Posted by
Perrin Drumm | 1 Feb 2012
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After ten years of writing about art and design, Anna Carnick wanted to sit down with eight of her favorite designers as well as "those that defy categorization" and ask them to weigh in on how design, as a profession, has changed over the years and where they think its headed. Design Voices includes brief profiles followed by in-depth interviews with Giulio Cappellini, Ross Lovegrove, Massimo Vignelli, Stefan Sagmeister, Maarten Baas, Tokujin Yoshioka, Dror Benshetrit and Milton Glaser. Though they all address the changing relevancy and application of design, I still have one question: where the ladies at? Any female designers out there? Male dominance aside, here are some highlights.
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Posted by
Robert Blinn | 4 Jan 2012
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We had the pleasure of meeting Paul Barbera at Creature of Comfort's beautiful shop on Mulberry Street. Against that backdrop, over a few glasses of senselessly fine tequila and surrounded a fastidiously attired fashionistas and artists, we chatted with Barbera about why he sought out moments in direct contrast with our carefully curated surroundings. For his new book Where They Create, Creature of Comfort's Paul observed that one of his biggest issues was getting his subjects not to clean house.
Each one of us presents a façade to the world, endeavoring to convey our idealized selves to others. Interior photography generally follows the same mold. Clutter is cleaned away and multiple photo exposures are taken to balance the light that comes through the windows without underexposing the detail against the walls. The creative process, however, is far messier. Barbera's early career included fashion photography, advertising, editorial and interiors, but it wasn't until a chance cancellation led him to shoot the working space of his friend Jeb's studio in Italy that he found that an abrupt and unguided tour of the workspace of creatives could offer unguarded insight into their process. Over the next two years, he photographed those spaces and posted them to his website until a chance meeting with Alexandra Onderwater led to the publication of his book. Inside, over 30 creative spaces are photographed using natural lighting and more importantly, without the help of a broom.
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Posted by
Robert Blinn | 21 Dec 2011
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In her new book Design by Nature, Maggie Macnab addresses the importance of metaphor in communication using the natural world as a starting point. For an abstract thought or concept, meaning can sometimes be expressed faster by pairing two superficially dissimilar ideas than by trying to explain it directly using the physical sciences. Consequently, metaphor has existed as a tool for conveying thought since human beings first began to examine the conceptual relationships that underpin our world. Clearly, a mastery of metaphor in the visual arena can go a long way towards effective visual communication.
An early design example Macnab uses is the outline of an animal paw with a Band-Aid on it. Pairing two different concepts familiar to most viewers, she's able to (quite successfully) piggyback upon all of the associations we have. After seeing the logo, hearing that it's meant to represent an animal hospital should come as no surprise.
The idea of metaphor can be traced at least partly to Aristotle's Poetics, and it's no coincidence that the first scientists were called Natural Philosophers. In trying to make sense of the world, they tried to ascribe meaning (i.e. philosophized) about the natural world. Not surprisingly, when viewed through our modern lenses, be they telescopic or microscopic, they got a lot of it wrong. In our prior review for Macnab's Decoding Design, this reviewer expressed a great deal of consternation that she often spoke of both science and pseudoscientific interpretations as equally factual. In that book, however, the focus was on interpreting those concepts (or those of nature) to the artificial forms created by others.
We're happy to report that this time around, Macnab begins with nature and builds from the ground up. While many of the concepts she discusses (e.g. the four elements plus quintessence/ether) have now passed into pseudoscience, at one point they represented significant building blocks in the way that natural philosophers attempted to comprehend the universe. Consequently, even if they don't conform precisely to current scientific understanding, they remain accessible metaphors for communication, and the graphic designer's job is to communicate with a mass audience, not PhDs.
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Posted by
Robert Blinn | 6 Dec 2011
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The Class of 2012 in Industrial Design at the University of Cincinnati had a problem our book reviewer can sympathize with: ID books rarely show process, yet portfolio presentation requires the viewer to understand the underlying thinking in a matter of seconds. Furthermore, most ID schools don't run those students through the paces of Photoshop or InDesign that is requisite for putting their work in the best light. With their new book The Portfolio Handbook, the University of Cincinnati Class of 2012 asked people in-the-know how a portfolio should be structured so you wouldn't have to.
The book begins with a light tone, framing portfolio design questions as coming from little South Park-headed personas asking (and answering) naïve questions. Each section is introduced by the talking heads and often followed with shots of students working on prototypes or huddled around walls of Post-it notes. Those shots serve to illustrate that the students have done the work they're explaining, and that the same structures that underlie classroom teaching and presentation apply to portfolio layout.
