Sustainable Everyday talks about the future using the tools of design: design which, in this case, does not prefigure tomorrow but takes part in shaping it. Parallel text in Italian and English.
What might everyday life be like in a sustainable society? How do you take care of yourself and other people? How do you work, study, move around? How do you cultivate a network of personal and social relationships and create an undistorted relationship with the environment? What do the sustainable societies we are able to imagine today have in common? How wide a range of options do we have open to us on the basis of these common elements?
Sustainable Everyday offers us a state-of-the-art picture based on the answers we can give to these questions today. It goes on to outline possible scenarios and workable alternatives applicable in the everyday dimension of existence (the world as we, its inhabitants, see it). It deals with the future of our domestic lives, but the focus is not on the technology which is to reshape traditional functions, but rather on emerging “living strategies” which are becoming possible and, at least for some, desirable today; different ways of living that arise more from social and systemic innovation than from technological development.
The book is the result of an international research program and a series of 15 design workshops in 10 different countries. They lay out a detailed scenario of sustainable everyday life: a scenario which sets limits and opens possibilities; which raises new questions, offers new solutions and reveals possible, different ways of living. It leaves the reader space to form his/her own opinion and make informed, individual choices.
Sustainable Everyday: Scenarios of Urban Life By Ezio Manzini, Francois Jegou
Share your perspective. Does this book belong in the service design canon? What are the most important points to take away? Please share any links to reviews or other information regarding this book or its themes.
Also the website from the La Triennale di Milano exhibition.