Reconstruction 10.3 (2010)


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Alastair Fuad-Luke's Design Activism: Beautiful Strangeness for a Sustainable World. London and Sterling, VA: Earthscan, 2009. 244 pp. ISBN 978-1-8440-7645-1 (pbk). £24.95/$48.95. Tables, graphs, drawings and color photographs. / Joana Ozorio de Almeida Meroz

<1> In Design Activism: Beautiful Strangeness for a Sustainable World, Alastair Fuad-Luke approaches the topic of design activism from the fresh perspective of the strained relationship between aesthetics and sustainability. His main thesis is that if design is to succeed in contributing to a more sustainable world, then its key mission is to develop a new idea of beauty, which the author calls ‘beautiful strangeness’, and which he believes can be achieved by creating design counter-narratives to oppose today’s dominant idea of beauty. However, rather than pursuing a theoretical examination of the triangular relationship between aesthetics, sustainability and design, the book’s stated purpose is to map out design’s vast sphere of influence in the world today in order to locate the arenas where designers can practically exert an influence towards creating a more sustainable world. To this end, Design Activism comprehensibly plots a nearly encyclopedic amount of information related to design and sustainability. The organization of the information is supported by exceptionally communicative graphs, charts, drawings and high-quality color images. As such, it is a fine successor to Fuad-Luke’s equally practically minded previous books, such as The Eco-Design Handbook (2004) and The Eco-Travel Handbook (2008).

<2> Design Activism consists of seven chapters, a preface and six appendices. To start off, Fuad-Luke argues that at the core of the sustainability problem is our notion of progress, controlled as it is by ‘the universal mantra of capitalism’ (xix). Thus, any sustainable development ‘which still sees economic growth as part of developing human progress, [does] little to avert recent negative environmental or social trends’ (xx). Therefore, addressing sustainability in fact means confronting society’s dominant notion of ‘progress’. This is where design activism comes in. Fuad-Luke has an unflinching faith in the ability of design to influence the course of our lives by transforming ‘newly materialized forms’ of technological advances into ‘culturally acceptable’ forms by manipulating their ‘symbolic, aesthetic and functional’ aspects (xix). In other words, Fuad-Luke understands design as a mediator, ‘domesticating’ new concepts and technologies brought about by economic and technological progress by giving them a form acceptable to society. While this agency has for the past 250 years been instrumentalized by the dominant capitalist paradigm, activist designers can also utilize it to influence the sustainability debate by giving shape to more sustainable ideas of progress and thereby making them culturally acceptable. This is what he means by ‘beautiful strangeness for a sustainable world’.

<3> Given that Fuad-Luke understands sustainability as fundamentally an economic problem created by ‘the globally shared notion of “capitalism” which has come to dominate economic and political thinking’ (p. 6), and design as an agent mediating all spheres of economic undertaking, in the first chapter we find a framework based on different notions of ‘capital’ for analyzing where design can exert an effect on the sustainability agenda. The ‘Five Capitals Framework’ encompasses natural, human, social, manufactured and financial – to which the author adds another three: man-made goods, cultural and symbolic capitals. If we accept that ‘design mediates, to some extent, the flow of all these capitals,’ then design activism can function more effectively if it understands ‘how the various capitals relate to each other, in particular how financial (economic) capital works across all the other forms of capital because money and other financial instruments are merely representations of other forms of wealth (capital)’ (pp. 9-10). Design activism can then interfere by affecting ‘the perception and quality stock of these capitals, especially those capitals that are socially orientated – social, cultural, human, institutional – around which societal and “political” change pivots’ (p. 6). While this is an original and comprehensive framework that allows Fuad-Luke to conjoin a variety of other systems for evaluating design and sustainability later on in the book, it is left somewhat dangling since in subsequent chapters the author does not utilize it much when discussing historical and contemporary examples of design activism.

<4> The second chapter offers a condensed historical survey of design in ‘activist mode’ from 1750 to 2000, and reflects on the circumstances that gave rise to different design movements as well as what caused their gloomy ends. These include the Arts Crafts Movement, Bauhaus, Pop Design, Italian Radical Design, Postmodernist ecologists, alternative designers and eco-efficiency activists. Although Fuad-Luke acknowledges research in this section remains cursory, his overview of key design activism movements and how they relate to each other nevertheless is a very useful reference resource, especially in conjunction with Appendix 1 ‘Key Design Movements and Groups, 1850-2000’. The author concludes that the reason design activism failed in the past is that, firstly, the target audience was designers themselves rather than the world at large, and secondly, that the good intentions of design activists were ultimately always incorporated or rendered powerless by the very market they sought to oppose.

