Undesign: Designing in the Anthroposcene

Design has played a key role in the development of our industrial consumer society. Given the climate and environmental emergency this society is not sustainable in its current form - let alone to bring millions more people up to western standards of living. We need to dramatically reduce our impact and part of doing that has to be simply consuming less. Can design adapt and play a valuable role in making this a transition rather than a crisis?

There is emerging thinking that shows us some directions. The voluntary simplicity concept and prosperity without growth economics talk about how we can prosper as a species doing less, consuming less and measuring value in different ways than GDP. It is possible to imagine a life of lower consumption with less speed, stress and waste. We could work less time, create more leisure time and spend it on more valuable things.

My hypothesis is this is a desirable state but we con't know how to get there. To do so there could be a role for design to help people in the transition in a similar way to how designs helps people adopt and consume. I think this would need to be a more collective, collaborative form of design.

The challenge for designers is that we too must make a transition. Can we play a role in re-focussing our clients and large organisations or do we need to step into new roles in new emerging communities?