Four years of work is difficult to condense into a single portfolio, so they begin with a survey of working designers. The designers they surveyed placed the highest value on quality of ideas and conceptual sketches, placing less importance on finished designs, renders, 3D models or prototypes. Those are the same skills most non-specialized employers require, but portfolio construction is slightly more complex. Communicating the quality of ideas requires two other skills that don't score so highly: storytelling and graphic design, so the Handbook spends the bulk of its pages on that foundation.
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Posted by
Robert Blinn | 15 Nov 2011
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While there are plenty of books on figure drawing and fine art in bookstores, precious few appear on the art of design sketching. Learning Curves is Klara Sjolen's follow up to her 2005 book Design Sketching. Students at the Umea Institute of Design generated the content of the earlier book, while the more recent book showcases the output of working designers.
While Curves could be characterized as a sequel of sorts to the first book, drawing is a deep enough field that either book could be used as a starting point. Learning Curves is thicker and includes a broader range of modern techniques (e.g. using 3D CAD models as sketching templates, marker and Photoshop). Both books include demos on ellipses, shadows, perspective and materials. The 2005 book has more detailed tutorials on form and the more recent has one of the finest descriptions of different pens or materials we've seen yet. It is also testament that the earlier Sketching showcased extremely capable work from the students at Umea, since even a professional would be hard-pressed to determine whether a given sketch from either of the books was generated by a student or a pro.
The major difference between the two is the approach. While Design Sketching focuses on a series of tutorials defined by the product being drawn and the techniques required to generate the forms, Learning Curves presents nearly finished product sketches with "tips" from the experts on how to get the most out of technique. Either book does a nice job of providing a framework for learning how to sketch objects, but there's a lot more breadth in the more recent book, as well as a cleaner design aesthetic.
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Posted by
Robert Blinn | 1 Nov 2011
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Thomas Thwaites opens his recent book with a quote from Mostly Harmless, the last book that Douglas Adams wrote in his Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy series: "Left to his own devices he couldn't build a toaster. He could just about make a sandwich and that's it." The protagonist, Arthur Dent, finds himself stranded on a planet of limited technological sophistication and after initially hoping to impress the locals with his technical knowledge, he rapidly realizes that all of his knowledge is predicated upon preexisting technology. Somewhere between a travel romp and an investigation of the modes of production in a modern capitalist society, The Toaster Project tracks his quest to build an entire appliance "from scratch." The sad little toaster he built appears on the cover and looks more like a poached egg than a modern convenience, but by the time the narrative is finished, it's pretty clear that it was a quickly-scrambled quest to get it to look like anything at all.
Henry Petroski's The Pencil is the most well-known examination of a seemingly simple technology, but Petroski catalogued the manufacturing process rather than actually mining and building a pencil. Thwaites is more ambitious, though his enthusiasm leads to compromise before nearly every insight. He begins simply enough, by reverse engineering the cheapest toaster he can find (3.94 British Pounds), only to find that it has 404 different parts. He catalogues those parts into 5 different materials (steel, mica, plastic, copper and nickel), and then sets about making a comparable appliance with a clear set of rules. The remainder of the book reads as a travelogue of the resultant exploration.
The following pages could just as easily be read as a comedic exposé, a mad quest towards a seemingly unattainable goal, or a philosophical indictment of the complexities of modern life. Thwaites's voice is most suited to the first two, and those are the pieces most likely to captivate most readers. Industrial designers may find themselves wishing for slightly more technical insight, particularly at the end, but even with those compromises towards the lay audience, for those of us who cobbled together foam models and PowerPoint slides for our thesis projects (like myself), it's pretty tough to cast the first stone at someone who actually explores what it means to make something.
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Posted by
Robert Blinn | 18 Oct 2011
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Having read Naomi Klein's No Logo several years ago and been stirred by her central thesis, we were cautious about Debbie Millman's Brand Thinking, but it didn't take long before we realized that the subtitle "and Other Noble Pursuits" was rather tongue-in-cheek. When Millman says "brand thinking," she means thinking, but she doesn't give the same weight to "noble." Capturing interviews with the likes of Grant McCracken and Malcolm Gladwell while getting Karim Rashid to admit that he was embarrassed by some of his older designs for preposterously expensive couches, Brand Thinking encapsulates the conflict inherent in branding today.
