Core77

Most everyone I know was looking forward to The Where the Wild Things Are movie with great anticipation. It had taken so long to bring to the screen and when it was announced that Spike Jonze and Dave Eggers were collaborating on the film there was an audible buzz about things like integrity and fidelity. As it turned out, the film was not the expected result. It was not a Pixar or Disney animation, but rather a live action production that was spare and expressionistic. It wasn’t catering to children (but in a way, neither was the book). Dave Eggers also surprised many in his full blown novelization of a children’s picture book. While for me the initial screening and reading were a bit of shock, it didn’t take long to become uncomfortably comfortable with the new interpretations. Prior to the premiere of the film I interviewed Maurice Sendak for NYC & Company. His insights into the book never disappoint. I also read Egger’s novel, The Wild Things, and requested an interview as well. He graciously agreed to talk about his motivations and process.

Steven Heller: I know that Sendak gave you and Spike Jonze total freedom. He told me that his goal was to be as liberal with you as his editor Ursula Nordstrom was with him as a young writer and artist. Nonetheless, did you feel any constraints in adapting and reinterpreting his material?

Dave Eggers: Well, I think art of any kind usually benefits from a constraint or two. When I teach writing to high school kids, they almost always do their best writing when there are some constraints, or a very specific prompt. It makes you work a bit harder, for some reason. With Wild Things, it was good to know how the book would start and end. With that settled, there was a lot of freedom in the pages in between.

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Make no mistake, the "deconstruction" in the new book Deconstructing Product Design owes as much to Derrida as it does to David Macauley. William Lidwell and Gerry Manacsa take 100 (mostly) iconic products and hold them up to the scrutiny of a panel of modern design thinkers. For a hard-core industrial designer, deconstruction as disassembly might have been more interesting than deconstruction as critical analysis. Although it could have revealed some hidden engineering mysteries, our desire to see Segways in pieces and Tickle Me Elmo eviscerated may have to wait for another book.

Instead of laying waste to products with screwdrivers and crowbars, a wide range of occasionally famous, sometimes beautiful and frequently innovative products are subjected to the verbal barbs and jabs of unexpectedly-funny designers and engineers. In a very brief introduction the authors explain their criteria for choosing the 100 products they included: (1) does the product exemplify good design in at least one respect, and (2) does the product illustrate at least one key principle of design? Perhaps the best articulated spread of the book comes next, a two-page overview of the pages to come, complete with thumbnail text, picture frames and notes which provides a framework for understanding the product pages without resorting to a long-winded explanation.

The bulk of the book consists of 200 pages of product photography and accompanying analysis. Each product is shot against a white background and so evenly-lit as to suggest a rendering rather than a photo. For some objects, such as the LC4 Chaise Lounge and the Pot-in-Pot cooler, the funny textures suggest rendering, while for others, such as Elmo himself, the red fur seems naturalistic enough to have been photographed. Rather than glossy product photography, however, the images serve only to remind the viewer of the form factors of already familiar objects. Far more interesting is the historical background and analysis provided by the authors (e.g. early prototypes of Apple's mouse used the ball from a stick of Ban Roll-On deodorant) and reading the color commentary from design thinkers (and Core77 contributors!) such as interaction designer Jon Kolko, product designer Scott Henderson and design researcher Steve Portigal. Across the bottom of each spread a variety of experts weigh in on the product with an assortment of critical commentary, fond reminiscence and occasional bursts of humor. This reviewer's favorite comment was from Lyle Sander, and experience designer, who noted that it would be "unsportsmanlike to order pizza" with the sculpturally phallic BeoCom2 phone.

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Imagine a famous product designer saying, "It's critical that companies wake up to the fact that the product itself is the most powerful brand-building and business tool they have." I doubt this would make much news. It's something a lot of us have probably said and agree with, but the problem seems to be when we say it, it appears too self-serving or falls on deaf ears. This time is different. This time we aren't saying it, Ad men are. Not any Ad men, but some of the best in the business. Meet Alex Bogusky and John Winsor of Crispin Porter and Bogusky fame who have worked on some of the most widely recognized and awarded advertising campaigns around.

Alex Bogusky and John Winsor could be pimping new advertising methods as the latest and greatest way to build brands and grow business, but they are not. They are not saying what they do solves all the problems--that in itself is refreshing. Having worked in a couple advertising agencies and most recently in a product design firm, I am thrilled to see this book emerge. With more than thirty years of product design and development experience, Bob Worrell of Worrell Inc. likes to say, "Brand from the Product Out." That largely correlates to what Bogusky and Winsor articulate as "The most powerful brand experiences and connections begin with the product." It is a very similar thought and message said from different perspectives.

