Design, Ecology, Politics

2018-02-08
Design, Ecology, Politics

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  • Author: Joanna Boehnert
  • Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
  • ISBN: 1472588630
  • Category : Design
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 225

Design, Ecology, Politics links social and ecological theory to design theory and practice, critiquing the ways in which the design industry perpetuates unsustainable development. Boehnert argues that when design does engage with issues of sustainability, this engagement remains shallow, due to the narrow basis of analysis in design education and theory. The situation is made more severe by design cultures which claim to be apolitical. Where design education fails to recognise the historical roots of unsustainable practice, it reproduces old errors. New ecologically informed design methods and tools hold promise only when incorporated into a larger project of political change. Design, Ecology, Politics describes how ecological literacy challenges many central assumptions in design theory and practice. By bringing design, ecology and socio-political theory together, Boehnert describes how power is constructed, reproduced and obfuscated by design in ways which often cause environmental harms. She uses case studies to illustrate how communication design functions to either conceal or reveal the ecological and social impacts of current modes of production. The transformative potential of design is dependent on deep-reaching analysis of the problems design attempts to address. Ecologically literate and critically engaged design is a practice primed to facilitate the creation of viable, sustainable and just futures. With this approach, designers can make sustainability not only possible, but attractive.

Design as Politics

2010-11-01
Design as Politics

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  • Author: Tony Fry
  • Publisher: Berg
  • ISBN: 1847887066
  • Category : Architecture
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 288

Design as Politics confronts the inadequacy of contemporary politics to deal with unsustainability. Current 'solutions' to unsustainability are analysed as utterly insufficient for dealing with the problems but, further than this, the book questions the very ability of democracy to deliver a sustainable future. Design as Politics argues that finding solutions to this problem, of which climate change is only one part, demands original and radical thinking. Rather than reverting to failed political ideologies, the book proposes a post-democratic politics. In this, Design occupies a major role, not as it is but as it could be if transformed into a powerful agent of change, a force to create and extend freedom. The book does no less than position Design as a vital form of political action.

Sustainable Design

2007-05-01
Sustainable Design

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  • Author: Daniel E. Williams
  • Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
  • ISBN: 0471709530
  • Category : Architecture
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 322

Meeting the Challenge of Sustainable Design "Daniel Williams's Sustainable Design is . . . a thoroughly practical call for the design professions to take the next steps toward transformation of the human prospect toward a future that is sustainable and sustaining of the best in human life lived in partnership not domination." --From the Foreword by David W. Orr, the Paul Sears Distinguished Professor of Environmental Studies and Politics and Chair of the Environmental Studies Program at Oberlin College "In this pioneering book, Daniel Williams provides the sort of intelligent, thoughtful, experienced insights that--if followed--will ensure that we make the right choices. It should be on the desk of every architect in the world." --Denis Hayes, president and CEO of the Bullitt Foundation and coordinator of the first Earth Day in 1970 Architects identify "sustainability" as the most important change in the future of their profession. Sustainable Design: Ecology, Architecture, and Planning is a practical, comprehensive guide to design and plan a built environment compatible with the region's economic, social, and ecological patterns. In this book, Daniel Williams challenges professionals to rethink architecture and to see their projects not as objects but as critical, connected pieces of the whole, essential to human health as well as to regional economy and ecology. Comprehensive in scope, Sustainable Design answers key questions such as: * How do I begin thinking and designing ecologically? * What is the difference between "green design" and "sustainable design"? * What are some examples of effective change I can make that will have the most impact for the least cost? Written for architects, planners, landscape architects, engineers, public officials, and change agent professionals, this important resource defines the issues of sustainable design, illustrates conceptual and case studies, and provides support for continued learning in this increasingly central focus of architects' and urban planners' work. Williams's book features winning projects from the first decade of the AIA's Committee on the Environment (COTE) Top Ten award program.

Earthly Politics

2004-03-19
Earthly Politics

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  • Author: Sheila Jasanoff
  • Publisher: MIT Press
  • ISBN: 9780262600590
  • Category : Political Science
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 372

Globalization today is as much a problem for international harmony as it is a necessary condition of living together on our planet. Increasing interconnectedness in ecology, economy, technology, and politics has brought nations and societies into even closer contact, creating acute demands for cooperation. Earthly Politics argues that in the coming decades global governance will have to accommodate differences even as it obliterates distance, and will have to respect many aspects of the local while developing institutions that transcend localism. This book analyzes a variety of environmental-governance approaches that balance the local and the global in order to encourage new, more flexible frameworks of global governance. On the theoretical level, it draws on insights from the field of science and technology studies to enrich our understanding of environmental-development politics. On the pragmatic level, it discusses the design of institutions and processes to address problems of environmental governance that increasingly refuse to remain within national boundaries. The cases in the book display the crucial relationship between knowledge and power—the links between the ways we understand environmental problems and the ways we manage them—and illustrate the different paths by which knowledge-power formations are arrived at, contested, defended, or set aside. By examining how local and global actors ranging from the World Bank to the Makah tribe in the Pacific Northwest respond to the contradictions of globalization, the authors identify some of the conditions for creating more effective engagement between the global and the local in environmental governance.

