In the forward to Tanizaki’s, In Praise of Shadows, American humanist and postmodern architect Charles Moore beautifully reaffirms a central pillar in my personal design philosophy. Moore states, “One of the basic human requirements is the need to dwell, and one of the central acts of dwelling is the act of inhabiting, of connecting ourselves temporally with a place that belongs to us and we belong to. This is not especially in the tumultuous present as easy task, and it requires help: we need allies in inhabitation”.
I am undoubtedly a committed ally in this quest for humanisation for art and design. I am a designer/researcher/photographer/artist/theorist who is constantly curious about theories of architectural space, the psychology of human behaviour, the philosophy of human experience and fundamentally, how all of these fields can organically interact to inspire design outcomes, which add value to humanity.
In the words of German Phenomenologist Martin Heidegger and fundamental to my design philosophy, ‘You cannot divorce man and space’. It is through this understanding of ‘our being in the world’ that I believe that designers have an ethical responsibility to those persons inhabiting our designed spaces. I see this responsibility as a positive where, for too long, designers have dismissed the fundamental impact of design on our ontological understanding of being.
Fundamentally, I believe that design has the potential to reach into humanity and draw out the qualities that appeal to the fundamental nature of an ethical and empathetic humanism. However, in order to do so we must step back from the world around us and look to and question our nature of ‘being’. Change is only possible when we become capable of realising that change is possible and design can assist this endeavour.
As a mentor in the design discipline, I aspire to a role that can help tease out the humanist designer within the design students. I believe that this possibility arises only when students can be faced with questioning their own path and philosophy of what it means to them to be a shaper of objects and spaces that has an affect on our being.
I have spent many passionate years researching, analysing and documenting existing architectural spaces (internationally and locally) through psychologically investigating our biological basis of behaviour in the built environment. Through this ongoing research I have started to develop a iterative design process teaching framework that can be implemented in the disciplines of design theory and design studio.