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About halfway through Change by Design: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation, Tim Brown repeats Tom Peter's much cited comment that "the MFA is the new MBA." In doing so, however, he doesn't fully endorse the sentiment. Instead Brown observes that the dynamic skills required in business share as much in common with the creativity required for a design practice as they do with the critical thinking required for the MBA. On the back of the book jacket the author observes, "this is not a book by designers for designers, this is a book for creative leaders who seek to infuse design thinking into every level of an organization." In that way it straddles the gulf between the MFA and the MBA. Clearly learning to draw is a far sight from learning how to run a discounted cash flow analysis and the skill set doesn't overlap. We need both MFAs and MBAs. But the crux of what Brown is getting at is what McKinsey & Company referred to as the "T-Shaped" person, where the vertical axis represents the depth of the skill set that forms their core competency. Valuable design thinkers, however, "cross the T," holding not only deep familiarity with their core role, but also a disposition for collaboration across enterprises. A "design thinker" isn't just an artist and isn't just a number-cruncher. Instead they need to be knowledgeable enough about each to be conversant: to be a member not of a multidisciplinary team but of an interdisciplinary team.

If this all sounds a little like business-jargon-tinged self-help ... well, it is. Business books tend to be written in a peculiar dialect somewhere between anecdote and allegory, and Change by Design is no exception. Perhaps owing to the Harvard Business School case method, it seems de rigeur in business books these days to present lessons as anecdotes about business interactions (e.g. Shimano's core business of bicycle sprockets and derailleurs was flattening) followed an analysis of the market and the causes of said shift. At the "B-School" the initial case would be followed by rigorous debate and a written analysis of what the company should do to change its position. In Change by Design, the reader learns what solutions IDEO reached (e.g. returning to the comfort and familiarity of coasting bikes from childhood). Regardless of the success of that coasting initiative, however, the real lesson is in the allegory as Brown provides that proves the centerpiece of the book: "The reason for the iterative, nonlinear nature of the journey is not that design thinkers are disorganized or undisciplined but that design thinking is an exploratory process; done right, it will inevitably make unexpected discoveries along the way, and it would be foolish not to find out where they lead." Reading that, then, perhaps industrial designers should be thrilled; the processes that we learned for "needsfinding" and "directed research" truly are akin to the case method. Perhaps that's what Peters was getting at after all.

But if Tim Brown was right, and this isn't a book "by designers for designers," what can we get out of it? The rigorous analytic thinking that MBAs learn in finance classes isn't presented here. Instead we see the softer/touchier side of "inspiration, ideation, implementation" of which long-time prototypers and experimenters should already be aware. IDEO, however, has managed to out-business corporate America through design, so perhaps there's something to be learned here. Ultimately, the difference between design and art is commerce and function, so most designers will eventually need to reach out or at least speak to corporate America. Through his years as CEO of IDEO, Brown knows as well as anyone how to communicate with suits ... even if he has an MFA. Consequently, while we (designers) may not be the target audience for the book, there is certainly something to be learned here for us to "cross the T" and speak to MBAs.

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The collapse of the US auto industry stands as one of the national tragedies of this generation, but it also provides boundless opportunities for ironic reflection when looking through a book like Heimann and Patton's Classic Cars. The first time we opened their book of historic auto ads, it revealed a blue '67 Olds Toronodo, complete with a matador against a red background, framed against the caption, "After you've walked off with all the honors, what do you do for an encore?" Regrettably we've found out. The copy on the back of this coffee table books contrasts the Stone Age and the Bronze Age with the 20th Century -- The Automobile Age. The 20th Century has come to a close, and there's little doubt that the age of the automobile is at an end as well. That said, a hundred year retrospective on any human endeavor reflects not only on the products produced, but upon the values and the cultures that produced them.

So while Classic Cars is first and foremost a record of the graphic design that accompanied one of the first mass-produced assembly line products of all time, it also stands as a visual history of the industrial design of the 20th Century ... and all of its attendant successes and missteps. Heimann covers pop culture for Taschen and Patton writes about automobile design for The New York Times, so their catalog of auto ads not only covers the classics like the Jaguar XK-E or the '66 Mustang, but also cars like the Paige and the Lozier which exist now only in the air conditioned garages of white haired men who fancy themselves collectors. I couldn't find some classic early automobiles like the Duesenberg J (one apocryphal origin of the term "what a doozy") in their book, but perhaps that's because the advertising medium barely applied to cars, or to the social class that could afford them, at that time. The advertisements themselves stand on their own merit. Most of the early ads are hand painted, a lost rendering art these days, and echo the Art Nouveau posters of Alphonse Mucha. Whether ignoring the naive copy meant to solicit purchase or not, those early ads have an artistic sensibility that stands on it's own merit. While the written copy itself often confounds the rules of the grid, the earnest tone of the words hearkens back to an era where a ownership of a car was tantamount to success and we didn't even know cigarettes were lethal.

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While not exactly summer beach reading, Hartmut Esslinger's new book on Design Strategy, A Fine Line crams as many ideas, themes and disparate story arcs into its 180 pages as a Dan Brown novel. For the first few chapters Esslinger follows the tried and true business book methodology of using real world examples to illustrate lessons in leadership and strategy. For the last three chapters, he begins to apply the design lessons he learned in the corporate world to what he terms "industrial-colonial capitalism" -- the problems of the modern age caused in part by the last century of design strategy. The beginning brims with ideas and scattershot observations about people and companies that occasionally distract from the underlying message, but by the end Esslinger has hit his stride, talking about big ideas applying principles with real insight.

