Output details

Does sustainability localise networks of design?

Current views of sustainability expect digital ecologies, networked knowledge translated into biomaterial ecologies of consumption or applied design. This expectation emerges as a regulation of the current extended networks of production brought about by twentieth century networks of design. Such networks are characterised by their attachment to the materialities of design; both in the collective appreciation of ‘design’ in our material world and in the physical links that bind ‘designers’ together; their co-study, co-practice and co-presence in studio. However, the more modern knowledge economy is explained as the separation of design from its material expression, saliently exemplified by certain processes of branding. The industrialisation of emergent economies proceeds through the migration of production into less developed economies with design activity remaining in developed economies.

My paper situates the importance of historicity in having induced the design network’s rôle gauging reverberations in the global economy. I analyse digital ecologies in their nexus between representing the dissociation of design and material and the manifesting the grown of designed economies. My work is situated as the pre-history of future digital economies.