Design for Resilience
Making the Future We Leave Behind
By Stuart Walker
- 416 pp., 6 x 9 in, 77 b&w illus.
- Hardcover
- ISBN 780262048095
- Published: August 1, 2023
- Publisher: The MIT Press
The MIT Press describes the book as follows:
“A beautifully written and illustrated framework for resilient design that is as pragmatic as it is inspiring, showing us not only how but why we should design differently.
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.”
A Review of Design for Resilience from ‘Nature’ journal
Solutions to climate change are widely assumed to require new technologies. Stuart Walker, a scholar of design for sustainability, disagrees, while accepting the importance of technology and science. Rather than pursue the modern love affair with novelty, he writes, designers should learn from stable earlier societies that “valued continuity, kept to practices that had stood the test of time, and lived within the parameters of their local environment”. His thoughtful book ranges from food to spirituality.
doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-023-03468-7
Reviewed by:
Andrew Robinson, ‘Why we fall for scams, and the new is bad for the planet: Books in brief’, Nature,
November 2023, available at: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-03468-7
Related articles:
Attending to what is needful; Sublime Magazine; READ
Design Criticism, Design Observer; READ
Nature-Positive Innovation; Project Syndicate; READ
The Located Making Framework for Sustainable Enterprise; READ