Esslinger's clearly not afraid to express his own opinion and in the early pages. When he recounts the garage days of his fledgling consultancy, frog, the book engages in a fair amount of "I told you so," and name dropping as he heaps praise upon friends (e.g. "the brightest minds of our age, including Dieter Motte, Akio Morita and Norio Ohga of Sony ...") and scorn upon enemies (e.g. "including Paul Kunkel, who wrote a largely inaccurate and trashy book about Apple's Design in those early years"). Depending upon your perspective, these early chapters could be refreshingly candid or unpleasantly gossipy. That said, Esslinger's certainly entitled to a few "I told you so's". From his very earliest work, when he proposed that the clockmaker Kienzle use radio signals to synchronize with an atomic clock (in 1968!) his brand of design thinking was met with frequent skepticism and disdain. Today, however, companies all over the world chase the sort of strategic design thinking that frog pioneered, radio clocks are a standard (you've probably even got one in your pocket, depending upon whether you set your cell phone's clock or it's time zone) and Kienzle clocks are mostly museum pieces. Fortunately, much of frog's design is still in production.

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Anyone who thinks that minimalist or clean product design begins and ends with Jonathan Ive would be well served to check out the latest exhibit on Dieter Rams. Unfortunately, the exhibit in question was already held at the Suntory Museum in Osaka, Japan … but the contents of the retrospective have also been catalogued in a book, Less and More available in limited numbers through the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum. Rather than working for Braun, Rams was Braun, since of the 1,272 products designed during his stay, "Rams, or teams in which Rams was a member, designed 514 of them." During that time, they crafted the design language for everything from stereo amplifiers to electric shavers, and much of that language remains applicable today.

While the book's title Less and More nearly demands to be mistyped as Less is More, Rams himself explained his design approach as "Weniger, aber besser," which translates roughly to "Less, but Better," but the book remains indicative of its title. Consisting of nearly 800 pages (more), it has a nearly flimsy cover (less), that comes in a box (more) wrapped in a plastic wrapper (much more). The book itself demanded to be treated delicately and the process of reading it felt more reverent than functional. That, however, is our only complaint. The interior of the book alternates between thick pages with juicy product shots and dense essays written in Japanese and English on diaphanous paper. The essays do a nice job of describing the circumstances by which the young Rams wound up working at Braun a scant two years before Braun's products made a splash at the 11th Milan Triennial and wound up the MoMA's permanent collection shortly thereafter, but as befits any designer, the pictures of his products tell the story just as clearly.

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After reviewing Sketchbooks: The Hidden Art of Designers, Illustrators and Creatives just a few weeks ago, it seemed premature to cover another one so soon, but any drawing teacher would concur: you can never do enough sketching. Sketchbook: Conceptual Drawings from the World's Most Influential Designers by Timothy O'Donnell covers similar material in a slightly different manner. While Brereton's book caught artists and ad execs at their most candid, O'Donnell documents primarily illustrators and designers doing real projects. Thus the art throughout is more precise, a little tighter and far less kooky. While this bodes well for the pencil chops of designers as a whole, it also means that looking at some of these sketchbooks is totally demoralizing.

Looking at the book as a whole, however, is beyond lovely. Laid out on a grid with four unrelated serif and sans fonts (no superfamilies here!) it coheres harmoniously ... and that's even with Johnny Hardstaff's frenetic sketches on the page. Hardstaff, however, is the only artist that appears in both O'Donnell and Brereton's books, probably because his skills with a felt tip are so damn tight. Lots of other talent abounds too. Ayse Birsel of Birsel+Seck says of her partner, "Bibi draws like a god," and although I don't know what god draws like, he (that would be Bibi) is as good as Mr. Hardstaff. Birsel+Seck are product designers to boot ... plus Yahweh might find Johnny Hardstaff's sketches a little risque. What Sketchbook: Conceptual Drawings from the World's Most Influential Designers does far better than The Hidden Art of Designers is illustrate the creative process. Each serves a different master. While Brereton's book was about love, O'Donnell's book is about results. Fortunately for the reader, viewing these conceptual sketches doesn't feel like work at all.

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Our collective backs hurt. Between text messages and mouse movements, repetitive injuries are on the rise and people spend increasing portions of their days on their (increasingly large) behinds staring into a CRT tube. If the behaviors of our primate relatives are any indication of our pasts, sitting in static positions with our fingers in a blur is simply not a task for which the human body was built.

