Abstract
In the era of the Anthropocene, where the climate crisis forces humankind to rethink its values and systems of production, sustainability literacy becomes crucial for any design practitioner. This paper aims to contribute to the extensive literature that regards meta-design as a reflexive practice for the study of design purposes, processes, methods, and outputs by outlining a meta-design framework to tackle the modern artificial environments in which humankind has become naturalized. Specifically, by inscribing modern “technologies” within Simondon’s concept of “technical object”, it delineates the preliminary guidelines of a research approach for design education that, drawing from Lemonnier’s chaîne opératoire and Leroi-Gourhan’s degrés du fait, applies locally situated ethnographic explorations with system analysis to the study of modern artifacts to stimulate self-reflexivity on “efficacy” biases in design thinking.
Keywords
meta-design, design literacy, material culture, anthropology of technology
DOI
https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2022.300
Citation
Sacchetti, N. (2022) Anatomy of a “technology”: Proposing a meta-design framework for sustainability literacy that addresses the issue of efficacy in modern socio-technical cultures, in Lockton, D., Lenzi, S., Hekkert, P., Oak, A., Sádaba, J., Lloyd, P. (eds.), DRS2022: Bilbao, 25 June - 3 July, Bilbao, Spain. https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2022.300
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Conference Track
Research Paper
Included in
Anatomy of a “technology”: Proposing a meta-design framework for sustainability literacy that addresses the issue of efficacy in modern socio-technical cultures
In the era of the Anthropocene, where the climate crisis forces humankind to rethink its values and systems of production, sustainability literacy becomes crucial for any design practitioner. This paper aims to contribute to the extensive literature that regards meta-design as a reflexive practice for the study of design purposes, processes, methods, and outputs by outlining a meta-design framework to tackle the modern artificial environments in which humankind has become naturalized. Specifically, by inscribing modern “technologies” within Simondon’s concept of “technical object”, it delineates the preliminary guidelines of a research approach for design education that, drawing from Lemonnier’s chaîne opératoire and Leroi-Gourhan’s degrés du fait, applies locally situated ethnographic explorations with system analysis to the study of modern artifacts to stimulate self-reflexivity on “efficacy” biases in design thinking.