Download or read book Networks of Design written by Jonathan Glynne and published by Universal-Publishers. This book was released on 2010-06 with total page 574 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Networks of Design maps a new methodological territory in design studies, conceived as a field of interdisciplinary inquiry and practice informed by a range of responses to actor network theory. It brings together a rich body of current work by researchers in the social sciences, technology, material culture, cultural geography, information technology, and systems design, and design theory and history. This collection will be invaluable to students and researchers in many areas of design studies and to design practitioners receptive to new and challenging notions of what constitutes the design process. Over ninety essays are thematically organised to address five aspects of the expanded notions of mediation, agency, and collaboration posited by network theory: Ideas, Things, Technology, Texts, and People. The collection also includes an important new essay on rethinking the concept of design by Bruno Latour, one of the most influential figures in the philosophy and sociology of science and technology and a pioneer of actor network theory, and essays deriving from forum discussions involving designers and designer-makers responsive to actor network theory. Rather than an anthology of previously-published essays, Networks of Design presents work in progress on design theory and its applications. It is the outcome of a live and vigorous debate on the possibilities and actualities offered by actor network led conceptualisations of the relationships and processes constituting design. All the essays, many collaborative, derive from papers presented at the international conference of the Design History Society held at University College Falmouth, UK in the Autumn of 2008.
Download or read book The Cotton Kings written by Bruce E. Baker and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Cotton Kings is a colorful account of the men who fought to control the price of cotton on unregulated exchanges in New York and New Orleans. Dishonest brokers used bad information to raise and lower prices, make or break fortunes, regardless of supply and demand. Eventually, federal regulation stamped out corruption on the exchanges, helping millions of farmers and textile manufacturers.
Download or read book The Chieftain and the Chair written by Maggie Taft and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2023-05-22 with total page 201 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A history of how Danish design rose to prominence in the postwar United States, becoming shorthand for stylish modern comfort. Today, Danish Modern design is synonymous with clean, midcentury cool. During the 1950s and ‘60s, it flourished as the furniture choice for Americans who hoped to signal they were current and chic. But how did this happen? How did Danish Modern become the design movement of the times? In The Chieftain and the Chair, Maggie Taft tells the tale of our love affair with Danish Modern design. Structured as a biography of two iconic chairs—Finn Juhl’s Chieftain Chair and Hans Wegner’s Round Chair, both designed and first fabricated in 1949—this book follows the chairs from conception and fabrication through marketing, distribution, and use. Drawing on research in public and private archives, Taft considers how political, economic, and cultural forces in interwar Denmark laid the foundations for the postwar furniture industry, and she tracks the deliberate maneuvering on the part of Danish creatives and manufacturers to cater to an American market. Taft also reveals how American tastemakers and industrialists were eager to harness Danish design to serve American interests and how furniture manufacturers around the world were quick to capitalize on the fad by flooding the market with copies. Sleek and minimalist, Danish Modern has experienced a resurgence of popularity in the last few decades and remains a sought-after design. This accessible and engaging history offers a unique look at its enduring rise among tastemakers.
Download or read book New Mythologies in Design and Culture written by Rebecca Houze and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2016-05-19 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Taking as its point of departure Roland Barthes' classic series of essays, Mythologies, Rebecca Houze presents an exploration of signs and symbols in the visual landscape of postmodernity. In nine chapters Houze considers a range of contemporary phenomena, from the history of sustainability to the meaning of sports and children's building toys. Among the ubiquitous global trademarks she examines are BP, McDonald's, and Nike. What do these icons say to us today? What political and ideological messages are hidden beneath their surfaces? Taking the idea of myth in its broadest sense, the individual case studies employ a variety of analytic methods derived from linguistics, psychoanalysis, anthropology, sociology, and art history. In their eclecticism of approach they demonstrate the interdisciplinarity of design history and design studies. Just as Barthes' meditations on culture concentrated on his native France, New Mythologies is rooted in the author's experience of living and teaching in the United States. Houze's reflections encompass both contemporary American popular culture and the history of American industry, with reference to such foundational figures as Thomas Jefferson and Walt Disney. The collection provides a point of entry into today's complex postmodern or post-postmodern world, and suggests some ways of thinking about its meanings, and the lessons we might learn from it.
