ANTI-TREND RESILIENT DESIGN AND THE ART OF SUSTAINABLE LIVING TABLE OF CONTENTS FOREWORD INTRODUCTION
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1 ANTI-TREND VERSUS TREND To Be or Not to Be Trendy The Immaterialist Analyzing Anti-trendy Tendencies Basic Assumptions The Desires of a Time An Anecdote Concerning the Lowering of Productivity Balancing Between Too Much and Too Little degrowth bad faith the fisherman and the businessman when assumptions collide
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2 ANTI-TRENDY INTUITION The Intuitive Compass Right and Wrong Hunches Logical Conclusions Confirmatory Bias Intersubjectivity Immediate Knowledge Getting to the core of things Mindful Reduction Object Analysis Common Ground and Open Horizons The Core of Sustainable Living Disrupting the Familiar Epoché Human Common Ground
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37 38 40 41 43 45 48 50 51 52 54 58 60 62
64 66 67 69 70 72 76 78 79 81 83 85 87
The Importance of Fiction The Stabile Core The Sublime Moment of Insight Momentary Elimination of the Familiar Transitions Synaesthesia and Sensory Experiences Aisthetikos Open Sensing magic Learning to Navigate Intuitively Intuitive Forecasting ubuntu the guiding principle of inner needs
90 3 ANTI-TREND AND AUTHENTICITY 91 Living in despair 93 The Aesthete Civil Disobedience, or the Art of 96 Choosing “the Good” 97 Change Must Come from the Individual 99 Oppression 101 restlessness 102 The Importance of Acknowledgement 103 the master and the slave 105 To Will Oneself Free is also to Will Others Free 108 being connected 112 Genuine Freedom 114 the ethicist Irrational versus Pre-rational 115 Consumption 118 The Sustainable Golden Mean 120 encouraging usage 121 discovering aesthetic links 125 Sustainable Storytelling 126 values and beliefs 129 sustainable forms of appeal 130 pathos 133 Time and Value 135 No-pain-no-gain 137 Resilient Living 142 Nourishing Repetitions
A Life Worth Sustaining Status Symbols The Emperor and the Painter 4 ANTI-TRENDY EXPERIENCES OF BEAUTY Anti-trendy Perceived Obsolescence Magical Things Disinterested Pleasure Aesthetic Nourishment Resilient Aesthetics The Cathartic Experience robustness relevance Unbearable Lightness Wild and Raw Aesthetics Rewilding the Design-object Adaptability The Beauty of Rhythms The Daily Chorus Continuity Aura
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the characteristics of a shareable object inclusive design repairability, flexibility, and aesthetics Long-lived and Short-lived Objects encouraging variety and celebrating change the butterfly embracing transience facticity and transcendence The Open, Raw Design-object broadness and affordability no person ever steps into the same river twice 6 THE ANTI-TRENDY DE-
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260 SIGN-OBJECT
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5 THREE ANTI-TRENDY REASONS FOR DESIGNING NEW OBJECTS IN A WORLD WITH WAY TOO MANY 194 THINGS Waste Materials, Deconstruction, and 195 Upcycling 199 Crafty Imperfections 201 Boro and Hacks 204 Disassembly 206 Sustaining and Empowerment 209 The Essence of a Craft Expression 213 the tactile bond 215 tactile literacy 219 Craft Innovation 224 Democratic Sustainability 225 Encouraging Sustainable Living Collaborative Consumption: Swapping, 228 Sharing, and Repairing
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Creating Resilient Designobjects Natural Limitations Alteration Resilience to Changing Needs regrowth Resilience to Anti-trendy Perceived Obsolescence Deterioration Resilience to Fleeting Trends Resilience to Exploitation of Natural Resources permaculture anti-growth closedness versus openness
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About the Author
FOREWORD The process of writing this book has been deeply affected by a life altering decision and journey that I embarked upon in July 2018 together with my family. During the spring of 2018 we decided to shake up life as we knew it, which meant a modern city life with good jobs, an apartment that we loved in a charming neighborhood—the city-center of Copenhagen, Denmark—and a well-organized and well-functioning school and kindergarten for our two children. After a two-month journey to Asia the previous year, something had started to grow within our minds: an undeniable desire to get rid of most of our belongings combined with a desire to live more sustainably, modestly, and in closer connection with nature as well as a deeply felt need to have more time to embark on the projects we are passionate about (which in my case meant, and still means, writing). And so, we resigned from our jobs, sold our apartment, all of our furniture, and gave away most of our clothes, toys, books, kitchenware, etc., took our children out of their school and kindergarten and moved to Bali, Indonesia with three suitcases. We still live here, in an open house in the middle of the jungle; we have no walls and no windows and own very little furniture and very few clothes (as not much is needed here due to the warm climate and the outdoors living). The sounds of the wind blowing, the tropical rain falling, the surrounding farmers working, and the animals and insects that live in and around our house (dogs, birds, cicadas, beetles, dragonflies, chickens, geckos, frogs, cats, cows, goats, etc.) are omnipresent. This book was written here in the Balinese jungle. It has been shaped by the experiences, impressions and thoughts that have emerged during my years in Bali and formed by my theories and ideologies regarding resilient design, aesthetics, empowerment, and sustainable living. 7
