CfP #19: Design and the Limits of Development
** deadline extended: 7 January 2023 **
Number 19 of “AIS/Design. Storia e ricerche” aims to explore the ways in which the culture of design over the 20th century has addressed – through theories, proposals, and projects – the topic of environmental sustainability and, more generally, the limits to the use of resources.
Since the initial phases of technological development in the 19th century, the discipline of design has been both an operational tool in the industrial production model, and a field of mediation between industrialisation and the imbalances it produced in the man-made environment. According to Vanni Pasca, this has created a dual identity in the culture of design: one consumerist, oriented towards development and competitive improvement; and the other critical, committed to speaking out about its limits and contradictions. The former has tried to solve problems from within the industrial system, while the latter has openly declared itself as anti-establishment.
In his dual role as designer-entrepreneur in the design world and lecturer-critic of industrialisation, William Morris certainly contributed to preempting some of the themes related to both the role of design in improving the quality of the environment (objects, the home, the city, and even the organisation of the countryside), and the duty of intellectuals and artists to fight against the harmful effects of industrialisation. (Morris, 1883). While Fabian socialism and Marxism in Europe were focused on themes of the living conditions of the working class (“The Housing Question” by Engels is from 1872) and the first environmentalist movements in America were primarily advocates for conservation of natural areas, opposing the systemic destruction of resources with the philosophy of the wilderness (Thoreau, Emerson, Whitman), Morris shifted attention to the relationship between industrialisation and the environment: thanks to him and other intellectuals of the Victorian era, such as Edward Carpenter and Robert Blatchford, a more holistic culture made headway, considering the environment as part of an ecosystem to be protected.
