UN reports state that the 2020 pandemic caused little impact to ‘slow climate change’ as Covid-19 was woefully ‘inadequate at transforming our behaviour’. Given the societal and infrastructural stresses Covid has wrought, coupled with the cataclysmic inter-related ecological warnings, evidenced by a succession of devastating ‘once-in-a-thousand-year events’, the Post-Covid era constitutes a new paradigm, providing unique environmental and social challenges for designers to address.

While aspirations for a ‘green recovery’ from the pandemic are yet to materialise as suitably radical policy. Extractive industries and voracious supply chains continue to drive international ecological collapse. Design in all its guises pervasively intervenes materially, culturally, economically and ultimately ecologically. In order to course-correct from a path of ecological collapse, it is imperative that the practices of design are reimagined and overhauled so that designers are able to pursue prospective ecological endeavours (not solely solution driven methods).

Design Dematerialisation can be viewed from a degrowth perspective, as an act to remove material things from the world; a shift in focus from static, material things, to dynamic, living experiences. This is a massive pivot from two centuries of cultural and economic norms that encouraged the transformation of the natural world into human commodities and unwanted by-products back into the natural world as pollution. This one-directional mode of worldmaking can be characterised as a straight line, with social and environmental destruction built-in at either end.