Evoking Design-As-Agency for Sustainable Engineering: The Art of Jeffrey Smart

Jeffrey Smart’s paintings encourage engineers to imagine how technical means join with participative and evaluative criteria for achieving responsive and sustainable engineering. Initially, his use of perfect, other-worldly geometries evokes the productive powers of technical systems. But the presence of everyday people implies that engineering needs to consider a range of evaluative perspectives as well. He therefore encourages engineers to grasp the design-as-agency potentials of the discipline. That is to say, his poetics of technology encourages engineers to imagine how diverse faculties might be drawn into convivial relationships with the ultimate goals of creating another emergent synthesis: that of a sustainable world. At base, his art provides a rare instance of metaphorical and divergent thinking about engineering, not least for sustainability, in visual form.