Design for Life

Creating Meaning in a Distracted World

Stuart Walker

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781315312514
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Architecture
• Categoría: Architecture General

Stuart Walker's design work has been described as life-changing, inspiring, disturbing and ferocious.

Drawing on an extraordinarily diverse range of sources and informed by creative practice, Design for Life penetrates to the heart of modern culture and the malaise that underlies today's moral and environmental crises.

The author argues that this malaise is deep-seated and fundamental to the modern outlook. He shows how our preoccupation with technological progress, growth and the future has produced a constricted view of life – one that is both destructive and self-reinforcing.

Based on over twenty-five years of scholarship and creative practice, he demonstrates the vital importance of solitude, contemplation, inner growth and the present moment in developing a different course – one that looks squarely at our current, precarious situation while offering a positive, hopeful way forward – a way that is compassionate, context-based, human scale, ethically motivated and critically creative.

Design for Life is an intensely original contribution that will be essential reading for design practitioners and students. Written in a clear, accessible style, it will also appeal to a broader readership, especially anyone who is concerned with contemporary society's rising inequalities and environmental failings and is looking for a more constructive, balanced and thoughtful direction.

1
The Subject

Personal involvement and positive charge

Wisely improve the Present. It is thine.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

If design is to make a substantial contribution to contemporary culture, it has to move beyond instrumental solutions for what are often rather trivial problems. From furniture design to household goods, from electronics to services, design’s conventional but slender aspiration of creating delight and pleasure in the use of worldly things offers little more than interminable novelty. This zeal for designing the future has created forever new, forever changing and therefore forever unattainable material dreams. It is a fool’s game that diminishes us as it lays waste the earth. Design has to reach beyond such devices of desire that disable and disconnect us from each other and the world itself.

Today, design needs to address quite different questions – not of what and how but of why. When we ask why, further questions arise – about priorities, values and meaning. To search for answers, we must look not to the world of inanimate things and rationalized utility but to the world of real encounters and lived experiences. It is here, in the life-world, that we contend with fundamental issues of truth and goodness, which may have no definitive resolution but nevertheless are at the core of what it is to be human. This book represents an attempt to explore these deeper questions and their implications for material culture. In this journey, design plays a key role, not least because it is both a creative process and a mode of expression. Therefore, it can be fundamental in informing our understandings, developing different perspectives and conveying concepts and ideas.

For better and worse, we live in a technologically sophisticated world and it has led to ways of life that are blessed with huge benefits. These benefits, however, are accompanied by huge costs, but it is pointless to yearn for some idealized past that never actually existed. The world is now technological and we cannot un-invent it even if we wanted to. As Lanier has said, “The earth is not a linear system, like a video clip, that can be played in forward or reverse”; after we’ve learned to get through climate change, the world will be different, more artificial.¹ And yet, we are not one-dimensional beings. There are many aspects of personhood and many needs not furnished, or even addressed, by our current approaches to design. While we may live with, profit from and enjoy the use of technologies, we still need to engage with other people and directly experience the real world – to touch the earth, taste the wind and feel the rain. Such experiences are restorative and nourish our ability to empathize. This implies a type of design that reminds us of who we are and where we are, about what we are doing and how our actions can be in harmony or conflict with others and the world. This kind of design is not part of corporate capitalism or techno-science. It is about other things, other ways of being ourselves, other priorities, and other aspects of our personhood, and it helps us see more conventional, utilitarian approaches from a different perspective. It is concerned with meaning, intuition, silence, reflection, localization, harmony, nature and time. It is a kind of design that reveals and critiques, reintegrates and replenishes. And it is a kind of design that releases us, at least temporarily, from the intrusions, pressures, hype, noise and busyness of our connected, preoccupied lives. Unchecked, this can create a frazzled, frenetic forgetting, because such ways are entirely incompatible with more contemplative modes. Through many small acts, in which design can play a part, we change the world and as we do so we too are changed. Slowly and imperceptibly our worldview is transformed – from one that is increasingly diminishing of the human spirit and destructive of the natural environment to one based in values and ideals and a belief in the common good; one that is rooted, forthright and hopeful.

