Dulmini Perera and Tony Fry
Contrapractice is a response to the current accelerating, unsustainable defuturing practices globally. It is also the subject of an ongoing research project of the authors. The ability to create and accelerate change has totally outstripped any collective ability to understand and appropriately deal with unconsidered consequences. At present, there is a huge divide between what needs to be understood and the extent of available understanding (not least by the planet’s political leadership). What the argument of this conversation makes clear is that not only is a greater and futural understanding of coming risks and dangers essential, but equally so is the development of transformative responsive action— contrapractice.
The first part of the conversation contributes to this aim by revisiting and reviewing the first published exposition of defuturing in 1999, as it presented ways of understanding the structural future-negating dynamics of industrial society and reflecting on it retrospectively via the environmental and philosophical theory of accelerationism.
In the second part of the conversation, we highlight how important it is not to take the notion of “practice” as a given, and the need to interrogate it theoretically and historically from a critical viewpoint that helps will reframe the role of practices within the developmental trajectory of accelerated global extractivism and contemporary accelerationist theory and corporate practice. Contrapractices are framed as organic forms of action (organic understood as action that takes on a life of its own, spreads and grows, via the action of practitioners) in response to imperatives coming from the presented complexity of accelerating defuturing forces.
Profiles
Dulmini Perera
University of Limerick
Dulmini Perera researches transdisciplinary approaches to complex systems, ecologies, culture and technology in and beyond design. She is Associate Professor, Theory of Architecture, University of Limerick, Ireland. Her research and writing focus on the wicked and complex relations between ecological questions and questions concerning technology. Through her practice, she experiments with the possibilities of playful contra-practices that enable ways to engage systemic complexity, which is beneficial for designers and others dealing with the multiple entangled crises of the present.
Dulmini is co-author, with Tony Fry, of Contrapractice.
Contexts—The Systemic Design Journal. Contra-Innovation: Expanding the innovation imperative in the context of futuring, defuturing and fictioning.
Tony Fry
Studio at the edge of the world
Tony Fry, PhD, is the director of the Studio at the Edge of the World, Adjunct Professor, School of Architecture and Design, University of Tasmania, and Visiting Professor, University of Ibagué, Colombia. He is the author of numerous books on design, including Design as Politics (2011), Defuturing, A New Design, Philosophy ([1999] 2020), and Writing Design Fiction: Relocation a City in Crisis (2023).
Tony is co-author, with Dulmini Perera, of Contrapractice.
Contexts—The Systemic Design Journal. Contra-Innovation: Expanding the innovation imperative in the context of futuring, defuturing and fictioning.
