[-empyre-] empyre Digest, Vol 118, Issue 1

[John Hopkins]

> In any case, I'm curious about the extent to which design
> practices/materials need to become uncertain, or even unrecognizable, to
> themselves in order to generate the design space that Adrian has in mind.

...snip...

> "slow design," and what that would look like. How would learning to design
> _with_ mess-- instead of  trying to fix it-- reconfigure the
> practices/materials that have stolen uncertain futures from us?

Howard and Elisabeth Odum's 2008 book "A Prosperous Way Down"* suggests one path 
-- that designing for collapse (where "collapse is just a period in which things 
are changing faster than usual”) is a viable way to go. Consider being stripped 
of 99.9% of your familiar materials and material infrastructure -- how to 
'design' then? How do 'design' survival?

I'd argue that there is little if any 'sustainable' design appearing on our 
neoliberal radars precisely because we are using radars to identify it! The 
interdependency is so pervasive that we are blissfully unaware of it. Odum's 
argument is that bio-system pulses (human population increase now being one 
example) are a common occurence and that the shape of the pulse is determined by 
energy availability. A design future therefore needs to take into account where 
a glut of hydrocarbon energy has placed us in that interdependent picture. Most 
of the design work I've observed (in the academies I've either taught at or 
visited in 30 countries) is definitely in the 'blissfully unaware' (of this) 
category.

I'd say the 'unrecognizable' issue might include 'forgotten' technologies; while 
the 'mess' will be trying to 'design' in the midst of a chaotically imploding 
system. Maybe teaching in an education system that is doing just that (at least 
in the US) gives a hint at how unsustainable the present is, but addressing the 
reality of such a situation is very difficult to comprehend.

Odum posits, in the reviewer's words, among many other salient points that:

"post-industrial information societies are not possible – no society can exist 
without basic energy, food and materials provisioning"

Where will design take place when this is the wider-scale condition?

jh

-- 


* -- a short review of the book - http://www.tabel.tcu.edu.tw/PWD1.html
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Dr. John Hopkins, BSc, MFA, PhD
grounded on a granite batholith
twitter: @neoscenes
http://tech-no-mad.net/blog/
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