Download or read book Design Ecology Politics written by Joanna Boehnert and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2018-02-08 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Design Ecology Politics written by Joanna Boehnert and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2018-02-08 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Earthly Politics written by Sheila Jasanoff and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2004-03-19 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Design as Politics written by Tony Fry and published by Berg. This book was released on 2010-11-01 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Politics of Nature written by Bruno Latour and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009-07-01 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Victor Papanek the Politics of Design written by Victor Papanek and published by Vitra Design Museum. This book was released on 2018-10-04 with total page 392 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Wild by Design written by Laura J. Martin and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2022-05-17 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Laura J. Martin examines ecological restoration’s long history. Since the early 1900s, restorationists have confronted vexing philosophical questions: Which states of nature should be restored? Who should choose? Is human-designed wilderness really wild? Restoration work leads us to reimagine nature and the nature of environmental justice.
Download or read book After Nature written by Jedediah Purdy and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2015-09 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An Artforum Best Book of the Year A Legal Theory Bookworm Book of the Year Nature no longer exists apart from humanity. Henceforth, the world we will inhabit is the one we have made. Geologists have called this new planetary epoch the Anthropocene, the Age of Humans. The geological strata we are now creating record industrial emissions, industrial-scale crop pollens, and the disappearance of species driven to extinction. Climate change is planetary engineering without design. These facts of the Anthropocene are scientific, but its shape and meaning are questions for politics—a politics that does not yet exist. After Nature develops a politics for this post-natural world. “After Nature argues that we will deserve the future only because it will be the one we made. We will live, or die, by our mistakes.” —Christine Smallwood, Harper’s “Dazzling...Purdy hopes that climate change might spur yet another change in how we think about the natural world, but he insists that such a shift will be inescapably political... For a relatively slim volume, this book distills an incredible amount of scholarship—about Americans’ changing attitudes toward the natural world, and about how those attitudes might change in the future.” —Ross Andersen, The Atlantic
Download or read book Design Nature and Revolution written by Tomás Maldonado and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book The Social Design Reader written by Elizabeth Resnick and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2019-07-11 with total page 497 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Social Design Reader explores the ways in which design can be a catalyst for social change. Bringing together key texts of the last fifty years, editor Elizabeth Resnick traces the emergence of the notion of socially responsible design. This volume represents the authentic voices of the thinkers, writers and designers who are helping to build a 'canon' of informed literature which documents the development of the discipline. The Social Design Reader is divided into three parts. Section 1: Making a Stand includes an introduction to the term 'social design' and features papers which explore its historical underpinnings. Section 2: Creating the Future documents the emergence of social design as a concept, as a nascent field of study, and subsequently as a rapidly developing professional discipline, and Section 3: A Sea Change is made up of papers acknowledging social design as a firmly established practice. Contextualising section introductions are provided to aid readers in understanding the original source material, while summary boxes clearly articulate how each text fits with the larger milieu of social design theory, methods, and practice.
Download or read book Deliberative Environmental Politics written by Walter F. Baber and published by Mit Press. This book was released on 2005 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Linking theory and practice, this book explores the potential of deliberative democracy to produce more effective environmental policy.
Download or read book Building Access written by Aimi Hamraie and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2017-11-01 with total page 443 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “All too often,” wrote disabled architect Ronald Mace, “designers don’t take the needs of disabled and elderly people into account.” Building Access investigates twentieth-century strategies for designing the world with disability in mind. Commonly understood in terms of curb cuts, automatic doors, Braille signs, and flexible kitchens, Universal Design purported to create a built environment for everyone, not only the average citizen. But who counts as “everyone,” Aimi Hamraie asks, and how can designers know? Blending technoscience studies and design history with critical disability, race, and feminist theories, Building Access interrogates the historical, cultural, and theoretical contexts for these questions, offering a groundbreaking critical history of Universal Design. Hamraie reveals that the twentieth-century shift from “design for the average” to “design for all” took place through liberal political, economic, and scientific structures concerned with defining the disabled user and designing in its name. Tracing the co-evolution of accessible design for disabled veterans, a radical disability maker movement, disability rights law, and strategies for diversifying the architecture profession, Hamraie shows that Universal Design was not just an approach to creating new products or spaces, but also a sustained, understated activist movement challenging dominant understandings of disability in architecture, medicine, and society. Illustrated with a wealth of rare archival materials, Building Access brings together scientific, social, and political histories in what is not only the pioneering critical account of Universal Design but also a deep engagement with the politics of knowing, making, and belonging in twentieth-century United States.
