Design as Future-Making

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.

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.

Acknowledgements Foreword, Arjun Appadurai, New York University, USA Introduction: Design as Future-Making, Susan Yelavich, Parsons The New School for Design, USA Section I. Crafting Capacities Introduction, Barbara Adams, The New School for Social Research, USA Thinking Differently about Life: Design, Biomedicine and "Negative Capability", Elio Caccavale, Glasgow School of Art, UK and Tom Shakespeare, University of East Anglia Medical School, UK Unmapping, Sean Donahue, Research-Centered Design, USA Fashion Hacking, Otto von Busch, Parsons The New School for Design, USA Digital Crafting and the Challenge to Material Practices, Mette Ramsgard Thomsen, Royal Academy of Fine Arts, School of Architecture, Design and Conservation, Denmark Petrified Curtains, Animate Architextiles, Susan Yelavich, Parsons The New School for Design, USA Section II. Shifting Geographies Introduction, Susan Yelavich, Parsons The New School for Design, USA Urban Ecologies: Quatre systèmes de conception pour la fabrication de "la Cité", William Morrish, Parsons The New School of Design, USA Architecture of Informality, Ivan Kucina, University of Belgrade, Serbia The Trans/Local Geography of Olympic Dissent: Activism, Design, Affect, Jilly Traganou, Parsons The New School for Design, USA and Grace Vetrocq Tuttle, communication design specialist, USA Garments as Agents of Change: Lucia Cuba, Hazel Clark, Parsons The New School for Design, USA Returning Duchamp's Urinal to the Bathroom? On the Reconnection of Artistic Experimentation, Social Responsibility and Institutional Transformation, Teddy Cruz, University of California, San Diego, USA Sze Tsung Leong and Susan Yelavich Interview, Sze Tsung Leong, artist, USA Section III. Up-ending Systems Introduction, Barbara Adams, The New School for Social Research, USA Designing Time, Anna Barbara, Polytechnic University of Milan, Italy Reasons to Be Cheerful, 1, 2, 3 . (Or Why the Artificial May Yet Save Us), Clive Dilnot, Parsons The New School for Design, USA Design Away, Cameron Tonkinwise, Carnegie Mellon University, USA Pace Layers, Bruce Sterling, author, journalist, editor and critic, USA Forms of Space and Time, Anna Barbara, Polytechnic University of Milan, Italy "When we understand that slide, we'll have won the war": Systemic Complexity and the Irregularities of Scale, Jamer Hunt, Parsons The New School, USA Afterword: Tim Marshall, The New School, USA Endnotes Bibliography Contributor Biographies