Download or read book Design for the Unthinkable World written by Craig Bremner and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-02-13 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This edited book contests that if design’s raison d'être is to make things better, then the object of design has always been, remains and can only be a changed world and our relationship to it – the world-for-us. Each chapter was written by carefully selected researchers and practitioners who span geographical, disciplinary, and methodological boundaries in their work. Contributors skilfully examine the case that, while this once might have been seen to be a worthy objective (how else to effect a preferred state and/or pursue the project for the better world?), now the role of designing must cease to service design for change in the manner in which it has been doing. Chapters explore how designing itself might change to explore the possibilities that might exist for the design of what-might-not-become in an unthinkable-world; what Eugene Thacker calls a world-without-us. This world-without-us does not mean a world devoid of humans or an interstellar world, but a world we project that continues to revolve around the sun but no longer revolves around us. This book will be of interest to scholars working in design research, design ecology, product design, service design, experience design, architecture, and information design.
Download or read book Design for Micro Utopias written by John Wood and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-03-02 with total page 231 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Everyone is already painfully aware of our predicament - ecological extinctions, dwindling fossil fuel reserves and economic chaos. The solutions are less obvious, despite the many opportunities that surround us. We have never had more access to resources, knowledge and technology but this is not the problem. What we lack most is creative thinking, fuelled by collective optimism. In a pragmatic world run by careerist experts this is hardly surprising. As voters and consumers we are trained to choose and complain, but not how to envisage what we really, really want. How can we design a better world unless we revive the art of dreaming? For without dreams we are lost. Perhaps it should be the duty of all citizens to imagine alternative futures; in effect, to think more like designers. After all, designers have always been dreamers, and have often found ways to realize their dreams. Design for Micro-Utopias does not advocate a single, monolithic Utopia. Rather, it invites readers to embrace a more pluralized and mercurial version of Thomas More's famous 1516 novel of the same name. It therefore encourages the proliferation of many 'micro-utopias' rather than one 'Utopia'. This requires a less negative, critical and rational approach. Referencing a wide range of philosophical thinking from Aristotle to the present day, western and eastern spiritual ideals, and scientific, biological and systems theory, John Wood offers remedies for our excessively individualistic, mechanistic and disconnected thinking, and asks whether a metadesign approach might bring about a new mode of governance. This is a daring idea. Ultimately, he reminds us that if we believe that we will never be able to design miracles we make it more likely that this is so. The first step is to turn the 'impossible' into the 'thinkable'.
Download or read book Not to Scale written by Jamer Hunt and published by Grand Central Publishing. This book was released on 2020-03-03 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From small decisions that paralyze us to big data that knows everything about us, Not to Scale is a thought-provoking guide to navigating the surprising complexities of a networked age when the things that are now shaping experience have no weight or size. The dictionary defines "scale" as a range of numbers, used as a system to measure or compare things. We use this concept in every aspect of our lives-it is essential to innovation, helps us weigh options, and shapes our understanding of the impact of our actions. In Not to Scale, Jamer Hunt investigates the complications of scale in the digital age, highlighting an interesting paradox: We now have a world of information at our fingertips, yet ironically the more informed we have become, the more overwhelmed we feel. The global effects of our daily choices (Paper or plastic? Own or lease? Shop local or buy online?) remain difficult for us to comprehend, and solutions to large-scale national and international issues feel inconceivable. Hunt explains how these challenges are intimately tied to a new logic of scale and provides readers with survival skills for the twenty-first century. By taking massive problems and shrinking them down to size, we can use scale to effect positive change and adapt to the modern era. Connecting our smallest decisions to the grand scheme of things, Not to Scale is a fascinating and empowering guide to comprehending and navigating the high stakes often obscured from our view.
Download or read book Chronicles of Care A Design History of the COVID 19 Virus written by Paul A. Rodgers and published by Vernon Press. This book was released on 2024-04-16 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Covid-19 crisis and the designed interventions that the authors have catalogued in this book prove definitively that design does care. The authors documented this as it evolved every day from the 1st January 2020 to 31st May 2020 inclusive. Then they looked at all of this care and caring from the point of view of design and, by the sheer volume of design interventions they have documented, illustrate that design is good in a crisis. What the Covid-19 pandemic illustrated is that for the first time in modern history, capital was totally irrelevant. Money could not save your life. Only design could. Rapidly designed masks, shelters, hospitals, instructional posters, infographics, dashboards, respirators, sanitisers, virtual and local communities emerged to save us. From January 2020, design became king. The Covid-19 global pandemic presented an ontological reality; design is more than margins or profit. In fact, design became extremely valuable when it stopped concentrating on those things and started to care about peoples’ lives. This brief episode in history is still repositioning the status of design and reconfiguring its signifier from consumption to care. The contents of this book cover the outbreak, lockdown, and the beginning of the reopening in the UK. In between, the book functions as a history of pandemic crisis design interventions. As such it is a “research-in-the-moment project” where we have illustrated our thoughts and insights in tables, charts and diagrams. We have accepted all design interventions as valid and given them the same role and status by presenting each of them in a standard format. No curation. No selection. No position. The task of critical analysis must follow – perhaps by us, certainly by others.
