{"title":"Tony Fry","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"defuturing-book-tony-fry-9781350089532","title":"Defuturing","description":"“Once one understands the nature and magnitude of defuturing as the negation of world futures, how one has to account for the history and making of the material world – including design - dramatically changes. Defuturing as our condition forces the generation of a new philosophy of design.”   With these thoughts this book presents a radically new understanding of the history, context and futures of designing.   First published in 1999, now reissued with a new preface by the author, Defuturing: A New Design Philosophy is a prescient and powerful account of what it means to comprehend that we live in world that is taking away futures for ourselves and non-human others. Arguing that designing is doubly implicated in this process, first in its roles in helping to create the unsustainable, but second, re-thought through the lens of defuturing, as a mode of acting in the world that can help contest the negation of the world, Defuturing transforms our comprehension of designing and of how futures can be constituted.   Working not through abstract theorizing but through the analysis of concrete examples,  the book uses historical material on design to expose the archaeology of defuturing. Shattering the illusion that the future simply “is”, Defuturing confronts designing with the challenge of remaking while offering the elements of a new practical reasoning of design acting.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":49730221441297,"sku":"NGR9781350089532","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51614207901969,"sku":"NIN9781350089532","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1350089532.jpg?v=1750921619"},{"product_id":"design-as-politics-book-tony-fry-9781847885678","title":"Design as Politics","description":"Design as Politics confronts the inadequacy of contemporary politics to deal with unsustainability. 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Design Futuring - a pathfinding text for the new era - extends far beyond Design courses and professional practice, and will also be invaluable to students and practitioners of Architecture, the Creative Arts, Business and Management.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50094140358929,"sku":"CIN184788217XG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":50818118091025,"sku":"GOR006489853","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/184788217X.jpg?v=1750834174"},{"product_id":"design-and-the-question-of-history-book-tony-fry-9780857854773","title":"Design and the Question of History","description":"Design and the Question of History is not a work of Design History. Rather, it is a mixture of mediation, advocacy and polemic that takes seriously the directive force of design as an historical actor in and upon the world. Understanding design as a shaper of worlds within which the political, ethical and historical character of human being is at stake, this text demands radically transformed notions of both design and history. Above all, the authors posit history as the generational site of the future. Blindness to history, it is suggested, blinds us both to possibility, and to the foreclosure of possibilities, enacted through our designing.       The text is not a resolved, continuous work, presented through one voice. Rather, the three authors cut across each other, presenting readers with the task of disclosing, to themselves, the commonalities, repetitions and differences within the deployed arguments, issues, approaches and styles from which the text is constituted. This is a work of friendship, of solidarity in difference, an act of cultural politics. 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The essays in this collection locate design at the center of a series of interrelated planetary crises, from climate change, nuclear war, and racial and geopolitical violence to education, computational culture, and the loss of the commons. In doing so, the essays propose a range of needed interventions in order to transform design itself and its role within the shifting realities of a planetary crisis. It challenges the widely popular view that design can contribute to solving world problems by exposing how this attitude only intensifies the problems we currently face. In this way, the essays critique the dominant modes of framing the meaning and scope of design as a largely Anglo-European 'problem-solving' practice. By drawing on post-development theory, decolonial theory, black studies, continental philosophy, science and technology studies, and more, the contributions envision a critical and speculative practice that problematises both its engagement with planet and itself.  The essays in this collection will appeal to design theorists and practitioners alike, but also to scholars and students generally concerned with how the past and future of design is implicated in the unfolding complexity of ecological devastation, racial and political violence, coloniality, technological futures, and the brutality of modern Western culture generally.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":50697906258193,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":50697908486417,"sku":"NGR9780367898540","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52144572858641,"sku":"NLS9780367898540","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0367898543.jpg?v=1751038475"},{"product_id":"new-political-imagination-book-tony-fry-9780367622770","title":"A New Political Imagination","description":"The book presents the case for the making of a new political imagination by offering a critique of existing political institutions, philosophy and practices that are unable to provide the thinking, means and leadership to deal with the complexity and crises of specific locales and the world at large.  