At a moment when the term “design” is used not only to designate acts of a designer — such as projecting the organizational, representational, technical, and material dimensions of an object, building, image or interface — but to reference any act of strategic or even managerial thinking, De-Signing Design: Cartographies of Theory and Practice offers welcome conceptual and discursive tools for thinking critically about the future. Demonstrating the complex relays between thinking and doing, or theory and practice, it marks out a variegated new ground upon which to operate beyond the purely instrumental.

Felicity D. Scott, Columbia University

De-signing Design: Cartographies of Theory and Practice is a synthetic modernist handbook for de-signing design and for the city as design outcome. Its compelling narrative begins with Jacques Derrida’s provocative placement of the hyphen in the formation of the term “de-signing”. Thus equipped, we set off on a journey that leads from the production of the first atlas by Abraham Ortellus in 1570 all the way to the world of BwO (body-without-organs) and other entities “poised in potentiality”. Strategies and outcomes that once seemed out of the world of Superfictions now appear tantalizingly real.

This book will appeal to, will excite, and will inform artists, designers, architects, bio-engineers, narratologists, city planners, graduate students, and anyone with a keen sense of wonder about our future and how it might be “de-signed”.

Peter Hill, Deakin University