<5> Chapter Three is dedicated to surveying the principal challenges facing designers today. It reviews well-known problems such as peak oil, decreasing land for food production, diminishing freshwater reserves, struggling ecosystems and endangered biodiversity, and synthesizes them into a coherent whole. Fuad-Luke is sensitive to the consideration that many of these issues are not absolute but must be understood in relation to specific modes of consumption and production that are in turn results of social issues such as poverty and migration. Thus, when looking at contemporary examples of design-led activist practice, Chapter Four makes a clear distinction between ‘under-consumers’ who ‘actually need to consumer more to elevate their very basic standard of living’ (p. 55) and the ‘remaining 20 percent of the world, the rich [who] are the profligate over-consumers’ (pp. 55-6), since each group poses different sets of challenges to the environment and therefore require a different set of design solutions. According to Fuad-Luke,

designers need to educate [the over-consumers] by raising awareness of the real impacts of the over-consumers directly and indirectly on the global commons and on the under-consumers. Designers need to invoke new ideas about how to live a better life with reduced consumption. In contrast, the under-consumers are often struggling to meet basic physiological requirements of life. Yet they too need education and design solutions to gain access to appropriate levels of consumption that improve their quality of life. (p. 78)

We also find in this chapter a thoughtful and useful model – unfortunately still rare in design discourse – on ‘the critical role of artifacts in design activism,’ which distinguishes between protest, demonstration, service, propositional and entrepreneurial artefacts (p. 85).

<6> Partially on the basis of these frameworks, the last three chapters consider how co-design can be a powerful strategy for design activism. While Chapter Five appraises different manifestations of co-design – such as metadesign, social design and slow design – and their impact on discussions regarding intellectual property, participatory culture and direct democracy, Chapter Six functions as something of a ‘how-to’ manual on getting started with your own co-design activism. Since co-design demands that the design be ‘finished’ by someone else besides the designer, such as the user or a co-worker, this means a greater participation in the creation of the design, not only in physical terms but also in terms of the attribution of meaning. Fuad-Luke concludes, ‘design needs to enjoin with active citizens to co-create and co-design the new “now,” the counter-narrative that points to a new directionality, towards sustaining that which genuinely sustains’ (p. 196).

<7> The least persuasive feature of the book is precisely this emphasis on the counter-narrative as a means for design to influence the sustainability scale, since, arguably, this has been the tactic unsuccessfully employed by all the design activism movements Fuad-Luke reviews in Chapter Two. The Italian Radical Design and Anti-Design movements that operated from the late 1960s to the early 1980s is a case in point. Emerging as a counter-narrative to both ‘the mass-market exploitation of pop design to sell yet more’ and to the modernist paradigm that pop design itself aimed to distance itself from, this coalition of Italian designers and architects ‘critiqued the rationalist approach and contested design’s role in consumerism’ (p. 42). And yet, while ‘There is no doubt that these Italian movements […] genuinely sought to improve relationships between objects, spaces, the built environment and human fulfillment,’ Fuad-Luke concedes that ‘Sadly, the genuine efforts of these proto-Postmodernists were easily subverted by commercial exploitation’ (p. 42). Thirty years down the line and amidst an age of rapidly advancing convergence ‘where old and new media collide, where grassroots and corporate media intersect, where the power of the media producer and the power of the media consumer interact in unpredictable ways’, (Jenkins, 2006: 2) there is reason to question, in my view, whether dichotomies between ‘resistance’ and ‘cooptation’, domination and counter-narrative still have purchase. Perhaps the vigor of practices such as co-design may precisely lie in the dismantling of definitive borders rather than in asserting a new limit, only to be trespassed by an inevitable successor.

<8> All in all, the book succeeds in its aim of charting the territory for design activism today given its extraordinary ability to synthesize a wealth of information regarding sustainability and design drawn from a vast assortment of methodologies. As we all know by now, in its attempt to shake us into action by informing us of all the perils we face, the sustainability debate always risks the opposite by making us numb by the sheer amount of data it hurls at us. Design Activism avoids this pitfall by focusing instead on frameworks with which to interpret information, even if at times it ‘struggles a bit under the weight of so many frameworks’, as Ann Thorpe points out in her review of the book. But if there is an over-abundance of data available in terms of sustainability in general, the opposite is the case when it comes to contemporary design activism. Nevertheless, Fuad-Luke ingeniously gathers a variety of examples from contemporary practice and theory from around the globe, the result of which is a focused snapshot of ‘design activism 2009’ and an invaluable blueprint for future research into design, activism and sustainability.

References
Jenkins, H. (2006) Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York and London: New York University Press.

Thorpe, A. (16 March 2010) Book review: Design Activism — Beautiful Strangeness for a Sustainable World. Online access: http://designactivism.net/archives/227.


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