Stuart Walker
Stuart Walker discusses his new book, Design for Resilience, published in the summer of 2023. This session is an opportunity to discuss not only how but also why we should design differently.
With over ten books in print and dozens of published articles, Stuart is a consistent and compelling voice on design for sustainability, product aesthetics, and practice-based approaches consistent with environmental care and social equity. He employs the creative design process as a mode of inquiry, honouring both the core practice and creative potential of “designing.”
Stuart is a Professor of Design for Sustainability at Manchester School of Art, Manchester Metropolitan University; a Visiting Professor at Kingston University, London; and an Emeritus Professor at Lancaster and Calgary Universities. He is also Adjunct Professor at Ontario College of Art and Design University in Toronto; and Emeritus Professor at the University of Calgary, Canada, where he spent much of his early academic career and where he was Associate Dean (Academic) and Associate Dean (Research) in the Faculty of Environmental Design.
Resources
MMU Profile: Selected publications
Design for Resilience: MIT Press. Design for Resilience
Book description
Design for Resilience is a timely, visionary map for creating restorative design that addresses humanity’s most critical issue: climate change. Our current wealth-oriented economic systems have resulted in gross disparities, war, refugee crises, and mass migrations that augur a bleak collective future. In this book, respected scholar Stuart Walker combines formidable research with practical examples to offer a hopeful, original, and transformative view of what resilient design looks like and how it can apply to all aspects of life, from personal objects to food to culture to business to recreation.
Working at the intersection of theory, philosophy, history, environmentalism, and justice, Walker offers a fresh approach that decolonizes design thinking to fundamentally change the nature of design practice and how it shapes our lives, communities, and industries. Asking nothing short of the fundamental question, “How should we live?,” Design for Resilience addresses the high-priority issues that concern governments, policymakers, designers, and people around the world who recognize that now, perhaps more than at any other time in human history, we need paradigmatic changes to create a future that lasts.
