This dissertation examines how bio-based design practices can contribute to a post-growth societal transformation by rethinking the material, social, and cultural dimensions of technological production. It begins from the recognition that escalating environmental crises expose the limitations of sustainable design: while sustainability-oriented innovation has led to many advances, these remain largely embedded within economies organized around perpetual growth, whose expanding material and energy throughput is incompatible with finite planetary boundaries. Addressing this tension requires a dual transformation: transitioning from fossil-carbon based infrastructures to regenerative, bio-based ones, while simultaneously reorienting society toward modes of living that prioritize wellbeing within ecological limits.

To explore the implications of post-growth thinking for design, I analyze three layers of society – infrastructure, social structure, and superstructure – combining theoretical investigation with practice-based experiments. At the infrastructure level, I consider the political dimensions of material production, and propose convivial materialization as an alternative to the industrial monopoly over how things get made, instead emphasizing localized, regenerative, and autonomy-enhancing modes of production. At the level of social structure, I explore the Commons an economic model to organize technology according to post-growth values. Focusing on carbon sequestration as a critical climate mitigation strategy, I propose the concept of a Carbon Commons, to reframe sequestration as a social process through which communal objectives can be integrated with technical ones. When treated as a commons, carbon sequestration can be designed to simultaneously regenerate ecosystems, meet collective needs and aspirations, while providing the basis for social relations based on reciprocity, shared responsibility, and mutual care. At the superstructure (cultural) level, I challenge the dominant temporal assumptions in design and argue for engaging more-than-human temporalities through two capacities – noticing and care – to embed design practice within ecological contexts and work towards long-term regeneration. Synthesizing these insights, the dissertation positions regenerative design as a practical means of operationalizing post-growth principles in a reinforcing manner.

Together, this dissertation presents a cohesive argument: design can play a transformative role in advancing post-growth futures, but only when it critically confronts the structural drivers of ecological crisis and reorients its material practices toward regenerative, convivial, commons-based, and care-centered modes of world-making. ... Read more

Time is a crucial element in design, and even more so when it comes to designing for sustainability. Many designers approach sustainability from a problem-solving perspective, according to which time is linear (and therefore quantifiable) and the future is predictable (and therefore designable). Designerly time appears quintessentially modern and human. A welcome antidote can be found in more-than-human design perspectives, where a multitude of actants and agencies and their appropriate temporalities are given consideration and space. In this paper we add to such approaches by exploring in practice two ways to engage with more-than-human temporalities: noticing and care. We illustrate how these approaches may give way to new design practices by discussing the conceptualization and construction of a music festival stage in France. We argue that such design practices integrate ecological care into the design process by attuning the designer to the different scales and rhythms of ecosystems and their more-than-human members. ... Read more

Materials form the basis of modern technological society. The extraction and processing of raw matter and the disposal of material things is at the heart of most of the environmental and social crises, and has important implications for the design and deployment of computation systems. In this paper, we present an analysis of the way in which materials are selected during the design process: how designers determine whether a given material is fit for purpose. While originally addressing specific functional or aesthetic purpose, with increasing urgency designers have begun to select materials that also consider a broader environmental purpose (eg. CO2 footprint) or ethical purpose (eg. Fair Trade). The analysis also unveils a missing category: the need to consider the social relations that emerge in the creation of materials across their supply chains. Fit for political purpose is thus proposed to create a bridge between the nuts-and-bolts material design of technology and the socio-political impacts of its production. ... Read more

The design of composite products for a circular economy is challenging. Materials such as glass-fibre-reinforced plastics have long product lifetimes but are hard to recycle. For the effective reuse and recycling of products, parts, and materials, recovery strategies must be selected and implemented in the product design stage. This extends the scope and complexity of the design process and requires additional skills from the designers. We developed a novel circular composites design method for products containing composite materials to support designers and improve product circularity. This method, which is the first of its kind to address the circular design of composite products, helps designers explore recovery pathways and generate design solutions. In this study, we evaluated the method’s effectiveness, accessibility, and usability in design practice. We tested the method with five design case studies in the construction, furniture, and automotive industries. The method was used to generate, evaluate, communicate, and detail product designs. We found that two of the five cases used the method to develop circular product concepts. In the other three cases, recycling rather than product-level recovery strategies was the result, with a focus on improving the material formulations instead of the overall product design. Although the designers considered the method accessible and usable, its effectiveness was restricted by the existing business, logistics, reprocessing technology, and policy contexts. These factors are intertwined and partly dictate the boundary conditions of the design, which means that to successfully implement the proposed method, the transition to a circular economy requires a holistic approach to adjust the design process, organisations, and value chains. ... Read more

Soteria is a patient transporting drone, which is part of a living lab setting for Future Mobility, which Embraer is developing. It has been designed in conjunction with the Talaria propulsion system, an autonomous and modular eVTOL flight package. The idea is that during disaster scenarios, Soteria is summoned by first responders to the scene after which a noncritical patient is loaded from the field into the carrier. Soteria then autonomously and independently ferries the patient safely to the closest hospital, where they are unloaded by medical personnel. It is important that handlings are fast and that the patient will fit in the system. Therefore, Soteria was ergonomically tested. The interior of the carrier, the interior layout, and human-machine interface were evaluated with a 1:1 model and compared with guidelines found in the literature. Based on that improvements were made and presented for future design iterations. ... Read more