Design and Spirituality: A Philosophy of Material Cultures by Stuart Walker

摘要

In the last decade or so, sustainability has emerged as one of the most important issues that we, as a race, must collectively address and overcome. Sustainability, in this phase of maturity, has become a wide-ranging issue touching upon more than environmental issues, including also societal and personal dimensions. Many of the contemporary crises we face are rooted in the unsustainable way that modern society is structured. This has created a wide array of conflicting and contested definitions, methodologies and approaches ranging from techno-utopian fixes to calls for a radical shift in values and so the transition away from modernity. Design sits at the crux of these issues since it is responsible for most of the societal and environmental impacts of most aspects of human activity. In Stuart Walker's latest book, 'Design and Spirituality', he presents a way to move forward through design in an eloquent and pragmatic way. The book brings together a wide assortment of thinking and doing, bridging philosophy with practice. As such, it provides a way to conduct research through design that has the capacity to address the root causes of today's unsustainability. This type of practice leverages the creative practice to explore alternative systems of values necessary to advance our thinking about sustainability and to imagine new artefacts that embody and communicate these values. It provides a way to look to tradition to understand how meaning and spirituality have been a part of design in pre-modern times.