[ A Series of Lectures in Design Theory ]

[ Schedule ] [ Concept of the Lecture Series ] [ slovensko ]

JONATHAN CHAPMAN | 8. 4. 2008

DESIRE, DISAPPOINTMENT AND WASTE

Sustainable design is about criticism. At best, it reinvigorates Design with an essential ethos of debate that was once the very hallmark of creative practice, to enable a more expansive, holistic appreciation of design, and more broadly, the lived experience of Sustainability. It is therefore alarming to note that sustainable design methodologies are becoming increasingly myopic in their focus on the symptoms, rather than the behavioural causes, of the inefficient model of design, production and consumption we fumble through today.

Landfill sites across the developed world are overloaded with fully functioning products – toasters that still toast and freezers that still freeze – the majority of which still perform their tasks perfectly, in a utilitarian sense. In an emotive sense, however, these orphaned products bear an immaterial mode of defect manifest within the relational space occupied by both subject and object – durability therefore, is just as much about emotion, love and attachment, as it is about fractured polymers, worn gaskets or blown circuitry.

This lecture engages with salient issues of emotionally durable design, to propose new and alternative genres of objects that reduce the consumption and waste of resources by increasing the resilience of relationships established between consumers and their products.

—
Jonathan Chapman is a professor of design at the University of Brighton and the founder of [ Safehouse Creative ], a company devoted to sustainable design and research. He is the author of Emotionally Durable Design: Objects, Experiences and Empathy (London: Earthscan, 2005).

[ O Jonathanu Champanu ]
[ Safehouse Creative: Sustainable Design & Research Lab ]

[ Schedule ]