Stuart Walker is Professor of Sustainable Design and Co-Director of the ImaginationLancaster design research lab at Lancaster University. He spent much of his academic career in Western Canada, where he was Associate Dean in the Faculty of Environmental Design at the University of Calgary. His research focuses on design for sustainability; product aesthetics and meaning; practice-based design research and product design that explores and expresses human values and notions of spirituality. In addition to his role at Lancaster University, he is also and Adjunct Professor Engineering at the University of Calgary, Canada and Visiting Professor of Sustainable Design at Kingston University, UK.
His research explores a variety of themes related to "Design for Sustainability" and "Design and Meaning and Aesthetics, and he employs the creative design process itself as a mode of inquiry, which honours both the core practice and creative potential of 'designing'. He has written several books and dozens of journal papers on these themes including: Sustainable by Design: Explorations in Theory and Practice, Earthscan, London (2006) and The Spirit of Design: Objects, Environment and Meaning, Earthscan, London (2011). He is currently developing and co-editing a large, multi-authored Handbook for Sustainable Design for Berg, Oxford. His papers have been published and presented internationally and his propositional and experimental (academic) design work has been exhibited across Canada, in Italy, and at the Design Museum in London.
He is also involved in the Design PhD conference - an annual event offered in conjunction with Northumbria University - and he is particularly interested in hearing from potential Design PhD candidates with interests that fall within the broad themes of design for sustainability and/or design and human meaning (values, spirituality etc.), and who have interests in practice-based design research.
