Description
Book SynopsisOnce one understands the nature and magnitude of defuturing as the negation of world futures, how one has to account for the history and making of the material world including design - dramatically changes. Defuturing as our condition forces the generation of a new philosophy of design. With these thoughts this book presents a radically new understanding of the history, context and futures of designing. First published in 1999, now reissued with a new preface by the author,
Defuturing: A New Design Philosophy is a prescient and powerful account of what it means to comprehend that we live in world that is taking away futures for ourselves and non-human others. Arguing that designing is doubly implicated in this process, first in its roles in helping to create the unsustainable, but second, re-thought through the lens of defuturing, as a mode of acting in the world that can help contest the negation of the world,
Defuturing transforms our comprehension of designing and of
Trade ReviewDefuturing: A New Design Philosophy bears true to its title. It’s the confident announcement of a new approach to design by a fiercely independent and original design thinker. Nobody has grasped with greater clarity design’s role in creating the structural logic of sustainability constitutive of today’s world as Tony Fry. In these pages, the reader will find a most perceptive exploration of the profound historicity of design, from which there emerges a genuinely new way of looking at the world, one that goes well beyond the redeeming rhetoric of humanism and the nihilistic lucubrations of posthumanism. By conjuring up a critical new awareness of design’s powers of world making, Fry is able to craft the contours of a compelling redirective design practice and a novel lexicon for making otherwise. * Arturo Escobar, Emeritus Professor of Anthropology at the University of North Carolina, USA *
Table of ContentsList of images Tony Fry's
Defuturing: A new design philosophy by Clive Dilnot Preface to the 2020 edition Preface to the original edition INTRODUCTION An introductory lexicographical review Design Sustain-ability and unsustainability Defuturing Relationality Guided Reading
PART I: An opening 1. TECHNOLOGY, WARRING AND THE CRISIS OF HISTORY Technology in flux From structure and from
techné From war to warring The crisis of the crisis of history
PART II: History, modernity and defuturing 2. MADE IN AMERICA: A WORLD PRODUCTION America Then and now Productivism and a history of world making 3. DWELLING IN STREAMLINES AMERICA Streamlining Design The New York World's Fair Utopia: A designing idea 4. TOTAL DESIGN: EUROPE The Bauhaus, as told The Vkhutemas postscript
PART III: One point: Four locations 5. DESIGN AND THE BODY OF COMPETITION The body Bodies of the body The measure that measures the standards Openings as endings 6. TIME AND CHINA Time The years of 1926 China: Four perspectives 7. TELEVISUAL IN-HUMAN DESIGN The televisual Perspectives and horizons Ecology of the image 8. THE AUTONOMIC TECHNOCENTRICITY OF COMPUTERS The reason machine The force of design Reiterations towards making decisions CONCLUDING IMPRESSIONS Bibliography Index
