Unsustainability: For Designers, Emergency Managers & Everyone Else
A Brief Look at The Phenomenal Work of Dr. Tony Fry on Design, Sustainability, Unsustainability, and the Duration of the Future.
Introduction
In 1999, the Australian design theorist Dr. Tony Fry published an essential book, A New Design Philosophy: An Introduction to Defuturing. This was one of the first design books I read in 2016; it was found on Carnegie Mellon University’s Transition Design program reading list I had been following. Compelled by the title and what I read about the book, I suspected it would be a very educational read. Given my design and philosophical literacy at the time, I found it a challenging experience but well worth the effort. Some parts were clear, but I found most of the text to be dense, philosophical, and containing frequent re-conceptualizations and redirections that triggered changes in how I viewed design, its use, what it created, and what design creates makes possible. Despite the initial difficulties and after moving back and forth through the heavily tabbed volume, I started to get an early sense of Fry's new design philosophy, though perhaps not at the level of all the detail Fry provided. I gained further clarity after thinking about the book and not thinking about the book.
After years of pining for this book, which had been consistently priced at two hundred dollars, I recently searched for it on Amazon to find it was now ninety-nine, which was still more than I was willing to pay. This was quickly remedied by noticing a used copy for a single-digit price. I could not order it fast enough. It came through Thrift Books and looks like it came from the Wayne State Library, which is likely why it arrived in perfect condition. After reading and writing more on the subject, I look forward to understanding Fry’s design philosophy more deeply. I am happy that I now own the book that gave me a different understanding of design than I have found elsewhere. Fry’s (1999) work is prefaced by Victor Papanek's Design for the Real World: Human Ecology and Social Change, published in 1971. It also negatively implicated design in global issues and presented ideas for changing design practice. There are undoubtedly other titles deserving of mention as well.
Fry’s work is broadly applicable as design is not a term reserved for individuals and companies with it on their business cards and LinkedIn profiles. Anyone designs who decides upon a foreseeable and desirable end and acts to bring it into being. With this common definition of design in mind, Fry’s work applies to anyone who decides what should exist in the world and then brings it into being
Furthermore, the works from Fry presented here, as well as the excellent and shorter read Design Futuring: Sustainability, Ethics, and New Practice, will interest anyone who is asking the question, “How did we arrive here?” referring broadly to the current state of the world and how it is lived in.
The answer to this question comes from the fresh perspective of design studies. In Fry’s writing (1999; 2000), design is directly implicated in the planet’s degradation. As part of the ongoing damage to the earth, it continues to drift into a state of greater hazard severity and frequency. It is persistently characterized by the population’s dangerous ignorance of the unsustainable way they continually make and live in a world on earth made possible by design. The knowledge Fry brings into being is of value to everyone who wishes to move away from the dominance of unsustainability and toward sustainability to secure any future that extends humanity’s timeline. Emergency managers may derive from Fry’s many books an understanding of the crisis intensifying the emergencies they coordinate. However, idealistically, Fry’s works, including A New Design Philosophy: An Introduction to Defuturing, will provide vital context and relationships that widen the understanding of emergency managers who are burdened with the effects of unsustainability and will benefit from knowledge of design’s role and how it has made the environment a more hostile place. There will be a discussion later on multidisciplinary teams, including Chief Resilience and Sustainability Officers and those wishing to minimize loss. Everyone on the team would also benefit from this reading, as it provides a deep orientation of the problem and potential ways forward.
The works of Fry are not good news books. If there is any good news to be found, it is discovering how much bad news there is.
A New Design Philosophy
Fry implicates design directly in the unsustainable, that which cannot be sustained, and leads to defuturing, the act of taking time away from the future. Ultimately, the future is erased for humanity as conditions will eventually become unsurvivable for humanity. The future may first become inhospitable after growing increasingly hostile (Fry, 1999). Through many factors, including extractive economies, educational disciplinary narrowness, ignorance of the extended effects of a design, and irresponsibility, designers bring things into being that erase the time the human species has left before it cannot save itself from itself (Fry, 2009). Past the year 2074, if action is not taken at the scale and expediency necessary and change is not made at a permanent and profound level, the planet will be unrecognizable from what is observed in the present (Spinosa, Flores, & Dreyfus, 1999).
