(Designing) Beyond the Modern is the second volume in a trilogy by Eduardo Staszowski and Virginia Tassinari, following Designing in Dark Times: An Arendtian Lexicon (2020).
This book is a provocation: how can we begin to move beyond the modern when so much of how we think and make remains entangled in its logic? Among the forces that have both shaped and been shaped by the modern project, design occupies a central role. Rather than treating it as a neutral tool, this book approaches design as a practice deeply implicated in modernitys extractive, colonial, and anthropocentric foundations. The parenthesis in the title signals an ambivalence about whether designing can remain a relevant or viable practice. Without offering a conclusion, the book confronts the legacy of the Modern and calls for a caesura: a rupture, a pause, or an interval where a critical praxis, whether called design or not, might begin to take shape.
Drawing on philosophy, decolonial thought, and design theory, it challenges the logics that continue to shape modern institutions and imaginaries. Through essays, fragments, and engagements with the work of Tomás Maldonado, along with a conversation with Arturo Escobar and a contribution from Aílton Krenak, this book traces tensions and potential shifts that emerge when thinking and acting beyond the Modern.
Arvustused
(Designing) Beyond the Modern, a superb work whose authors abandon academic comfort towards a beyonding disciplinary era. A book that uses the multiple crises of modernity and its offspring, Design, to vitalize rationality with relationality, opening the field to its exteriorities and to the fluid entry of othernesses. * Alfredo Gutiérrez Borrero, Associate Professor of Product Design, Jorge Tadeo Lozano University of Bogotá, Colombia * What surprised me most about this book was how it thinks beyond Design. Its argument might be wrapped around a shift from Design to designing, but its breadth of vision and its broader value rest on the way it helps plot a way forward beyond the Modern. This should be a clarion call for all disciplines. * Michael Dutton, Professor of Politics (Emeritus), Goldsmiths, University of London, UK * (Designing) Beyond the Modern takes seriously the need to unlearn dominant narratives. It turns toward movements of refusal and regeneration, drawing attention to ways of knowing long marginalized by modern regimes of thought and practice. * Zoy Anastassakis, Associate Professor at Escola Superior de Desenho Industrial (ESDI), Brazil * In these darkening times it is vitally important that the normality of modernitys promise of progress is made strange and that designs implication in the destruction of the non-modern is exposed and resisted. This book amplifies many voices, past and present, that contribute to the possibility of a futural (as opposed to defuturing) designing sensibility. * Anne-Marie Willis, Lecturer in Design Ethics and Design History at the University of Tasmania, Australia *
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Drawing on philosophy, decolonial thought, and design theory, this book approaches design as a practice deeply implicated in modernitys extractive, colonial, and anthropocentric foundations
TABLE OF CONTENTS:
PREFACE
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
INTRODUCTION
i. Moving Beyond
ii. Critical Praxis
iii. The Structure of the Book
THE MODERN
Many Faces of Modern
Reframing the Modern
Catastrophe
Colonial
Human
DESIGNING
Designing Today, Tomás Maldonado
Commentary on Maldonado
Design-as-Modern
Dilemma
Nihilism
Dialectics
Expertise
Denaming and Renaming
Idiocy
Tomás Maldonado, Design and The Future of Modernity, Emanuele Quinz
BEYOND THE MODERN
Beyond
A Conversation with, Arturo Escobar
Language
Exteriority
Caesura
Affirmative Critique
Potentialities
Ancestral
Get Out of This Concrete Nightmare!, Aílton Krenak
AFTERWORD
Index
Eduardo Staszowski is Professor of Design Strategies at Parsons School of Design and Director of the Parsons DESIS Lab, USA. He is the co-editor of the Designing in Dark Times, Radical Thinkers in Design, and Beyond the Modern series, and Designing in Dark Times: An Arendtian Lexicon (Bloomsbury, 2020).
Virginia Tassinari is Assistant Professor in the Human-Centered Design Department, Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering at TU Delft, the Netherlands, and a design researcher for the foresight and design studio Pantopicon, Belgium. She is the co-editor of the Beyond the Modern series and Designing in Dark Times: An Arendtian Lexicon (Bloomsbury, 2020).
