Design in the service of technology and commerce is implicit in creating new perceptions of time and space while concurrently accelerating the flow of resources to maximise production and economic growth.  Donà (1988) refers to the co-presence of past, present and future (time) in the modern age and that ‘Greed and obesity, transferred from food to time, mark out a new aesthetic frontier’. Objects and places are mere temporal metaphors, avatars of another time or place.  The new global order ensures a unitary vision of time as global networks (TV, radio, internet) deliver instant knowledge and global transportation concatonates space.  This has created a global time frame that goes beyond the functionality of World Standard Time zones.

Jencks (1996) charts shifts in space/time models over the human timeline.  He proposed that the cyclic space/time model of the pre-modern era (10,000 BC to AD 1450), with its slow-changing reversible time culture based on space-time separation, was replaced by a linear model in the modern era (1450-1960) focusing on a sequential and progressive culture resulting in space-time compression.  Here the idea of ‘progress’ was borne.  Finally Jencks sees the collision of cyclic and linear models in the current post-modern era (1960 onwards) creating a space-time implosion resulting in a relative speeding up and, hence, new perceptions of a fast-changing culture.

Perhaps Post-modernism was inevitable given the space-time changes wrought by the Industrial Revolution in the mid-nineteeth century.  Kern (1996) describes an accelerating culture of speed emerging from the 1870s onwards as the telephone, telegraph, cinema and the bicycle created opportunities for travelling faster, either virtually or physically.  The Futurists celebrated this emergent culture and Marinetti observed that the new religion-morality of speed was born. Speed became the emblem of modernity.  And technology, in the pursuit of modernity, sought to anilate time and distance. This comes with some cultural risk. Kern notes Rifkin’s arguments that the industrial civilisation created rhythms and tempos quite different from those created by organic evolution with more and more precisely organised precision and insufficient time for imprecision.  Kern refers to Achterhuis’s diagnosis that the father of the modern capitalist economy, Adam Smith’s An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, originally published in the late 18th century, stressed that all technology and all economy is fundamentally in one great struggle to combat the scarcity of time.  Since design is wed to both technology and economy then design has also contributed to a perceived speeding up of our lives.

Although recognition of the fast-changing nature of today’s cultures is widespread, perceptions of time are complex.  Kern further notes that Acherhuis sees dualistic perceptions where one perception is of an constantly accelerating rate of living where people don’t have enough time (accelerated time) interspersed with a contrasting perception comprising moments of rest, meditation and wonder (quality time).  Manzini (1996) sees strong personal perceptions of speed bound up with western cultural meanings of personal freedom and mobility.  Such cultural perceptions allow people to design (the speed) of their lives but perhaps fail to fully recognise the impact of the technology-economy nexus. The net effect of these shifts in time perceptions creates social jet lag for those who couldn’t keep up. In the 1970s Alvin Toffler coined the phrase ‘future shock’ to describe the dizzying disorientation brought about by the premature arrival of the future (Toffler, 1970). Entering the 21st century the process of globalisation has made many societies and cultures indifferent, blasé or induced a sense of powerless about the speed at which technology and the products of manufacturing change our lives.  Everyone is too busy with the present to recall the genuinely postiive things of the past or engage in critial thinking about the future. 

On a broader picture Will Murray refers to a timeline of accelerating ‘economies’ (Murray, 2000) The Industrial Economy commenced 200 years ago, the Consumer Economy 50 years ago and the Knowledge Economy 25 years ago (Fig 3).  How has design contributed to these economies? Design facilitates mass production and rapid turnaround of new styles ensuring shorter product (market) life cyles and encouraging consumption for fashion’s sake rather than real need.  Design encourages greater resource flows and increased the production of factory and post-consumer waste.  In the Industrial Economy flows are typically raw materials and energy; in the Consumer Economy energy, finished materials and products are the dominant flows; and in the Knowledge Economy flows are dematerialised as electronic information yet they require large amounts of energy, raw and finished materials and products to support the rapidly expanding knowledge infrastructure (satellites, internet and telephony networks, local networks and individual PC workstations).

Design gives the Industrial, Consumer and Knowledge economies material form, semiotic content and so generates socio-cultural relevance.  It has also generated an unsatiable demand to use (finite) resources and create mountains of waste. Design has accelerated resource flows. It is therefore not suprising that the role of design in encouraging more sustainable production and consumption has received considerable attention.  Such work focuses on reducing the environmental impacts by the reduction of materials and energy usage, closed loop production, eco-efficiency, life cycle analysis and industrial ecology.  This body of work is well documented by Charter and Tischner (2001) and in the Centre for Sustainable Design’s series of annual conferences called Towards Sustainable Product Design from 1995 to the present. New design approaches and tools have emerged including green design, Design for the Environment (DfE), eco-re-design, ecodesign, LCA, DfX (where X is Assembly, Disassembly, Recycling), and Design for Sustainability (DfS). While such design approaches often have made considerable progress it is not clear how successful they have been in reducing our production and consumption metabolism, i.e. the speed with which resources flow, although the Wuppertal Institute’s MIPs system is a means of measuring redution of material flows over time.  Moving towards sustainble design practice is not easy.  Many observers have noted the phenomenon of the rebound effect, where gains in eco-efficiency and economy are lost through the monetary savings being applied to other forms of consumption (e.g. Manzini,2001).