Medium Design: Knowing How to Work on the World

Abstract

designer who must act. At the book’s beginning, Maldonado warns the reader that the text is fragmented and erratic. But his analysis of design’s relationship to large-scale systems, ecology, social structure, politics, and technology does important work to show the centrality of design for the environment. While sustainable designers today are familiar with the visionary work of Victor Papanek, whose widely celebrated Design for the Real World: Human Ecology and Social Change appeared a year after Design, Nature, and Revolution, Maldonado’s book has been largely overlooked. This reprint seeks to rectify this by showing us how we still have a lot to learn and much to remember about design’s role beyond the stylization of individual objects. Maldonado is both a skeptic and a realist. He sees the complex relationships of systems, understands man’s proclivity for concrete manifestation, and envisions hope in the form of design and planning. Maldonado’s book remains a rallying cry to defuse environmental apocalypse by leading with design and planning for what is, he says, “a future devoid so of future” (75).