Designing through Planetary Breakdown: Locating Material Knowledge and Practical Skill

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Jesse Adams Stein Chantel Carr

Designing through Planetary Breakdown

Locating Material Knowledge and Practical Skill

Jesse Adams Stein, Chantel Carr

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English

Routledge
30 June 2025

The Arts: General & Reference; Product design; Development studies; Global warming; Technical design

In an era of profound environmental and geopolitical uncertainty, Designing through Planetary Breakdown offers fresh perspectives on design’s evolving role in the face of planetary change. This unique collection emphasises practices and perspectives at the edges of conventional design, encompassing craft, material knowledge, repair, manual skills, creative practice and non-professional design, to reveal how design can address urgent challenges in grounded, hands-on ways.

Structured into two sections – Skills and Capacities, and Care and Generative Practices – the chapters cover a rich range of topics examining both traditional and emerging approaches to making, caring and maintaining. Readers will find reflections on community-led adaptive urban heat strategies in Western Sydney, First Nations’ perspectives on design labour, repair-led design education initiatives, and the ethical and social dimensions of global supply chains. The book journeys through a wide range of empirical examples, including from Cuba, Indonesia, Spain and Australia, offering insights into generative transformations of materials and technologies. It demonstrates how design, expanded beyond the traditional professional confines, can foster practical responses to global issues.

Designing through Planetary Breakdown is ideal for scholars, students, designers and craftspeople across design studies, design anthropology, repair and discard studies, craft studies and more broadly in the humanities and social sciences. Practical and deeply social, this collection offers a call to action: a guide for all hands to shape a future not just of survival, but of regeneration and collective action.

The Introduction and Chapter 3 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons [Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC BY-NC-ND)] 4.0 license.

Edited by: Jesse Adams Stein, Chantel Carr
Imprint: Routledge
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions: Height: 234mm, Width: 156mm,
Weight: 280g
ISBN: 9781032779560
ISBN 10: 103277956X
Pages: 204
Publication Date: 30 June 2025
Audience: College/higher education , Primary
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active

Climate transition possibilities at design’s edges: Labour, skill, care and repair Jesse Adams Stein and Chantel Carr PART I – SKILLS and CAPACITIES at DESIGN’S EDGES 1. On weathering and “climate-readiness”: A strengths-based approach to adaptive practice in Western Sydney Stephen Healy and Abby Mellick Lopes 2. Geographies of responsibility: Design and social sustainability in global supply chains Elise Hodson 3. Craft skills as enablers of care Susan Luckman 4. Repair-led learning for design education Melisa Duque and Blanca Callén 5. Repair, save and reuse: Cuba during the Special Period Ana Sofía López Guerrero & Marcos da Costa Braga PART II – CARE and GENERATIVE PRACTICES 6. Bangawarra Ngeeyinee Bayaba:Speaking with Bangawarra Shannon Foster and Jo Paterson Kinniburgh in conversation with Alexandra Crosby 7. Saving the loom: Tracing one machine’s 20-year journey from strategic government investment to small-scale craft volunteerism Jesse Adams Stein 8.Care, disability and digital interfaces Jacquie Lorber-Kasunic and Kate Sweetapple 9. Weaving with scraps:Skills, materials and innovation in Indonesia Kestity A. Pringgoharjono and Alexandra Crosby 10. Brick by brick, shell by shell:(Bio)material practices for regeneration, repair and resilience Kate Scardifield 11. Moisture, mud and monuments, or How to hold a cemetery together in torrential rain Daniel Tranter-Santoso

Jesse Adams Stein is an interdisciplinary design researcher and historian specialising in the relationship between technology, work and material culture. She is a senior lecturer in the School of Design at the University of Technology Sydney. She recently completed an ARC DECRA Fellowship examining the connectivity between local manufacturing production, design education and vocational training in Australia, focusing on the 1980s to the present. Chantel Carr is a human geographer and ARC DECRA Fellow in Geography and Sustainability at the University of Wollongong. Carr’s research examines the social and labour dimensions of decarbonisation and energy transitions across multiple spatial scales. Funded by the Australian Research Council and government partners, Carr’s research has examined energy transitions in the built environment, reskilling challenges for workers in carbon-intensive sectors, and household sustainability practices.

Reviews for Designing through Planetary Breakdown: Locating Material Knowledge and Practical Skill

""This is an agenda-setting book that explores the many ways in which design labor is contributing to struggles for realizing post-carbon futures. … Designing Through Planetary Breakdown makes a major contribution to emerging discussion between design studies and design practice, the critical social sciences and environmental and climate studies."" Professor Damian White, Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) ""Designing through Planetary Breakdown is part of wave of literature on expanded design practice, not just theory, for transitions by design. This honest and practical book presents a series of design responses to planetary breakdown. With case studies of design for care, repair, and resilience, the text presents the problems and possibilities that emerge at the margins as design develops new approaches for adaptation."" Dr Joanna Boehnert, Bath Spa University, author of Design, Ecology, Politics