De-Industrial Design

A book forthcoming from Lund Humphries as part of their "Designing Now" series.

De-Industrial Design argues that mainstream sustainability frameworks—efficiency, recycling, footprints, circularity—remain trapped in the paradigm of the Industrial Revolution they claim to reform. These approaches are intrinsically conservative: they aim to sustain a status quo that is itself the problem.

The book traces how Industrial Design, a discipline that takes its identity from industrialism, is uniquely complicit in climate change—and uniquely positioned to contribute to what comes next. Drawing on emerging biological technologies, speculative design, and contemporary practice, it makes the case for a design that doesn't derive its purpose from extraction, emission, and individualism but instead operates within the technological revolutions already underway in computation and biology.

We cannot survive the Anthropocene with the tools that created it.