Re-futuring the “Vicious Circle”. The power of anomaly and debris to envison a chaotic design system.

Starting from Tony Fry’s view of design as “our ability to prefigure what we create before the act of creation” the paper aims to tackle how to envision the re-futuring of the design environment by considering the importance of the debris and anomaly in re-launching a stagnant system. In this sense the paper argues that it is necessary to position the actions generated by the design activity in a continuos renewal cycle, envisioning in this way their future and consequences. In contrast with defuturing (Fry, 2009), and responding to the process of futuring we argue that in order to envision the turbulences created by the present environmental crisis it is necessary to embrace a re-futuring strategy towards environmental design and sustainability. The paper will start from the concept of futuring the anticipatory long-term (10, 20, 30 years) process (Sobrero, 2004), and extend it to design defuturing, or the dislocation of the outputs of the design activities from the “nature of the fundamental exchange” (Fry, 2009) with the surrounding environment, and the importance of debris and residuals as a part of the living system. Challenging the current understanding of sustainable design, it will be shown how, in order to demystify the stereotype of “virtue” it is necessary to envision a design re-futuring in which debris is given a central role in the natural lifecycle.