INTRODUCTION The overall purpose with this book is to encourage designers and consumers to take responsibility for overproduction and overconsumption, and to alter unsustainable production and behavioral patterns. There is a current need for responsibility to be taken, and for action. A collective need that unites us all worldwide as a “we.” Hence, when I use the term we I mean both the creatives, who have the power to shape our reality and influence future ways of living, and the consumers, who have the authority to alter and change demands. We need to understand that we can all make a difference, and that no step toward a more sustainable and resilient world is too small. We need to enable sustainable innovators to lead the way by daring to change our ways. We need to believe that when our intuition tells us that somethings is wrong, maybe it is wrong. We need more civil engagement, or even more civil disobedience. We need more products that empower workers and artisans, and much less growth-thinking in order to turn around the environmental crisis that we are facing. We need resilience and anti-trend as opposed to consumption that encourages fleeting trends. We need long lasting, aesthetically nourishing design-objects that can inspire us to buy much less. And we need sustainable short-lived objects that can satisfy our fleeting needs. We need sustainable living solutions that can enable us and our natural environment to flourish. We need sustainable pioneers who can arouse a need in us to shake up our habitual ways of life, which tend to revolve around work and consumption. We need more friction and less “smoothness” and convenience. We need more purpose, more commitment, more heaviness and less insignificant lightness. We need to embrace change and celebrate diversity. We need community-feelings and shareable products and living solutions rather than greed and selfish “Ark”-builders. We need all of this, and so much more. And this book is my attempt to provide a small slice of this cake. 8
Through an investigation of anti-trend as opposed to volatile trends the importance of pursuing anti-trend and resilience in life in general and in relation to the creation of sustainable design-objects and living solutions is underlined. Hence, the anti-trend investigations navigate through two main focal points: anti-trendy living and the anti-trendy design practice. Establishing a sustainable lifestyle and designing durable products have one very important thing in common: they revolve around the formation of an enduring core that can function as a stable, yet flexible foundation for actions and usage. The book contains an inherent “supply and demand” logic, which in short can be described like this: in order for the supply or creation of sustainable design solutions that encourage resilient living to raise, the demand for resilient, sustainable products must increase, and vice versa. The creation of sustainable solutions and the need therefore are in other words intertwined. In my perspective one of the most important and vital ways of overcoming and turning around the immense environmental problems we are currently facing worldwide is radical reduction of consumption. When I write consumption, I mean it in the most straightforward sense of the word: buying too many things and going through and getting rid of them again way too quickly. The fashion industry alone emits more carbon than international flights and maritime shipping combined, and in addition hereto, think about the production and consumption of furniture, home accessories, toys, and other knick-knacks. However, despite the fact that altering our habitual consumer ways might sound easy, it appears to be unbelievably hard. Even though we are bombarded with horrific and very tangible scenarios involving starving polar bears, whales with plastic-filled stomachs, and burning rivers, and even though these images are presented as interlinked with overconsumption, we continue to shop and we continue to discard the majority of our belongings way before they don’t work anymore or are worn out, and hence we continue to add to the mountains and islands of trash that are building up in landfills and in oceans. Why? Because we are evil? No, of course not. Rather, the reason could be partly interlinked with an increasing detachment from our physical, natural environment and partly with the fact that habits are hard to change, particularly when engulfed in a busy daily routine. Furthermore, our lack of sustainable action is likely connected to the fact that status symbols are to an extent associated with new, glittery things, and to the constant craving for more that seems to govern our late-modern minds and societies, as well as to the despair that this entails. Therefore, a significant part of the book is dedicated to an investigation of despair as well as authentic, sustainable living as an antidote. Other parts of the book are committed to solutions: to an investigation of how objects and living solutions can encourage fulfilled, sustainable, resilient living with less; and to parse the three legitimate reasons for creating new products in a world that is already overflowing with things, product-waste, and the anti-trendy design-object. 9
However, before getting started, allow me to serve a small foretaste of each chapter as well as a structure-overview. The six chapters of the book are interlinked in pairs: Chapter One and Two’s mainly focus on anti-trend analysis of cultural and societal tendencies toward sustainable living. The methodology presented enables the researcher to differentiate between trend based, fleeting and deeply felt, durable needs and longings. Chapter Three and Four are devoted to an investigation of what it means to live authentically. The underlying hypothesis of the chapters is that overcoming despair leads to a more sustainable lifestyle and hence reduces overconsumption. Furthermore, these chapters investigate the importance of raw, “heavy” aesthetic experiences in relation to human well-being and sustainable living. Chapter Five and Six are devoted to defining the resilient design-object. These chapters dive into the reasoning for designing new things in a world overflowing with stuff as well as a concrete definition of the properties and characteristics of the resilient, anti-trendy design-object. In other words, the overall structure of the book goes like this: chapters One and Two: anti-trendy research; chapters Three and Four: authentic, sustainable living; and chapters Five and Six: the resilient design-object.
For my boys, my never-ending source of inspiration.
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Woven ceiling for Potato Head Bali by BYO Living. Material: upcycled plastic waste from 1.7 tons of PET plastic bottles (Lim Masulin).