Toward the end of the 18th century, in an abrupt and fateful afterthought to the human record, we began to move from the singular creations of the pre-industrial era toward the almost universal practice of mass-production. Today the imperatives of engineering, law and global marketing have extended the requirement of absolute standardization to practically everything we produce and consume.

This was the situation that moved William Morris to action. In his single-minded protest against industrial civilization, Morris advocated a set of principles – the unity of the fine and the applied arts, simplicity of form, propriety of ornament, the honest use of materials – that might form the basis of an authentic, modern design. But his campaign took him even further. Almost alone among his contemporaries, Morris dared to inquire into "How We live, and How We Might Live;" to denounce the class prejudice that separated the fine arts from "The Lesser Arts;" to listen in the rhythms of the nature and cadence of history for "News from Nowhere." Morris died in 1896, feeling utterly defeated. Although his ideas were the product of Victorian moralism, utopian socialism and medievalizing romanticism, his demand for sustainable design is timelier than ever before.

The current recession, although it has devastated the lives of millions worldwide, offers a glimmer of hope. As production and consumption join hands in a breathtaking spiral of decline, we can catch a glimpse of what design might look like in a world that does not operate at an ecological deficit, a world in which every act of production and consumption stabilizes, or even adds to our collective natural assets.

The most obvious characteristic of design in a restorative world is that there will be less of it. A lot less of it. There will be less time, less money, less energy and less creative genius spent turning the earth into a ravaged, crowded, burnt-out cinder. The design professions will be decimated (literally, “reduced by a power of ten”), at least as we know them today. In an age threatened by hyper-consumption (acquisition that stimulates desire rather than fulfills it), the forced unemployment of just two product designers would have great ramifications. No product means no product to package, and that minor calamity finishes off a struggling firm of graphic designers, who take with them a mid-size advertising agency and its retinue of hired hands. Unemployed tenants do not pay rent and that tips their overextended landlord-developer into the red and results in the cancellation of three planned mini-malls and a luxury condominium. The specter of a few dozen shell-shocked architects loitering around the cafeterias of design schools, offering to teach for food, causes three Midwestern art academies to close their doors.

Membership renewal notices go unheeded, causing the IDSA, the AIGA and the AIA to issue final appeals and then quietly fold up their tents. No more travelling exhibitions. No more sumptuous coffee table annuals. No more mass-mailings on luscious, creamy paper inviting members to attend gala events in distant cities to discuss environmentally sensitive design. Phone messages are left unanswered, e-mails unreturned, websites unsurfed.

All this means fewer products, fewer resources expended on making things and fewer designers engaged in conceiving and planning them. Fewer products to sell means fewer advertisements, which means less paper and more trees, less air time and more air. Suddenly there is less chemical pollution of the biosphere and less visual pollution of the semiosphere. People feel less assaulted by the relentless barrage of things and images and become more attentive to the spaces between them, which they will begin to call “nature.”

The fewer things there are, the fewer things people find that they actually want. “Need” and “desire” begin to be disentangled. Once the siege of commercial advertising is lifted, quiet, stillness and empty space will be craved with the same intensity directed toward snowmobiles and home entertainment centers today. Glassy-eyed drivers will stop drifting along the freeways in hybrid cars with ergonomically-designed dashboards looking for something to buy. The leaf-blowers will fall eerily silent.

But what of the legions of unemployed designers? Happily, in a truly restorative world there would also be more design. A lot more of it. But design of a different sort, practiced by a new breed of designer according to principles now only dimly perceived.

The first new design specialty to blossom will be un-design. Under the guidance of trained and dedicated professionals, un-design students will study methods of fabrication but starting from the back end of the textbook. Forget Derrida. They will practice applied deconstruction. During their summer recesses, they will intern with un-design studios and gain practical experience excavating junkyards, strip-mining department store shelves and clear-cutting rooftop satellite dishes. Upon graduation they will hang out their shingles and begin practicing un-design for an array of corporate and municipal clients: Architects will be put to work un-designing dilapidated, underutilized and just plain ugly buildings; Graphic un-designers will set out to neutralize billboards, web pages and corporate identity systems; Industrial un-designers will start by dismantling handguns and cigarette machines and move on to assault rifles and SUVs. They will have more work than they can handle.

As legions of un-designers gradually clear away the appalling detritus of the Design Century, a guild of immaterialists will emerge who specialize in “mining urban industries,” in the phrase of the Worldwatch Institute, transforming industrial waste into a new generation of building and manufacturing materials: Used tires will be more sought-after than virgin timber, empty soft-drink bottles and salvaged copper wire more valuable than oil wells. Just as the raw engineering of the first industrial age had to be softened by the designer’s touch, so the processed materials of the post-industrial age will cease to look like used egg cartons and become shimmering, sensuous and superb.

Once the immaterialists have done their work, a new breed of post-designers will step in and begin the arduous but playful task, conceived a century ago by William Morris, of “redesigning the world.” Some will practice “design-for-disassembly,” creating products that can be put together, taken apart, repaired and customized by mere mortals. Others will work toward an ecology of information, thinning the festering datamass and rehabilitating the printed page.

In every case, post-designers will adhere to basic principles of ecology as if they were laws of nature (which, as it turns out, they are): the sustainable use of natural resources, so that at the end of its useful life every product gracefully morphs into something new; the elimination of residual waste, whether of materials or of energy; the creative synthesis of regionalism and globalism, and of the high-tech and the hand-made; the sharing of ideas, information, architectural space and computer time because we are all in this together. These principles will be codified into a few basic and utterly non-negotiable commandments:

• Post-designers will worry not just about the costs of failure but the costs of success.

• Post-designers will create products that clean up after themselves.

• Post-designers will solve the problem they are assigned and then one more, pro bono publico.post-clients and the users of their products into post-users. The world will once again be ablaze with activity but of a restorative, renewable, sustainable character. The ranks of the post-designers will swell. Post-design schools will reopen. The post-professional societies will be reborn.

It has been only 200 years since the instinct of acquisitive individualism became linked to a market economy and an industrial technology – about 1/10,000th of the career of humans on the earth – and the prognosis is not good. It took nearly a century, and the idiosyncratic genius of William Morris, to perceive the extent to which design was part of the problem and might yet be part of the solution, and still another for this insight to enter into our own collective consciousness. We are now at a perilous juncture: Nobody knows how long it will take to clean up the mess we have made, and nobody knows how much time we have left to do it.

The recession may be a blessing in hideous disguise.

This essay reinterprets some of the author's speculations first published in Metropolis a decade ago.