Design After the Anthropocene

The Anthropocene refers to the current geological epoch in which our species has become a primary driver of global environmental change and the main geological force on Earth. However, many consider it as reductive, since it hides the real political questions and prefer the term Capitalocene (Moore in Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, history, and the crisis of capitalism, PM Press, Oakland, ON, 2016) or Technocene (Sloterdijk in Art in the Anthropocene: encounters among aesthetics, politics, environments and epistemologies. Open Humanities Press, London, pp 327–339, 2015). Design is at the center of unsustainable production/consumption systems; since its birth as a practice and discipline, it has actively promoted unsustainable ideas of well-being and lifestyles. Half a century after Papanek’s searing criticism of the trajectory Design has taken (1971), the idea of the guiltiness of even the most positively intentioned Design for ecological and social sustainability seems to be becoming a real concern. Even when engaged in critical practice, questions about the depth of Design’s impact and its long-term sustainability remain. A deeper understanding of the political economy of Design is needed. If the question is how Designers could become care providers by transforming themselves into politicized change agents (Fry in Design as politics. Berg, Oxford, 2010), one possible answer is the promotion of a Design-led societal transition to more sustainable long-term futures (Irwin in Transition design: a proposal for a new area of design practice, study, and research, design and culture. Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, 2015). This means imagining different futures where Design could contribute to prefiguring (DiSalvo in J Des Strat 8:29–35, 2016) the forms of collective action to improve the resilience to the present/near-future climate change issues. What is the role of Design in the construction of post-capitalist, therefore, post-Anthropocene imaginaries? Could Design contribute to shifting paradigms from an extractivist growth economy to a resource one; focusing on actions rather than consumption?