Download or read book Narrative Economics written by Robert J. Shiller and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2020-09-01 with total page 408 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From Nobel Prize–winning economist and New York Times bestselling author Robert Shiller, a groundbreaking account of how stories help drive economic events—and why financial panics can spread like epidemic viruses Stories people tell—about financial confidence or panic, housing booms, or Bitcoin—can go viral and powerfully affect economies, but such narratives have traditionally been ignored in economics and finance because they seem anecdotal and unscientific. In this groundbreaking book, Robert Shiller explains why we ignore these stories at our peril—and how we can begin to take them seriously. Using a rich array of examples and data, Shiller argues that studying popular stories that influence individual and collective economic behavior—what he calls "narrative economics"—may vastly improve our ability to predict, prepare for, and lessen the damage of financial crises and other major economic events. The result is nothing less than a new way to think about the economy, economic change, and economics. In a new preface, Shiller reflects on some of the challenges facing narrative economics, discusses the connection between disease epidemics and economic epidemics, and suggests why epidemiology may hold lessons for fighting economic contagions.
Download or read book Narrative and Numbers written by Aswath Damodaran and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2017-01-10 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How can a company that has never turned a profit have a multibillion dollar valuation? Why do some start-ups attract large investments while others do not? Aswath Damodaran, finance professor and experienced investor, argues that the power of story drives corporate value, adding substance to numbers and persuading even cautious investors to take risks. In business, there are the storytellers who spin compelling narratives and the number-crunchers who construct meaningful models and accounts. Both are essential to success, but only by combining the two, Damodaran argues, can a business deliver and sustain value. Through a range of case studies, Narrative and Numbers describes how storytellers can better incorporate and narrate numbers and how number-crunchers can calculate more imaginative models that withstand scrutiny. Damodaran considers Uber's debut and how narrative is key to understanding different valuations. He investigates why Twitter and Facebook were valued in the billions of dollars at their public offerings, and why one (Twitter) has stagnated while the other (Facebook) has grown. Damodaran also looks at more established business models such as Apple and Amazon to demonstrate how a company's history can both enrich and constrain its narrative. And through Vale, a global Brazil-based mining company, he shows the influence of external narrative, and how country, commodity, and currency can shape a company's story. Narrative and Numbers reveals the benefits, challenges, and pitfalls of weaving narratives around numbers and how one can best test a story's plausibility.
Download or read book Design and National Identity written by Javier Gimeno-Martínez and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2016-09-22 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This important study introduces the key theories of national identity, and relates them to the broad fields of product, graphic and fashion design. Javier Gimeno-Martinez approaches the inter-relationship between national identity and cultural production from two perspectives: the distinctive characteristics of a nation's output, and the consumption of design products within a country as a means of generating a national design landscape. Using case studies ranging from stamps in nineteenth century Russian-occupied Finland, to Coca-Cola as an 'American' drink in modern Trinidad and Tobago, he addresses concepts of essentialism, constructivism, geography and multiculturality, and considers the works of key theorists, including Benedict Anderson, Eric Hobsbawm and Doreen Massey. This illuminating book offers the first comprehensive account of how national identity and cultural policy have shaped design, while suggesting that traditional formations of the 'national' are increasingly unsustainable in an age of globalisation, migration and cultural diversity. Javier Gimeno-Martinez is Lecturer in Design Cultures at the VU University Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
Download or read book The Politics of Furniture written by Fredie Floré and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2017-02-10 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In many different parts of the world modern furniture elements have served as material expressions of power in the post-war era. They were often meant to express an international and in some respects apolitical modern language, but when placed in a sensitive setting or a meaningful architectural context, they were highly capable of negotiating or manipulating ideological messages. The agency of modern furniture was often less overt than that of political slogans or statements, but as the chapters in this book reveal, it had the potential of becoming a persuasive and malleable ally in very diverse politically charged arenas, including embassies, governmental ministries, showrooms, exhibitions, design schools, libraries, museums and even prisons. This collection of chapters examines the consolidating as well as the disrupting force of modern furniture in the global context between 1945 and the mid-1970s. The volume shows that key to understanding this phenomenon is the study of the national as well as transnational systems through which it was launched, promoted and received. While some chapters squarely focus on individual furniture elements as vehicles communicating political and social meaning, others consider the role of furniture within potent sites that demand careful negotiation, whether between governments, cultures, or buyer and seller. In doing so, the book explicitly engages different scholarly fields: design history, history of interior architecture, architectural history, cultural history, diplomatic and political history, postcolonial studies, tourism studies, material culture studies, furniture history, and heritage and preservation studies. Taken together, the narratives and case studies compiled in this volume offer a better understanding of the political agency of post-war modern furniture in its original historical context. At the same time, they will enrich current debates on reuse, relocation or reproduction of some of these elements.
Download or read book Georg Jensen written by Alison Fisher and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2018-01-01 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This beautifully illustrated catalogue explores how Georg Jensen silver has expanded the boundaries of modern style, changing the look of twentieth-century homes and spreading Scandinavian design around the world. Design for Everyday Living is the first scholarly treatment of Georg Jensen to approach the firm's output in an analytical way, situating it in the context of twentieth-century design history and focusing on the firm's unique evolution and global influence. This book is geared to a wide audience of interested nonspecialists and design historians rather than to a narrower readership of silver collectors. It is also innovative in that it focuses on the story of the firm rather than solely on the career of its founder. The essays are all original and include a contribution from Thomas Thulstrup, the leading expert on Georg Jensen silver. The book also benefits from a close collaboration with the Jensen firm, which has allowed us access to images and archival materials published here for the first time"--
Download or read book Engineered to Sell written by Jan L. Logemann and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2019-11-20 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The mid-twentieth-century marketing world influenced nearly every aspect of American culture—music, literature, politics, economics, consumerism, race relations, gender, and more. In Engineered to Sell, Jan L. Logemann traces the transnational careers of consumer engineers in advertising, market research, and commercial design who transformed capitalism from the 1930s through the 1960s. He argues that the history of marketing consumer goods is not a story of American exceptionalism. Instead, the careers of immigrants point to the limits of the “Americanization” paradigm. Logemann explains the rise of a dynamic world of goods and examines how and why consumer engineering was shaped by transatlantic exchanges. From Austrian psychologists and little-known social scientists to the illustrious Bauhaus artists, the emigrés at the center of this story illustrate the vibrant cultural and commercial connections between metropolitan centers: Vienna and New York; Paris and Chicago; Berlin and San Francisco. By focusing on the transnational lives of emigré consumer researchers, marketers, and designers, Engineered to Sell details the processes of cultural translation and adaptation that mark both the midcentury transformation of American marketing and the subsequent European shift to “American” consumer capitalism.
Download or read book Network Governance and the Differentiated Polity written by R. A. W. Rhodes and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017-06-30 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Network Governance and the Differentiated Polity is the first of two volumes featuring a selection of key writings by R. A. W. Rhodes. Volume I collects in one place for the first time the main articles written by Rhodes on policy networks and governance between 1990 and 2005. The introductory section provides a short biography of the author's journey, Part I focuses on policy networks, and Part II focuses on governance. The conclusion provides critical commentary, both replying to critics and reflecting on theoretical developments since publication. The volume complements the author's other publications on networks and governance, and many chapters in the volume feature an afterword setting out the context in which it was written and identifying what has changed empirically. Volume II looks forward and explores the 'interpretive turn' and its implications for the craft of political science, especially public administration.
Download or read book Networking Peripheries written by Anita Say Chan and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2024-05-21 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An exploration of the diverse experiments in digital futures as they advance far from the celebrated centers of technological innovation and entrepreneurship. In Networking Peripheries, Anita Chan shows how digital cultures flourish beyond Silicon Valley and other celebrated centers of technological innovation and entrepreneurship. The evolving digital cultures in the Global South vividly demonstrate that there are more ways than one to imagine what digital practice and global connection could look like. To explore these alternative developments, Chan investigates the diverse initiatives being undertaken to “network” the nation in contemporary Peru, from attempts to promote the intellectual property of indigenous artisans to the national distribution of digital education technologies to open technology activism in rural and urban zones. Drawing on ethnographic accounts from government planners, regional free-software advocates, traditional artisans, rural educators, and others, Chan demonstrates how such developments unsettle dominant conceptions of information classes and innovations zones. Government efforts to turn rural artisans into a new creative class progress alongside technology activists' efforts to promote indigenous rights through information tactics; plans pressing for the state wide adoption of open source–based technologies advance while the One Laptop Per Child initiative aims to network rural classrooms by distributing laptops. As these cases show, the digital cultures and network politics emerging on the periphery do more than replicate the technological future imagined as universal from the center.