The authors make clear that there is a fundamental disjuncture between the complexity of the combined critical conditions that are now putting life on Earth at risk, and the divisions and theories of knowledge that are dominantly and instrumentally trying to understand the situation. In response, this work makes the case for the need for a new political imagination that rejects the sufficiency of existing political ideologies (including democracy) being the end point of politics. The book tackles the political underpinnings of social and economic life in a world still embedded in the inequities of the afterlife of colonialism and state socialism. Thereafter it engages narratives of change, rethinks imagination and critical practices, to finally present a relationally connected way to move forward.  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Examining the relation of design to the nature of the human species - where the  species came from, how it was created, what it became and its likely future - Fry asserts that current biological and social models of evolution are an insufficient explanation of how 'we humans' became what  we are.  Making a case for ontological design as an evolutionary agency, the book posits the relation between the formation of the world  of human fabrication and the making of mankind itself as indivisible. It also functions as a provocation to rethink the fate of Homo sapiens,  recognising that all species are finite and that the fate of humankind turns on a fundamental Darwinian principle - adapt or die. 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The stories bring into question the relation between the natural and unnatural forces of change and expose responses to, and lessons learnt, from different disaster crises situations. Stories also focus on how means to adapt are sought. The projected fictions are created from projected current climate facts; trends; and the author’s experience of population displacement, relocation and design-based climate change responsive action. Central to the book is the recognition that to be able to respond and adapt to the scale of coming changes in the climate requires going beyond existing practical action and embracing a new way of imagining futures. Disappearing Cities aims to stimulate ways of meeting this need.  The book opens with a Prologue that establishes the contextual frame of empirical foundation out of which the fictions are created. It recognises that we all live in a world in which the conditions that will result in huge numbers of cities disappearing are underway. From the human perspective, the process appears to be very slow, whereas in historico-geological time, it is happening exceptionally quickly. The number of the loss of cities is going to be huge, yet the recognition that this will occur is not arriving, In part, this is because of a lack of knowledge, but equally, it reflects a lack of imagination. Transposing what is known about climate change by a significant percentage of the societies of many nations to actual environments in which they live is just not arriving. What appears so solid and established fails to be seen and imagined as a risk and vulnerable. From establishing this opening perspective, the first part of the book presents stories of cities already disappearing as a result of the forces of nature changed by anthropogenically created global warming. Part two discusses the impacts of natural disasters being made unnaturally. For example, by the way industrial societies are damaging and changing natural systems, including the climatic. The final part goes to cities destroyed by completely un-natural means, including war.  Disappearing Cities aims to contribute to meeting the need for a better understanding of, and ability to imagine, the risks to which vast numbers of cities are, and will be, exposed to forces of disappearance. To do this, the narratives are a hybrid of fact and fiction. The work was inspired by Italo Calvino’s book Invisible Cities and is intended to be a salient contemporary companion to this text. It mirrors its form but differs in style and content. 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The research for the book is informed by diverse sources including industry journals, contemporary accounts and technical literature – all framed by rich, early accounts of iron and steel making from the middle ages to the opening of the industrial age, and most notably, the crucial works of Vannoccio Biringuccio, Georgius Agricola, Andrew Ure and Harry Scrivenor.   In contrast, trans-cultural accounts of the history of metallurgy from eminent sinologists and cultural historians like Joseph Needham and G.E.R. Lloyd are used. Readings on the pre-history and history of science, as well as histories and philosophies technology from scholars such as Siegfried Giedion, Merritt Roe Smith, L.T.C Rolt, Robert B. Gordon inform the analysis. Social and economic history from historians such as Eric Hobsbawn, William T. Hogan and David Brody are consulted; labour process theory is also examined, particularly the influential writings of F.W. 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Understanding design as a shaper of worlds within which the political, ethical and historical character of human being is at stake, this text demands radically transformed notions of both design and history. Above all, the authors posit history as the generational site of the future. Blindness to history, it is suggested, blinds us both to possibility, and to the foreclosure of possibilities, enacted through our designing.\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e The text is not a resolved, continuous work, presented through one voice. Rather, the three authors cut across each other, presenting readers with the task of disclosing, to themselves, the commonalities, repetitions and differences within the deployed arguments, issues, approaches and styles from which the text is constituted. This is a work of friendship, of solidarity in difference, an act of cultural politics. 