Design Philosophy Papers

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Elimination by Design

Tony Fry

To cite this article: Tony Fry (2005) Elimination by Design, Design Philosophy Papers, 3:2,
145-147

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Published online: 29 Apr 2015.

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Download by: [Professor Anne-Marie Willis] Date: 18 July 2017, At: 01:34
Design Philosophy Papers VOLUME 3, ISSUE 2 PHOTOCOPYING © TEAM D/E/S 2005
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Elimination by Design
Tony Fry

Tony Fry is the main Dominantly, designers and architects who are preoccupied
contributing editor to with ‘sustainability’ strive to realise their objective by
Design Philosophy Papers.
designing artefacts and built structures with reduced
environmental impacts. To a lesser extent they are also
a concerned with retrofitting existing products and
buildings. One has to see such activity in the context
of (i) globalisation, with its continual expansion of
urban environments, the production of goods and
consumerism, (ii) the fact that ‘sustainable’ artefacts and
structures only represent a very small segment of what
is available in the market. In fact a large percentage of
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the ‘sustainable’ commodities are merely meeting the

demands of environmentally sensitive niche markets.
Moreover, even with significant improvements in ‘unit’
environmental performance, overall growth in market
volume means that gross negative environmental impacts
will continue to increase.
To design ‘environmentally improved’ versions of
existing products or buildings will not deliver a condition
of sustainment. This is because current ‘practices
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and products of ‘sustainability’ just cannot displace

 Tony Fry

the sheer mass of the unsustainable. At best, all that can be

argued is that with the full weight of market forces, they will
gradually replace the mass of everything that defutures.
Rather than create more ‘green’ things that simply add to
‘consumer choice’ – houses, cars, shirts, shoes, breakfast cereals,
lawnmowers, carpets etc. – the imperative is the elimination, by
design, of the unsustainable. This is what will advance the prospect
of an ‘age of sustainment’.
Clearly such elimination requires an enormous design effort.
However, partly the project has already started – a considerable
amount of thought and work is being invested in replacing
products by services. This shift is totally counter to ‘capital logic’
whereby products displace services (bread-making machines
displacing bakeries, washing machines displacing laundries and
vending machines displacing shops). For elimination by design
to really become effective it needs to pursued very aggressively.
The overall quantity of the unsustainable just has to be
dramatically reduced. It is not a question of finding replacement
but rather displacement. Likewise, many objects of desire have
to be exposed to strategies for transforming them into the
absolutely undesirable. To do this there has to be a focus
‘sustainment benefit’ whereby real qualitative gains are brought
within reach – this in contrast to try to persuade with moral
argument.
Clearly it has taken a long time to accumulate all the ‘stuff’ that
blocks our path to sustainment, and it’s going to take a long time
to selectively eliminate it. Obviously this is no mere mechanical
exercise but one that requires constructive acts of ‘clearing’, allowing
us to identify what really matters to us so we may be sustained
spiritually, symbolically, intellectually as well as physically.
Equally, through its clearing function, elimination design has
the potential to provide a means whereby ‘already existing
sustain-able design’ can reveal itself. What is being identified
here is the plethora of often common and overlooked made
objects and built forms that have historically demonstrated an
ability, in the right hands, to sustain. There are many starting
points to think such things – tools that conserve materials in
use, rather than deplete them as a resource; technologies that
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improve human and animal fitness rather than reduce it; structures
that perform their function with modesty rather than with
excess; products that retain their utility and symbolic value over
the lives of their users. The very act of naming and gaining a
consensus on what is listed, is an opening affirmative action In
this respect, the recovery implicit in ‘bringing design to
sustainment’ is a recovery, understood as both a retrieval and a
coming back to health.
Seeking the sustain-able from what already is, in contrast to
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constantly making the new, needs to be seen in the frames of

 Elimination by Design

dematerialisation (the shift to services) and rematerialisation

(acts of re-design and re-engineering that bring technologies
back into an ecology of sustaining labour. Rematerialisation
can be explored in many directions. It can be based upon the
recovery and the reinvention of past material practices. It can
replace energy intensive and environmentally damaging machines
with newly conceived hand tools that may be simple or those
which are sophisticated and which amplify the mechanics of
the human body. Equally this kind of rematerialisation can
regenerate work as a domain of reconceptualised craft and pleasure
(by eliminating work simply as operational tasks and reinstating
the education of the hand and the eye), work as health-improving
(by reducing or eliminating sedentary activity in office, factory or
on farms without a return to physical exploitation) and work as
caring for one’s natural or artificial environment. Likewise physical
activities can be re-introduced to reduce the use of chemicals in
the home and in agriculture. None of these advocated practices
rest with a romantic and historicist view of labour, but rather have
to be contemporary reconstructions able to engage the damaged
worlds in which we live.
While only outlined schematically two claims can be made:
first, elimination design is not a recipe for economic disaster but
the reverse (this as a key element in the construction of means
to create wealth by overcoming the unsustainable while effecting
a paradigmatic shift in economy that is predicated upon moving
from growth to a reinvented quality model): and, second, it is
project (with immediate conceptual and practical potential) that
has the ability to transform design and architecture and break
the bonds to the fetishisation of design, dysfunctional divisions of
ego-centric labour, and service-provider passivity.

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