Today, as a global population, we produce 1.3 billion tons of municipal solid waste per year, waste, that in English Literature professor Brian Thill’s conception, ‘lays thick blankets of our chemical age across the entire planet, into every rocky outcropping, to the bottom of every sea’s floor, nestling in the trees and bogs and pools of the world’. The damage being done to our planet by the products, processes, and values generated by design is increasingly visible and measurable. When we look at a phenomenon like plastiglomerate, a new rock conglomerate made up of natural debris mixed in with molten plastic, we see directly and tangibly the ways in which the fall out of past design decisions are being laid down in the very strata of our planet for future generations to understand us, and to question us by.

This course provides an introduction to some of the issues and ideas with which to parse, interpret and evaluate design’s role in climate change, from a humanities perspective. We will examine a range of historical and contemporary responses by critics and designers to the conundrum of product and information overload, and explore some speculative projects that hypothesize on how product design and its criticism might be conducted more accountably in the future.

To augment image and object analysis, theoretical insights will be elicited by close reading and discussion of some key texts, concepts, and manifestoes by design philosophers, cultural theorists, and designers such as Tony Fry, Bruno Latour, Timothy Morton, Donna Harraday, and Isabelle Stengers, among others.

With a strong emphasis on fieldwork and on-site reporting, the course will encourage students to use a broad array of research methods, ranging from more familiar techniques such as interviewing, archival and database research, image and textual analysis, and direct observation to methods derived from other disciplines such as internet scraping, walking and mapping.

The final project of the course will collate essays on key terms written by individual students to make a Design and the Deep Future lexicon, which will be presented performatively to other members of the Leiden and KABK communities.

Keywords: Design, climate change, Anthropocene, critical design, speculative design, trash, waste, plastiglomerate, geology, design philosophy, deep time.