When asked which of the objects he designed was his favourite, Italian design maestro, Achille Castiglioni responded, “The object I’m proudest of? A switch for an electric lead I designed thirty years ago with my brother Pier Giacomo. It was produced in large numbers and bought for its formal qualities, but no one knows who made the design…”… Read more…

The diversity of ideas about what constitutes democracy should have impact on design and design studies because they suggest different, at times fundamentally different, courses of action … and bases for judgment and critique… Read more…

Just how progressive is the recent turn towards socially engaged design? A series of papers over two issues of Design Philosophy Papers is asking this question. And we want you to join the conversation… Read more…

It was the business end of an intensive course on design for sustainable futures. …. It was a balance between profitable destabilisation, and an utter breakdown in engagement with the task, the issues, and the thinking… Read more…

The sensibility of these ‘dissonant landscape’ photographs is indicative of a new seriousness, a willingness to confront the immensity of the unsustainble. This is a far cry from the naive optimism of the can-do, techno-fix mentality of institutional and corporate ’sustainability’… Read more…

As an exhibition title Sustain me: contemporary design has an alternative reading: the desperate cry of a practice searching for relevance amidst a crisis of its own making… Read more…

As phosphorus underpins global food security and mineral phosphate deposits are rapidly being depleted, diverting urine to agriculture makes good sense. Yet to capture, value, and reuse urine requires a transformation in how we think about sewage… Read more…

One of the problems with the ‘greener gadgets’ version of sustainable design is that the result is mostly still more stuff – hopefully less harmful stuff, but rarely just less stuff. Is it possible to use the practice of designing to eliminate stuff?… Read more…

Will people forget about fresh air, like pure water very soon? Will they buy fresh air as a product in a bottle… Read more…

So this is my chair at rest – it is relaxing at the moment. Time off, for a while, before it has to cope with the distribution of my weight – before it has to work as a delegated agent or actant (as Bruno Latour would put it) supporting me in a reclined position… Read more…