Design and Nature: A Partnership

Organised as a dialogue between nature and design, this book explores design ideas, opportunities, visions and practices through relating and uncovering experience of the natural world.

Presented as an edited collection of 25 wide-ranging short chapters, the book explores the possibility of new relations between design and nature, beyond human mastery and understandings of nature as resource and by calling into question the longstanding role for design as agent of capitalism. The book puts forward ways in which design can form partnerships with living species and examines designers’ capacities for direct experience, awe, integrated relationships and new ways of knowing. It covers:

• New design ethics of care

• Indigenous perspectives

• Prototyping with nature

• Methods for new design and nature relations

• A history of design and nature

• Animist beliefs

• De-centering human-centered design

• Understanding nature has power and agency

Design and Nature: A Partnership is a rich resource for designers who wish to learn to engage with sustainability from the ground up.

Kate Fletcher is a Professor at the Centre of Sustainable Fashion, University of the Arts London, UK, where she explores design for sustainability.

Louise St. Pierre is an Associate Professor at Emily Carr University, Canada, where she researches sustainability, contemplative practice and design’s relationship with nature.

Mathilda Tham’s work sits in a creative, feminist, activist space between design, futures studies and sustainability. She is Professor of Design, Linnaeus University, Sweden.