Part B
Under these circumstances, it is not enough for designers to be politically and chemically correct. “Organic”, “green”, “environmental”, and “sustainable” are buzzwords that have been applied in earnest to design – including food and fashion – over the last two decades, as have “ethical” and “aware”. Yet, despite these noble intentions, we are still, as individuals and communities, tracking a course of destruction through overconsumption and disregard for countless forms of life, including our own. Much design has been violent. (Antonelli, 2019)
1.1 Meeting point!
In this part of the book, we are going to look into design: how it is related to the socio-environmental-political crisis and how it can be part of a redirection of our individual or collective actions towards a more futuring culture. We shall start from analyzing briefly why design has been an ally of the aggressive hegemonic culture that we have studied in part A; then we will see some of the ways in which the alliance of design and sustainability has been unrolled in the last decades, by whom and following what visions; and finally we will see in more detail four design angles that can be analyzed and be part of a positive response to the crisis in politics of Nature.
1.2 Where does design fit?
Much design has been violent. How come? To initiate the arguments on this topic, one might find useful defining what design is - even though any attempt to do so seems forever insufficient.
Starting by borrowing the ample yet reasonable definition by Austrian designer Victor Papanek, design can be seen as “the conscious action to impose meaningful order”. Or, in other words, it’s about using creativity and technique to achieve a desired outcome (be the outcome well defined or not). This definition helps the analysis attempted in this work since it fits the many fashions in which design has been performed throughout history, crafting to industrial applications, to its contemporary multi-disciplinarity. This definition is also interesting because it is not centered in a legitimated figure (the design professional) and allows to include people that are not connected to the design field and even non-human beings in the activity (a bird is surely conscious that it is building a nest when it does so). This may seem silly at first, but, if we think about all we have studied so far in this book, around the issues of agency and power, it is an important step towards detaching design from the principles of hegemony. Furthermore, this notion of design, in its simplicity and non-attachment to a specific economic activity, allows interesting possibilities for the future.
The origins of design are debated: according to some it comes from the crafting activities enrolled by people since the first shaping of tools (about 2.5 million years ago); according to others, the vast majority, design was born with the Industrial Revolution (starting around the second half of the 18th century). The matter of what are the roots of design (crafting or optimizing products for producing and selling) is an interesting and necessary debate that will not, however, be performed in this book. It is enough for now to understand that most designers place the establishment of our profession along with the ascent of the industrial activities and the modern lifestyle, as, in fact, it became a recognized profession then.
Returning to the question highlighted in the title of this section, the answer is now (after many pages of theoretical delight since the first pages of this work), very simple. As a practice that became recognized and expanded alongside and in service of the rise of industrialization, it would be difficult for design to detach conceptually from these paradigms. Put simply and swiftly, all the negative and nature-depredating critiques that concern politics and economics apply also to the traditional applications of design.
1.3 The first critiques to the unsustainability of design
We can find deeper analysis of all of these statements in the words of Victor Papanek and Argentinian design philosopher Tomas Maldonado, known as the pioneering critics of industrial design in the 20th century. As Papanek (1972) famously wrote as the first lines of his Design for the Real World: “There are professions more harmful than industrial design, but only a very few of them” (p. 14). This impactful choice of words was unprecedented, as design had rarely, until then, been regarded as an extremely influential practice, let alone dangerous. He continues: