Arthropods. New Design Futures

Future shock, or Possibilities for Creative Future Change? “In our time, the amount of change in the environment self psychologically is so great, and the pace of thispsyche’s capacity to adapt.” Nowhere, probably, are the forces of change Arnold Toynbee mentions so ap­parent and the means to deal with them creatively so diverse and protean as in the increasingly intertwined interfaces of art, architecture, science, and technology, public involvement in environmental change, and the other disciplines, talents, enthusiasms, and concerns that affect and/or are affected by man’s environment and the ways he manipulates it. This book is an examination of a number of approaches to the general aspects of environmental change. It dis­cusses the work, practical and theoretical, of a number of individuals and groups from a number of countries who have as common ground an interest in ameliorating man’s lot in an increasingly desensitized atmosphere, and of postulating ways in which he can have—in smaller or larger scale—a deciding influence on the ways he will live and the nature of the places in which he will live. Some of the work will appear fantastic to many readers; other proposals will seem commendably “practical” and worthy of support by governments, industries, and the rest of the bureaucratic hierarchy that has gotten us into the sorry fix we are in at the present time. This book seeks not to make laudatory, or disparaging, judgments upon specific projects or to arbitrarily segre­gate the workable from the visionary (the visionary must be tomorrow’s “workable,” anyway, if we are to move ahead), but to investigate the forces at work in new fields of environmental creativity and the interests that provoke them. — F.to: 22x30; pagg. 168; BN; rileg. rigida con sovracoperta. Editore: Praeger, New York, 1971.