On 26 May 2011 the international news magazine The Economist featured the cover headline ‘Welcome to the Anthropocene’, depicting an artificially created Earth. The issue noted that, according to geologists, humankind is entering a new era where the majority of our planet's geological, ecological and atmospheric processes are affected by humans. Our civilization's entry into the Anthropocene, literally meaning ‘The Age of Man’, underlines how our species is increasingly shaping our environments not only locally but also at a global scale to meet our needs. This shift is characterised by some as ‘the human turn’, a world in which ‘man has increasingly moved to the centre as a creature that has set itself above and beyond, and even reshaped, its natural surroundings’ (Raffnsøe, 2013, p 5). This fact has wide-reaching implications for many of our natural scientific disciplines and for our understanding of our role on the planet.

The human turn can be construed from a range of angles – geological, philosophical, social and industrial. The coming of the Anthropocene might also be seen as the culmination of the last several hundred years’ design of the increasingly human-made environments in which we live: ‘The capacity to shape our world has now reached such a pitch that few aspects of the planet are left in pristine condition, and, on a detailed level, life is entirely conditioned by designed outcomes of one kind or another’ (Heskett, 2002, p 8). The notion that our planet can be transformed by design is by no means new. In fact, the universality of design is a key strand in much thinking and writing on design. Buckminster Fuller, the futurist, architect and designer suggested already in the early 1970s, in Victor Papaneks’ Design for the real world, that ‘Design is everything’. C. West Churchman, in 1971, asserted that ‘We believe we can change our environment in ways that will better serve our purposes’ (1971, p 3). Norman Potter opens his influential book, What is a Designer?, with the statement that ‘Every human being is a designer’ (Potter, 2002).