Peter Opsvik, a Norwegian designer, has been working on improving the human working posture for over forty years, with a single-mindedness that makes his whole career look like one extended project. Rethinking Sitting showcases Opsvik's career with a variety of chairs that make Bill Stumpf's Aeron seem downright anachronistic. While the Aeron looks like it could have been inspired by H.R. Giger's Alien and sports levers that promise comfort, the sparse Scandinavian design of Opsvik's chairs belies their versatility. Most chairs are composed of simple bent birch and cotton padded supports, with nary a lever to be found, but once a human being sits on it, the chairs deform, flex and rock into a variety of positions. While sitting in one of his chairs for an extended period of time remains the most visceral way to understand his designs, Rethinking Sitting does an admirable job of presenting ergonomics to those of us in less comfortable postures.

In a short introduction, Opsvik explains that the basic structure and design of chairs has remained unchanged since ancient Egypt, before quickly turning to theory and biomechanics. Speaking of chair design with a near philosophical reverence, he notes that it's harder to watch a parade than to be in one, and then ponders why "Prussian discipline" of the 1800s is still central to the design of our working places. The human body wants to move. All of his chairs stand (rock?) as testament to this single insight. Through vibrant sketches, prototypes and photos, he illustrates this concept over and over again: the body moves and the chair conforms.

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Martin Bone is one of us. The opening pages of his collaboration with Kara Johnson, I Miss My Pencil, include fetishistic shots of everyday objects like kitchen knives and attache cases that the authors know and love. In the short blurbs of text that accompany the beautiful product shots, Johnson explains a part of the product lifecycle that designers too often ignore. Recounting the effect of a ding on her experience as a car owner, she explains, "My previously flawless car now registered a dent above the back rear wheel. But my love did not waver. In fact, perhaps surprisingly, it grew: I love my car even more now with this little dent," that now serves to remind her of a weekend snowboarding. After the personal introduction, Pencil embraces the holy grail of industrial design: infusing shiny new products with the same love that grows naturally out of a shared history (or dent).

No strangers to industrial design, both authors work at IDEO, with Bone as design director and Kara Johnson leading the materials team. A series of 12 projects done for the sheer joy of creation, I Miss My Pencil reads like a student's wet dream of industrial design 101. The book is broken into three sections: Aisthetika, which deals with sense and experience, Punk Manufacturing, which combines craft and mass production, and Love+Fetish, which might be enough to titillate any objectophiles out there. Using about as much white space as I've ever seen in a book Mr. Bone and Ms. Johnson populate their tabula rasa with plenty of full bleed artful photographs and IM formatted conversations about their products. In yet another designer detail, the voices in those exchanges are each given their own font, with Bone speaking in dot matrix and Johnson a businesslike serif. At once joyous and confusing, I Miss My Pencil left me incredulous in the same way an avant garde indy movie produced by a major studio would. Every once in a while a completely impractical beautiful thing slips past consumer focus groups. At numerous times while reading, I wondered what sort of person would want to read a book about the joy of following absurd premises like "what does a laptop taste like?" to their logical (!?!) conclusions. Perhaps the audience for that sort of thing is tiny, but I think it includes us.

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Not so long ago, in the Cameron Crow eighties of "Say Anything," sitting down to read an encyclopedia or a dictionary would have represented the very pinnacle of uncoolness. These days, however, a surfer can view Wikipedia intending to find some pictures of the Chicago World's Fair and walk away with an encyclopedic knowledge of the history of serial killers in the United States (OK, the surfer was me, but I'm stable ... promise). Over a decade ago, one of the keynote speakers at my graduation gave a presentation on these things called "hyperlinks" and how they were going to change the world. I'll admit that at the time, the whole affair seemed pretty dorky, but the gulf between the boredom I felt while sitting in the auditorium and my enthusiasm about Wikipedia today encapsulates the difference between hearing about a new technology and actually using it.

Gerlinde Schuller's Designing Universal Knowledge attempts to fill the rather large gap between the print experience of reading an encyclopedia and the hypertext meandering typified by the Internet. The first of three books, or reports, called "The World as Flatland," it addresses the difficulty in providing an accessible user experience to a "universal" audience. Organized as an encyclopedia from A-Z, Schuller tackles entries as modern as "Hacking" and as ancient as the "Library of Alexandria." Cross indexed entries are underlined and written in blue text, just like live links in webpages, only you have to turn the pages to see the results. Indeed, this reviewer remains slightly confused about the nature of the publication (even after visiting its website, as to whether a printed book was indeed the right format for this meticulously cross indexed work. While virtually every article was interesting as a stand-alone case study, the format of the book remains somewhat confounding. Initially I'd expected a manifesto that answered the question of how one could design universal knowledge for the information age, but I found instead a collection of issues, questions and observations about the complexities of the sort of world that might require universal design. I'd hoped for something more definitive than an assortment of interviews and concepts that demonstrate that even the quest for universal knowledge can't be defined universally. Then again, perhaps that reflexive self-reference is the only way to fully understand our networked world.

