Eye Magazine

Editors Tony Fry and Adam Nocek present Design in Crisis as part of an ‘ongoing conversation that aims to challenge how designers engage with the planetary crises we are living through’. Rather than viewing design as a panacea for crisis, the book begins from the position that design itself should be understood as a discipline in crisis, given its role in creating and exacerbating social, political and environmental problems. ‘This is a crisis by design,’ the editors write, evidenced through design’s implication everywhere within the ‘unfolding complexity of ecological devastation, racial and political violence, coloniality, technological futures and the brutality of modern Western culture generally’. Nocek is an associate professor in the Philosophy of Technology and Science and Technology Studies at Arizona State University, while Fry has been one of design’s most prolific and tirelessly trenchant critics for more than three decades. The book’s ten articles are divided across three sections, each with a contextualising preface by the editors …