Defuturing

Defuturing: A New Design Philosophy bears true to its title. Its the confident announcement of a new approach to design by a fiercely independent and original design thinker. Nobody has grasped with greater clarity designs role in creating the structural logic of sustainability constitutive of todays 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 designs 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 *

Tony Fry is Principal of The Studio at the Edge of the World, Australia, Adjunct Professor at the University of Tasmania, Australia and Visiting Professor at Universidad de Ibagu, Colombia. Tony has held academic positions in Australia and internationally and is the author of fourteen books, including Design Futuring (2009); Design as Politics (2011), Becoming Human By Design (2012) and Remaking Cities (2017). His latest book is Unstaging War (2019).

List 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 techn 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