Defuturing has a relationship to place. The effects of the unsustainable are already making places like Maricopa County, Arizona, uninhabitable for any outdoor activity during the summer months. The heat is trending upward, requiring higher energy demands for cooling homes, businesses, and government buildings. Depending on the balance of renewable and non-renewable energy resources, this greater energy demand may be taking away (defuturing) the number of years individuals have left in the county before living there becomes unsustainable due to energy requirements (and potential costs) and the hostility of the environment. The aridness of the climate also threatens the ability of Maricopa County ranchers and farmers to sustain themselves due to heat and its effects on soil, rising irrigation and labor costs, and shifts in practice due to overwhelming heat.
Unsustainability is not limited to bringing something designed into being, but what that designed thing does, makes possible, and how and who it harms. For example, building the Xcel Energy Comanche 3 750-megawatt coal-fired power plant in Pueblo, Colorado, or the Sandy Creek Energy Station Coal-Fired 923-megawatt Power Plant in McLennan County, Texas, the largest ever built in the United States, designing the ever-expanding Denver International Airport, or office buildings are all resource—and waste-intensive and often involve non-renewable resources. The production of the designed outcome and its unsustainability has just begun. Design has made possible the emissions from the coal-fired power plants that rise out of the stacks, causing local and widespread pollution. Design has also enabled more flights, intensifying another source of the unsustainability of fossil fuel consumption affecting the state, country, and the world. Newly designed office buildings, hotels, and conference centers encourage fossil-fuel-burning travel. Still prevalent, single-use plastics are found throughout grocery and department stores, as are vegetables wrapped in plastic, all of which were designed and may seem minimal but add up in landfills over time. Unsustainability is at the heart of the dominant modern way of being. It is not only what is designed, but that which is designed encourages, discourages, makes possible, how it performs, who it helps, and who it hurts, and affects the sphere of our lifeworld as we experience and are changed by what has been designed, affecting what we design next (Fry, 1999; Willis, 2006).
Sustainability (?)
Sustainability is about futuring, adding time to the future. The rise of more advanced building codes and requirements, the increasing popularity of electric vehicles like Tesla, Rivian, Polestar, Leaf, and the Prius, the availability of public transportation, owned or rented e-scooters and bikes, the support for farmers markets, the use of various reusable water bottles, and the advancements in solar technology, all represent sustainable designs that have the potential to add time to the future. However, it is difficult to act without a degree of defuturing, even when pursuing sustainable solutions. Through an aggressive ignorance of the unsustainable, even those with the best sustainable intentions can create and depend on product value chains that are defuturing through heavy resource consumption, including non-renewable resources and energy to make the product and associated pollution, international travel to visit manufacturers, mandatory in-office working requiring fossil-fuel burning commuting, and if created overseas, the fossil fuels created to import it into the United States. The sustainability promised by any Hydro Flask (China) or Stanley (Brazil & China) arrives as a product of an unsustainable value chain. However, it should be noted that both companies integrate recycling into their value chain, although mining is still involved, as well as burning fossil fuels to import products worldwide. prAna is a clothing company that espouses sustainable practices and materials. Yet, all its products are made overseas in Vietnam and China and then imported worldwide by fossil fuel-burning vessels. While there is undoubtedly an attempt at futuring by Hydro Flask and Stanley, they both involve defuturing that may outweigh the futuring. How many times must a Hydro Flask be used before the product’s defuturing unsustainable value chain is compensated for? Sustainability is more challenging than making something new, such as sustainability touting lifestyle clothing lines, sustainability-promising products, electric cars, and green homes. Even solar panels require the mining of metals. Achieving sustainability is not as easy as it may seem, even though popular products may enable sustainable behaviors. However, how much of the future was sacrificed to make these products must be questioned.
The Emergency Management Connection
I am reading Fry's book, Defuturing: A New Design Philosophy, published in 2020. In the blurred text, the cover reads "In Dark Times," which we are indeed in, and fields and industries around the globe are realizing it. Fry's (2020) understanding of how dark the present is surpasses mine. Still, environmental and lifestyle trends observed over the last ten years indicate humanity is headed into a more problematic and severe future dominated by a way of being in the world characterized by defuturing far more than futuring. Defuturing so far seems to be a condensed version of his earlier work suitable for anyone who wants to understand sustainability and unsustainability and their relationship to design. As I and others have said, design is not an act or series of acts exclusive to people with corresponding degrees and “design” written on their LinkedIn profiles. Design must be understood more broadly to encompass the design that is both innate and unavoidable to humanness more accurately. Everyone designs who defines a foreseeable end and patterns their activity towards materializing it. This was emphasized heavily in the opening chapter I wrote in Design for Emergency Management.