These aren't easy questions. What is a brand, and what does it mean? Millman points out that the first brand as a trademark was Bass Ale, according to the 1876 UK Trademark Act. Bass happens to taste fantastic (IMHO) but it also sells at a premium. Buying a Bass "says" something about the buyer (e.g. you're not a teetotaler, but also not likely a Nascar fan). At the same time, the origin of the Louis Vuitton "LV" logo pattern was created based upon Victorian Orientalism, but was ultimately patented and succeeded at avoiding counterfeiting as well. Now Louis Vuitton has moved from painstakingly crafted leather trunks to being a small part of the megalithic LVMH it has drastically reduced quality in favor of quarterly profits. LV "branded" counterfeit products can be found at fractional prices from Canal Street to Shanghai, where the projection of brand identity has become paramount to the underpinning quality. We wonder though, once quality ceases to define a brand, what fills the void?
The British "chav" subculture has pursued brands to the point that Burberry plaid "became" their identity, not the other way around. Cristal champagne was wholly embraced by hip-hop culture, until a brand director quipped "We can't forbid people from buying it" and yet that's precisely what many luxury brands do with their pricepoints. The looming trouble for many of these brands, however, is that modern technology makes superficially luxurious products more affordable. Dana Thomas's Deluxe presented a detailed chronology of the devaluation of brand in world culture and examines directly what Millman ascertains in interviews. Nancy Ectoff's Survival of the Prettiest took Thorstein Veblen's Theory of the Leisure Class to its logical conclusion, explaining that wasteful adornment that took thousands of man-hours to make connotes social status. The question of what brand means in the modern era of mass production is far more ineffable. Every day, how we adorn ourselves makes a statement about the sort of person we are.
Even more amazingly, though, brands are shaping our culture. In interviewing Grant McCracken, Millman reveals not only that the Coke bottle is an iconic shape, but also that Coke's Christmas campaigns gradually changed jolly old St. Nicholas from a green-attired woodsman to the red and white "Santa Claus" of today. Red and white are the colors of Coke. What does that say about Coke? More troubling, what does that say about us?
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Posted by
Robert Blinn | 7 Sep 2011
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In my personal book collection, I've had a history of underlining, dog-earing and otherwise "marking up" my copy, complete with page citations and summaries of important details on the inside cover. Since I do actually lend my books out, often with my notes, my lending library, has, in a sense been Openly Designed, and in the few circumstances, the readers have left notes of their own. As a reviewer, however, there has always been a drive to photograph the book in a pristine form, so I've tended towards keeping looseleaf sheets of paper with my notes, often on the backside of the PR fluff that tends to come with them. For Open Design Now, the introductory letter was rather brief, not too fluffy, and after I got through with it, was annotated with words like "YESSS," so we will confess some mild bias toward the topic before we even opened the cover.
To further the interests of open source, I'll include my notes in the photo gallery for this particular work, but it might also be worth observing that my notes filled not only the back of the PR letter, but also the unintelligible Dutch invoice and two other sheets of paper as well. We have never reviewed a book this rich in content and new ideas. Of course, Open isn't the work of one author either. Instead, it includes articles by and interviews with design luminaries such as Joris Larman, collectives like Droog, manufacturing pioneers Bre Pettis, open design commentators and lawyers that we promise you haven't heard of but will be thankful to read. Part way through Open I had a conversation with my patent attorney cousin, and by the mid-point of the book, I emailed her a photo of the cover to tell her it was required reading. We hesitate to say that books like Open Design Now are required reading for industrial designers, but if you consider yourself a maker or a tinkerer in any way at all, and plan to be working for the next decade or two, the concepts described within will likely affect your career and your life whether you read it or not.
Predictably (and respectably), the first words of the book, on the inner cover flap describe the Creative Commons status of the book , under which it is not copyrighted, per se, but instead licensed, and anyone can share the book as long as they attribute it, do not profit from it, and if you build upon it you must share it too ("share alike"). After a brief introduction, the book is organized into three sections: Articles, Cases and Visual Index. The Visual Index is bright yellow, and includes nearly all of the images in the book. When reading through the articles, little yellow boxes with terms like "Hacking" and "DIY" pop up sporadically. Each of those boxes refers back to the visual index, which is alphabetized, although the visual index is certainly lovely to peruse on its own merit.
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Posted by
core jr | 23 Aug 2011
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Images and review by Daniel Stillman
With 30 years of origami experience, one of my first concerns in reviewing Paul Jackson's newest book Folding Techniques for Designers: From Sheet to Form is the fact that origami is a 3D art. Translating 2D instructions into form is no trivial matter. Like Ikea instructions, origami diagrams are a language into themselves. This book is the distillation of years of teaching this material to design students. To get some practical benefit from it, I would suggest that you spend at least several hours, playing with the forms and techniques introduced here. As part of my review, I've asked my friend and leather jewelry designer Melissa Zook—someone with zero origami experience—to print out some templates, make some folds, and get inspired by the book.