REFLECTION

The intention of much of my earlier design work was to create possibilities that could be considered for adoption or adaption and so I referred to it as propositional design. It is a term that places the focus on what is yet to come. Like modernity itself, the underlying notion is one of progress and the future. Similarly, speculative design, which tends to concentrate on emerging technologies, also suggests a concern with the future. Critical design seeks to challenge norms and conventions through such means as satire, but its focus is again on emerging technologies and their future implications. None of these adequately describe the kind of design work included in this book, which is concerned with the present. While it is natural to think ahead, in reality, the present is the only place where we can act and make a difference. The here and now is ours, the future is for those we will become.

Today, we hear much talk of design futures, even though foresight is notoriously myopic. We know less about the future than we do of the past and even that, as L. P. Hartley told us, is a foreign country.² This preoccupation with the future is an evasion. It is not just a distraction from the present and a means of avoiding responsibility for our actions, it also prevents us from being fully in the present, looking at it squarely, recognizing our presumptions and confronting our biases. By contrast, when the focus of design becomes the present, it can reflect back to us who we are and what we are doing. Disquieting as this may be, it can throw light on established norms and allow us to see ourselves from a new angle. This we can call reflective design, not only because it holds a mirror up to us but also because it invites pause and thoughtful consideration of our suppositions. Using design in this way allows us to fully engage in the now, to question and perhaps change our priorities and to make different, hopefully better, choices. Hence, this is not design for an alternative future, it is alternative design for a complementary present – within and coexistent with technological culture. It is a form of design that transcends material utility and responds to another, inner facet of our humanness. It focuses our attention on deeper things by questioning, disrupting and offering fresh interpretations. The concern is with creating a material culture capable of contributing to life in a meaningful way, which implies a material culture that provides for our practical, social and spiritual needs in ways that are not just considerate of others and the natural environment but are also virtuous. In this endeavour it is important to recognize that, whereas practical and social needs align with traditional understandings of inner values and ethics, today the natural world is also a critical concern because its degradation affects both our physical and spiritual well-being.

If we are to extract ourselves from the narrow grip of modernity we must develop new understandings and new ways of doing things – ways that are better, fuller and more caring of each other and the natural world. We cannot do this without first recognizing the inadequacies of our current outlook and in this, design can make a creative contribution. Scholarship in design, if it is to say anything interesting and useful, has to incorporate the creative process of designing because this is the vital core of the discipline. It is a core that involves much more than objectivity, empirical evidence and instrumental rationality. To do creative work we must engage in ways of thinking that are capable of integrating myriad, often conflicting, elements into an holistic outcome. Conventional wisdom in academic research suggests that the subject under investigation is best viewed from a position of objective detachment; a neutral position free of subjectivity and bias. As will become evident in Chapter 6, in recent times this notion has been shown to be misguided. Indeed, as Bouteneff notes, “some of the best research and insightful observations come from those who are deeply and personally involved in their subject, precisely by virtue of that engagement”.³ The creative activity of designing is a deeply immersive, all absorbing process that includes subjective decision-making, intuition, emotion, sensitivity to aesthetics and consideration of values. Design research that is not informed by this will not be getting to its core or revealing its true potential. Furthermore, whereas the natural sciences study material phenomena and the world as it exists, the creative disciplines call upon the imagination to wrestle with and express different concerns and visualize alternative ways of knowing. In this way, design and the other creative arts complement the more objective analyses of the sciences – they seek to synthesize rather than analyze, and they involve human values, beliefs and ideals.

The practice of design requires and builds knowledge, know-how, experience and understanding. By drawing on the human imagination and struggling to find creative resolution, one encounters first-hand the occurrence of insight and synthesis. It is a process that by necessity involves the researcher. It is also unapologetically unsystematic. Systematic approaches are deliberately and rationally constrained by the frame of reference of the investigator or designer. By contrast, opening up one’s view to many and varied experiences and encounters in galleries, museums, libraries and, most importantly, in the world itself ‘allows in’ the unexpected and the serendipitous, as well as outlooks and frames of reference different from one’s own. This ‘allowing in’ is important for the creative process of designing, a process that involves the comprehensive and integrative modes of thinking associated with right-hemisphere brain functions. Designing involves a type of thinking or state of being that sees the big picture and makes connections, often challenging what we habitually take for granted. It is a type of thinking that is open to spontaneity, invention, discovery, unexpected juxtapositions and surprise.⁴ In the discussions that follow, therefore, the concern is not with neutral conclusions but with understandings and insights arising from engagement in the dynamic, frustrating, creative and fascinating process of designing.