Emergency managers will benefit from any of the books presented here. Of the three Fry texts presented here, Design Futuring: Sustainability, Ethics, and New Practices is the shorter read, but Defuturing may be more helpful. Both will be extraordinarily educational. Fry’s books will provide context and insight into how the operational area the emergency manager is responsible for has evolved thus far and continues to arrive increasingly hazard-prone and with greater hazard frequency and severity due to the unsustainable. As already unpacked, Fry puts forth design’s role in producing the unsustainable and defuturing trajectory. Self-education in design studies, particularly in the work of Fry and the Design for Emergency Management textbook, is of immense value to understanding the past, present, and future. According to Fry, the problems faced by emergency managers that appear in such a wide variety of hazards are predominantly sourced from design. In particular, designers who are unaware of or ignore the known harmful effects of the outputs of their designed processes.
Part of an education in design is the earlier identified difficulty in pursuing sustainability with its unacknowledged defuturing outputs despite its commitment to futuring. Emphasized is the ease at which the unsustainable is created and added to the already-ubiquitous defuturing. Sustainability alone will not change future conditions and make a less hazard-prone and hostile landscape. Key to Fry’s understanding is the crisis of the unsustainable and the salient need to address the unsustainability to save the future. Relentlessly attending to the unsustainable and preventing it from eroding the time left in the future will allow sustainability to add years back. This is the clear objective, albeit a long way away. For now, it provides an intention, a coherence to those who wish to act to protect the future for generations yet to come. It becomes more a matter of what is stopped, lessened, and regulated than what is made new in a resource-consuming process during a crisis perpetuated by the latest with all its glitz and glamour.
Dr. Cameron Tonkinwise, also in Australia, has commented that designers should withhold their labor when asked to create the unsustainable. Indeed, despite their desires to harm the planet less, extractive economies pull them into the project as if by magnetic force. Crisis is used like Fry and Morin, and the author uses it without administrative implications but to articulate that something is wrong. It is wrong to the degree that it has surpassed a threshold where what may have been a disaster has become a crisis, notable by its evasion of description, explanation, and ability to be known as a complex whole, even one overwhelmed by disorder and noise frequently transitioning to chaos. The crisis has global implications, threatening life, property, resources, and the planet, as well as the ability to sustain human life beyond a premature ending, all requiring an expedient and expansive response. The above understandings achieved through self-education across essential design study writings are critical to an understanding that underpins the how and why of the present and speculative ideas about what will happen in the distant future and along the way.
Engaging with designers and the designed, the (somewhat) sustainable and unsustainable, is likely beyond the purview of most emergency management offices. In utopian emergency management, Fry’s work would apply to how emergency managers and the multidisciplinary team respond to defuturing and create a shift in what they recognize is in the world and how they can know about it. Idealistically, emergency managers might help assemble a multidisciplinary team to primarily address the crisis of the unsustainable while also promoting truly sustainable (?) practices. The team, at a minimum, may be comprised of:
Resilience offices
Sustainability offices
Climate scientists
Transition designers
Design theorists
Energy companies
Renewable energy companies and subject matter experts
Department of Energy and Offices of Energy
Administrators such as those involved with zoning and building codes
Businesses
Banks
Insurers
Developers and builders
Political figures
The related research community
Within this utopia, an emergency manager might form contacts with the above over time, establish a meeting the emergency manager co-facilitates, discuss what the emergency manager has seen change over the years and what they now know, and describe changes they have seen in the hazards surrounding and within the community, and those that are emerging. Across the Office of Emergency Management and the assembled team, someone will need the language to identify and describe sources of defuturing. This is where self-education in the work of Fry or, even further into the philosophical realm, Morin and Kern’s (1999) Homeland Earth: A Manifesto for the New Millennium may be helpful.
Coordination and coherence are of particular concern. While each team member or organization brings their specialty and brilliance, none of the above entities have experience leading and coordinating such a large team at a cadence appropriate for a crisis while pursuing multiple complex objectives. This is one of the many reasons emergency management cannot “pass” on the crisis of unsustainability and hand it off to the Resilience Office or Officer (a vastly insufficient number of people) and swerve around the ethical issues involved with knowing the future is in peril and proceeding onward. Once it is known, it cannot be unknown. It is difficult to think how even limited short-duration engagements with the leadership of a larger team would be objectionable in the face of unsustainability, which Fry appears to regard as the most destructive force on the planet.
