Design Shifts: A Poetic Journey Through Our Post-Normal Times (Poems for Post-Normal Times)

Design Shifts, A Poetic Journey Through Post-Normal Times offers a unique exploration of architecture and design's evolving role in an era of unprecedented planetary change. Through fifty evocative illustrated poems written over a decade, poet-architect-futurist Phillip Daffara examines how the principles, processes, and purposes of design are being transformed by the conditions of post-normal times-characterised by chaos, complexity, contradiction, and uncertainty.

Organised into four thematic chapters-Living Systems, Collective Futures, Human-Centered, and Designer's Journey-this collection traverses emerging paradigms from biomimetic architecture to urban metabolism, from neuroarchitecture to abolitionist design. Daffara's verses serve as both meditation and manifesto, reflecting on how designers might respond to our most pressing challenges while reimagining their relationship to place, materials, and the communities they serve.

Written in accessible yet thought-provoking language that will appeal to designers, architects, urbanists, environmentalists, and anyone concerned with how we shape our built environment, this volume offers wisdom for navigating our complex present while envisioning regenerative futures. At once personal reflection and global inquiry, these poems invite readers to consider how the spaces we create might better serve all forms of life on our shared planet.

Dr Phillip Daffara comes from a family of farmers which shaped his passion for nurturing ideas like social seeds within a planet of possibilities.

Phillip Daffara is an Architect, Urban Futurist, Regenerative Practitioner and Poet. He believes in empowering people to be the architects of their own cities and futures.

His vision is to make holistic places, using all the senses.