On Friday I was fortunate to attend a talk by Stuart Walker who is professor at Lancashire University exploring the theme of sustainable materiality.

I was reminded of John Gray's Silence of Animals in which he presents the idea of progress at any cost. Progress in of itself as man's desire to get to the pure land where there is no suffering, sickness or death. He lays the origins of our desires at the feet of Christianity in particular, the promise of salvation.

Stuart Walker also explores religious themes, I was reminded of Cave dwelling monks of meditate and reflect on a theme then bring back their teachings for the villagers below. He mediates on what is sustainability, what is means to be human and our inherent need to create or redesign our material world. 

In his talk he spoke of digital waste, how the cloud is not indeed anything so ephemeral but a tower block that requires refrigeration, the net is a network of cables underneath the Atlantic, servers of cat videos and ebooks which are back-up on multi servers ... he spoke of workers throwing themselves from the Fox Con (Apple factories) ... industry being at the mercy of it's shareholders ... redesigning products consisting of constantly redesign the exterior, components can be reused infinitely ... materials that can be returned to the earth having had little manufacturing or processing acted upon them.

I see Stuart Walker's explorations as an antidote to Evgeny Morozon's solutionism which he demonises in "To Save Everything Click Here". From Stuart there is call back to crafts, raw materials and reusing what we have in a local rather global way. He brings us back to the human in the industrialised process.

Draft post from August 30th 2015