With conventional solutions failing, a new culture of decision-making is called for. Strategic design is about applying the principles of traditional design to "big picture" systemic challenges such as healthcare, education and the environment. It redefines how problems are approached and aims to deliver more resilient solutions. In this short book, Dan Hill outlines a new vocabulary of design, one that needs to be smuggled into the upper echelons of power. He asserts that, increasingly, effective design means engaging with the messy politics - the "dark matter"- taking place above the designer's head. And that may mean redesigning the organization that hires you.

    Following the success of their first book, Architecture for Humanity brings readers the next edition, with more than 100 projects from around the world. Packed with practical and ingenious design solutions, this book addresses the need for basic shelter, housing, education, health care, clean water, and renewable energy. One-on-one interviews and provocative case studies demonstrate how innovative design is reimagining community and uplifting lives. From building-material innovations such as smog-eating concrete to innovative public policy that is repainting Brazil’s urban slums, Design Like You Give a Damn [2] serves as a how-to guide for anyone seeking to build change from the ground up.Praise for Design Like You Give a Damn [2]:<!--StartFragment--> “The resourcefulness of the projects in the book is inspiring, its information practical (see Stohr’s chapter on financing sustainable community development) and its numerous factoids sobering.” —TMagazine.blogs.NYTimes.com

    Although Australia’s prompt, science-led response to COVID-19 has not been perfect, it has saved tens of thousands of lives. But for decades, governments have ignored, ridiculed or understated the advice of scientists on the climate emergency.Now, in the wake of the megafires of 2020, a time of reckoning has arrived. In The Climate Cure renowned climate scientist Tim Flannery takes aim at those responsible for the campaign of obfuscation and denial that has already cost so many Australian lives and held back action on climate change.Flannery demands a new approach, based on the nation’s response to COVID-19, that will lead to effective government policies. The Climate Cure is an action plan for our future. We face a fork in the road, and must decide now between catastrophe and survival.

    Edited by the Sustainability Institute’s Diana Wright, this essential primer brings systems thinking out of the realm of computers and equations and into the tangible world, showing readers how to develop the systems-thinking skills that thought leaders across the globe consider critical for 21st-century life.Some of the biggest problems facing the world—war, hunger, poverty, and environmental degradation—are essentially system failures. They cannot be solved by fixing one piece in isolation from the others, because even seemingly minor details have enormous power to undermine the best efforts of too-narrow thinking.While readers will learn the conceptual tools and methods of systems thinking, the heart of the book is grander than methodology. Donella Meadows was known as much for nurturing positive outcomes as she was for delving into the science behind global dilemmas. She reminds readers to pay attention to what is important, not just what is quantifiable, to stay humble, and to stay a learner.In a world growing ever more complicated, crowded, and interdependent, Thinking in Systems helps readers avoid confusion and helplessness, the first step toward finding proactive and effective solutions.

    They use enormous amounts of energy to heat raw material, shape it with heavy machinery, and maintain its design, strength, and durability with toxic chemicals. Now, in a world of depleted natural resources, entrepreneurs and scientists are turning to nature to inspire future products that are more energy- and cost-efficient. Biomimicry, the science of employing nature to advance sustainable technology, is arguably one of the hottest new business concepts. At the center of this growing movement has been award-winning inventor and biomimetic entrepreneur Jay Harman.In The Shark's Paintbrush, Harman introduces us to pioneering engineers in a wide array of businesses who are uncovering and copying nature’s hidden marvels. He shows business leaders and aspiring entrepreneurs how we can reconcile creating more powerful, lucrative technologies with maximizing sustainability. He injects a whole new vocabulary and way of thinking into the business sphere that speaks to both small start-ups and corporate giants.

    James Wines puts up the various - and often irreconcilable - concepts of environmentally-friendly architecture for discussion, making a case for an architecture that not only focuses on technological solutions, but also tries to reconcile man and nature in its formal idiom. Among the examples of contemporary ecological architecture presented are works by Emilio Ambasz, Gustav Peichl, Arthur Quarmby, Jean Nouvel, Sim Van der Ryn, Jourda and Perraudin, Log ID, James Cutler, Stanley Saitowitz, Fran ois Roche, Nigel Coates and Michael Sorkin.

