I have just read Jeremy Till’s Design after Design lecture and it is so inspiring.
Till discusses the ‘modern project’ using the principles of progress (“If the modern project is underpinned by the need to maintain progress on all fronts, then design is used as a messenger for that urge“), growth (“the modern project is only deemed credibly progressive on the back of markers of growth“), order (“The modern project was, and still is, a project of ordering and categorising, and with it a project of excluding and privileging“) and reason (“the application of rational thought to a given context in order to better it“) and how they are currently challenged by climate change. The modern project, he claims, does not respond to ethics. It will only address its own demise. Climate emergency also defies reason and the scientific method.
So, what about design then? “What we see,” says Till, “is a radical shift from design being attached and addicted to the production of the new, and into practices that pay attention to what comes before the object and what comes after it.” Design now “accommodates difference,” it is “a collective enterprise of sense-making,” it is “sensitive to systems of production, both material and human.”
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