The contemporary socioeconomic system is immensely interconnected and specialized, to where the production of small appliances requires large transnational scales of industry from resource extraction to distribution. But this interdependency indicates severe unsustainability in the risks it leverages for cascading failure throughout the system. To restructure the system for resiliency…

The design process which allows for better incorporation of social and ecological needs is, in many ways, only a variation on the traditional process. Before beginning, the designer should stop to consider all current events, ideological movements, and public trends that may be ongoing, particularly as they relate to the…

Contemporary corporations which approach users as “consumers” and degrade their complexity into statistical trends of financial return have done all but eliminate meaning from consumer culture. Marketing for sustainability centers on a superficial facade of environmental return which does not speak to the public effectively; this causes “green” products to…

Too often, sustainability is reduced to a matter of efficiency. “If we can reduce our energy use/our consumption habits/our footprint, we’ll be able to sustain our way of living.” Design that is centered around efficiency features such as recycled content, energy-efficiency, or nature-based branding is the least-appealing to the average…

Designers are typically appropriated by corporations to enhance the enterprise’s position in the marketplace by way of enhanced product or branding aesthetics; their work functions for the commercial profit of wealthy institutions, and in that way loses its ontological power to transform the public’s relationships. Today, as corporations become more…

Defining market sustainability begins by asking whether our modern consumption culture, defined by mass- produced goods made of cheap materials and competitive advertising, fulfills our innate purpose. To accurately answer this, we will have to return to the basic needs that drive our consumption and reassess our wants in accordance…

The climate crisis, with its threat of natural disaster, new disease, and extreme wealth disparity, has posed the potential for a new age of human habitation, marked by the end of civilizational development and the beginning of constant and ubiquitous unsettlement; some have referred to it as an “urmadic age”…

In moving from old to new paradigms, we should be considerate of the ways we appropriate and apply knowledge. The modern paradigm was in place from 1700 to the present day, and with it the distribution of knowledge was established through linear, rational, and evidence-based processes. But is this really…

The Web has become the epicenter of our cultures, and we continue to accept that the remainder of human existence will work in conjunction with internet technology; but in this dependency, we become unable to ask ourselves whether this coexistence is desirable, or even functional. If the Internet were to…