Design as Future-Making

(Paperback)

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Description

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.

Reviews

In reading this book I thought that future-making is not building: it is weaving. Intertwining these essays, Susan Yelavich and Barbara Adams have been very skillful weavers. And, therefore, very effective future-makers. -- Ezio Manzini, Professor of Design at the Politecnico di Milano, Italy
A probing investigation of the design of design, this heroically optimistic book looks beyond mere things to their imbrication by the social, the political, and the ecological. Revealing layers of informality, resistance, and unpredictability in form-making, these essays whiz across borders in search of both the insubordination of objects and of the ways our relationships with them can make happy changes in the world we inhabit and invent together. -- Michael Sorkin, The City College of New York, USA
The future has never felt more uncertain, but Design as Future-Making truly captures the role that design can and will play in moving us forward. It is the right book for this moment. -- Fred Dust, IDEO, USA

Author Bio

Susan Yelavich is an associate professor and director of the MA Design Studies program in the School of Art and Design History and Theory at Parsons The New School for Design, USA. Barbara Adams is a PhD candidate in sociology at the New School for Social Research and teaches in several other divisions of the New School in New York City, including Parsons The New School for Design and Eugene Lang College The New School for Liberal Arts.