Part One: Why it is Awesome
As soon as I saw this book cover, I was excited. Paul Jackson has been pushing the boundaries of origami for years. As a boy, I geeked out to many of his awesome models—his horse from an equilateral triangle first offended me for its lack of purity (origami was from squares!) but won me over for its elegance. His lidded box taught me how to divide a square into fifths using my eyes and an algorithm. Both were committed to memory at one point in my life. While I loved his representational designs, I was amused and bewildered by his more artistic endeavors that played with form and shadow, but had no legs. More and better representational origami was my main goal, and the goal of much of the origami world. Then I grew up, and so did origami.
Peter Engel's book, Origami from Angelfish to Zen, was the first origami book that blew my mind. It showed me that origami was about form, topology, creativity, dreams and math. And nature is math. So I began to realize that my paper doodlings were pointing at something deeper—something about the real nature of the world. Engel got me reading the work of mathematical biologist D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson and thinking about my own origami designs. Creation was about algorithms, reflection, repetitions, alterations. Nature finds a good nugget of design and uses it over and over again, riffing on it like Jazz. We're all made of cells. Origami is just made of triangles, really, and those triangles can multiply like bacteria across a sheet, creating new organisms as they multiply.
This book is a deep meditation on those cells and all the ways they can be combined and recombined to make forms.
Years ago, Jackson wrote an Encyclopedia of Origami and Papercraft Techniques which showed me the power and breadth of the medium of paper. This book is pushing way beyond that. Paper is just one type of sheet material. Anything thin—leather, metal, fabric—can be explored using these techniques. When you break the plane, you create dimension and form. And the study of form should be of interest to any designer. I think it should inspire the reader to take something good—a sketch, a form "module" if you will—and find out how far it can go, how else it can be applied and transformed.
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Posted by
Robert Blinn | 10 Aug 2011
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Phaidon's new monograph on Dieter Rams, As Little Design as Possible follows on the heels of 2009's Less and More and the observations we made there on the man's life remain true. Indeed, just as both titles try to translate his design ethos "weniger, aber besser," into English ("less, but better"), both monographs attempt to distill a man's life and work into photographs while also making it clear that this is a man who wants his work to speak for itself.
Consequently, the resultant words and careful photography (e.g. clean product shots with neutral gray backgrounds, super close details, and long shots with context like human hands or objects on shelves) leave it such that most of the pages in each book could be traded with one another without much aesthetic compromise. The major difference, however, is that As Little Design as Possible also has some very nice photos of a few ugly spaces. While Less and More ended with the 2009 exhibit of his work in the Suntory Museum in Osaka Japan, As Little Design as Possible began there. Sophie Lovell was offered unprecedented access to his archives, his home and his process.
As Little Design as Possible has some pictures of some pretty cluttered workspaces. Tools, boxes, saws, bins stuffed with rolled paper, chairs cracked and delaminated, a classic Braun sign showing signs of rust, and even a box of Suntory Whiskey in the background (apropos), but on the page directly opposite the whiskey, below a black and white photo of a jazz era dancer and in front of his classic SK 4 phonograph (AKA "Snow White's Coffin), a set of tools lies, so neatly and meticulously laid out that they communicate on an emotional level in a way that perhaps even his product never could—this is a man who cares about the details.
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Posted by
Raymond Jepson | 26 Jul 2011
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Reviewed by Ray Jepson
GM has routinely been singled out in the last two decades as an example of a bloated enterprise that is so focused on maximizing today's profit that it sacrifices its very future to do so. According to Bob Lutz, that is a fairly good description of GM when he arrived in 2001 as Vice Chairman in charge of product development. In his book, Car Guys Versus Bean Counters, he chronicles the very wary GM of 2001 through it's first still-born turn-around, it's acquisition by the American and Canadian governments and it's new born success since 2009.
It might seem that a book written by a businessman about how to turn around a business would have little to say about design. In fact, it is clear that Lutz has only a small understanding of design. However, he consistently argues for its position at the front of product development through-out this book, from the horrible failures of the '80′s and '90′s to GM's incredible success of the last few years.
