A History from Scandinavia: Ecological by Design

“One of the most concrete efforts yet made to track the real historical entanglements of design and environment in the postwar period. Kjetil Fallan explodes clichéd images of Scandinavian modern furniture and design culture still nurtured by many of us, and replaces them with socially complex, philosophically sophisticated, and technologically ambiguous case studies that shed new light on the successes and failures of design’s ecological aspirations.”—Larry Busbea, University of Arizona, author of Proxemics and the Architecture of Social Interaction and The Responsive Environment: Aesthetics, Design, and the Human in the 1970s“Fallan, a leading international scholar, charts the historical course of arguably the most important issues facing designers today: how design contributes to environmental sustainability and unsustainability, growth and degrowth, justice and injustice. Drawing on the critical roots of environmental design and philosophy in Scandinavia, Fallan frames the damage done by capitalism and colonialism within global design history to make this a vital, timely, beautifully written, and far reaching book.”—Christina Cogdell, Professor, Department of Design, University of California at Davis, author of Toward a Living Architecture? Complexism and Biology in Generative Design“This is the nuanced contribution to the discussion about design and environmentalism that we need. Making vital Scandinavian design history accessible for an international audience, Fallan skillfully traces the moment in history when design lost its innocence and status as a tool for progressive modernism through becoming complicit in unsustainable production and consumption. Nonetheless hopeful, he unravels the complexities and paradoxes of design’s entanglement with environmentalism with a forward-looking focus on ecoproduction, ecoconsumption, ecophilosophy, and renewable energy.”—Mads Nygaard Folkmann, Professor of Design Studies, University of Southern Denmark, author of Design Aesthetics (forthcoming)