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Design on a Darkling Plain : transcending utility through questions in form

This practice-based design exploration considers the relationship of contemporary products to issues of sustainability and enduring meaning and introduces a new ‘non-utilitarian’ notion of designed object that has its roots in medieval sacred imagery.

The instrumental value of products is discussed along with their secondary or extrinsic value, which includes technological advancement and business development. In this context, the intrinsic value of contemporary products, or lack of it, is discussed in the context of sustainability. This leads to a set of general propositions for countering triviality and waste and increasing intrinsic value, and some of these fall under the remit of design. Against this backdrop, product meaning and intrinsic value are considered with reference to the philosophy of E. F. Schumacher and various other critiques – from Arnold in the nineteenth century to Orr in the twenty-first – and a case is made for objects of design, rather than art, that have no practical utility but whose function is concerned with what might be referred to as ‘inner work’. These arguments and ideas are then translated into a series of propositional objects – or questions in form – that ask how matters of ultimate concern, which are inherently ineffable, might be appropriately expressed as contemporary, contemplative artefacts. Significantly, it is argued that these are design objects rather than art objects even though they have no practical function. They aim to probe the meanings and possibilities for design in the twenty first century in the context of increasingly acute environmental degradation and social inequity (i.e. key issues of sustainability).

This research resulted in invitations to lecture internationally, including a lecture at Aalto University, Helsinki 2012 and participation in the Erasmus Sustainability and Service Design Intensive Programme 2012-2013, University of the Aegean, Greece.