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Midway through Richard Brereton's Sketchbooks: The Hidden Art of Designers, Illustrators and Creatives, commercial artist and graphic designer Ed Fella confides, "in 1976 an artist friend gave me a sketchbook, saying 'Even though you're a designer, you think like an artist and should keep a sketchbook.'" Well, even if you happen to be a designer and you don't think like an artist, we at Core77 still think you should carry a sketchbook. Whether it's a modest moleskine with battered corners stuck in your back pocket or a fancy leather tome, sketchbooks can serve as practice pages, ways to fill time, as a finished products, or even what graphic designer Pep Carrio beautifully describes as "warehouses of memory."

Historically, artists have often self-edited their sketchbooks by tearing out pages or censoring their output. While it's hard to discern exactly what editorial oversight Richard Brereton performed when he chose which particular plates would make it into his compilation of sketchbooks by design professionals, he clearly did not limit his search to classically drawn figures. Instead Sketchbooks presents a diverse range of styles, subject matter, and even artistic skills, and that's a good thing. Anyone who has perused a collection of portfolios or taken a drawing class intuitively understands that being "loose" is high praise. When an artist gains the confidence to draw with brio, sketches gain vibrancy and pop off of the page. For most of us, the state of mind that allows lines to be drawn with snap seems like the exclusive provenance of artists with this thing called "talent," or perhaps a lucky few who've practiced for lifetimes. Fortunately, Brereton's collection proves otherwise. While some of the graphic artists contained within have produced work that could be described as "fine art," and many others seem childlike or crude, virtually all of them draw like no one is looking; and perhaps that's precisely the essence to which a sketchbook should aspire.

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There's a difference between green engineering and green design.

Green engineering reduces people's ecological impact without requiring them to change their habits--for instance, replacing coal power with wind power; the consumer still just flicks the light switch, and their lights turn on just the same.

Green design reduces people's ecological impact by changing their habits--for instance, better urban design lets people walk to work rather than driving to work. Everything has a user interface, even cities. How easy is it to find transit, how close does it go to where you want and when you want? Is there a corner store a block away, or just a big-box store five miles away?

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Graphics are such an integral part of skateboard culture that at first the blonde woodgrain on the cover of New Skateboard Graphics barely registers as the maple blank of a board. Nearly 300 decks are printed on the inside front and rear folds of the book on an orderly white background but the colorful little ovoids could pass for children's Band-Aids at a distance. While I'm sure that early attempts at mastering the tailslide have sent more than a few kids home with Scrappy Doo bandages, J. Namdev Hardisty's book demonstrates just how far skate culture (and design) has progressed since the green Vision Gator that left me bleeding more than once somewhere in the eighties.

For a graphic designer or a product designer interested in applique, New Skateboard Graphics is an eyeful. In the foreword, Michael Leon explains the realities of the modern sales environment where the consumer tends to observe the boards with the bottom graphics visible at a distance on a wall or in miniature in a catalog. Hardisty follows up with a short essay on the two-way connection between the branding of the company and the aesthetics of the riders, but from there it's all about the graphics. The rest of the book is framed as a series of collections that reveal (to some extent) the ethos of each company. We see the candy colors of Enjoi, the Crumb meets Steadman squiggles of Heroin, and the etched B&W artistry of Mystery all in one place. The boards should provide an immediate emotional connection to who's ever fallen off a rail, but their visual language is bound to delight even those with two left feet.

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As a reviewer for Core77, the task of locating appropriate books on product and process invariably leads to scouring shelves labeled anything but product design. Coffee table monoliths on designed objects wind up in shelves devoted to architecture, to home decor, to style, to business, or to graphic design. Finding an actual product design glossy in a typical bookstore is about as remarkable as locating a Jethro Tull album that had been filed under "T" in the jazz section of Walmart. Perhaps this is a zeitgeist moment for product design now that Gary Hustwit has released an entire movie about product design in the same month that Metropolis Magazine devotes a whole issue to our profession, so it seemed worthwhile for the book column to sample a text of the monthly variety.

I'm not sure if the recent real estate collapse will dampen the enthusiasm for glossy architecture periodicals, but I'm thrilled that "The Magazine of Architecture and Design" has unabashedly devoted an entire issue to the latter. Setting aside for the moment the paradox between the very green essays and the very shiny advertisements, the columns and articles inside provide a broad sampling of up-to-the-moment thinking on product design, be it "The Product of No Product" as described by John Hockenberry or the sarcasm of Bruce Sterling, who advises struggling designers to ask themselves "what would Maurizio Cattelan do," for which a very literal answer might be -- sculpt an ostrich with its head in the sand. Apologies to Mr. Sterling, but that doesn't quite seem to be the sort of answer readers might be hoping for, since there are many other stronger cases within.

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The wild cover design of Design Disasters: Great Designers, Fabulous Failures, and Lessons Learned forced me look to the back of the book to get the precise wording of the title, commas and all. Perhaps that's what cover designer James Victore intended when he spilled half the title off of the front page and presented such an obfuscated grid on the back cover that I had to run down the page with a ruler to try to locate the baselines. Ultimately I found the title written in its full Library of Congress form upside down and aligned with a nested set of bullet points for the contributor credits on the back cover. While I've never been a fan of guessing author or artist motive, the overall effect amounts to making a pleasing harmony out of a relative mess, which actually fits the book's themes pretty well.

