A natural death Is announced

Abstract

We have, for some considerable time, been living in an era of unprecedented change, but only now are we apparently becoming aware of the paradigm shift overtaking our life on earth. We hardly need the admonishment of Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth1 to point out the material unsustainability of our manufacturing and consumerist base. We cannot afford to keep focusing on designed objects in isolation from the real problems of the world, and we cannot afford not to link the present manufacturing/consumerist base with the changes happening to and in society as a whole. We have to ask what these paradigm shifts are all about, and we will be required to give up our comfortable worldviews and to construct, to design, our new and better paradigms of thinking and living. We have to announce our own death in order to live. However, we cannot do so from within the parameters of any of the design disciplines as we know them today because "we" are not enough. But before I bury the corpse of old-fashioned design (because its self-deception ignored the concerns of everyday life), let us pause a moment and reflect upon what could have been by asking this: W/ry do I see a discipline being buried and do I not see something else?