An Investigation of Spiritual Identity in Product Design

Mankind, as his divine nature, is able to perceive spirituality and God’s presence among his interactions. Also human's need to spiritual cultivation is an undeniable point, but the studies around industrial design, hasn’t perpended that well enough. Actually there are so limited available scales and references, if a designer intend to design a product according to spiritual identity, or inspire a celestial sense by his/her product or even evaluate a product upon this concept. Spirituality is a complex, fathomless and subjective point of human life, which researching around it, requires multilateral studies. However, it is an essential and natural need, which should be investigated in objective formats. In the present research, Product design is studied according to the mentioned feature of the users. The goal of this paper, is recognition of affective factors on creating products with spiritual identity and also, spiritual perception for users. Actually, this is an effort to search for an approach which can guide the designers in this way and consequently can lead to optimizing the quality of the designed products. This theoretical research, has been formed on Brayan Lawson design process. In the following, library and field studies were organized. Those studies were done based on triple steps of analysis, synthesis and evaluation and also their interaction together. The structure of the research is based on a group of the words. These words which suggest some functional, aesthetics and symbolic features for products, are obtained within two ways. One group were derived by literature review in art and spirituality, especially Islamic art and traditionalist's ideas. Another group are achieved by an organized referring to attributes of God in holy Quran, the written and perfect reference of spirituality. Initially the interpretation of the Mentioned keywords and attributes were studied in variant references And then were sieved by conceptual and qualitative analysis in several steps, considering the prevalent concepts for industrial design. Finally the list of attributes and keywords was evaluated by 6 experts with related research areas to the subject of the paper. The final list including 29 keywords and attributes has been presented upon which designing the products seems to effect on manifesting spiritual identity for the user, during the process of utilizing, especially Iranian users. Within this direct referring to the attributes of God, a point was clarified: similar to the all the components of the universe, each product and its design has an essence beyond its appearance, too. This essence can respect to the God and attributes of him. This research showed that the designers who follow the moral and human approaches in design (for instance sustainable design, universal design, user centered design and etc.) have basically returned to their divine nature, consciously or unconsciously; while they may have different beliefs and faiths. Actually they are investigating the perfection in their design, or maybe in their expertise, but of course the real perfection of everything is in referring to the unique God, Allah.