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Fry argues that this pluralisation of war has broken the binary relation between war and peace: conflict is no longer self-evident, and consequentially the changes in the conditions, nature, systems, philosophies and technologies of war must be addressed.    Through a deep understanding of contemporary war, Fry explains why peace fails as both idea and process, before presenting ‘Unstaging War’ as a concept and nascent practice that acknowledges conflict as structurally present, and so is not able to be dealt with by attempts to create peace. Against a backdrop of increasingly tense relations between global power blocs, the beginnings of a new nuclear arms race, and the ever-increasing human and environmental impacts of climate change, a more viable alternative to war is urgently needed. Unstaging War is not claimed as a solution, but rather as an exploration of critical problems and an opening into the means of engaging with them.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52661542781201,"sku":"NLS9783030247195","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":53037297762577,"sku":"NIN9783030247195","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9783030247195.jpg?v=1762267585"},{"product_id":"becoming-human-by-design-book-tony-fry-9780857853547","title":"Becoming Human by Design","description":"The last in Tony Fry's celebrated trilogy of books continues his radical rethinking of design. Becoming Human by Design's provocative argument presents a revised reading of human 'evolution' centred on ontological design.   Examining the relation of design to the nature of the human species - where the  species came from, how it was created, what it became and its likely future - Fry asserts that current biological and social models of evolution are an insufficient explanation of how 'we humans' became what  we are.  Making a case for ontological design as an evolutionary agency, the book posits the relation between the formation of the world  of human fabrication and the making of mankind itself as indivisible. It also functions as a provocation to rethink the fate of Homo sapiens,  recognising that all species are finite and that the fate of humankind turns on a fundamental Darwinian principle - adapt or die. Fry considers the nature of adaptation, arguing that it will depend on an ability to think and design in new ways.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52679785513233,"sku":"NLS9780857853547","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9780857853547.jpg?v=1762311444"},{"product_id":"unstaging-war-confronting-conflict-and-peace-book-tony-fry-9783030247225","title":"Unstaging War, Confronting Conflict and Peace","description":"This book presents the concept of ‘unstaging’ war as a strategic response to the failure of the discourse and institutions of peace. This failure is explained by exploring the changing character of conflict in current and emergent global circumstances, such as asymmetrical conflicts, insurgencies, and terrorism. Fry argues that this pluralisation of war has broken the binary relation between war and peace: conflict is no longer self-evident, and consequentially the changes in the conditions, nature, systems, philosophies and technologies of war must be addressed.    Through a deep understanding of contemporary war, Fry explains why peace fails as both idea and process, before presenting ‘Unstaging War’ as a concept and nascent practice that acknowledges conflict as structurally present, and so is not able to be dealt with by attempts to create peace. Against a backdrop of increasingly tense relations between global power blocs, the beginnings of a new nuclear arms race, and the ever-increasing human and environmental impacts of climate change, a more viable alternative to war is urgently needed. 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Most explicitly, this moment is expressed by evolutionary biology, making clear that planetary life is at the start of the sixth extinction event - a situation indivisible from climate change impacts. The already unstable geopolitical state of the world and its dangers will amplify the coming eco-environmental conditions, resulting in population displacement, resource stress, critical conditions of food security, and conflict. Globally, across all political ideologies, existing institutional politics demonstrate an incapability of responding to these situations.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThere is an evident temporal disjuncture between how extant politics is positioned in time and the moment of an ever-accelerating end times. Effectively, political institutions, their theory and practice, are out-of-step with terminal speeding defuturing events. As the book makes clear, this situation needs to be fully recognised. At the same time, there are visions and political positions presenting themselves as directing what will come after the end times. Viewing these positions indicates that the future will be plural and contested. In one direction, technology and corporations will become even more powerful (as a critique of the literature on accelerationism shows). But at the other extreme, a huge swathe of displaced humanity is almost certain to be abandoned.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIn the face of these prospects, new political thinking and practices are essential. But this will not come from the existing political paradigm. Such change needs a new political imagination. Responding to this need is a primary focus of the book. 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