Download or read book Speculative Everything written by Anthony Dunne and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2013-12-06 with total page 235 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How to use design as a tool to create not only things but ideas, to speculate about possible futures. Today designers often focus on making technology easy to use, sexy, and consumable. In Speculative Everything, Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby propose a kind of design that is used as a tool to create not only things but ideas. For them, design is a means of speculating about how things could be—to imagine possible futures. This is not the usual sort of predicting or forecasting, spotting trends and extrapolating; these kinds of predictions have been proven wrong, again and again. Instead, Dunne and Raby pose “what if” questions that are intended to open debate and discussion about the kind of future people want (and do not want). Speculative Everything offers a tour through an emerging cultural landscape of design ideas, ideals, and approaches. Dunne and Raby cite examples from their own design and teaching and from other projects from fine art, design, architecture, cinema, and photography. They also draw on futurology, political theory, the philosophy of technology, and literary fiction. They show us, for example, ideas for a solar kitchen restaurant; a flypaper robotic clock; a menstruation machine; a cloud-seeding truck; a phantom-limb sensation recorder; and devices for food foraging that use the tools of synthetic biology. Dunne and Raby contend that if we speculate more—about everything—reality will become more malleable. The ideas freed by speculative design increase the odds of achieving desirable futures.
Download or read book Design Education in the Anthropocene written by Paul A. Rodgers and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-05-01 with total page 175 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume examines emerging practice and research in design education rooted in the context of significant global issues. A diverse set of international contributors present novel design education research that seeks to make significant social, economic, cultural and environmental change. Topics covered include fashion, sustainability, creativity, social justice, museum education, climate change, environmentalism, and empathy. The chapters draw a link between current research practice and theory and future challenges for the field. The book will be of interest to scholars working in communication design, graphic design, design research, and information design.
Download or read book The Age of the Unthinkable written by Joshua Cooper Ramo and published by Little, Brown. This book was released on 2009-03-23 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Today the very ideas that made America great imperil its future. Our plans go awry and policies fail. History's grandest war against terrorism creates more terrorists. Global capitalism, intended to improve lives, increases the gap between rich and poor. Decisions made to stem a financial crisis guarantee its worsening. Environmental strategies to protect species lead to their extinction. The traditional physics of power has been replaced by something radically different. In The Age of the Unthinkable, Joshua Cooper Ramo puts forth a revelatory new model for understanding our dangerously unpredictable world. Drawing upon history, economics, complexity theory, psychology, immunology, and the science of networks, he describes a new landscape of inherent unpredictability -- and remarkable, wonderful possibility.
Download or read book Design as Research written by Gesche Joost and published by Birkhäuser. This book was released on 2016-04-25 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Are there differences between design practice and the practice of design research? What alliances between text and artefact are possible in the search for new knowledge? How does design research translate and transform theories and methods from other disciplines? Is design research moving towards becoming a formal discipline and, if so, would this really be an advantage? 16 international authors address these four different aspects in the form of personal statements, and 19 researchers share their reflections based on their experience of having carried out a practice-based PhD. This book investigates the status quo of things in the multi-faceted and constantly evolving field of design research, and outlines the elementary issues faced by researchers. The compendium is a survey of a fast-growing field and, at the same time, provides pointers for personal orientation. With statements from: Uta Brandes, Rachel Cooper, Clive Dilnot, Michael Erlhoff, Alain Findeli, Bill Gaver, Ranulph Glanville, Matthias Held, Wolfgang Jonas, Klaus Krippendorff, Claudia Mareis, Mike Press, Elizabeth B.-N. Sanders, Arne Scheuermann, Cameron Tonkinwise, Brigitte Wolf
Download or read book Design Unbound Designing for Emergence in a White Water World Volume 2 written by Ann M. Pendleton-Jullian and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2018-12-04 with total page 495 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tools for navigating today's hyper-connected, rapidly changing, and radically contingent white water world. Design Unbound presents a new tool set for having agency in the twenty-first century, in what the authors characterize as a white water world—rapidly changing, hyperconnected, and radically contingent. These are the tools of a new kind of practice that is the offspring of complexity science, which gives us a new lens through which to view the world as entangled and emerging, and architecture, which is about designing contexts. In such a practice, design, unbound from its material thingness, is set free to design contexts as complex systems. In a world where causality is systemic, entangled, in flux, and often elusive, we cannot design for absolute outcomes. Instead, we need to design for emergence. Design Unbound not only makes this case through theory but also presents a set of tools to do so. With case studies that range from a new kind of university to organizational, and even societal, transformation, Design Unbound draws from a vast array of domains: architecture, science and technology, philosophy, cinema, music, literature and poetry, even the military. It is presented in five books, bound as two volumes. Different books within the larger system of books will resonate with different reading audiences, from architects to people reconceiving higher education to the public policy or defense and intelligence communities. The authors provide different entry points allowing readers to navigate their own pathways through the system of books.