Page Left: GM's product development hit its stride in 2007, winning double honors: both the North American Car and Truck of the Year awards for teh Saturn Aura and Chevy Silverado. Page Right: (top) Chevy Malibu, 2008 North American Car of the Year and (bottom) 2008 Cadillac CTS, Motor Trend Car of the Year
To start with, Lutz reminisces on the some of the early super-star designers that GM made: Harley Earl and Billy Mitchell. Earl is responsible for creating the GM styling department. After working as a coach builder for years, Earl was hired to design the 1927 LaSalle (a now defunct GM brand). It was such a success that GM president Alfred P. Sloan decided to create the GM art and color section with Harley Earl as its chief. Earl's success and brilliant work got him all the way up to a Vice President in GM, the first designer to become a VP in a major corporation.
Billy Mitchell took over from Earl in 1958. Mitchell continued a GM prominence in automotive styling, as well as design's leadership role in defining products. Lutz recounts the story of Mitchell sending a man to Ferrari in Italy, buying a brand new Ferrari for list price, flying it back to Detroit where Mitchell instructed GM engineers to remove the Ferrari V12 and put it in a new Pontiac Firebird concept car he was working on. Mitchell then called the chief engineers down to the GM proving ground. As the Ferrari Firebird V12 circled the track, with it's engine screaming, Mitchell told the engineers, "That's how the car should sound!"
However, as GM continued to evolve, the design department lost it's flamboyant leaders, with Mitchell retiring in 1977. After which, inspired by the successes of Toyota and Honda, GM leadership became obsessed with efficiency and repeatability. In the 1980′s, executives with a purely business background were placed in charge of development projects. All decisions started to be based on metrics and complicated mathematics rather than the emotional touch that successful products always use.
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Posted by
Robert Blinn | 14 Jun 2011
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Our first introduction to the taxonomy of chairs by Jonathan Olivares was at the Phaidon Store on Wooster where a meticulously deconstructed chair hangs suspended in an exploded view of it's requisite parts in the window. The armrest, the back, the seat and the base all float away from the chair in a deconstruction of a chair, an appropriate metaphor for Olivares's Taxonomy.
In the introduction, he explains that natural objects have been the subject of taxonomy since man first tried to understand his environment. An early page shows the morphology of the leaves from Carolus Linnaeus' Hortus Cliffortianus, or if you're a baller, the real book and after a quote from Baudrillard's The System of Objects, Olivares goes on to explain that, "As far as [he] knows, this book is the first taxonomy of an industrialized object." It could have been the taxonomy of toasters or automotive engines, but office chairs seemed an ideal subject because of their close relationship with the human body and their mechanical complexity. Wow!
While car aficionados, trainspotters or objectophiles in general tend to have a highly detailed and hugely comprehensive mental library of specialty-related ephemeral otaku-like traits, that knowledge is rarely categorical. That is to say that while they might be able to distinguish a Corvette from a Corvair and explain the historical relevance of each, no one as of yet has ever tracked the "evolution" of a thing and categorized it based upon the classification on novel traits alone. For that reason alone, the Taxonomy of Office Chairs is a milestone of wonderment to us, precisely because a non-designer would likely find it soporific, just as I would upon hear someone rattle off baseball batting averages.
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Posted by
Robert Blinn | 23 May 2011
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Luke Williams' new book Disrupt opens with a quote from Jerry Garcia, so you know it's going to be different: "We do not merely want to be the best of the best. We want to be the only ones who do what we do." That said, Williams' core thesis is not a new one: The only way for a business to succeed is to cultivate disruptive innovation, even if it disrupts their existing business.
The strategy of incremental improvement used by most major companies is virtually guaranteed to paint them into a corner because real change happens not only in increments but also in sudden fits and starts. Williams refers to the late Stephen J. Gould's idea of punctuated equilibrium and he's right. Much like Steven Johnson's recent book Where Good Ideas Come From which would serve as a nice companion, Disrupt observes that innovation continues at a gradual pace and builds upon the work of others, but once sufficient structures are in place (often from other fields) to enable innovation, change happens disruptively and is virtually assured.
Like most other business books on the shelf, Williams uses examples drawn from today's business world along with his experiences consulting at frog. Usually after an assortment of anecdotes the reader is left with a set of scattered conclusions and no easy means for putting those conclusions into use. In Disrupt, Williams not only connects his mode of thinking to entrepreneurs who have successfully turned disruptive ideas into profitable businesses, but he also leaves readers with future references and templates for executing his methods. If Disrupt represents a disruption to the way of doing business, it does so not by aggressively changing the nature of a business book, but instead by clearly enumerating the tools that entrepreneurs need to craft their own disruptive hypothesis.
