PART I – SKILLS and CAPACITIES at DESIGN’S EDGES

1. On weathering and “climate-readiness”: A strengths-based approach to adaptive practice in Western Sydney

Stephen Healy and Abby Mellick Lopes

2. Geographies of responsibility: Design and social sustainability in global supply chains

Elise Hodson

3. Craft skills as enablers of care

Susan Luckman

4. Repair-led learning for design education

Melisa Duque and Blanca Callén

5. Repair, save and reuse: Cuba during the Special Period

Ana Sofía López Guerrero & Marcos da Costa Braga

PART II – CARE and GENERATIVE PRACTICES

6. Bangawarra Ngeeyinee Bayaba: Speaking with Bangawarra

Shannon Foster and Jo Paterson Kinniburgh and Alexandra Crosby

7. Saving the loom: Tracing one machine’s 20-year journey from strategic government investment to small-scale craft volunteerism

Jesse Adams Stein

8. Care, disability and digital interfaces
Jacquie Lorber-Kasunic and Kate Sweetapple

9. Weaving with scraps: Skills, materials and innovation in Indonesia

Kestity A. Pringgoharjono and Alexandra Crosby

10. Brick by brick, shell by shell: (Bio)material practices for regeneration, repair and resilience

Kate Scardifield

11. Moisture, mud and monuments, or How to hold a cemetery together in torrential rain

Daniel Tranter-Santoso

Biography

Jesse Adams Stein is an interdisciplinary design researcher and historian specialising in the relationship between technology, work and material culture. She is a senior lecturer in the School of Design at the University of Technology Sydney. She recently completed an ARC DECRA Fellowship examining the connectivity between local manufacturing production, design education and vocational training in Australia, focusing on the 1980s to the present.

Chantel Carr is a human geographer and ARC DECRA Fellow in Geography and Sustainability at the University of Wollongong. Carr’s research examines the social and labour dimensions of decarbonisation and energy transitions across multiple spatial scales. Funded by the Australian Research Council and government partners, Carr’s research has examined energy transitions in the built environment, reskilling challenges for workers in carbon-intensive sectors, and household sustainability practices.

"This is an agenda-setting book that explores the many ways in which design labour is contributing to struggles for realising post-carbon futures. … Designing through Planetary Breakdown makes a major contribution to emerging discussion between design studies and design practice, the critical social sciences and environmental and climate studies."

Professor Damian White, Rhode Island School of Design (RISD)

"Designing through Planetary Breakdown is part of wave of literature on expanded design practice, not just theory, for transitions by design. This honest and practical book presents a series of design responses to planetary breakdown. With case studies of design for care, repair and resilience, the text presents the problems and possibilities that emerge at the margins as design develops new approaches for adaptation."

Dr Joanna Boehnert, Bath Spa University, author of Design, Ecology, Politics