Orbital debris: design and it's extra-terrestrial aftermath

When the sociologist Roland Barthes encountered the new Citroën D.S. at the 1955 Paris Auto Show, he considered it obvious that this ‘superlative object’ had ‘fallen from the sky’ (Barthes 1991, 88). The achievements and accoutrements of space travel fuelled the post-war auto industry and the Western imagination of modernity. Whether in Poissy or Detroit, designers channelled Space Age aesthetics for their cars that the artist Richard Hamilton described as being ‘fabulously wrought like rocket[s] and space probe[s]’ (Hamilton 1963, 53).

Outer space, whether seen as a conceptual tabula rasa from which cosmological forms were summoned for application to earthly functions or as a mysterious metaphoric ‘world above that of nature’ from which vehicles fell, fully manufactured, into cultural discourse, has long provided design with its ultimate reference point and horizon for cognitive as well as actual colonization.

In the sixty years since the publishing of Barthes’ now-famous essay, however, space, as a context for design, has been transformed. What was once an infinite expanse of pre-design possibilities is now an increasingly finite dumping zone for pieces of post-design waste. Trillions of pieces, in fact....