Design is critical to the green transition, and yet within the dominant conceptual frameworks of ‘sustainability’ and ‘net zero’ its impact will always be limited. According to these logics, design is less a medium for imagination than a means of damage limitation. It is reduced to reducing: shaving off increments of carbon, plastic, and waste without rethinking the systems that produce them. Future Observatory, the Design Museum’s national research programme for the green transition, funds and supports such work, and incremental change is urgent. But, as the design theorist Arturo Escobar argues, the climate crisis is not just a carbon crisis but a crisis of storytelling. In line with his assertion that we need to transition from one story of the world to another, an important facet of Future Observatory’s work is to explore alternative narratives.
Central to those narratives is the belief that design will have to shift from being a human-centric discipline to one that works with and for landscapes, ecosystems, and other species. More-than-human design is a challenge to contemporary practice, indeed to the very definition of design as we know it. But if the Anthropocene has made anything clear, it is that we live in a time when human interests have to be tempered with the interests of the rest of the living world. What does it mean to design not just for ourselves but for other species and for the health of natural systems? What does it mean to design with and for the living world?

Speaker Biography

Justin McGuirk

Justin McGuirk is the director of Future Observatory, the United Kingdom’s national design research programme for the green transition, based at the Design Museum in London. He is also the former chief curator of the Design Museum. A writer and curator, he has produced numerous high-profile exhibitions and publishing projects. In 2012, he was awarded the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale of Architecture. He is a regular speaker at universities and conferences around the world, and his writing has appeared in the New Yorker, the Guardian, e-flux, and numerous art and design journals. He is the author or editor of ten books, including Radical Cities (Verso, 2014) and More than Human: Making with the Living World (the Design Museum, 2025). He is also the editor of Future Observatory Journal.

About the Presenter(s)
Justin McGuirk is the director of Future Observatory, the United Kingdom’s national design research programme for the green transition, based at the Design Museum in London.

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