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Posted by
Robert Blinn | 8 Apr 2011
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Phaidon's new monograph of Hella Jongerius, Misfit, is a text and photographic extension of her love of "misfit" products that defy appearances of mass production despite being mass produced. Its quirks are apparent from right off of the bat, from the non-traditional binding to the transparent shapes on the cover that the user can employ to "customize" the cover image vase. We immediately turned the vase into a "bug" by deploying the transparencies as "wings." Even the simple line-drawn vase on the cover has depth, which isn't immediately apparent until you touch it. Like enamel on a vase, the lines have weight and are echoed in the string used to hold the book together.
The unorthodox design is beautiful, but whether you're a reviewer hellbent on viewing absolutely every page or you're simply a coffee table book-lover, the binding makes the pages slightly hard to turn. Even so, you'll want to see the work on each page, because it's lovely. Perhaps the difficult pages are simply the cost of interacting with beauty. The cover is basically a version of her "Coloured Vases," but we were particularly knocked out by her larger scale furniture and intrigued by the level of insight and detail the book provides on her process. Irma Boom's layout is visually striking and includes several "conversations that might have taken place" with design luminaries such Louise Schouwenberg, Paola Antonelli and Alice Rawthorn. We're glad that apparently they actually did take place because through those interviews readers can find that Jongerius follows her philosophy in craftsmanship in her own life.
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Posted by
Lisa Smith | 29 Mar 2011
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"Each Under a Fiver item is a testament to an un-global culture, a testament to local needs and interests. Communities around the world continue to require things that serve their local needs, and often design plays little to no part at all."
In Usefulness in Small Things, Industrial Facility's Kim Colin and Sam Hecht share their "Under a Fiver" collection, first presented at London's Design Museum alongside "Some Recent Projects," an exhibit of the firm's own work. The premise of the collection is simple. As Hecht puts it in his introduction, "As I continued to travel, I made sure to wander through any local hardware stores, pharmacies or supermarkets I came across, finding low-cost objects (all are under five pounds) that told me something about where I was." The resulting array is a delightful antidote to the image-based work so popular on the Internet, a real force in the decline of attention paid to the experiential elements of objects and spaces.
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Posted by
Robert Blinn | 24 Mar 2011
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A focus on industrial design can make a book reviewer feel a little like a middle child. ID books will appear in the architecture section, occasionally in graphic design and sometimes even in the art section. Rarely is industrial design given focus in the United States. Carroll Gantz's The Industrialization of Design is the first history of design we've seen in quite a while and also serves to explain the diminished status of industrial design in this country as compared to Europe. The book opens tracking the "Twin Revolutions" in industry in the United States and Britain, walking the reader from the origins of design in both countries into the seamless multinational production effort that is most ID today.
The cover and interior design lack the polish of a typical design coffee table book but serve to foreshadow the book's functionalist creed. Most industrial design history is taught as composites, taking books with very focused topics (e.g. Bauhaus, LeCorbu, Modernism) and synthesizing them into a relatively linear, if overlapping, narrative. As a former director of the ISDA and long time teacher, Gantz has put all that synthesis in one place, and it's a lot.
Each chapter is thematically organized with titles like "The 'New' Decorative Art" or "Dreams of the Future and War," but the main thrust is linear and chronological rather than topical. It's packed with information all the way down to the names of individual craftsmen in clock workshops. Some, like Eli Terry, may be tracked from apprenticeship into his eventual success, but unlike the many "histories" on the bestseller shelves, Gantz does overlay conflicts and struggles over the history in order to invest the reader emotionally. The successes and failings that happen over time, in his book, are dealt with as historical facts, and are neither to be cried about nor celebrated, only understood. What is to be celebrated instead, is the inextricable tide of progress based on human ingenuity.
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Posted by
Robert Blinn | 28 Feb 2011
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Rian Hughes' new book Cult-ure is bound in faux leather and gold trim. The biblical references don't stop there, as the author handily provides a fabric page marker for the reader to keep track of what page/psalm they're on. Interestingly, the yellow and black dust jacket barely covers the front. On the back of that caution-strip, explanatory prose clarifies the allusion, stating that Cult-ure is meant to be "Gideon's Bible for the boutique hotel."
Positioning the strip one way presents the reader with a fragment of the title "CULT," followed by the phrase "IDEAS CAN BE DANGEROUS." While he spends very little of the book addressing the Bible itself, the rational free-wheeling fount of ideas spilling from this book could easily be taken as an affront by people with religious memes. Indeed, even the word meme (which Hughes uses a lot) was coined by atheist commentator Richard Dawkins in his book The Selfish Gene, and refers to the survival of the fittest of ideas in the forest of the human mind. When Internet entrepreneurs refer to ideas spreading virally, they're talking about memes, and they, along with Hughes, owe quite a debt to Dawkins.
