“Today we reject reflection not because it is dangerous or disturbing, but
because we lose time on it, because it ‘doesn’t serve any purpose’, doesn’t serve to gain us more time. Success, after all, means gaining more time.” Thus the French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard cynically described the social logic of the present time in Le Différend (1983).
In the field of design we measure success not only in the amount of time gained
but also in the number of products sold. The goal is to achieve the largest
possible market share, which, according to dry economic logic, requires
continual growth – growth is exalted above all else. Like the tides of the sea, we observe in
society an oscillation between a lesser and a greater need to talk about
responsibility. Those good old PR slogans that preach about our attitudes
towards the environment and society most often surface only when a company
wants to communicate with potential customers – on the condition, of course, that they bring it earned profit.
But there are exceptions. There exists in design, mainly in theory and in a few
(very rare) cases of enlightened practice, a parallel world that highlights,
constructs and creates sustainable development and sustainable design. The
discrepancy between theory and practice demonstrates, perhaps, that there is
not enough theory and that the theory we do have describes only a certain ideal
image of the discipline. Practice, meanwhile – if we can play a little with a notion developed by Alain Badiou – accepts in their entirety the maxims of the already-established “Western” system instead of searching out the conditions for a new politics of collective
emancipation (Alain Badiou,
L’Éthique, 1993). Badiou’s idea, then, gives us hope that all is not yet lost.
Roughly, we can say that today in design there exists a confrontation between,
on the one hand, a desire for society’s continual improvement and, on the other, resignation and doubt that the
progress we see is really the way to attain the kind of cosmopolitan society
Kant foretold at the end of the 18th century. There is a third way, too – one we might call Badiou’s way – which tries to show that the current discrepancy between theory and practice is
merely an emancipatory stage that promises a new state of affairs and,
consequently, creates a rift in consciousness.
The main purpose of this book is, to outline certain presuppositions for a new
state of affairs, a new politics of collective emancipation – we might even call it a sustainable ethics of design. By reading this book, you
may not earn anything that resembles the classic notion of “profit”, but as the Roman Club discovered back in 1972, while there may exist limits to
material growth, there is no limit to learning.
Barbara Predan
Translated by: Rawley Grau
