Researching my latest book showed me where true beauty and meaning are to be found
I have been writing about design and its relationship to sustainability for many years, but when I set out to develop a book on design for resilience, I hadn’t anticipated that I would be embarking on such an unpredictable and enlightening journey – a journey full of surprises, joy, and simple, unassuming beauty.
Resilience means robustness and adaptability. Things that are resilient are capable of accommodating changes and misfortunes, and they can recover and carry on. And to understand what resilience means for design, I decided to look at objects and practices that have been present in human societies for hundreds if not thousands of years.
We can be sure that if something has been around for such a long period of time, irrespective of language, culture and beliefs, it will have withstood many changes and misfortunes, and will have adapted to all kinds of situations and human proclivities. We can also be sure that such things tell us something important about ourselves and point us to what is needful and meaningful.
What I found were things that are necessary, simple and straightforward, but also things that may be taken for granted and therefore overlooked. So, even though they may be very important aspects of life and community, they are frequently not really seen or appreciated. And if we are not careful they may wither and disappear under the unrelenting onslaught of consumerism.
On my journey, I considered objects and practices associated with home, food, culture, play and spirit, all of which have always been important to human society. A chair, a table, a lamp, a pot, homespun cloth of wool and flax, a washing line, locally grown food, a fishing hook and net, and the sickle – used by the ancient Egyptians and still in use all over the world – and many, many more, from boardgames and sports to theatre, music, dance, jewellery and tattoo, to pilgrimage, shrines and ritual.
All these things matter to us and they always have. They have changed, been adapted, revitalized and reinvented, but they have always prevailed. When we attend to them, when we really see them, we come to appreciate their beauty, which is usually a function of their restraint and essentialness – an essentialness that enables ways of living that are quiet and unburdened, that express and reify who we are, and that are free from all the distractions, temporality and incessant ‘noise’ of what contemporary living has become.
And when we are not overwhelmed by clutter, we are able to direct our attention, time and efforts towards those things that are truly beautiful and meaningful, all of which transcend our own individual needs and preoccupations – love, care and being present for other people and the natural world, without which we have nothing.
Design for Resilience: Making the Future We Leave Behind is published by The MIT Press on August 1st, 2023.
Stuart Walker is Professor of Design for Sustainability at Manchester School of Art, Manchester Metropolitan University.
Read more of Stuarts’s articles in Sublime Magazine