Hughes is a former comic book artist currently practicing in graphic design, but what makes Cult-ure relevant to design readers is not Hughes' background, but its connection to non-hyphenated "culture." Hughes references Tim Hewell's comment that, "the battle for ideas is far more complex than the battle for territory -- and likely to last even longer." Culture is where it will take place; every product designer thinking about market share should be thinking about share of mind. Especially in the wake of recent events in Egypt, new media resources allow for the spread of ideas faster than ever before.
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Posted by
core jr | 9 Feb 2011
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Remember the summer of 2009 when we announced that Eric Chan of ECCO was looking for a few good designs? 1000 Product Designs is now out on Rockport Publishing and delivers what its title promises -- 1000 product designs in the realm of chairs, lighting, kitchen gadgets, furniture, office accoutrements and everything in between. Although we know that a picture is worth 1000 words, this book proves that design is a word that can be told in a thousand pictures. Check out more after the jump!
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Posted by
Shai Akram | 8 Feb 2011
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Gestalten released Staging Space a compilation of the 'scenic interiors and spatial experiences' late last year. It's quite a thorough volume, covering a broad cross-section of categories, split into many sections including office spaces, exhibition design, scenographic environments and spatial explorations.
Chapters begin with a short forward, putting the work in context in a general sense, and each following entry is left open to the readers interpretation with a short, easily digestible description.
Michael Johansson
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Posted by
Robert Blinn | 4 Feb 2011
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In our last review of a Jon Kolko book, Thoughts on Interaction Design Donald Norman wrote in the comments, "OK, you convinced me. I've ordered the book." We can't be sure that our review influenced his newest book Living with Complexity, but since Norman's work centered on frustrating objects, the extrapolation into systems was bound to happen. Kolko's new book Exposing the Magic of Design might seem superficially similar to Norman's to those of us in the industrial design field, but Kolko has profoundly different content.
Kolko's book is subtitled "A Practitioner's Guide to the Methods and Theory of Synthesis," and this reviewer joked that it sounded like an undergraduate film or semiotics course. Kolko himself states that "the ability to 'be playful' is critical to achieve deep and meaningful synthesis," but the tenor of the tome is far from the giant grin the author wears while using carrots as a "phone" on the cover of his previous work. Exposing the Magic of Design is blunt, direct, serious and self-assured. At less than 200 pages and full of diagrams, processes and methods, Kolko certainly didn't have time for any hand-holding. In this era of easy distraction, Exposing the Magic's interaction design requires complete attention. Perhaps that's the way the author meant it.
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Posted by
Robert Blinn | 1 Feb 2011
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A photograph of Al Gore's messy office opens Donald Norman's new book Living with Complexity. At first this reviewer looked at the office and the piles of paper in judgment and then began to realize that the very man campaigning against messing up the environment had a rather messy desk. Donald Norman might differ. Living with Complexity takes the theses offered in his earlier books The Design of Everyday Things and Emotional Design and extrapolates them from the world of goods into the world of service providers.
In Norman's view, Gore's desk is the cluttered extension of an organized mind. Indeed, Norman interviewed many seemingly organized owners of messy workspaces and heard them repeatedly request, "Please don't clean my desk." The apparent disorder of the office was being carefully tracked in their minds. Norman explains that all of our desire for "simplicity" is a false hope because life is complex. Complexity, however, does not need to be confusing. Those designers who can manage to produce devices (and systems) that corral the complexity of the world into intuitively grouped and well-designed systems will garner success in our digital world.
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Posted by
Robert Blinn | 20 Jan 2011
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We're jealous of Bill Moggridge's social network...which is a rather meta way of expressing that his new book "Designing Media", about the divide between traditional and virtual media, includes interviews with an amazingly diverse range of fascinating, talented and powerful people. True to the occasionally awkward mashup that is print media in the digital age, Moggridge's book includes an additional DVD of the actual interviews themselves. We confess that after reading every word of the rather gargantuan book, we only accessed the accompanying DVD to watch the physicality and body language of the most interesting interviewees (e.g. Zuckerberg pre-Fincher). That said, we suppose that the pick and choose hypertext way of gathering information from the feed is something Moggridge (and most of the interviewees) would find perfectly appropriate. Indeed, the interviews are available here. I've linked to Chris Anderson's video in particular, given that his last book advocated giving content away for free.