In earlier writings I introduced and developed an understanding of a Quadruple Bottom Line for Sustainability to inform our creative design endeavours.^{5, 6} It comprises:

• Practical Meaning – providing for physical needs while ameliorating environmental impacts;

• Social Meaning – ethics, compassion, equity and justice;

• Personal Meaning – conscience, spiritual well-being, questions of ultimate concern; and

• Economic Means – financial viability, but not as an end in itself.

This differs from Elkington’s Triple Bottom Line⁷ in that the focus is on our understandings of meaning and meaningful actions. There is also the additional component of Personal Meaning, which recognizes the importance of the individual in achieving sustainable ways of living. To address this Personal Meaning element in a substantive manner we have to use a different kind of language. Rather than relying primarily on facts, analysis and information, or intellectual argument, rationalization and objectivity, we need to draw equally on the language of emotion, relationships, integration and composition. This involves intuition, subjectivity and the lived experience – the life-world or Lebenswelt – the world we share and live through in the present. This, too, is the language of creativity and the imagination.

Self-evidently, personal meaning has to be meaningful at the personal level; we have to engage, feel and experience a thing emotionally and aesthetically in ourselves. It has to touch us at a deeper level. So the question arises, how do we achieve this? Obviously not by restricting our inquiries and considerations to information and facts. First, we have to use more symbolic, evocative forms of expression that are capable of alluding to those aspects of being human that lie beyond evidential confirmation but are, nonetheless, felt and known within oneself. Second, through the visual arts, we can create alternatives and envision different understandings and reveal different worlds. Through word and image we can engage with ideas in ways that transcend intellectual understandings and touch the heart. We appreciate creative works through the experiences they enable, which are aesthetic, emotional and intuitively felt. As Siegel has written, “an embellished event can be closer to the truth than factual precision if its evocation is infused with intuitive wisdom”.⁸

When we design we have to engage, and through this engagement the designer or practice-based researcher becomes involved, this is a necessary condition of doing design. Involvement means calling upon not just facts but also one’s values, beliefs and aesthetic sensibilities, all of which are critically important. They are what make us human, they give our lives meaning and significance, they allow us to dream and offer us hope. However, these aspects of our humanity have been downplayed, sidelined and eroded in modern, economically developed societies. Today, this is being challenged. Grey, discussing Catholicism, suggests that today’s older generation, emerging from more conservative, rigid times, have tended to espouse more liberal directions, a position that is in keeping with Enlightenment notions of progress and continual advancement. But, she says, “the future is not where this older generation seems to think it is”,⁹ suggesting instead that many young people are rejecting such ideas and wanting a religious or spiritual identity that runs counter to evermore liberalization, novelty and transience, and is “unashamedly traditional”; one that demands discipline and high standards.¹⁰ And it is certainly the case that the very traditional Latin Mass is today attracting younger congregations.¹¹ In a different arena, social anthropologist Scott Atran asks, “What dreams may come from most current government policies that offer little beyond promises of comfort and security?”.¹² He argues that today’s violent extremism results from an erosion of meaningful values and beliefs. In an address to the UN Security Council he said his research indicates that, “Violent extremism represents not the resurgence of traditional cultures, but their collapse, as young people unmoored from millennial traditions flail about in search of a social identity that gives personal significance and glory. This is the dark side of globalization. They radicalize to find a firm identity in a flattened world”.¹³ These developments, which characterize our time, can be understood as the after-effects of modernity with its focus on materialism, secularization, liberalization, rampant consumption and a preoccupation with possessions. Modernity may have been able to offer physical comfort, better health and, perhaps, security, but it has failed to offer more substantive avenues to human meaning. Taylor has said that “an essential condition of a life having meaning” is that “the repeatable cycles of life connect over time, and make a continuity” and that the rejection of these ideas during the modern period has resulted in homogeneity and emptiness.¹⁴ Some see a return to tradition as a route to deeper values and beliefs while others, as Atran’s research indicates, take a very different route – searching f...