Defuturing - (Radical Thinkers in Design) by Tony Fry (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

"Once one understands the nature and magnitude of defuturing as the negation of world futures, how one has to account for the history and making of the material world - including design - dramatically changes. Defuturing as our condition forces the generation of a new philosophy of design."

With these thoughts this book presents a radically new understanding of the history, context and futures of designing.

First published in 1999, now reissued with a new preface by the author, Defuturing: A New Design Philosophyis a prescient and powerful account of what it means to comprehend that we live in world that is taking away futures for ourselves and non-human others. Arguing that designing is doubly implicated in this process, first in its roles in helping to create the unsustainable, but second, re-thought through the lens of defuturing, as a mode of acting in the world that can help contest the negation of the world, Defuturingtransforms our comprehension of designing and of how futures can be constituted.

Working not through abstract theorizing but through the analysis of concrete examples, the book uses historical material on design to expose the archaeology of defuturing. Shattering the illusion that the future simply "is", Defuturingconfronts designing with the challenge of remaking while offering the elements of a new practical reasoning of design acting.

Review Quotes

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

About the Author

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 Ibagué, 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).