Tony Fry

Susan Stewart

Clive Dilnot

Design and the Question of History is not a work of Design History. Rather, it is a mixture of mediation, advocacy and polemic that takes seriously the directive force of design as an historical actor in and upon the world. Understanding design as a shaper of worlds within which the political, ethical and historical character of human being is at stake, this text demands radically transformed notions of both design and history. Above all, the authors posit history as the generational site of the future. Blindness to history, it is suggested, blinds us both to possibility, and to the foreclosure of possibilities, enacted through our designing. The text is not a resolved, continuous work, presented through one voice. Rather, the three authors cut across each other, presenting readers with the task of disclosing, to themselves, the commonalities, repetitions and differences within the deployed arguments, issues, approaches and styles from which the text is constituted. This is a work of friendship, of solidarity in difference, an act of cultural politics. It invites the reader to take a position – it seeks engagement over agreement.

Design and the Question of History

In recent decades, the field of design has expanded. Moreover, there has been a significant historical shift to a world essentially defined by artifice. The onset of the Anthropocene - the epoch in which human impact upon our planet has become irreversible - is the most dramatic symptom of this phenomenon. In these conditions, we are forced to consider the extent to which design should be understood less as a subaltern moment of action, and more as a necessary mode of acting in general. But what then are the characteristics, the advantages, the limits, and the possibilities of understanding acting in general through the model or lens of design? In particular, is the model of “action as design” capable of engaging with the destructive tensions bequeathed to us by the industrial economy, now reinforced by neo-liberalism? This book offers a conception of our times, an examination in what is entailed in this view concerning the character of our century, and explores the implications of design and acting in the 21st century. Its underlying insight is the following: today it is the artificial, and no longer nature, which constitutes the horizon, medium and condition of existence.

The Urgency of the Possible

Acting in Dark Times

Christopher Killip

Chris Killip, born in 1946 on the Isle of Man, is one of the most influential photographers and teachers to have come out of the United Kingdom. His work in the late 1970s and 1980s defined an era; it has received numerous prizes and is included in most major museum collections. Of The Pirelli Photographs, taken at the famous tire manufacturer's plant, he says, "I wanted to show the manufacturing process as clearly as I could, and to do so in this factory meant it would have to be lit... The workplace had become, in a real sense for me, a theater and I embraced the look of these new photographs with their relation to fashion, film noir, and even Soviet Realism. For me this Îlook' seemed a more telling way to record and document this enforced ritual."

Pirelli Work

Radical rethinking of the relationship between design and history.

Clive Dilnot

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