I. Acceleration and Attention Economy

The present we live in sits amid a confusion faster and deeper than at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, or even the Digital one. Technology accelerates, social change accelerates, and the very pace of life accelerates; the margin to pause is lost, and we are ceaselessly driven by something (Rosa, 2005). Upon this acceleration, human attention and behaviour themselves are treated as capital and mined; built on that data, mechanisms engineered to trigger dopamine come to govern our habits, and the inner life turns into a commodity (Zuboff, 2019). Easy happiness has become something taken instantly — and at the same time we are made to feel that it is not what we chose, but a consequence the structure has produced. Within that same acceleration, we keep transforming the planet irreversibly; each act of consumption stacks an unseen burden upon the future (Crutzen, 2000). What this acceleration, attention economy, and environmental burden have cost us is, we believe, corporeality itself.

II. Le corps vécu and Resonance

“The human being does not first understand the world with the head, but dwells within it through the body; the lived body — le corps vécu — is the first site that binds the world and us.” So Merleau-Ponty wrote in his Phenomenology of Perception (Merleau-Ponty, 1945). What grows thin within the accelerating world is precisely this experience through the body (Bauman, 2000). To see, to touch, to feel with the skin — what remains in the body as substance has grown relatively faint, and that sensation is our point of departure. At the opposite pole of acceleration lies resonance: a relationship in which we do not own or dominate the world, but call out to it and are answered in turn (Rosa, 2016). What we would call “a more fundamental and certain interaction” feels close to this resonance. To move our focus toward corporeality, and toward emotion — this is not nostalgia, but a return for resonating with the world once more.

III. Defuturing

To keep making the unsustainable is not to make a future; it is to quietly rob the next generation of its choices — a condition called defuturing (Fry, 1999). A designer can give physical form to the metaphysical, intervening across a wide span of human life: lifestyles, material values, modes of consumption. The weight of that responsibility was already pointed out half a century ago (Papanek, 1971), and we ourselves are among those who, day by day, accelerate consumption and add to its burden. How things act upon the world, and what in turn shapes it — we know astonishingly little. That is exactly why we must keep learning, day after day. So that when each of us reaches the end of our path we might leave even a little to hand on to the next generation, we will not stop thinking, and will keep on learning.