The Nature of Design

2004-10-14
The Nature of Design

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  • Author: David W. Orr
  • Publisher: Oxford University Press
  • ISBN: 0199883939
  • Category : Science
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 248

The environmental movement has often been accused of being overly negative--trying to stop "progress." The Nature of Design, on the other hand, is about starting things, specifically an ecological design revolution that changes how we provide food, shelter, energy, materials, and livelihood, and how we deal with waste. Ecological design is an emerging field that aims to recalibrate what humans do in the world according to how the world works as a biophysical system. Design in this sense is a large concept having to do as much with politics and ethics as with buildings and technology. The book begins by describing the scope of design, comparing it to the Enlightenment of the 18th century. Subsequent chapters describe barriers to a design revolution inherent in our misuse of language, the clockspeed of technological society, and shortsighted politics. Orr goes on to describe the critical role educational institutions might play in fostering design intelligence and what he calls "a higher order of heroism." Appropriately, the book ends on themes of charity, wilderness, and the rights of children. Astute yet broadly appealing, The Nature of Design combines theory, practicality, and a call to action.

Politics of Nature

2009-07-01
Politics of Nature

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  • Author: Bruno Latour
  • Publisher: Harvard University Press
  • ISBN: 0674039963
  • Category : Philosophy
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 320

A major work by one of the more innovative thinkers of our time, Politics of Nature does nothing less than establish the conceptual context for political ecology—transplanting the terms of ecology into more fertile philosophical soil than its proponents have thus far envisioned. Bruno Latour announces his project dramatically: “Political ecology has nothing whatsoever to do with nature, this jumble of Greek philosophy, French Cartesianism and American parks.” Nature, he asserts, far from being an obvious domain of reality, is a way of assembling political order without due process. Thus, his book proposes an end to the old dichotomy between nature and society—and the constitution, in its place, of a collective, a community incorporating humans and nonhumans and building on the experiences of the sciences as they are actually practiced. In a critique of the distinction between fact and value, Latour suggests a redescription of the type of political philosophy implicated in such a “commonsense” division—which here reveals itself as distinctly uncommonsensical and in fact fatal to democracy and to a healthy development of the sciences. Moving beyond the modernist institutions of “mononaturalism” and “multiculturalism,” Latour develops the idea of “multinaturalism,” a complex collectivity determined not by outside experts claiming absolute reason but by “diplomats” who are flexible and open to experimentation.

Design, Nature, and Revolution

2019
Design, Nature, and Revolution

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  • Author: Tomás Maldonado
  • Publisher:
  • ISBN: 9781517907006
  • Category : Architecture
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 160

A landmark text in design discourse for a world desperately in need of redesign--back in print What good is design? In a world facing social unrest, political tribalism, and impending ecological doom, Tomás Maldonado poses philosophical inquiries into the role design plays during a moment of crisis and analyzes what "design" might mean as an ever-enlarging compass beyond stylization of specific objects. He discusses how design is both influenced by and central to ecological crisis. Written as a kind of obituary to the Modern movement's wave of failed "concrete utopias," Maldonado combines philosophy, sociology, radical countercultural thought, and the ecological sciences into a polemic that recenters design in the human environment.

Design, Ecology, Politics

2018-02-08
Design, Ecology, Politics

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  • Author: Joanna Boehnert
  • Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
  • ISBN: 1472588622
  • Category : Design
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 224

Design, Ecology, Politics links social and ecological theory to design theory and practice, critiquing the ways in which the design industry perpetuates unsustainable development. Boehnert argues that when design does engage with issues of sustainability, this engagement remains shallow, due to the narrow basis of analysis in design education and theory. The situation is made more severe by design cultures which claim to be apolitical. Where design education fails to recognise the historical roots of unsustainable practice, it reproduces old errors. New ecologically informed design methods and tools hold promise only when incorporated into a larger project of political change. Design, Ecology, Politics describes how ecological literacy challenges many central assumptions in design theory and practice. By bringing design, ecology and socio-political theory together, Boehnert describes how power is constructed, reproduced and obfuscated by design in ways which often cause environmental harms. She uses case studies to illustrate how communication design functions to either conceal or reveal the ecological and social impacts of current modes of production. The transformative potential of design is dependent on deep-reaching analysis of the problems design attempts to address. Ecologically literate and critically engaged design is a practice primed to facilitate the creation of viable, sustainable and just futures. With this approach, designers can make sustainability not only possible, but attractive.

Victor Papanek: the Politics of Design

2018-10-04
Victor Papanek: the Politics of Design

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  • Author: Victor Papanek
  • Publisher: Vitra Design Museum
  • ISBN: 9783945852262
  • Category :
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 392

The designer, author and design activist Victor J. Papanek anticipated an understanding of design as a tool for political change and social good that is more relevant today than ever. He was one of the first designers in the mainstream arena to critically question design's social and ecological consequences, introducing a new set of ethical questions into the design field. Victor Papanek: The Politics of Design presents an encompassing overview of Papanek's oeuvre, at the heart of which stood his preoccupation with the socially marginalized and his commitment to the interests of areas then called the Third World, as well as his involvement in the fields of ecology, bionics, sustainability and anti-consumerism. Alongside essays and interviews discussing Papanek's relevance in his own era, this book also presents current perspectives on his enduring legacy and its influence on contemporary design theory. Original Papanek family photographs, art and design work, drawings, correspondence and countless materials from the Victor J. Papanek Foundation archive at the University of Applied Arts Vienna are reproduced here for the first time, alongside work by both Papanek's contemporaries and designers working today.

Political Ecology

2004-08-09
Political Ecology

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  • Author: Paul Robbins
  • Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
  • ISBN: 9781405102667
  • Category : Science
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 264

This text presents a critical survey of the burgeoning field of political ecology, an interdisciplinary area of research which connects politics and economy to problems of environmental control and ecological change. Provides the first full history of the development of political ecology over the last century. Considers the major challenges facing the field now and for the future. Written to be accessible to students at all levels and from different disciplines. Uses case examples to explore abstract, theoretical issues in a down-to-earth way. Features study boxes, introducing key figures in the development of the discipline and summarizing their key works. Details of the author’s own research experiences to offer a personal glimpse into political ecology research.