The Culture of Nature in the History of Design: Making and Unmaking the Environment

The Culture of Nature in the History of Design confronts the dilemma caused by design’s pertinent yet precarious position in environmental discourse through interdisciplinary conversations about the design of nature and the nature of design. Demonstrating that the deep entanglements of design and nature have a deeper and broader history than contemporary discourse on sustainable design and ecological design might imply, this book presents case studies ranging from the eighteenth to the twenty-first century and from Singapore to Mexico. It gathers scholarship on a broad range of fields/practices, from urban planning, landscape architecture, and architecture, to engineering design, industrial design, furniture design and graphic design.

From adobe architecture to the atomic bomb, from the bonsai tree to Biosphere 2, from pesticides to photovoltaics, from rust to recycling – the culture of nature permeates the history of design. As an activity and a profession always operating in the borderlands between human and non-human environments, design has always been part of the environmental problem, whilst also being an indispensable part of the solution.

The book ventures into domains as diverse as design theory, research, pedagogy, politics, activism, organizations, exhibitions, and fiction and trade literature to explore how design is constantly making and unmaking the environment and, conversely, how the environment is both making and unmaking design. This book will be of great interest to a range of scholarly fields, from design education and design history to environmental policy and environmental history.

Kjetil Fallan is Professor of Design History at the University of Oslo and a founding member of the Oslo School of Environmental Humanities. He is the author of Designing Modern Norway: A History of Design Discourse (2017) and Design History: Understanding Theory and Method (2010), editor of Scandinavian Design: Alternative Histories (2012), and co-editor, with Grace Lees-Maffei, of the book series Cultural Histories of Design as well as the volumes Designing Worlds: National Design Histories in an Age of Globalization (2016) and Made in Italy: Rethinking a Century of Italian Design (2014).