Download or read book Conservation Is Our Government Now written by Paige West and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2006-05-31 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A significant contribution to political ecology, Conservation Is Our Government Now is an ethnographic examination of the history and social effects of conservation and development efforts in Papua New Guinea. Drawing on extensive fieldwork conducted over a period of seven years, Paige West focuses on the Crater Mountain Wildlife Management Area, the site of a biodiversity conservation project implemented between 1994 and 1999. She describes the interactions between those who ran the program—mostly ngo workers—and the Gimi people who live in the forests surrounding Crater Mountain. West shows that throughout the project there was a profound disconnect between the goals of the two groups. The ngo workers thought that they would encourage conservation and cultivate development by teaching Gimi to value biodiversity as an economic resource. The villagers expected that in exchange for the land, labor, food, and friendship they offered the conservation workers, they would receive benefits, such as medicine and technology. In the end, the divergent nature of each group’s expectations led to disappointment for both. West reveals how every aspect of the Crater Mountain Wildlife Management Area—including ideas of space, place, environment, and society—was socially produced, created by changing configurations of ideas, actions, and material relations not only in Papua New Guinea but also in other locations around the world. Complicating many of the assumptions about nature, culture, and development underlying contemporary conservation efforts, Conservation Is Our Government Now demonstrates the unique capacity of ethnography to illuminate the relationship between the global and the local, between transnational processes and individual lives.
Download or read book Urban Design Ecologies written by Brian McGrath and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2013-01-14 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Der Urban Design Ecologies Reader stellt Architekten und Stadtplanern wichtige Tools zum besseren Verständnis heutiger städtebaulicher Maßnahmen bereit. Essays führender Experten spannen den Bogen zwischen historischen Entwicklungen und innovativen Ansätzen zur Bewältigung der globalen Herausforderungen rasanter Urbanisierungsprozesse und des Klimawandels. Die neuesten Ansätze in den Bereichen Stadtentwicklung, darunter Kernkonzepte wie Stadtarchitektur, Architektur großer Metropolen (Stichwort "Großarchitektur"), Wucherung der Städte, Megastädte (oder die informelle Stadt) und Metastädte, die von digitalen Technologien und dem Ökologiegedanken getragen werden, werden im Detail erörtert.
Download or read book Urban Ecological Design written by Danilo Palazzo and published by Island Press. This book was released on 2012-06-22 with total page 325 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This trailblazing book outlines an interdisciplinary "process model" for urban design that has been developed and tested over time. Its goal is not to explain how to design a specific city precinct or public space, but to describe useful steps to approach the transformation of urban spaces. Urban Ecological Design illustrates the different stages in which the process is organized, using theories, techniques, images, and case studies. In essence, it presents a "how-to" method to transform the urban landscape that is thoroughly informed by theory and practice. The authors note that urban design is viewed as an interface between different disciplines. They describe the field as "peacefully overrun, invaded, and occupied" by city planners, architects, engineers, and landscape architects (with developers and politicians frequently joining in). They suggest that environmental concerns demand the consideration of ecology and sustainability issues in urban design. It is, after all, the urban designer who helps to orchestrate human relationships with other living organisms in the built environment. The overall objective of the book is to reinforce the role of the urban designer as an honest broker and promoter of design processes and as an active agent of social creativity in the production of the public realm.
Download or read book Comparative Environmental Politics written by Paul F. Steinberg and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2012 with total page 441 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Combining the theoretical tools of comparative politics with the substantive concerns of environmental policy, experts explore responses to environmental problems across nations and political systems.
Download or read book Design for Ecological Democracy written by Randolph T. Hester, Jr. and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2010-09-24 with total page 524 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shows how to combine the forces of ecological science and participatory democracy to design urban landscapes that enable us to act as communities, are resilient rather than imperiled, and touch our hearts. Over the last fifty years, the process of community building has been lost in the process of city building. City and suburban design divides us from others in our communities, destroys natural habitats, and fails to provide a joyful context for our lives. In Design for Ecological Democracy, Randolph Hester proposes a remedy for our urban anomie. He outlines new principles for urban design that will allow us to forge connections with our fellow citizens and our natural environment. He demonstrates these principles with abundantly illustrated examples—drawn from forty years of design and planning practice—showing how we can design cities that are ecologically resilient, that enhance community, and that give us pleasure. Hester argues that it is only by combining the powerful forces of ecology and democracy that the needed revolution in design will take place. Democracy bestows freedom; ecology creates responsible freedom by explaining our interconnectedness with all creatures. Hester's new design principles are founded on three fundamental issues that integrate democracy and ecology: enabling form, resilient form, and impelling form. Urban design must enable us to be communities rather than zoning-segregated enclaves and to function as informed democracies. A simple bench at a centrally located post office, for example, provides an opportunity for connection and shared experience. Cities must be ecologically resilient rather than ecologically imperiled, adaptable to the surrounding ecology rather than dependent on technological fixes. Resilient form turns increased urban density, for example, into an advantage. And cities should impel us by joy rather than compel us by fear; good cities enrich us rather than limit us. Design for Ecological Democracy is essential reading for designers, planners, environmentalists, community activists, and anyone else who wants to improve a local community.
