Designed Future is a journey through the modern era: our life in cities, the Americas, new territories and the old continent, of vision and design as essential tools for building the future. As the most complete collection of essays, interviews and lectures, this book is an in-depth view of the journey and particular thinking of one of the most relevant living architects, the Brazilian modern master, Paulo Mendes da Rocha (1928-2021). For the first time translated in English, it disclosures a must-read intense and provocative thinker in contemporary times.

This book discusses imaginary future generations and how current decision-making will influence those future generations. Markets and democracies focus on the present and therefore tend to make us forget that we are living in the present, with ancestors preceding and descendants succeeding us. Markets are excellent devices to equate supply and demand in the short term, but not for allocating resources between current and future generations, since future generations do not exist yet. Democracy is also not “applicable” for future generations, since citizens vote for candidates who will serve members of their, i.e., the current, generation. In order to overcome these shortcomings, the authors discusses imaginary future generations and future ministries in the context of current decision-making in fields such as the environment, urban management, forestry, water management, and finance. The idea of imaginary future generations comes from the Native American Iroquois, who had strong norms that compelled them to incorporate the interests of people seven generations ahead when making decisions.

This book will show you how to break through that self-imposed ceiling. It will challenge you to Take Command of your life by: 1. Awakening you to your beliefs and stories 2. Disrupting your patterns and behaviors 3. Designing a future you can't wait to live into

This book describes experiments in innovation, design, and democracy, undertaken largely by grassroots organizations, non-governmental organizations, and multi-ethnic working-class neighborhoods. These stories challenge the dominant perception of what constitutes successful innovations. They recount efforts at social innovation, opening the production process, challenging the creative class, and expanding the public sphere. The cases considered include a collective of immigrant women who perform collaborative services, the development of an open-hardware movement, grassroots journalism, and hip-hop performances on city buses. They point to the possibility of democratized innovation that goes beyond solo entrepreneurship and crowdsourcing in the service of corporations to include multiple futures imagined and made locally by often-marginalized publics.

In Designed for the Future, author Jared Green asks eighty of today's most innovative architects, urban planners, landscape architects, journalists, artists, and environmental leaders the same question: what gives you the hope that a sustainable future is possible? Their imaginative answers—covering everything from the cooling strategies employed at Cambodia's ancient temple city of Angkor Wat to the use of cutting-edge eco-friendly mushroom board as a replacement for Styrofoam—show the way to our future success on earth and begin a much-needed dialogue about what we can realistically accomplish in the decades ahead. Featuring an international roster of leading design thinkers including: • Biomimicry pioneer Janine Benyus • Curator Barry Bergdoll • Educator and author Alan Berger • Environmentalist and author Lester Brown • Architect Rick Cook • Urban Planner Paul Farmer • Critic Christopher Hume • Architect Bjarke Ingels • Landscape designer Mia Lehrer • Architect Rob Rogers • Critic Inga Saffron • Artist Janet Echelman

Sustainability is a powerful force that is fundamentally reshaping humanity’s relationship to the natural world and is ushering in the Age of Integration. The move from well-intentioned environmental friendliness to the higher bar of integral sustainability and regenerative design demands a new type of design professional, one that is deeply collaborative, ethically grounded, empathically connected and technologically empowered. As a response, this book argues for a great leap forward in design education: from an individualistic and competitive model casually focused on greening; to a new approach defined by an integral consciousness, shaped by the values of inclusivity and cooperation, and implemented by a series of integrative behaviors including: an ethically infused design brief a co-creative design process on-going value engineering pre-emptive engineering design validation through simulation on-line enabled integrated learning the use of well vetted rating systems. This book contains the integral frameworks, whole system change methodologies and intrinsic values that will assist professors and their students in an authentic and effective pursuit of design education for a sustainable future.

Today, it can seem as if the world has nothing but problems. And more than ever the boundaries of those problems are expanding in terms of the speed, scale, and impact by which they can alter business conditions, public governance, entire societies, the health of our planet, and the quality of our lives. Meeting these growing challenges requires ambitious new ways of designing solutions. With Expand: Stretching the Future By Design, authors Jens Martin Skibsted, a multiple-award winning designer, entrepreneur, and design philosopher, and Christian Bason, political scientist and CEO of the Danish Design Centre, take readers beyond “design thinking” to challenge current habits and carve out new space for more sustainable innovation. From transforming the ways we do business and reimagining health care, to creating planet-restoring housing and humanizing our digital lives in an age of AI, Expand explores how expansive thinking across six key areas—time, proximity, value, life, dimensions, and sectors—can provide radical, useful solutions to a whole host of current problems around the globe. With powerful real-world examples, the book challenges our freewheeling belief in technological determinism and its insensitivity toward ethics, humanity, and the environment. Expand is the first book to not just critique design thinking, but welcome it as a starting point for an ambitious, wide-ranging tale of how to expand and think beyond it. The best way to predict the future is to design it. Expand is the book that shows us how.