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 …