Design Disasters collects stories of failure (along with the titular lessons learned) from luminaries such as Stefan Sagmiester, thinkers like Ralph Caplan and Henry Petroski and Core's own Allan Chochinov. Perhaps Steven Heller explains the logic behind the cover in his introduction, which states, "If I were the joking sort, I would just make the type from here on unreadable as an example of failed design." I'm glad he didn't because such an omission would have denied the reader the opportunity to hear the stories contained within. Heller himself describes the creative process with a special emphasis on success through failure. It's an old lesson, but in this age, when design presentations can be changed with a few twitches of the wrist at the mouse, there's no reason why every finished design can't be built from a cornucopia of failures, so much so that perhaps the very nomenclature of failure needs to be reconsidered. Perhaps we designers have already subliminally assimilated this lesson. After all, most people I know don't call it failure, we call it process. For me, success and failure are the same things, just on a different timeline.

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Initially reviewing a book like Women of Design: Influence and Inspiration from the Original Trailblazers to the New Groundbreakers offered trepidation because, well, I'm a man, and I thought my opinion might be suspect. Recently, though, the New York Times Magazine (coincidentally a periodical designed by Janet Froelich, profiled in the book) included a thought-provoking article "What Women Want", by Daniel Bergner, about female sexuality and the very real differences in male and female perception of physical beauty and attractiveness. Early in the article, he quotes Kurt Freund, a pioneering sexologist who said, "How am I to know what it is to be a woman? Who am I to study women, when I am a man?"

I'm happy to report that while perhaps we can admit that while there are profound neuroanatomical differences between men and women and their perceptions of the opposite sex, our graphic design and art seem to be measurable by a common yardstick. The work profiled by Gomez-Palacio and Vit amply demonstrates that women produce graphic design in every way comparable to that of men. Indeed, when comparing the graphic elements introduced by masculine Bauhaus visionaries like Laszlo Moholy-Nagy with the work of Ellen Lupton like Thinking With Type (also profiled here), it's obvious that the more modern work is more scientifically thought out and aesthetically pleasing. Indeed when looking at the work of the designers profiled within, aesthetic trends show more improvement across temporal than gender lines. That said, the employment opportunities offered to the women within do seem to skew towards fashion and housework -- multiple subjects cut their chops at Martha Stewart Living, for example -- though I think that may say more about the workplace than it does about design. Looking at the actual work contained within, I couldn't help but notice that stereotypes about the feminine aesthetic seemed to apply more broadly to the client than the designer, which strongly indicates that the capacity of a designer to produce good work for a client has little to do with gender.

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Reviewed by Virginia Gardiner

For those of you who want to become experts on toilets, the reading list isn't long, because not enough serious books have been written on the subject. There's Alexander Kira's seminal book from the '70s, The Bathroom: the first to address ergonomics in this intimate place for industrial design. More engrossing and pithy is Ellen Lupton and Abbott J. Miller's The Bathroom, the Kitchen, and the Aesthetics of Waste. When it comes to eco-toilets, the most informative might be Lifting the Lid: An Ecological Approach to Toilet Systems by Peter Harper & Louise Halestrap, while the most fun is certainly Joseph Jenkins' The Humanure Handbook.

But as of fall 2008, your first book will have to be Rose George's revelatory The Big Necessity: Adventures in the World of Human Waste. With good humor and deep seriousness, George travels the world and presents impressive research about the current state of sanitation.

Colorful encounters with people and places are centered around dismal facts. 2.6 billion people worldwide currently have no toilets--as George puts it, "Four in ten people have no access to any latrine, toilet, bucket or box." Resulting waterborne illness kills about 7000 people every single day. The centuries-old solution that's still current--flush toilets with sewers--is already taxing the richest economies, and won't be sustainable anywhere in the long term.

George asks why such a fundamental aspect of our designed lives remains on the margins of polite conversation. After all, she points out, Le Corbusier called the toilet "one of the most beautiful objects industry has ever invented." Its purpose is unremittingly crucial. "The toilet is a physical barrier," she writes, "that takes care of the physical dangers of excrement."

And toilets embody lots of other shit: physiologies, cultures, infrastructures, economies, even politics. They are a perfect example of how objects are much more than objects. They are the vehicle that carries away our largest bodily contribution to the planet (about a thousand pounds per person per year) and yet our current solution is to flush and forget using several gallons of drinking water.

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Amazon's publicity blurb for The L.A. Earthquake Sourcebook bills it as "the coolest earthquake preparedness-book ever published," which I imagine to be true, but I also can't think of much competition. A collaboration between Stefan Sagmeister and The Art Center College of Design in association with the L.A. Earthquake Get Ready Project, the Sourcebook juxtaposes essays by experts like FEMA Director James Lee Witt with excerpts from authors like Joan Didion. The essays, fiction and graphic design are all interesting and on more than one occasion, I was curious to look into the works of the fiction authors included because the excerpts left me wondering about the works profiled after reading the short three to five page teasers.

