Design for Resilience: Making the Future We Leave Behind

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.

Stuart Walker is Chair of Design for Sustainability at Manchester School of Art, Emeritus Professor at Lancaster and Calgary, and Visiting Professor at Kingston University, London. He has conducted research and exhibited his conceptual designs internationally. His most recent book is Design and Spirituality: A Philosophy of Material Cultures.