Designers Visionaries and Other Stories A Collection of Sustainable Design Essays

Designers, Visionaries and Other Stories unpacks the complex and crucial debates surrounding sustainable design to deliver a compelling manifesto for change, at a time of looming ecological crisis, mounting environmental legislation and limited progress. This is a book about sustainable design, by the leading sustainable design thinkers, for creative practitioners, professionals, students and academics. This challenging work provides the reader with a rich resource of future visions, critical propositions, creative ideas and design strategies for working towards a sustainable tomorrow, today. The authors boldly present alternative understandings of sustainable design, to curate a challenging, sometimes uncomfortable and always provocative, collection of essays by some of the worlds leading sustainable design thinkers. The result is an impacting and polemical anthology that reinvigorates the culture of critique that, in previous years, has empowered design with the qualities of social, environmental and economic revolution.

Foreword - John Thackara * Introduction - Jonathan Chapman and Nick Gant * Re-defining the Purpose of [Sustainable] Design - Alastair Fuad-Luke * Design Redux - Stuart Walker * The Scenario of a Multi-Local Society: Creative Communities, Active Networks and Enabling Solutions - Ezio Manzini * Relative Abundance: Fuller‘s Discovery That the Glass Is Always Half Full - John Wood * Clothes that Connect - Kate Fletcher * (in)conclusion - Jonathan Chapman and Nick Gant

Jonathan Chapman and Nick Gant are co-directors of the Inheritable Futures Laboratory (IF:Laboratory) - a sustainable design research group at the University of Brighton, which generates practice-based research initiatives that aim to nurture greater flow of information between academia and industry. Jonathan is a senior lecturer in three dimensional design at the University of Brighton and founder of sustainable design and research company Safehouse Creative. Nick is the subject leader of the three dimensional design programme at the University of Brighton and director of award-winning design practice BoBo Design.