The Carbon Commons

Abstract

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.