There are opportunities today for design to employ its creative skills and knowledge to take the discipline in new, little-explored directions. Doing so will be of critical importance because the accelerating pace of technological advancement in recent years, especially in digital technologies, has not only created a plethora of new products and economic benefi ts but also an increasing sense of disquiet. This uneasiness about the pace of change and the impacts of technological objects, introduced in the previous chapter, is caused by a variety of factors that can be summarized as follows:

• the environmental repercussions of production and waste;1, 2 • the social exploitation often associated with how these goods are made;3 • concerns about the personal impacts of using these products, such as

social isolation and compulsive use behaviours;4 • growing concerns about the relationship of these technological objects to

our spiritual wellbeing5 and those things that may be important to human

welfare and our relationship to the world but are unsuited to digital media.6