The interviews in "Designing Media" are organized in sections under headings like: the enduring nature of the printed word, crowdsourcing, social media, the media isn't the message, the value of content, and how digital media encourages the proliferation of the truth. Powerful stuff. Moggridge, a founder of IDEO, now manages the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum and is, in his own words, "a spokesperson for design." Moggridge provides thoughtful editorial oversight between each of the interviews. When you bounce from an interview with DJ Spooky to Jimmy Wales, a little context is profoundly helpful, and Moggridge provides seamless segues. Under Moggridge's watch, "Designing Media" becomes more than a set of interviews. By the final comments in the last interview, the thrust of its underlying thesis that "the printed word will not disappear" simply serves as a valedictory to a thesis that the reader has already discovered for themselves. Moggrdige assures us that, "while digital media is directly responsible for falling revenues in music, film and the printed word, individuals and companies will find ways to carve niches in the new digital domain."
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Posted by
Robert Blinn | 20 Dec 2010
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James Victore's new monograph is so slick that a stranger on the subway asked us what we were reading because he "needed a new book." The design strikes such a careful balance between craft and irreverence that has the same appeal as the cool kid in school that never followed the rules but still graduated on time.
The matte black pages provide a striking contrast to a typically bound book, even when closed, and the cover painting sandwiches those uncommon pages between a carefully defaced oil painting festooned with Victore's trademark hand illustrations (scrawled painted words and a Van Dyke goatee) combined with a stark typeface arrangement. The cover itself actually forms a fold-out of the painting that can serve as a poster, Victore's stock and trade. From the cover on in, the monograph is just as boisterous and freewheeling an exploration of the bounds of graphic design as James Victore's career has been.
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Posted by
core jr | 17 Dec 2010
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The Predictable Magic to which Prahalad and Sawhney refer in their recent book has been given the moniker of Psycho-Aesthetics, and Ravi's firm RKS has applied it successfully to a range of products over his career as a consultant. What they're getting at is not what is commonly recognized as aesthetics (the visual sense). Instead what looks are to the eye, Psycho-Aesthetics are to the soul or the psyche. In the Afterward they provide the clearest description of their end goal: "It's not how you feel about the design or the experience; it's how it makes you feel about yourself."
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It was 1997, I was 20 years old, wandering around random Milan back streets when I stumbled into a little architecture bookstore and picked up the only book on the front table in english, "Aircraft" by Le Corbusier. Written in 1935, I'd argue there hasn't been a better book written on design since. It masquerades as a book on emerging aircraft technology but in actuality it is a call to arms for all creatives. Corbu' is at his quotable best with lines like:
"Reform is in the very essence of things. It lies at the heart of craftsmanship. Revolution is accomplished by the cumulative effect of details."
"No door is closed. Life goes forward... make nothing academic, never say: that is the end!"
"The schools are run by "professors" (the very definition of a school). The professors teach according to the prescribed programme. The programme is prescribed by authority. Is this authority in touch with life? Occasional only. As life a programme? No, life is explosive."
"Teaching is only possible in the workshop. Arithmetic and handwriting can be taught in schools. But invention originates in the workshop."
If that wasn't enough, it has over 100 beautiful pictures of mid 1930's aircraft. This is the only item you need to put on your holiday wish list. It's out of print, so you will pay a premium, but it is worth it. Birch Books has a few copies as does Amazon.
Posted by
Helen Walters | 1 Dec 2010
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It's always interesting to take a look back at a year's worth of books, particularly from an industry still reeling from assaults to its very existence. This year, certain clear themes emerged from writers looking at the worlds of innovation and design.
Most clearly, we have entered the age of the individual. Emphasizing every person's ability to have an effect or make a difference was a theme touched on by many. The importance of cross-disciplinary innovation was another, with many outlining the powerful idea that innovation simply won't emerge from staring into a world you already know inside and out.
And even while many admitted that there are no easy answers to our time of global turmoil, there was an overarching sense of optimism too. Perhaps that's not entirely surprising--after all, who's going to buy a book in which an author stacks up the depressing evidence that we're doomed, doomed? But the cumulative effect was also somewhat inspiring.
Finally, this year's award for the Innovation Author's Preferred Hero of Choice goes to.... Johannes Guttenberg. Yes, some 560 years after the introduction of the printing press, it turns out that citing the German goldsmith is still seen as the best way to back up a theory about innovation.
Here then, in no particular order, are eleven books that made me stop and think this year.
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DESIGN MIAMI 2011
TOKYO DESIGN WEEK 2011
DUTCH DESIGN WEEK 2011
VIENNA DESIGN WEEK 2011