The problem, both with the book, and explicitly acknowledged by the authors is that people (presumably both readers and California residents) don't really want to be reading or hearing about "the big one." Despite plenty of content and good intention, the graphic design, fiction and informative work each seem to exist in their own planes rather than coming together in synthesis. Individual graphic exercises like Clifford Elbi's transcription of the names of faults on the lines of the hand in a palmistry chart can provoke thought and inspire conversation, but most of the graphic design serves as bookends for essays rather than providing a template for action. At the very end of the book pages from Martin Kaplan and Darren Ragle's graphic novel "A River in Egypt" actually begin to combine graphic elements with earthquake advice on the same page, but the rest of the book feels more like a collection of (very good) poster design shuffled between informative, but somewhat disconnected essays. That said, I was never bored while paging through the book, which may be the highest praise to which an earthquake manual can aspire.

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Design is the Problem: The Future of Design Must be Sustainable

A book in progress by Nathan Shedroff. Publisher: Rosenfeld Media. Anticipated publication date: 2009

Design makes a tremendous impact on the produced world in terms of usability, resources, understanding, and priorities. What we produce, how we serve customers and other stakeholders, and even how we understand how the world works is all affected by the design of models and solutions. Designers have an unprecedented opportunity to use their skills to make meaningful, sustainable change in the world--if they know how to focus their skills, time, and agendas. In Design is the Problem: The Future of Design Must be Sustainable, Nathan Shedroff examines how the endemic culture of design often creates unsustainable solutions, and shows how designers can bake sustainability into their design processes in order to produce more sustainable solutions.

The concept of "needsfinding" seems unique to our consumer culture. True needs like air, sleep or hunger announce themselves with neurochemical fury, tearing animals away from what they think they should be doing and dragging them into the immediacy of their body. So when we industrial designers talk about the customer's undiscovered needs and how our products can address them, we should admit to ourselves that needsfinding, as we know it, is an oxymoron. For most of corporate America, resonating with their customers is really more about finding things their clients didn't know they wanted rather than needed.

For some clients, though, the issue of wants versus needs does begin to blur. In their book their book Wired to Care on customer empathy, Dev Patnaik with Peter Mortensen wisely begins with the example of Patty Moore, a young industrial designer who wandered out into the city streets with a fake white wig, earplugs, blurry glasses and a cane. For Patty, the needsfinding journey was about discovering what parts of the modern world were incompatible with old age. No doubt the city was filled with plenty of other real elderly women who were perfectly capable of navigating, but it took her Harrison Bergeron outfit of handicaps to make Patty realize just how hard walking a mile in those shoes might have been. What Patnaik has done is realize that the "needsfinding" exercises that industrial designers do that seem so focused on objects and products are really about people and empathy. So while empathy and companionship aren't exactly the most primitive of needs on Maslow's Hierarchy, they are among the most human, and frankly, a little humanity is something that most companies could use a little more of.

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Manufractured by Steven Skov Holt and Mara Holt Skov introduces injection molded plastic packaging into the arts and crafts debate that William Morris and John Ruskin championed over a century ago. The industrial revolution passed long ago, but the debate about whether mass produced products or handcrafted one-offs were better for society continues. Personally, I'll take my food containers without phthalates, thank you very much. I suspect the authors would agree, but the world is still littered with PVC and polystyrene parts, and that's what Manufractured addresses. Kirill Shelayev shot and covered the Manufractured exhibit for Core77 at the Portland Museum of Contemporary Craft in Oregon where it will be showing until January 9, 2009, but for those of us who don't feel like making the trek to the Pacific Northwest in January, the Skov Holt's (apologies, but I'll use "Skov Holt" rather than "Skov Holt and Holt Skov" throughout the review for simplicity) book Manufractured: The Conspicuous Transformation of Everyday Objects can stand in for the exhibit with thoughtful text and plenty of photographs.

In their introduction, the authors note that the end of the 20th Century seemed to toll the death knell for the Craft movement as even the Museum of American Craft became the Museum of Arts & Design in 2002, but that aside from changes in nomenclature the Craft movement remains alive and well in the post-Industrial age. Prior book reviews such as Desire and Process have echoed this claim: As mass production makes pristine industrially produced products affordable to the general public, subsets of society will run counter to this trend, seeking legitimacy and uniqueness in hand crafted goods, complete with flaws. After an introduction spanning from Ruskin through Marcel Duchamp and on to the Droog collective, the Skov Holt's highlight eleven designers/artists/craftspeople who've begun to use previously manufactured objects as their raw materials. Although my personal aesthetic favorite, Brian Jungen's installation Cetology, an apparent full scale whale skeleton made of hundreds of plastic lawnchairs rather than bone, was included in the introduction rather than the Manufractured exhibit itself, the subjects of the exhibition, from Cat Chow's dresses made of only fasteners to Devorah Sperber's Pantone cap pixilated art do not disappoint in their visual appeal.

