We are living, through a time, imbedded with many questions. Often, without concrete answer, instead, hints of thought and theory.

So, what to believe? Moreover, how to activate change, when pulled into differing directions?

The role of a designer poses many questions around sustainability. The generating of products causes climate-changing greenhouse gas emissions. Across its life cycle, the average product results in carbon emissions of 6.3 times its own weight, according to a study by Christoph Meinrenken.

The existing rhetoric, which places mindfulness in combat of commercialism, holds truth. Yet, there is also devastation to be found in the effect of production. I pose, through this writting, how we may look toward a future with alternative values, acknowledging the role of design as an act. The act of producing.

In relation to this, chaos theory contests two undeveloped assumptions of ecology; the notions of steadiness in nature and the stability hypothesis. The historic model of a balance of nature which humans could disturb implied that people could restore spoiled ecosystems with healthier practices.

Regardless of our ability to encourage more mindful consumerism. Exemplified in anticipating that we could, perhaps, strip away “70 per cent” of all the furniture we currently use in our home, in accordance to famous quote by Philippe Starck.

Idyllically, this statement is clear response to grotesque capitalist behaviour, however, what is to happen to that ‘70 per cent’ when it is gone? Where… is gone? Does location ‘gone’ serve the environment better positive, than the known place of the consumer? What happens to the remaining 30 per cent? How long until the void is filled with another 70 per cent?

The cycle continues, irrespective.

I am by no means pessimist, a heavy optimist, perhaps arguably.

Nonetheless, it is important to create some humanness in a rhetoric that we have shaped in the devastation, of our planet. By means of definition, humanness, acknowledges need as plea. Therefore, for sustained impact, it is not design nor designers in question, instead, we consumers, those voicing need, are to learn new ways of living with objects.

Whereby we neither lose to gain, or gain to lose, but learn a manner of maintaining what we have. The implementation of thinking creatively becomes a process of self-actualisation, which works toward an approach to living that centres need around the human, opposed to inherently within the human. Illuminating a sense of individuality that is determined by one-self, not design, nor designer.

Designers, I believe, have crafted a world relying on newness of product, instead of acknowledging the potential of product to begin as form, enriching the future endeavour of an investment in recreation.

We should effort the refraining of disposal. Disposal speaks to a broader cultural problem. The ease at which we rid, in order to move onwards toward new, without consideration for others. In hope of personal growth, betterness. In a sense, it has become a form of modern enlightenment to consider one-self so wholly, the rest of the world falls small. It was said in The Wastemakers, “the lives of most Americans have become so intermeshed with acts of consumption that they tend to gain their feelings of significance in life from these acts of consumption rather than from their meditations, achievements, inquiries, personal worth, and service to others.”

In extension to this statement, it is possible, through post-modernist approach, by unveiling value as the act of self-govern and recreation. We will see again, radical departure from utopian vision. If modernist objects suggest simple, clean and machine-like perfection, then the postmodernist consumer recreates object in response to a beginning form. The original form and the one becoming, grow with layers of information.

This aesthetic responding to consumerism, is destruction. Destruction of current mass values, methods of making and thinking.

This disorderly, ordered world of nonhuman nature is to be recognised as an uncontrolled autonomous actor, alike humans. It is this autonomy in recreation that will familiarise a sustained future.