'Defuturing: A New Design Philosophy bears true to its title. It’s the confident announcement of a new approach to design by a fiercely independent and original design thinker. Nobody has grasped with greater clarity design’s role in creating the structural logic of sustainability, constitutive of today’s world, than Tony Fry. In these pages, the reader will find a most perceptive exploration of the profound historicity of design, from which there emerges a genuinely new way of looking at the world. By conjuring up a critical new awareness of design’s powers of world making, Fry is able to craft the contours of a compelling redirective design practice and a novel lexicon for making otherwise.'

'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, firstly in its roles in helping to create the unsustainable, but secondly, 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, Fry 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.