ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a historical context to ideas and practices of designand nature, highlighting underlying tensions and problematic conceptions about nature in the Modern West. It reviews various attempts to design with naturein past and recent history, with attention to how design and research is still embedded in a Western conception of our relationship with natureinherited from the Scientific Revolution. The chapter argues that with each ‘new’ approach to designing with nature from the Romantic Movement in the late 19th century, through to contemporary design and current design theory, designers inadvertently continue Modernist and colonialist powerrelationships that place humans at the top of a hierarchy, with nature at the bottom. Led by William Morris, a number of artists, designers and philosophers in the mid-late 19th century advocated a return to nature and mysticism. Ecological design as mastery grew out of myths that humans can be entirely separate from nature and can control natural systems.
