Sacral objects have extremely varied uses and meanings in the world religions. They have evolved over extended periods of time to their current forms today, where they are tightly bound to a spatiotemporal context (ie. in a church as a part of a liturgy).
The development of sacral objects have been mainly left to the hands of craftsmen in the recent decades with little critical treatise by designers. Hence the results are often ornamental adaptions of traduced objects made to meet the fashion of their time. The importance of religions declined from the 60s to the turn of the century when a sudden, unexpected global religious rennaissance manifested itself in different extreme forms.
Therefore a more critical eye on the function of different religious objects ought to be seen as a timely topic for designers to engage with beyond a pure artisanship. The assignment of this semester is to research an object (or a piece of clothing, installation or environment) from one of the world religions and translate it with an up-to-date conceptual take.
