Aesthetic Sustainability

Why do we readily dispose of some things, whereas we keep and maintain others for years, despite their obvious wear and tear? Can a greater understanding of aesthetic value lead to a more strategic and sustainable approach to product design? Aesthetic Sustainability: Product Design and Sustainable Usage offers guidelines for ways to reduce, rethink, and reform consumption. Its focus on aesthetics adds a new dimension to the creation, as well as the consumption, of sustainable products. The chapters offer innovative ways of working with expressional durability in the design process. Aesthetic Sustainability: Product Design and Sustainable Usage is related to emotional durability in the sense that the focus is on the psychological and sensuous bond between subject and object. But the subject-object connection is based on more than emotions: aesthetically sustainable objects continuously add nourishment to human life. This book explores the difference between sentimental value and aesthetic value, and it offers suggestions for operational approaches that can be implemented in the design process to increase aesthetic sustainability. This book also offers a thorough presentation of aesthetics, focusing on the correlation between the philosophical approach to the aesthetic experience and the durable design experience. The book is of interest to students and scholars working in the fields of design, arts, the humanities and social sciences; additionally, it will speak to designers and other professionals with an interest in sustainability and aesthetic value.

Kristine H. Harper is an Associate Professor in Sustainable Fashion at Copenhagen School of Design and Technology. Her research focuses on sustainable product design, philosophical aesthetics, aesthetic nourishment, the durable subject-object bond, and Designer Social Responsibility. She has written a wide range of articles on sustainable design and durable aesthetics.

Introduction: Aesthetic Sustainability 1. The Pleasure of the Familiar 2. The Pleasure of the Unfamiliar 3. The Expression of Flexible Aesthetics 4. Designing the Temporal Object 5. The Magical Thing 6. The Value of Aesthetic Sustainability 7. Aesthetic Strategy