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Let me disclaim one thing before I get into the beautiful details of reviewing Art & Sole: Contemporary Sneaker Art & Design; I'm profoundly unhip. Even though I visited my grandmother in NYC on a yearly basis and spent a few years of grade school in Asia, I spent high school in Nebraska, so my insecure trend-following formative years were a world away from city graffiti or Tokyo fashion. That said, Intercity's Art & Sole blew me away. For those of you like Turtle on Entourage who relentlessly follow tiny variations (and limited editions) of sports-themed footwear guaranteed never to see a basketball court, you have my deepest apologies if I confuse an Air Max 90 for a 95. But for the rest of us, Art & Sole should be an eye-opening visit to the wild nexus between commerce, guerilla art, mass production and customization that is limited edition sneaker design.

Art & Sole is divided into two parts: "Sneakers & Art" and "Art & Sneakers" (I thought four ampersands in one sentence might be a few too many). Despite the palindrome, the titles are pretty self-explanatory. "Sneakers & Art" showcases collaborations between artists and sneaker manufacturers. Much of the work consists of vivid graphic art applied to the (occasionally literal) canvas of a major brand sneaker, but some of it showcases the very leading edge of industrial design: laser etching, CNC stitching and algorithmic patterns. Both the one-offs and the oxymoronic mass-customization series impress with beautiful photos and succinct and clear explanatory prose for those of us who don't recognize names of sneaker designer / graffiti artists like Futura 2000, but also of some surprise footwear icons like John Maeda. The second part, "Sneakers & Art" includes sneaker inspired 2-D art that, while cool, shouldn't be nearly as interesting to industrial designers as some one off custom jobs like Takara Tomy's Nike Transformers, fully articulated transformable sneakers. Just as amazing as the content of the book is the fact that Intercity managed to catalog and photograph hundreds of customized sneakers, many of which were produced in extremely limited runs, and all of which appear to be in spotless condition. For anyone interested in where popular fashion is headed, and where industrial design is likely to follow, Art & Sole represents quite a catalog of possibilities.

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In The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind James Boyle introduces readers to the idea of the public domain and describes how it is being tragically eroded by our current copyright, patent, and trademark laws.

In a series of fascinating case studies, Boyle explains why gene sequences, basic business ideas and pairs of musical notes are now owned, why jazz might be illegal if it were invented today, why most of 20th century culture is legally unavailable to us, and why today's policies would probably have smothered the World Wide Web at its inception.

Appropriately given its theme, the book will be sold commercially but also made available online for free under a Creative Commons license.

Author and quality of life consultant Jules Peck, has teamed up with Edelman UK CEO Robert Phillips on an independent project meant to produce some of the answers to the question: What will it take to restructure our economy into a system that promotes the well-being of individuals and the environment, while encouraging a voluntary decrease in superfluous consumption?

The result of their study is www.citizenrenaissance.com, a collaborative project that has led to a white paper and will eventually become a book.

Peck and Phillips posit that in order to make the economy work for both people and the planet, we must shift the focus from quantitative, growth-oriented measures like GDP and onto measures of qualitative development. They envision a new "Wellbeing Economy" and "Ecological Economy," which will measure and define economic progress in a way that accounts for environmental and social issues, and that can supplement GDP as a central measure of the state of nations.

via WorldChanging

Desire: The Shape of Things to Come, by Gestalten Press is visually interesting on every page. The oddly framed and somewhat flat front cover's picture of simple wooden furniture and gaudy gold tableware is by no means representative of the elegant furniture designs contained within. The introduction by Andrej Kupetz sets the tone by explaining the context of 21st Century design as a natural successor to the functionalism of Louis Sullivan's edicts and the visual expression of the Memphis movement. I still find the description of eras from the last fifty years as "modern" and "postmodern" somewhat confusing, but since it has become common usage I understand the authors need to use the terms. More interestingly, however, the remainder of the book does provide some new and useful (though not likely to become common usage) categories for recent design movements.

After the introduction, the book is structured in four parts: The Modernists, The Inventors, The Taletellers, and The Entertainers. Each section has a short introduction detailing the movements and their major players. The layout includes a mix of full bleed photographs, silhouettes and nicely gridded pictures with descriptive text. For some work, short background essays on the designers accompanies the photos. A lot of the furniture included in Desire transcends the neat categorization that the author provides, but is equally effective at provoking the emotion to which the title aspires. Though much of the work profiled here is more exhibition piece than industrial production, any reader is likely to discover something to lust after. For me, it was Kjellgren and Kaminsky's "Pompous Fat Armchair" which looks like set design from the Matrix met an 80's couch and a folding umbrella in an S&M club. Since that may not quite be your thing (and both the designers and myself admit that it isn't normally ours either), I encourage readers to find their own wish list inside.

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