On November 10th 2009, the Architecture Museum of Ljubljana and the Pekinpah Association have released Sustainable alternatives in design: It's hight time we start losing time, a book of lectures in design theory edited by Barbara Predan and Cvetka Pozar.

Since the UN climate summit in Copenhagen has failed to provide an effective mechanism for curbing global warming, we are back searching for alternatives. We believe that design can and should offer alternatives in solving problems that stretch - as Walter Gropius has put it - from the spoon to the city. The book of lectures entitled Sustainable alternatives in design: It's hight time we start losing time offers heterogeneous and plausible alternatives which can help us to redefine the way we understand the role of design and its core idea - the notion that design is, in essence, a problem solving discipline.

Visit [ http://www.pekinpah.com/said ] for details.

[ A Series of Lectures in Design Theory ]

[ slovensko ] [ The project is supported by ]

Dieter Rams (Germany) | 6. 3. 2008 [ more ]
Ezio Manzini (Italy) | 20. 3. 2008 [ more ]
Jonathan Chapman (U.K.) | 8. 4. 2008 [ more ]
Clive Dilnot (USA) | 13. 5. 2008 [ more ]
Per Mollerup (Denmark) | 10. 6. 2008 [ more ]
Victor Margolin (USA) | 3. 10. 2008 [ more ]



Sustainable alternatives in design: It’s high time we start losing time

“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 will 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 the present series of lectures will be, in fact, 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.

Please join us. 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



The project is supported by

[ U.S. Embassy Ljubljana ]
[ Embassy of Denmark ]
[ Istituto Italiano di Cultura in Slovenia ]
[ British Council ]
[ Goethe Institut Ljubljana ]
[ Antalis ]

The programme of AML is supported by
[ Ministry of culture RS ]