Situated Criticism and the Experiential Present

Time and Green Design It is interesting to note that some of the most memorable "environmentalist" phrases use metaphors which are spatial rather than temporal, and it may not be too far-fetched to argue that this bias sustains the popular perception of ecological problems in terms of commodities and their availability. Arguably, a rise in materialism since the 1960s has distorted the deeper polemics of environmentalism and perpetuated the idea that nature is a consumerist resource requiring strategic management. Even innocent phrases such as "Think globally, act locally," and "Small is beautiful" (Schumacher: 1973) may seem to quantify materiality rather than celebrating a temporal experience of Being. Here, the new rhetoric of "sustainability" and LCA' in product development reveal their utilitarianist roots in the old language of husbandry and managerial control. This paper asks whether we can develop a more ecologically and ethically centered discourse of design criticism by theorizing how we experience time, rather than how we should manage materials. This may, however, be difficult to achieve. Trying to translate environmentalist slogans into a more temporal framework shows us that the concepts of time and space are surprisingly incommensurate. For example, the expression: "Think globally, act locally" might, in a pinch, be interpreted as: "Think in the long term but act in the short term," just as a temporal reading of "Small is beautiful" could equate to Blake's idea of "Eternity in a flower." Temporally centered arguments are likely to introduce aspects of change rather than fixity. For example, "Small is beautiful" could also be interpreted as: "Do not eat anything which will not rot or decay, but never eat it when it has begun to do so!"