When everything is destined to be designed, design disappears into the everyday. We simply don’t see it anymore because it’s everywhere. This is the vanishing act of design. At this moment design registers its redundancy: our products, environments and services have been comprehensively improved. Everything has been designed to perfection and is under a permanent upgrade regime. Within such a paradigm, design is enmeshed with the capitalist logic of reproduction. But this does not come without conflicts, struggles and tensions. Chief among these is the situation of design in a planetary procession toward decay. Our dispense culture prompts a yearning for longevity. The computational compulsion to delete brings alive a desire to retrieve objects, ideas and experiences that refuse obsolescence. Society is growing more aware of sustainability and alert to the depletion of this world. For the ambitious designer, it’s time to take the next step: designing the future as a collective relation attuned to life.
MULTIFILE
Green spaces play an important role in urban areas. We study the accessibility of green urban areas by combining open data sets about green with population size data. We develop a mathematical model to define the population density of a green area and calculate the available green space depending on the location. To this end, we do not only consider walking distance to and size of the green area, but also take into account the local population size. Our model quantifies how the available green space depends on the location in the city, such that heavily populated areas have a small amount of green available, even when closely located to a green area.