Your description of State of Design sounds similar to Sydney Design 09; a lot of well intentioned talk, but always as a side show to the main event that is big ‘d’ Design. Despite the rhetoric, the ethical issues are really just speed humps in the drive to more glitzy glamour, cruzey cool and whiz bang kapow.

There seems to be a dissonance that turns on a clash between, on the surface, a recognised moral imperative, but at heart, a cherished and harmful identity that is also maintained as a valued economic role. What it produces are practitioners who produce unnecessary designerly stuff that we’re now supposed to feel good about because it’s ‘green’. Designers are very good at greening something they’ve decided must exist, but not so good at identifying what shouldn’t exist and designing away the need and desire for things.

Design needs a different identity that compels its practitioners to make the creative interjections required for sustain-ability. The vision has to move from a concern with individual things to a concern with a total interaction of things, images, places, behaviours, identities and power; a totality that is presently unsustainable. There is a lot of skill, creativity and potential in design, but mostly it’s in service of the “knowledge and innovation economy”, a consumption vehicle we’re yet to fully accept as problematic and begin the pragmatic task of turning around. There is a failure to see design work as political, i.e. not just the role of imaging political campaigns, but as an act of working with/against/despite the constraints of certain social/material reality in order to create a new one. Greening crap sustains the unsustainable without challenging much more than the bank balance of ‘activist consumers’.

I think there’s definitely something in the image you paint of fostering a better culture of design. In fact, providing its aim is to increase our ability to sustain, I think it’s the only real way forward. The great thing is that this in itself is a design challenge, but it comes with the challenge of helping designers see it as an alternative project, and engaging with it as something that should undo our present expectations of design.