Download or read book Design History written by Kjetil Fallan and published by Berg. This book was released on 2010-01-01 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Design History has become a complex and wide-ranging discipline. It now examines artefacts from conception to development, production, mediation, and consumption. Over the last few decades, the discipline has developed a diverse range of theories and methodologies for the analysis of objects. Design History presents the most comprehensive overview and guide to these developments. The book first traces the development of the discipline, explaining how it draws from Art History, Industrial Design, Cultural History and Material Culture Studies. The core of the book then analyses the seminal methodologies used in Design History today. The final section highlights the key issues concerning knowledge and meaning in Design. Throughout, the aim is to present a concise and accessible introduction to this complex field. A map to the intellectual landscape of Design History, the book will be an invaluable guide for students and a very useful reference for scholars.
Download or read book The Making of European Consumption written by P. Lundin and published by Springer. This book was released on 2015-01-26 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: American ideals and models feature prominently in the master narrative of post-war European consumer societies. This book demonstrates that Europeans did not appropriate a homogenous notion of America, rather post-war European consumption was a process of selective appropriation of American elements.
Download or read book Spatio Temporal Narratives written by Ana Crespo Solana and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2014-06-02 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores new methods and techniques for research about merchant networks and maritime routes of trade during the First Global Age through the use of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) as a tool to visualize the formation of trading systems, database management, cartography and spatio-temporal analysis in Historical GIS. In doing so, the book focuses on key issues in understanding the birth of the so-called First Global Age (16th to 18th centuries): the integration of spatial economies; the regionalization of markets; the organization of maritime trade routes; and the evolution of self-organizing networks of merchants, producers, communities, and other social agents during the age of expansion. The essays collected here deal with relevant information about historical problems including maritime connections, the organization of oceanic trade and the use of digital cartography and metric analysis of old maps, and social network analysis – commercial networks involved a high level of cooperation and served to move goods and people within a highly open system over an expanding geographic space.
Download or read book London Couture and the Making of a Fashion Centre written by Michelle Jones and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2022-04-12 with total page 319 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How design collaboration, networks, and narratives contributed to the establishment of a recognized English couture industry in the 1930s and 1940s. In the 1930s and 1940s, English fashion houses, spurred by economic and wartime crises, put London on the map as a major fashion city. In this book, Michelle Jones examines the creation of a London-based couture industry during these years, exploring how designer collaboration and the construction of specific networks and narratives supported and shaped the English fashion economy. Haute couture—the practice of creative made-to-measure womenswear—was widely regarded as inherently French. Jones shows how an English version emerged during a period of economic turbulence, when a group of designers banded together in a collective effort to shift power within the international fashion system. Jones considers the establishment of this form of English design practice, analyzing the commercial, social, and political factors that shaped the professional identity of the London couturiers. She focuses on collaborative activity that supported this form of elite, craft-based fashion production—from the prewar efforts of the Fashion Group of Great Britain to the wartime establishment of the Incorporated Society of London Fashion Designers, modeled loosely after French fashion’s governing body, the Chambre Syndicale de la Couture Parisienne. It was these collective efforts by couturiers that established and sustained London’s place as an internationally recognized center for creative fashion.
Download or read book Leading Transformation written by Nathan Furr and published by Harvard Business Press. This book was released on 2018-10-16 with total page 161 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: New Tools to Overcome the Human Barriers to Change Leaders know that their job is to transform their organizations to keep pace with technology and an ever-changing business environment. They also know that they are bound to fail in doing so. But this discouraging prospect is not because they won't be able to solve a technological or strategic problem. Leaders will fail because of intractable human responses associated with change--responses such as fear, ingrained habits, politics, incrementalism, and lack of imagination. These stumbling blocks always arise when we humans are faced with change, but what if we had a way to transcend them? This book reveals a radical new method for doing just that. Written by the executive who designed and implemented it, the neuroscientist who helped make it work, and the academic who explains why it works and how to do it, Leading Transformation introduces an innovative yet proven process for creating breakthrough change. Divided into three steps--envisioning the possible, breaking down resistance, and prototyping the future--this process uses cutting-edge tools such as science fiction, cartoons, rap music, artifact trails, and neuroprototypes to overcome people's inability to imagine or react to what doesn't yet exist, override powerful habits and routines that prevent them from changing, and create compelling narratives about the organization's future and how to get there. Showing how these tools have been used successfully by companies such as Lowe's, Walmart, Pepsi, IKEA, Google, Microsoft, and others, the process revealed in this book gives leaders the means to transcend the human barriers that block change and lead their organizations confidently into the future.
