Defuturing: A New Design Philosophy
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Overview
“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 Philosophy is 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, Defuturing transforms 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”, Defuturing confronts designing with the challenge of remaking while offering the elements of a new practical reasoning of design acting.
A new edition of Tony Fry’s foundational work of design philosophy, in which he introduces the idea of ’defuturing’, a deconstructive method to expose fundamental flaws in the designed world around us.
New edition of a previously unavailable yet foundational work by a leading design philosopher.
The areas of design thinking that Fry addresses - design futures, sustainability, critical and speculative design - are becoming increasinly popular at undergraduate and graduate level.
Wide geographical and historical range of case studies addressed - including the US, Germany, Russia and China.
New edition includes a substantial new Preface by the author.
List of images
Tony Fry’s Defuturing: A new design philosophy by Clive Dilnot
Preface to the 2020 edition
Preface to the original edition
INTRODUCTION
An introductory lexicographical review
Design
Sustain-ability and unsustainability
Defuturing
Relationality
Guided Reading
PART I: An opening
1. TECHNOLOGY, WARRING AND THE CRISIS OF HISTORY
Technology in flux
From structure and from techné
From war to warring
The crisis of the crisis of history
PART II: History, modernity and defuturing
2. MADE IN AMERICA: A WORLD PRODUCTION
America
Then and now
Productivism and a history of world making
3. DWELLING IN STREAMLINES AMERICA
Streamlining Design
The New York World’s Fair
Utopia: A designing idea
4. TOTAL DESIGN: EUROPE
The Bauhaus, as told
The Vkhutemas postscript
PART III: One point: Four locations
5. DESIGN AND THE BODY OF COMPETITION
The body
Bodies of the body
The measure that measures the standards
Openings as endings
6. TIME AND CHINA
Time
The years of 1926
China: Four perspectives
7. TELEVISUAL IN-HUMAN DESIGN
The televisual
Perspectives and horizons
Ecology of the image
8. THE AUTONOMIC TECHNOCENTRICITY OF COMPUTERS
The reason machine
The force of design
Reiterations towards making decisions
CONCLUDING IMPRESSIONS
Bibliography
Index
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.
- Title: Defuturing: A New Design Philosophy
- Author: Tony Fry
- Series: Radical Thinkers in Design
- Publisher: Bloomsbury Visual Arts
- Print Publication Date: 2020
- Logos Release Date: 2024
- Pages: 288
- Language: English
- Resources: 1
- Format: Digital › Ebook
- ISBNs: 9781350089549, 9781350089532, 1350089532, 1350089540
- Resource ID: LLS:9781350089549
- Resource Type: Monograph
- Metadata Last Updated: 2025-04-22T12:07:01Z
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).