Expansion in practice and the global increase in numbers of those with design education or who study design has not brought with it increased understanding. On the contrary, despite the intelligence of many of those entering the field, reduced to the crudest understanding of vocation, depth of thought disappears; crises remain untouched; genuinely new practices and conceptions struggle to be comprehended in their implications. Radical Thinkers in Design , a moment of the larger project Designing in Dark Times , seeks in a small way to try to address this situation by bringing back into circulation, as aids to thinking and praxis, some key provocative texts in contemporary thinking on designing. As acting in the world descends ever deeper towards instrumentalism these books offer counter views. In what they open towards, what they explore and present, above all in what they anticipate , they point to the concrete possibilities, as well as to the necessity, of paradigm-shifts in design thinking and in our conceptions of what designing today can and should be. They offer approaches, concepts, modes of thinking and models of practice that can help not only in thinking how design can be re-thought and re-positioned in its internal momentum, but how it offers an integral mode and capacity of acting in the world. By showing how, at base, designing contains irreplaceable critical and affirmative moments, they point us towards ways of reversing some of the negative and destructive tendencies threatening to engulf the world.
Designing Designing