design manifesto

the mercury bound “messenger” spacecraft flew by earth back in august of 2005 and took several hundred pictures as it left us on its long journey towards the sun. the resulting images were stitched together to produce this very short but powerful sequence.


to identify this period of human history as “a critical juncture” might not place enough emphasis on the dire straits we find the big systems of our planet in or certainly moving towards. arguably there have been many other critical junctures of even greater import to the human race and to the planet but this is one that places people squarely in the driver’s seat.

looking around me at the necessary and unnecessary material possessions that have accrued to me over the course of my life, i can say with confidence that the human race has the capacity to invent. but does it also possess the capacity to reinvent - particularly to reinvent itself? to me that’s the (if you’ll forgive the awful pun) burning question as climate change - which is only one of several indicators that we have headed into a box canyon in terms of our decisions related to solving the challenges of meeting our basic needs - that people around the world should be asking themselves. it isn’t simply a question of halting practices that we always knew came with a price tag as much as it is, can we actually replace those practices with solutions that more seamlessly embed themselves within the existing natural infrastructure?

a redefining of expectations - practical and philosophical - an undoing of the relationship between man and nature or at the very least a restructuring of that relationship seems inevitable. the challenge is in part one of scale and then of place in the socio-economic order.

i have a special interest in design and so it is really refreshing to find that several companies, primarily on the order of small scale companies, have developed approaches (some of which have emerged as full-fledged products) to redefining the niche designers play in the broader economic ecology which we now know is firmly enmeshed in the natural ecology.

one such company is thomas matthews, a design group located in london, england. wandering through their site i think you’ll be impressed at the amount of thought you’ll encounter. detailed explanations of the practicalities of the process of sourcing and preparing the materials that leave their studio, alongside similarly detailed explanations of the specifics of their design.

an example of this can be seen in their beautifully designed (you should read how they sourced out the materials for this book!)
sustainability booklet.

it should come as no surprise that the senior designer at thomas matthews, mark beever, was associated with thomas mau’s massive change project which first drew attention to the obvious - for most people, design is invisible. design has become second nature, ever-present, inevitable, taken for granted. simply put, massive change seeks to place design as a major element of the need to both articulate and then act on the role of design in the earth’s future. as buckminster fuller once said: “the best way to predict the future is to design it.” wikipedia opens this out nicely by observig that “throughout his life, fuller was concerned with the question "does humanity have a chance to survive lastingly and successfully on planet earth, and if so, how?" considering himself an average individual without special monetary means or academic degree, he chose to devote his life to this question, trying to find out what an individual like him could do to improve humanity's condition in a way that large organizations, governments, or private enterprises inherently could not do.”

it’s encouraging that design groups like thomas matthews have immersed themselves and their clients in the sensible and thoughtful actualization of that approach.