ABSTRACT
The various calls to design for social, ecological, and political change, using pre-packaged innovation toolkits and other dispositifs of the knowledge economy, are largely window dressing when it comes to deep and sustained engagement with design's implication in and possible transformation of planetary crisis. The twin forces of race and geology are intimately tied to material politics that have given shape to the Anthropocene as lens through which to see environmental crisis. As a consequence, the meaning and scope of crisis, and how design is immanent to its production, is not a well-worn path for design theory, and therefore demands our careful attention. By crisis, what the readers have in mind are several interrelated conditions of disruption that converge into a ‘crisis point.’ One of the central challenges that this collection puts forward, which may even be the raison d'être for the collaborative project as a whole, is to think about design's response to crisis not as designer would.
