Abstract
After working several years with industrial design as a tool for the kind of radical systemic change, climate change arguably requires; it now seems timely to discuss the systemic obstacles that make such a shift so hard to implement. Much at odds with current discourse, the article defends current design disciplinary skills by focusing on the tension between what designers tend to do for sustaining the present system vs. what designers could do to support transition to a radically different system and why the latter is so hard to achieve but still so urgently required. With the overarching question – "what can design(ers) do?" – the article establish design disciplines as a distinct entity apart from design. Subsequently it gives an overview of how different disciplines have emerged as 'answers' to how societies, have developed and finally suggest a model for how to address climate change through disciplinary cooperation.
Keywords
refuturing, climate change, industrial design, development
DOI
https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2022.365
Citation
Edeholt, H., and Joseph, J. (2022) Design disciplines in the age of climate change: Systemic views on current and potential roles, 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.2022.365
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Conference Track
Research Paper
Included in
Design disciplines in the age of climate change: Systemic views on current and potential roles
After working several years with industrial design as a tool for the kind of radical systemic change, climate change arguably requires; it now seems timely to discuss the systemic obstacles that make such a shift so hard to implement. Much at odds with current discourse, the article defends current design disciplinary skills by focusing on the tension between what designers tend to do for sustaining the present system vs. what designers could do to support transition to a radically different system and why the latter is so hard to achieve but still so urgently required. With the overarching question – "what can design(ers) do?" – the article establish design disciplines as a distinct entity apart from design. Subsequently it gives an overview of how different disciplines have emerged as 'answers' to how societies, have developed and finally suggest a model for how to address climate change through disciplinary cooperation.