Designing with/out Extractive Materials

Consumer society’s manufacturing industry has taken on such a massive scale and reach as to make it abundantly clear that designing as an activity and a profession has decisive impact on ecological systems both locally and globally. Designing entails crucial decisions on which and how much materials to mine, blast, drill, excavate, or fell. This project examines how these decisions regulate consumption, and how this under-appreciated aspect of the design process has changed from the second industrial revolution to the present. Design is habitually cast as a catalyst of consumption, whether formulated as criticism or as promise. At the same time, design has long been seen as key in efforts to steer consumption in more desirable directions. In all these contexts, however, design is related to consumption through its manifestation as consumer products. But the cultural significance and ecological impact of design can not be fully appreciated from the ideological and socio-economic functions and circulations of commodities. To better understand how design influences consumption, we need to open the black box that is the consumer product, dig beyond its shiny surfaces and mesmerizing interfaces and examine its constituent parts. We need to study the ecological properties and entanglements of the materials of which it is made. By doing so, this project allows us to observe how design regulates consumption, not at the point of purchase, but at the point of origin: in the mines, quarries, and wells supplying designers and manufacturers with the extractive materials making up the industrialized world with all its modern conveniences and objects of desire.

This project examines how design regulates the consumption of extractive materials, and how this practice has changed over time in response to ideological shifts in the understanding of nature. Designing entails crucial decisions on which and how much materials to mine, blast, drill, excavate, or fell. This project will examine how these decisions regulate consumption, and how this under-appreciated aspect of the design process has changed from the second industrial revolution to the present. Given the scale to which the manufacturing industry has grown in order to satisfy our seemingly endless needs and desires, designing as an activity and a profession has decisive impact on ecological systems both locally and globally. Design is habitually cast as a catalyst of consumption, whether formulated as criticism or as promise. At the same time, design has long been seen as key in efforts to steer consumption in more desirable directions. In all these contexts, however, design is related to consumption through its manifestation as consumer products. But now that everything from genes to jeans is understood to be designed, the cultural significance and ecological impact of design can no longer adequately be gauged from the ideological and socio-economic functions and circulations of commodities. To better understand how design influences consumption, we need to open the black box that is the consumer product, dig beyond its shiny surfaces and mesmerizing interfaces and examine its constituent parts; the ecological properties and entanglements of the materials of which it is made. By doing so, this project will allow us to examine how design regulates consumption, not at the point of purchase, but at the point of origin: in the mines, quarries, and wells supplying designers and manufacturers with the extractive materials making up the industrialised world with all its modern conveniences and objects of desire.