Download or read book Design for the Real World written by Victor Papanek and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Design for the Real World has been translated into over twenty languages since it first appeared in 1971; it has become the world's most widely read book on design and is an essential text in many design and architectural schools. This edition offers a blueprint for survival in the third millennium. Victor Papanek's lively and instructive guide shows how design can reduce pollution, overcrowding, starvation, obsolescence and other modern ills. He leads us away from 'fetish objects for a wasteful society' towards a new age of morally and environmentally responsible design.
Download or read book What Can a Body Do written by Sara Hendren and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2020-08-18 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Named a Best Book of the Year by NPR and LitHub Winner of the 2021 Science in Society Journalism Book Prize A fascinating and provocative new way of looking at the things we use and the spaces we inhabit, and a call to imagine a better-designed world for us all. Furniture and tools, kitchens and campuses and city streets—nearly everything human beings make and use is assistive technology, meant to bridge the gap between body and world. Yet unless, or until, a misfit between our own body and the world is acute enough to be understood as disability, we may never stop to consider—or reconsider—the hidden assumptions on which our everyday environment is built. In a series of vivid stories drawn from the lived experience of disability and the ideas and innovations that have emerged from it—from cyborg arms to customizable cardboard chairs to deaf architecture—Sara Hendren invites us to rethink the things and settings we live with. What might assistance based on the body’s stunning capacity for adaptation—rather than a rigid insistence on “normalcy”—look like? Can we foster interdependent, not just independent, living? How do we creatively engineer public spaces that allow us all to navigate our common terrain? By rendering familiar objects and environments newly strange and wondrous, What Can a Body Do? helps us imagine a future that will better meet the extraordinary range of our collective needs and desires.
Download or read book Design for the Real World written by Victor J. Papanek and published by . This book was released on 1985 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Design Computing and Cognition 10 written by John S. Gero and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2011-02-22 with total page 733 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume contains the refereed and revised papers of the Fourth International Conference on Design Computing and Cognition (DCC'10), held in Stuttgart, Germany. The material in this book represents the state-of-the-art research and developments in design computing and design cognition. The papers are grouped under the following nine headings, describing both advances in theory and application and demonstrating the depth and breadth of design computing and design cognition: Design Cognition; Framework Models in Design; Design Creativity; Lines, Planes, Shape and Space in Design; Decision-Making Processes in Design; Knowledge and Learning in Design; Using Design Cognition; Collaborative/Collective Design; and Design Generation. This book is of particular interest to researchers, developers and users of advanced computation in design across all disciplines and to those who need to gain better understanding of designing.
Download or read book Stand Out of Our Light written by James Williams and published by . This book was released on 2018-05-31 with total page 151 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Argues that human freedom is threatened by systems of intelligent persuasion developed by tech giants who compete for our time and attention. This title is also available as Open Access.
Download or read book Unthinkable written by Brad Parks and published by Thomas & Mercer. This book was released on 2021-07-27 with total page 351 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From international bestselling author Brad Parks comes a new thriller about an ordinary man who may be able to save the world as we know it--but to do so, he must make an impossible choice. Nate Lovejoy is a self-proclaimed nobody, a stay-at-home dad who doesn't believe he's important to anyone but his wife and their two daughters. So it's a shock when members of a powerful secret society kidnap and spirit Nate away to a mansion at the behest of their leader, Vanslow DeGange, who claims to know the future. He's foreseen that a billion people could die--unless Nate acts. It seems improbable, especially given what DeGange says will set this mass casualty incident in motion: a lawsuit against the biggest power company in Virginia, being brought by Nate's wife, Jenny. Nate quickly smells a scam being perpetrated by the power company. But at every turn, it becomes apparent there's more to DeGange's gift than Nate wants to acknowledge. A billion people really could die, and Nate might be the only one who can save them. All he has to do is the unthinkable.
Download or read book Design for the Real World written by Victor J. Papanek and published by Academy Chicago Publishers, Limited. This book was released on 1985 with total page 426 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Design for the Real World has, since its first appearance twenty-five years ago, become a classic. Translated into twenty-three languages, it is one of the world's most widely read books on design. In this edition, Victor Papanek examines the attempts by designers to combat the tawdry, the unsafe, the frivolous, the useless product, once again providing a blueprint for sensible, responsible design in this world which is deficient in resources and energy.
Download or read book Metadesigning Designing in the Anthropocene written by John Wood and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2022-06-08 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Long-sighted, radical and provocative, this book offers a foundational framework of concepts, principles and methods (exemplified with selected tools) to enable metadesigners to manage and reinvent their practices. The book reminds readers that designers are, albeit unwittingly, helping to shape the Anthropocene. Despite their willingness to deliver greener products and services, designers find themselves part of an industry that has become the go-to catalyst for dividends and profit. If our species is to achieve the rehabilitation and metamorphosis, we may need to design at the level of paradigms, genres, lifestyles and currencies. This would mean making design more integrated, comprehensive, adaptive, transdisciplinary, self-reflexive and relational. The book, therefore, advocates a shift of emphasis from designing ‘sustainable’ products, services and systems towards cultivating synergies that will induce regenerative lifestyles. The book will be of interest to managers, designers, scholars and educators from a wide range of backgrounds, including design research, design history, design studies and environmental studies.