In one interaction, emergency management’s function of coordinating emergencies was implemented as a reason not to engage with sustainability in any context. This is administratively accurate, though attending to both sustainability and unsustainability fits under mitigation as the defuturing affects climate, which affects hazard severity, frequency, and management complexity, eventually becoming an emergency to be coordinated. It is in emergency management’s best interest to widen presuppositions and definitions of mitigation, regardless of who performs the work, such as the multidisciplinary team. Ideally, many Offices of Emergency Management will engage. Lastly, whether emergency management engages or not, the worsening outcomes of unsustainability will still end up on their desk.
To address the issue of managing a large team facing an immense problem, an emergency manager might provide a sketch of the Incident Command System, including pointing the team toward IS-100: Introduction to the Incident Command System. From there, the team can determine and re-determine leadership internally. Emergency managers’ stories may help move the Incident Command System from the abstract to the concrete and demonstrate how it is used and can benefit large operations. Alternatively, the emergency manager could establish constraints that determine what the team cannot do and constraints that determine what the team can do (Morin, 1992). A constraint structure may make the emergence of a complex system possible. Aligned with the science, actors within a complex system are free to operate as dynamically as needed within the structure of the constraints, forming intertwining patterns with other actors, organizing into new forms as needed, and exercising autonomy through distributed authority while having the ability to pursue the most possibilities in comparison to conventional modes of organization. While there are advantages, this organizing mode may create a gap of understanding and interoperability between the Office of Emergency Management and the multidisciplinary team.
This team is assembled to attend to the growing crisis behind the emergencies emergency management is accustomed to coordinating. Many members are unified by a deep concern for minimizing their loss exposure, which is a strong motivator to determine what unsustainable factors can potentially worsen hazard events and then address sources of unsustainability. There will be time delays between reducing the unsustainable and seeing positive effects. This adds a layer of unmitigable uncertainty. While this crisis involves and affects emergency management, it is a societal and planetary problem. Throughout the country, people are exacerbating the crisis, are somehow devastated by it, or are engaging in sustainability as a response. Relentlessly addressing the crisis of the unsustainable and its defuturing over extended time frames will remove, lessen, or further regulate elements intensifying the hazard events in the environment.
Conclusion
Whether sourced from a single book or across many recorded lectures, design education is broadly applicable across fields, including emergency management, and the teams focus on defuturing and futuring, which they may become loosely involved with. Studying design independently brings forward design, that which is not generally considered, and its associated processes, agency, and outcomes, producing valuable knowledge in personal and professional life. Education reveals how a world and a way of being in it were designed as separate but similar artifacts that hang together in a pattern of relationality with their own intention, scripts for use, and embedded encouraged and discouraged ways of interacting with the designed and world. The dominant way of existing has been continually designed into being (and that which supports it), and it has not had sustainability at its center.
Design has also produced many marvels, such as the multitude of medical imaging devices that take the place of exploratory surgery. Technologies such as the 3T MRI machine are so powerful that they replace the need for contrast dye and produce unparalleled imagery. Perhaps not yet perfected, the electric car, scooter, and bike take one less fossil fuel-burning car off the road and enable travel without emissions. The battery technology remains a hazard to the public and structural fire departments if it results in fire. End-of-life for lithium-ion batteries may result in recycling to extract necessary non-renewable resources to ensure they are reused if the infrastructure to do so exists locally. While many perspectives on the smartphone exist, one must include its overwhelming addition to the dominant way of being. This could not have been known fully before coming into use. The smartphone offers enormous possibilities, including always having a camera on your person, navigation, internet connectivity, interaction with the world and information, and companies, including your employer, friends, family, and what and who is paid attention to. However, it has not all been positive. In specific populations and instances, this technology indeed provokes anxiety, paranoia, and stress. The smartphone also further enables mass consumption and makes possible the observation of violence, suicides, wars, genocide, and other atrocities from the palm of a human hand while maintaining an impenetrably safe distance from these events. We may see them, but we are not them.
References
Fry, T. (1999). A new design philosophy: An introduction to defuturing. Sydney, AU: University of New South Wales Press LTD.
Fry, T. (2009). Design futuring: Sustainability, ethics and new practice. London: Bloomsbury.
Fry, T. (2020). Defuturing: A new design philosophy. London, UK: Bloomsbury.
Morin, E., & Kern, A. B. (1999). Homeland earth: A manifesto for the new millennium. (S. M. Kelly, & R. LaPointe, Trans.) Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press.
Spinosa, C., Flores, F., & Dreyfus, H. L. (1999). Disclosing new worlds: Entrepreneurship, democratic action, and the cultivation of solidarity. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Willis, A.-m. (2006). Ontological designing - Laying the ground. Design Philosophy Papers, 3(1), 80-98.