Description
Imaginative design will be a crucial factor in enacting sustainability in people's daily lives. Yet current design practice is trapped in consumerist cycles of innovation and production, making it difficult to imagine how we might develop a more meaningful and sustainable rendition of material culture.Through fundamental design research, The Spirit of Design challenges a host of common assumptions about sustainability, progress, growth and globalization. Walker's practice-based explorations of localisation, human meaning and functional objects demonstrate the imaginative potential of research-through-design and yield a compelling, constructive and essentially hopeful direction for the future - one that radically re-imagines our material culture by meshing mass-production with individuality, products with place, and utilitarian benefit with environmental responsibility. In so doing, the author explores:- How understandings of human meaning affect design and how design can better incorporate issues of personal meaning- How mass production needs to become integrated with localised production and service provision- How short-lived electronic goods can be brought into a more sustainable design paradigm- The changing role of the designer in a post-consumerist worldTaking a design-centred approach - a combination of creative, propositional design practice, reasoned argument and theoretical discussion - the book will impel readers to investigate the nature of contemporary material culture and its relationship to both the natural environment and to deeper notions of human meaning.
Table of Contents
1. Introduction2. Sambo's Stones: Sustainability and Meaningful Objects3. Following Will'o The Wisps and Chasing Ghosts: Re-Directing Design Through Practice-Based Research4. After Taste: the Power and Prejudice of Product Appearance5. Extant Objects: Seeing Through Design6. Sermons in Stones: Argument and Artefact for Sustainability7. Gentle Arrangements: Objects of Disciplined Empathy8. The Chimera Reified: Design, Meaning and the Post-Consumerism Object9. The Spirit of Design: Notes from the Shakuhachi Flute10. Wrapped Attention: Designing Products for Evolving Permanence and Enduring Meaning11. Temporal Objects: Design, Change and Sustainability12. Meaning in the Mundane: Aesthetics, Technology and Spiritual Values13. Wordless Questions: the Physical, the Virtual and the Meaningful14. Epilogue