    These are tough questions for the pushers of technology to answer. Our economic system is centered on technology, so it would be no small matter if tech ceased to be an end-in-itself in our daily lives. Technology is not going to go away, but the time to discuss the end it will serve is before we deploy it, not after. We need to ask what purpose will be served by the broadband communications, smart materials, wearable computing, and connected appliances that we're unleashing upon the world. We need to ask what impact all this stuff will have on our daily lives. Who will look after it, and how?In the Bubble is about a world based less on stuff and more on people. Thackara describes a transformation that is taking place now--not in a remote science fiction future; it's not about, as he puts it, the schlock of the new but about radical innovation already emerging in daily life. We are regaining respect for what people can do that technology can't. In the Bubble describes services designed to help people carry out daily activities in new ways. Many of these services involve technology--ranging from body implants to wide-bodied jets. But objects and systems play a supporting role in a people-centered world. The design focus is on services, not things. And new principles--above all, lightness--inform the way these services are designed and used. At the heart of In the Bubble is a belief, informed by a wealth of real-world examples, that ethics and responsibility can inform design decisions without impeding social and technical innovation.

    Influenced by a confluence of humanism, colonialism, and racism, this mythology ignored local wisdom and indigenous innovation, deeming it primitive. Today, we have slowly come to realize that the legacy of this mythology is haunting us.Designers understand the urgency of reducing humanity’s negative environmental impact, yet perpetuate the same mythology of technology that relies on exploiting nature. Responding to climate change by building hard infrastructures and favoring high-tech homogenous design, we are ignoring millennia-old knowledge of how to live in symbiosis with nature. Without implementing soft systems that use biodiversity as a building block, designs remain inherently unsustainable.Lo―TEK, derived from Traditional Ecological Knowledge, is a cumulative body of multigenerational knowledge, practices, and beliefs, countering the idea that indigenous innovation is primitive and exists isolated from technology. It is sophisticated and designed to sustainably work with complex ecosystems.With a foreword by anthropologist Wade Davis and four chapters spanning Mountains, Forests, Deserts, and Wetlands, this book explores thousands of years of human wisdom and ingenuity from 20 countries including Peru, the Philippines, Tanzania, Kenya, Iran, Iraq, India, and Indonesia. We rediscover an ancient mythology in a contemporary context, radicalizing the spirit of human nature.

    Noting that most design—from consumer goods and digital technologies to built environments—currently serves capitalist ends, Escobar argues for the development of an “autonomous design” that eschews commercial and modernizing aims in favor of more collaborative and placed-based approaches. Such design attends to questions of environment, experience, and politics while focusing on the production of human experience based on the radical interdependence of all beings. Mapping autonomous design’s principles to the history of decolonial efforts of indigenous and Afro-descended people in Latin America, Escobar shows how refiguring current design practices could lead to the creation of more just and sustainable social orders.

    While millions gaze at its cliffs each year, only 15,000 float through the canyon on the Colorado River. A landmark portrait of the Grand Canyon, this is the only photography book to document this amazing journey from river level. Now this classic is back in print, with an updated preface and introduction and a dozen new photographs. A journal in photos and words, The Hidden Canyon captures the desert landscape and the thrill of the rapids. Edward Abbey's journalfilled with wry humor and respect for the canyondescribes the journey as the dories (small wooden boats) alternately float and charge through the breathtaking landscapes and some of the roughest white water in North America.

    We need to go beyond 'going green' and to enlist a new generation of design activists, she wrote in an influential manifesto. We need big hearts, bigger business sense and the bravery to take action now.Featuring more than 100 contemporary design products and systems--safer baby bottles, a high-tech waterless washing machine, low-cost prosthetics for landmine victims, Braille-based Lego-style building blocks for blind children, wheelchairs for rugged conditions, sugarcane charcoal, universal composting systems, DIY soccer balls--that are as fascinating as they are revolutionary, this exceptionally smart, friendly and well-designed volume makes the case for design as a tool to solve some of the world's biggest social problems in beautiful, sustainable and engaging ways--for global citizens in the developing world and in more developed economies alike. Particularly at a time when the weight of climate change, global poverty and population growth are impossible to ignore, Pilloton challenges designers to be changemakers instead of stuff creators. Urgent and optimistic, a compendium and a call to action, Design Revolution is easily the most exciting design publication to come out this year.Emily Pilloton is the founder and Executive Director of Project H Design, a global industrial design nonprofit with eight chapters around the world. Trained in architecture at the University of California, Berkeley, and product design at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Pilloton started Project H in 2008 to provide a conduit and catalyst for need-based product design that empowers individuals, communities and economies. Current Project H initiatives include water transport and filtration systems in South Africa and India; an educational math playground built for elementary schools in Uganda and North Carolina; a homeless-run design coop in Los Angeles; and design concepts for foster care education and therapy in Austin, Texas.Allan Chochinov is Editor in Chief of Core77.com, and writes and lectures widely on the impact of design on contemporary culture.

