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How do we formulate alternative approaches to the world’s unresponsive or intractable dilemmas—from climate cataclysm to inequality to concentrations of authoritarian power? Easterling argues that the search for solutions is a mistake. Instead, she offers the perspective of medium design, one that considers not only separate objects, ideas and events but also the space(...)
Medium design: knowing how to work on the world
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How do we formulate alternative approaches to the world’s unresponsive or intractable dilemmas—from climate cataclysm to inequality to concentrations of authoritarian power? Easterling argues that the search for solutions is a mistake. Instead, she offers the perspective of medium design, one that considers not only separate objects, ideas and events but also the space between them. This background matrix with all its latent potentials is profoundly underexploited in a culture that is good at naming things but not so good at seeing how they connect and interact. In case studies dealing with everything from automation and migration to explosive urban growth and atmospheric changes, ''Medium design'' looks not to new technologies for innovation but rather to sophisticated relationships between emergent and incumbent technologies. It does not try to eliminate problems but rather put them together in productive combinations. And it offers forms of activism for modulating power and temperament in organisations of all kinds.
Design Theory
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John Hunt has witnessed again and again the power of original thinking to transform bothcompanies and individuals. Few can argue with Hunt's claim that it is ideas that move the world forward, and he articulates that anyone can play: there is no hierarchy to original thinking. By illustrating how to create space so ideas can breathe, this publication provides a lifeline(...)
The art of the idea: and how it can change your life
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John Hunt has witnessed again and again the power of original thinking to transform bothcompanies and individuals. Few can argue with Hunt's claim that it is ideas that move the world forward, and he articulates that anyone can play: there is no hierarchy to original thinking. By illustrating how to create space so ideas can breathe, this publication provides a lifeline to those who find themselves stuck in a rut.
Design Theory
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During the ‘CAMon! Project’ workshop led by Italian architects Michele Brunello, Marco Brega, and Andrea Angeli’s, students at the Libre Académie des Beaux-arts Douala in Cameroon learned how simple games can also be a formidable design tool. Through Stefano Graziani’s colour photographs, this book features the 12 games resulting from the students' designs. The texts(...)
Play & design from Cameroon: 12 prototypes inspired by theme of playing
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During the ‘CAMon! Project’ workshop led by Italian architects Michele Brunello, Marco Brega, and Andrea Angeli’s, students at the Libre Académie des Beaux-arts Douala in Cameroon learned how simple games can also be a formidable design tool. Through Stefano Graziani’s colour photographs, this book features the 12 games resulting from the students' designs. The texts address the theme of playing from different perspectives, highlighting the relationship between design, education and cooperation. Each game — puppets, puzzles, masks, and mazes — has a strong empathic value, based on imagination and a broader exploration of reality.
Design Theory
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Things in life tend to fall apart. Cars break down. Buildings fall into disrepair. Personal items deteriorate. Yet today’s researchers are exploiting newly understood properties of matter to program materials that physically sense, adapt, and fall together instead of apart. These materials open new directions for industrial innovation and challenge us to rethink the way(...)
Things fall together: a guide to the new materials revolution
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Things in life tend to fall apart. Cars break down. Buildings fall into disrepair. Personal items deteriorate. Yet today’s researchers are exploiting newly understood properties of matter to program materials that physically sense, adapt, and fall together instead of apart. These materials open new directions for industrial innovation and challenge us to rethink the way we build and collaborate with our environment. "Things fall together" is a provocative guide to this emerging, often mind-bending reality, presenting a bold vision for harnessing the intelligence embedded in the material world. Drawing on his pioneering work on self-assembly and programmable material technologies, Skylar Tibbits lays out the core, frequently counterintuitive ideas and strategies that animate this new approach to design and innovation. From furniture that builds itself to shoes printed flat that jump into shape to islands that grow themselves, he describes how matter can compute and exhibit behaviors that we typically associate with biological organisms, and challenges our fundamental assumptions about what physical materials can do and how we can interact with them. Intelligent products today often rely on electronics, batteries, and complicated mechanisms. Tibbits offers a different approach, showing how we can design simple and elegant material intelligence that may one day animate and improve itself—and along the way help us build a more sustainable future.
Design Theory
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Robertson’s unconventional history of the origins of the information age posits the filing cabinet as an information storage container, an 'automatic memory' machine that contributed to a new type of information labor privileging manual dexterity over mental deliberation. Gendered assumptions about women’s nimble fingers helped to naturalize the changes that brought(...)
The filing cabinet: a vertical history of information
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Robertson’s unconventional history of the origins of the information age posits the filing cabinet as an information storage container, an 'automatic memory' machine that contributed to a new type of information labor privileging manual dexterity over mental deliberation. Gendered assumptions about women’s nimble fingers helped to naturalize the changes that brought women into the workforce as low-level clerical workers. The filing cabinet emerges from this unexpected account as a sophisticated piece of information technology and a site of gendered labor that with its folders, files, and tabs continues to shape how we interact with information and data in today’s digital world.
