Review of Stuart Walkers Wrapped Attention: Designing Products for Evolving Permanence and Enduring Meaning | Current

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Review of Stuart Walkers Wrapped Attention: Designing Products for Evolving Permanence and Enduring Meaning
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Review of Stuart Walkers Wrapped Attention: Designing Products for Evolving Permanence and Enduring Meaning Andrea Husky I will begin my review with a citation from Stuart Walkers Wrapped Attention: Designing Products for Evolving Permanence and Enduring Meaning which is a chapter featured in Walkers book The Spirit of Design: Objects, Environment and Meaning: The conventions that underlie how electronic products are designed are not only linked to how they are made, the longevity of their use, and what happens to them after their useful life has ended, but also to how these products are used and the kinds of use they encourage. Professor Stuart Walker is Head of Design and Co-Director of the Imagination Lancaster creative research lab at Lancaster University, UK, and Visiting Professor of Sustainable Design at Kingston University, UK. Formerly, he was Associate Dean at the Faculty of Environmental Design, University of Calgary, Canada, where he retains his affiliation. His research papers have been published and presented internationally and his conceptual designs have been exhibited at the Design Museum, London, across Canada, and in Italy. He also serves on the editorial boards of several international journals. His essay Wrapped Attention; Designing Products for Evolving Permanence and Enduring Meaning provides us with an interesting take on, quite literally, the title of the reading: designing electronic products that address sustainability by ensuring longevity that also encompasses personal meaning for the consumer. This focus on personal meaning is a consistent thread throughout the article which that is explored throughout six sub-sections. First, Beyond the Triple Bottom Line, which discusses the proposed addition of personal meaning to the triple bottom line of sustainability, the interdependent economic, environmental, and social factors identified with human activity. Follwing that are, The Banality of a Shallow Blindness, New Directions and the Role of Speculative Design, Sustainability, Production, and Product Meaning, New design values for the Quadruple Bottom Line. The text concludes with The Conceptual design of a Mobile Phone, a conceptual mobile phone that addresses; the detrimental effects of multitasking, the applications of the quadruple bottom line, and the object as a continual state of flux is explored. Walkers portrayal of human activity when linked to electronic goods is shockingly accurate; information overload and multitasking are becoming detrimental to our abilities to be empathetic, ethically responsive, compassionate, tolerant and to develop emotional stability. His proposed conceptual solution of a mobile phone that grows with advancements in technology, minimizes multitasking, and therefor aids in reversing these issues is inspired, and directly in line to his main argument of personal meaning in sustainability. Wrapped Attention grabs the reader with expressive but understandable language, the tone is overall a hopeful expression for sustainability and its future within industrial design. Walkers research includes persuasive studies about our relation to our electronics, their manufacturing, and how we are using them. Big Idea
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The injection of personal meaning into the triple bottom line of sustainability, and its relation to the design and use of electronic goods, might influence design priorities and consequently create a remarkable synergy of economic imperatives, environmental responsibilities, social concerns and personal meaning. This synergy offers the possibility of a systemic shift in how we imagine, produce, use and dispose of electronic goods. and It consequently assures that designs contribution is worthwhile, meaningful and not purely a vehicle to incur sales by the production of novelty and difference. Useful learning outcomes and applications for designers The combination of theoretical material, with the application of the conceptual mobile phone, provide the reader with useful insight on the necessity of design and production that make use of technological advancements, but also confront not only the economic, environmental and social aspects of sustainability, but the major question of personal meaning. Walker touches on the urgency for the contribution of design to be meaningful and worthwhile. In contrast, the kinds of products currently available on the market for the majority do not address the importance of personal meaning in sustainability. To design and produce such a product requires an adjustment in how we think about it. Instead of thinking of it as a fixed commodity that is attached to certain period in time and consequently subject to obsolescence, we must imagine it as an object in continual flux, a constantly changing, adaptive product. What Other People are Saying Imaginative design will be a crucial factor in enacting sustainability in peoples daily lives. Through fundamental design research, this book challenges a host of common assumptions about sustainability, progress, growth and globalization. - Worldcat.org Walkers practice-based explorations of localisation, human meaning and functional objects demonstrate the imaginative potential of research-through-design and yield a compelling, constructive and essentially hopeful direction for the future one that radically re-imagines our material culture by meshing mass-production with individuality, products with place, and utilitarian benefit with environmental responsibility. -Earthscan Walkers assessment is a cultural one, and this fourth element addresses (perhaps secondarily) a shared worldview that he sees as being increasingly devoid of genuine meaning, and worse, erodes our commitment to shared social obligations. -B. Richards, Lancaster University Recommended reading extensions that compliment this article Sustainability, and active participation in the solution is a main concern of Stuart Walkers and these books help illuminate the importance of sustainability in design and design thinking Book by Fuad-Luke, A. (2009). Design Activism, London:EarthScan. 193. Article by Thorpe, A. (June 20, 2007). Three Sector Economy. The designers atlas of sustainability. (pp.60-61). Island Press.

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