WuV!Burv. NEWPRAC ICE · 4illll TONYFRY 11 [ I) (l \\ � 11 l I ) SUSTAINABILITY, ETHICS AND NEW PRACTICE Tony Fry �BERG Oxford • New York EnAJish edition First published in 2009 by Berg Editorial oflices: First Floor, Angel Court, 81 St Clement.<> Street, Oxford OX4 lAW, UK 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY10010, USA © Tony Fry 2009 All rights reserved. 1o part of this publication may bereproduced in any form or by any means without the written permission of Berg. Berg is the imprint of Oxford International Publishers Ltd. Libraryof Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Fry, Tony. Design futuring : sustainability, ethics, and new practice I Tony Fry.-English ed. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-84788-218-9 (cloth )-ISBN 978-1-84788-217-2 (pbk.) 1. Design. I. Title. NK1510.F77 2008 745.2-dc22 2008035114 British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN 978 l. 84788 218 9 (Cloth) 978 1 84788 217 2 (Paper) Typeset by JS Typesetting Ltd, Porthcawl, .Mid Glamorgan Printed in the United Kingdom by Biddies Ltd, King's Lyon Contents Preface vii Introduction 1 Part l Rethinking the Context and Practice of Design 1 Understanding the Nature of Practice 21 2 Understanding the Directional Nature of Design 29 3 The Imperative and Redirection 41 4 Design as a Redirec tive Practice 53 5 Reviewing 1\vo Key Redirective Practices 71 6 Futuring, Rcdirective Practice, Development and Culture 91 Part li Strategic Design Thinking 7 Unpacking Futuring- The Self, Community, Culture and Ethics 109 8 Methods of Change 1 - Platforming, Return Briefs and New Teams 125 9 Methods of Change 2- Designing in Time 145 10 Futuring and Learning the New from the Past 157 � Designer as Redirective Practitioner- New Roles beyond Design 171 Part Ill Design, Sustainment and Futures 12 Futuring against Sustaining the Unsustainable 183 13 Sustainment and a New Epoch of Humanity 197 viii Preface One of the consequences of taking design seriously as a field of political action has been to evolve a practice that refuses to locate it in a single design discipline- this means, for instance, working across visual communication, industrial design, architecture and urban design. Another consequence has been to dispose such a hybridized practice to the service of the sustainment of viable futures before subordinating it to the requirements of clients. There is a third consequence: striving to broaden the scope of what actually becomes recognized as design means that who actually becomes recognized as a designer is itself extended. The perspective that I have adopted in the book is that there is �lnother position between claiming that: (1) aJI human beings arc designers (the ability to prefigure being defacto one of the characteristics that defines the nature of being human) and (2) some human beings develop their ability to design, make it elemental to their identity and in many cases earn their living so doing. What this intermediate position (3) acknowledges is that designing is an intrinsic component of numerous practices and/or a very wide range of practitioners: artists design, plumbers design, farmers design, foresters design, gardeners design, bricklayers design, structural engineers design- and so on. Now the point of this obsen•ation (besides serving the general objective of the entire book, which is to expand how design is understood and practised and what it is mobilized for and against) is to say that whenever an appeal is made to the reader as a designer, it is based on the notion of the reader as equally (1) the designer (the 'I' that calls itself a designer) and (2) anyone for whom design is, or becomes known as, an important intrinsic object of their practice conceptually or practically. Strategically, this appeal to a wider community of designer-readers is part of the larger ambition of the boolt- to have the importance of design understood by more thinl{ers, disciplines and practitioners. Currently, the various forms of design studies and research do not do a good job of demonstrating the ever-increasing importance of design as directive of the material artificial and denaturalized worlds we inhabit and their futures. The enormous power of design for good and bad has to be brought out of the shadows. Preface ix Having said a little about how the reader of this book can be understood, there is something to note about how the book has been structure d typographic­ ally to assist its reading. The main argument of the book appears in a serif book typeface; all materia.! that puts forward methodological suggestions is italicized in the same face; and all case studies are presented in a sans serif typeface. The aim in making these distinctions is to assist a continuous reading of the text, but with the reader always knowing what element of it they are reading. This book stands on much of what I have learned from my previous writing and from projects like the online journals Design Philosophy Papers and Design Philosophy Politics, which do not just attempt to lift the level of writing on design but also seek to invite writers from other interests into the field. Equally it points to further projects. It has benefited from the support and solidarity of colleagues and friends, not least Eli Blevis, John Calvelli, Drea Howenstein, Frances Whitehead, Keith Armstrong, Jim Gall and Jason Grant. The contribution in time, mind and spirit of my partner Anne-Marie Willis has been immeasurable. I also want to acknowledge my friend of many years, Franl< Lowe. Frank died while the book was being written. lie was a Chinese New Zealander, an architect and publisher who, remarkably, over the years encouraged me to write scores of articles for his print and web publications on whatever topic I chose. In his humottr, generosity and unstinting enthusiasm for his causes and mine, he was a chiin tzu (an exemplary person). Tony Fry Introduction Collectively, across all our differences, we human beings have reached a crit­ ical moment in our existence. It has always been recognized that individuals, communities, races and even nations can be fated or made to disappear but we are now at a point when it can no longer be assumed that we, en masse, have a future. If we do, it can only be by design against the still accelerating defuturing condition of unsustainability (which is the essence of any material condition of tmsustainability as it acts to take futures away from ourselves and other living species). We human beings unwittingly have created this condition through the consequences of our anthropocentric mode of worldly habitation, which has been amplified by the kinds of technologies we have created and our sheer numbers. Effectively, what we have done, as a result of the perspectival limitations of our human centredness, is to treat the planet simply as an infiniteresource at our disposal. When we were small in number and our technological means of appropri­ ating resources were very limited, the impacts of our actions were low. But now we are numbered in billions, have extractive and materials processing 2 Introduction technologies of absolutely enormous capacity coupled with an economy with an insatiable appetite, we are confronting our nemesis - a defuturing condition of unsustainability. For all the celebration of human intelligence, the culture of Western rationalism that came into global dominance totally failed to comprehend and respond to the innate and subsequently amplified propensity of human centredness toward being unsustainable. Even now, in our collective moment of criticality, a moment in which damage to the planet's climatic and ecological systems is still increasing and exposing life as we know it to growing dangers, our species' auto-destntctive mode of being is neither fundamentally recognized nor redirectively engaged. Myopically, the guiding forces of the status quo continue to sacrifice the future to sustain the excesses of the present. In the face of this situation, the possibility of another l{ind of future begs to be articulated, as does the way to bring it into being by design. 'l\vo immediate questions follow. How is the future being understood? And what is meant by design? The future is not presented here as an objective reality independent of our existence, but rather, and anthropocentrically, as what divides 'now' from our tlnitude.l In otl1cr words, we exist in the medium of time as finite beings (individually and as a species) in a finite world; how long we now exist- the event of our being- is determined by either an une.xpected cataclysmic event (like our planet being hit by a massive meteorite) or by our finding ways to curb our currently autodestntctive, world-destroying nature and conduct. Design, in tl1e first instance, has to be understood anthropologically. It names our ability to prefigure what we create before the act of creation, and as such, it defines one of the fundamental characteristics that mal1.eus human. As has been said by many people in many ways - 'we all design'. However, this innate capability became objectifi.ed and was turned into a consciously formed and mobilized practice to which technical and operational definitions have become applied (by 'the design community'). Generally, professional and quasi-academic definitions of design obstruct it being widely recognized as something of vital importance to each and every one of us. Such definitions of design are usually territorial, instrumentally narrow, extremely reductive,