Design Theory
Poetics of the oriental rug
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‘Poetics of the Oriental Rug’ is published as a supplement to 'MacGuffin Magazine 9: The Rug'. It is the transcript of a seminal lecture entitled Poetica del tappeto orientale and delivered at the University of Padua in the early 1960s by Italian art historian Sergio Bettini (1905–1986).
Poetics of the oriental rug
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‘Poetics of the Oriental Rug’ is published as a supplement to 'MacGuffin Magazine 9: The Rug'. It is the transcript of a seminal lecture entitled Poetica del tappeto orientale and delivered at the University of Padua in the early 1960s by Italian art historian Sergio Bettini (1905–1986).
Design Theory
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Un parcours d'inventions et d'expérimentations à travers plus de 200 pièces d'artistes internationaux, observant la diversité non seulement des formes et des décors, mais aussi des processus de fabrication de la céramique.
Artifices instables – Histoires de céramiques
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Un parcours d'inventions et d'expérimentations à travers plus de 200 pièces d'artistes internationaux, observant la diversité non seulement des formes et des décors, mais aussi des processus de fabrication de la céramique.
Design Theory
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Drawing on fifteen years of field research in Las Vegas, anthropologist Natasha Dow Schüll shows how the mechanical rhythm of electronic gambling pulls players into a trancelike state they call the "machine zone," in which daily worries, social demands, and even bodily awareness fade away. Once in the zone, gambling addicts play not to win but simply to keep playing, for(...)
Addiction by design: machine gambling in Las Vegas
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Drawing on fifteen years of field research in Las Vegas, anthropologist Natasha Dow Schüll shows how the mechanical rhythm of electronic gambling pulls players into a trancelike state they call the "machine zone," in which daily worries, social demands, and even bodily awareness fade away. Once in the zone, gambling addicts play not to win but simply to keep playing, for as long as possible?even at the cost of physical and economic exhaustion. In continuous machine play, gamblers seek to lose themselves while the gambling industry seeks profit. Schüll describes the strategic calculations behind game algorithms and machine ergonomics, casino architecture and "ambience management," player tracking and cash access systems?all designed to meet the market's desire for maximum "time on device." Her account moves from casino floors into gamblers' everyday lives, from gambling industry conventions and Gamblers Anonymous meetings to regulatory debates over whether addiction to gambling machines stems from the consumer, the product, or the interplay between the two. ''Addiction by design'' is a compelling inquiry into the intensifying traffic between people and machines of chance, offering clues to some of the broader anxieties and predicaments of contemporary life. At stake in Schüll's account of the intensifying traffic between people and machines of chance is a blurring of the line between design and experience, profit and loss, control and compulsion.
Design Theory
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So-called extinct objects are those that were imagined but were never in use, or that existed but are now unused—superseded, unfashionable, or simply forgotten. Extinct gathers together an exceptional range of artists, curators, architects, critics, and academics, including Hal Foster, Barry Bergdoll, Deyan Sudjic, Tacita Dean, Emily Orr, Richard Wentworth, and many more.(...)
Design Theory
December 2021
Extinct: a compendium of obsolete objects
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So-called extinct objects are those that were imagined but were never in use, or that existed but are now unused—superseded, unfashionable, or simply forgotten. Extinct gathers together an exceptional range of artists, curators, architects, critics, and academics, including Hal Foster, Barry Bergdoll, Deyan Sudjic, Tacita Dean, Emily Orr, Richard Wentworth, and many more. In eighty-five essays, contributors nominate ''extinct'' objects and address them in a series of short, vivid, sometimes personal accounts, speaking not only of obsolete technologies, but of other ways of thinking, making, and interacting with the world. ''Extinct'' is filled with curious, half-remembered objects, each one evoking a future that never came to pass. It is also a visual treat, full of interest and delight.
Design Theory
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Assignments can give instructions, describe an exercise, present a problem, set out rules, propose a game, stimulate a process, or simply throw out questions. "Taking a line for a walk" brings attention to something that is often neglected: the assignment as a pedagogical element and verbal artefact of design education. This book is a compendium of 224 assignments, edited(...)
Taking a line for walk: assignments in design education
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Assignments can give instructions, describe an exercise, present a problem, set out rules, propose a game, stimulate a process, or simply throw out questions. "Taking a line for a walk" brings attention to something that is often neglected: the assignment as a pedagogical element and verbal artefact of design education. This book is a compendium of 224 assignments, edited by Nina Paim and coedited by Emilia Bergmark. A reference book for educators, researchers, and students alike, it includes both contemporary and historical examples and offers a space for different lines of design pedagogy to converge and converse. An accompanying essay by Corinne Gisel takes a closer look at the various forms assignments can take and the educational contexts they exist within. Taking a Line for a Walk derived from an exhibition of the same name at the International Biennial of Graphic Design Brno 2014.
Design Theory