Abstract:
This presentation works from the assumption that the design of the coming decades, in the name of developing
our societies' sustainability, will involve realising less materials-intensive ways of living and working
(dematerialisation). Designing such sustainable product-service systems requires a quite different approach to
designing than that which is prevalent today. In this paper, I explore:
1. the extent to which designing, of any specialism, and especially as it is taught in universities, continues to
remain wedded to making things, that is, to tecnne as the know-how of manufacturing finished products
2. the extent to which 'dematerialisation design' involves something that can perhaps no longer be called a
tecbne. less because its output is not a product, than because its output is not something that is never
'finished'
Drawing on Martin Heidegger's accounts of the Ancient Greek productivism that continues to inform modern
designing, I argue that the design of more sustainable product-service systems will need to pay greater heed to
how things change over time. Since designers tend to exemplify Marxist theories of alienated labour with their
desire to create 'once-and-for-all's, something like 'extended-designer-responsibility' is needed, where designers
are required to engage with their output beyond its production and sale/use.
As an epilogue, the paper discusses the way design students invest heavily in the production of finished products
for assessment, but then invariably never pick them up, satisfied merely with the intangible mark they receive.
How could this situation be exploited to educe designers of sustainable systems rather than technicians more
unsustainable stuff?