    But small, easy actions, if taken by enough people, can move mountains – and save planets.Written in collaboration with leading environmental experts from WWF, this short book provides simple changes we can all make to our everyday lives, from morning to night.These aren’t the only things you can do. Nor are they things you have to do. But these 12 small acts are basic steps anybody can take, and if even one of them sticks, our children will inherit a better world.Acts like:– Turning off devices instead of leaving them on standby– Buying less cotton clothing (a T-shirt needs 2,400 litres of water to make!)– Using reusable straws when possible– Turning off the tap while you brush your teethwill take only moments, but if enough people commit to them, we can make a real difference to our planet._______________________________'Now really is the time to act. You don’t have to be a superhero – everyone can make a difference by following this book’ – Ben Fogle

    Here you'll find hundreds of ideas on how to be ecologically smart and still be stylish and trend-setting. You don't have to sacrifice to go green--you can eat well, dress well, and live well once you learn how to:Learn where to shop for vintage and recycled jewelry (mining practices for gold and silver are notoriously polluting).Wear sustainable threads--organic cotton, peace silk, bamboo--or look for funky reconstructed designs made from vintage fabrics.Find shoes made from naturally tanned and dyed leather, hemp, or made from recycled materials...that still look incredibly chic.Party it up- with the planet in mind! Make your next fiesta fabulous with organic beverages, seasonal food from the farmer's market, and more.Pretty-up with organic, biodegradable hair products, body washes, moisturizers, and make-up--better for you and the planet's water supplies! We'll explain why and what to look for.How to earn points while convincing your boss to go green in your office.Travel green and still see the world in style!Save cash with some Earth-loving swaps around your apartment, dorm or house....and more. Let these and other easy-to-follow, fun and fashionable tips help you to feel great while doing good. You and Mother Nature will look fabulous!This book is printed on recycled paper.

    Every year, faced with the life-or-death problem of choosing and traveling to a new home, honeybees stake everything on a process that includes collective fact-finding, vigorous debate, and consensus building. In fact, as world-renowned animal behaviorist Thomas Seeley reveals, these incredible insects have much to teach us when it comes to collective wisdom and effective decision making. A remarkable and richly illustrated account of scientific discovery, Honeybee Democracy brings together, for the first time, decades of Seeley's pioneering research to tell the amazing story of house hunting and democratic debate among the honeybees.In the late spring and early summer, as a bee colony becomes overcrowded, a third of the hive stays behind and rears a new queen, while a swarm of thousands departs with the old queen to produce a daughter colony. Seeley describes how these bees evaluate potential nest sites, advertise their discoveries to one another, engage in open deliberation, choose a final site, and navigate together--as a swirling cloud of bees--to their new home. Seeley investigates how evolution has honed the decision-making methods of honeybees over millions of years, and he considers similarities between the ways that bee swarms and primate brains process information. He concludes that what works well for bees can also work well for people: any decision-making group should consist of individuals with shared interests and mutual respect, a leader's influence should be minimized, debate should be relied upon, diverse solutions should be sought, and the majority should be counted on for a dependable resolution.An impressive exploration of animal behavior, Honeybee Democracy shows that decision-making groups, whether honeybee or human, can be smarter than even the smartest individuals in them.

    In prose of outstanding immediacy, Jane Jacobs writes about what makes streets safe or unsafe; about what constitutes a neighborhood, and what function it serves within the larger organism of the city; about why some neighborhoods remain impoverished while others regenerate themselves. She writes about the salutary role of funeral parlors and tenement windows, the dangers of too much development money and too little diversity. Compassionate, bracingly indignant, and always keenly detailed, Jane Jacobs's monumental work provides an essential framework for assessing the vitality of all cities.