This book is the perfect introduction to the subject. It explores and explains the big ideas and key principles behind more than 90 celebrated design concepts and movements, placing each in its historical, cultural, and stylistic context.

The Design Book analyses the ideas and principles behind the design of pioneering products,
information systems and environments, exploring how creativity and innovation shape our lives.

In this book, you will find:

• The evolution of design from ancient times, through early manufacturing to the cutting-edge concepts of the 21st-century
• Profiles of the individuals and manufacturers behind each ground-breaking development and
• Fascinating insight into design movements, showing how each one began and describing its philosophy and visual style, from the aesthetic movement to mid-century modern and contemporary parametricism.

Our lives are filled with objects. Everyday things used in everyday settings, they are our constant companions. As such, writes Soetsu Yanagi, they should be made with care and built to last, treated with respect and even affection. They should be natural and simple, sturdy and safe--an aesthetic fulfillment of our practical needs. They should, in short, be things of beauty.

Long revered as the authority on craftsmanship and Japanese aesthetics, Yanagi devoted his life and writing to defend the value of craft. In an age of feeble and ugly machine-made things, The Beauty of Everyday Things is a call for each of us to deepen our relationship with the objects that surround us. Inspired by the work of the simple artisans Yanagi encountered on his lifelong travels through Japan and Korea, this now-classic book is a heartfelt defence of modest, honest, handcrafted objects, from traditional teacups to jars to paper--objects that exemplify the beauty of everyday things.

A witty, tongue-in-cheek discussion of design's potentials and pitfalls

In focusing on creating preferable conditions, the discipline of design is optimistic by default. And yet, vernacular manifestations of skepticism, dissatisfaction and even resentment toward design abound. Instead of systematically discarding them, can these sad passions shed a valuable light on the blind spots of the field? Can disillusion be something more than disillusionment? Can it become an emotional method to unveil design's dysfunctions and contradictions?
Author Silvio Lorusso looks into historical and present manifestations of design disillusion to shorten the gap between expectations and reality when it comes to the everyday practice of designers. Using humorous and irreverent visuals, often containing jokes about design, Lorusso constructs thoughtful dichotomies on such topics as synthesis and autonomy, power and impotence, and aspirations and compromise. The result is an amusing yet academic consideration of the design profession and its future.
Silvio Lorusso (born 1985) is the author of Entreprecariat: Everyone Is an Entrepreneur. Nobody Is Safe. He holds a PhD in Design Sciences from the Iuav University of Venice, and is an assistant professor and vice-director of the Center for Other Worlds at the Lusófona University in Lisbon.

A definitive survey of mid-century modern design and architecture in an accessible compact edition, this book offers a rich overview of one of the most popular, collectable, and dynamic periods of design. With rich and diverse examples of everything from furniture and lighting to ceramics and textiles to graphics and posters to interior design and architecture, this sleek compendium of mid-century style includes over 1,000 illustrations representing classic designs and little-seen rarities, as well as entries on nearly 100 major creators, such as Dieter Rams, Robin Day, Isamu Noguchi, Lucie Rie, Charles and Ray Eames, Alvar Aalto, and Oscar Niemeyer. An additional illustrated dictionary features hundreds more influential mid-century designers, manufacturers, organizations, schools, and movements.

Organized into three parts--Media and Masters, with six sections on applied arts; Houses and Interiors, featuring twenty seminal homes and their furnishings; and an A-Z of Designers and Makers--and complete with thirteen specially commissioned essays by renowned experts, this illustrated book is a must-have for collectors, design aficionados, and anyone seeking inspiration for their home.

Cheryl D. Holmes-Miller is one of the design field's most respected figures. She is legendary for her decades of scholarship and activism and is known as a touchstone and conscience for the design profession. This long-awaited book documents the history of the question she has been asking for decades: Where are the Black designers? along with related questions that are urgent to the design profession: Where did they originate? Where have they been? Why haven't they been represented in design histories and canons?

Holmes-Miller traces her development as a designer and leader, beginning with her own family and its rich multiethnic history. She narrates her experiences as a design student at Rhode Island School of Design, Maryland Institute College of Art, and Pratt, leading up to her oft-cited Pratt thesis examining barriers to success for Black designers. Holmes-Miller describes the work of her eponymous studio for noted clients that included NASA, Time Inc., and the nascent Black Entertainment Television, as well as the story of her later critiques of the industry in the design press, most notably in Print magazine. Miller also recounts the parallel history of collective efforts by fellow scholars and advocates over the past fifty years to identify and celebrate Black designers.

Enhanced with a foreword by Crystal Williams, president of Rhode Island School of Design, award-winning poet, and noted advocate for equity and justice in the fields of art and education, HERE is part memoir, part investigation, and part urgent call for justice and recognition for Black designers, making it an invaluable resource for graphic design professionals, teachers, and students.

A landmark of graphic modernism, the Vienna Secession's magazine is brought to life in a complete facsimile reprint with new essays and translations

The brainchild of Koloman Moser, Alfred Roller, Josef Hoffmann, Bertold Loffler and others--the leading graphic artists of the Vienna Secession and the Wiener Werkstätte--Die Fläche (German for The Surface) laid out an extraordinary group vision for design through adventurous work by these designer-professors and more than 100 of their students. Packed with bold ideas for posters, advertisements, book covers, woodcut prints and much more, the result is an inexhaustibly rich sourcebook of graphic forms, modern ideas and technical experiments, all reflecting a reorientation in design practice and teaching that would resonate around the world.
This full-size facsimile of all 14 issues of Die Fläche lets readers experience this rare gem as it was meant to be seen, while new essays and translations explore its significance.
Die Fläche is the first volume in Letterform Archive's facsimile series, which presents landmarks of print and design history with exacting reproductions and new essays that provide rich context and fresh insights.

Design has penetrated every dimension of contemporary society, from classrooms to statehouses to corporate boardrooms. It's seen as a kind of mega-power, one that can solve all our problems and elevate our experiences to make a more beautiful, more functional world.

But there's a backstory here. In The Invention of Design, designer and historian Maggie Gram investigates how, over the twentieth century, our economic hopes, fears, and fantasies shaped the idea of design--then repeatedly redefined it. Nearly a century ago, resistance to New Deal-era government intervention helped transform design from an idea about aesthetics into one about function. And at century's end, the dot-com crash brought us design thinking the idea that design methodology can solve any problem, small or large. To this day, design captures imaginations as a tool for fixing market society's broken parts from within, supposedly enabling us to thrive within capitalism's sometimes violent constraints.

A captivating critical history, The Invention of Design shows how design became the hero of many of our most hopeful stories--dreams, fantasies, utopias--about how we might better live in a modern world.

The iconic dress that has stood the test of time.

Contemporary yet classic, the little black dress never goes out of style. Popularized by Coco Chanel in the 1920s, the style freed women from the corset and became the epitome of liberation. Dubbed the 'Ford of fashion' by American Vogue, it was simple, stylish and affordable - 'the frock that all the world will wear'.

Tracing the fascinating evolution of the LBD, from Audrey Hepburn's sleek Givenchy sheath in Breakfast at Tiffany's or Princess Diana's rebellious 'revenge dress' right through to the mesh detailing and body-sculpting shapes of recent years, this little book is a celebration of one of fashion's most iconic garments.

'One is never under dressed or over dressed with a little black dress.'
Karl Lagerfield

'A little black dress is something to rely on. To fill you with confidence and ease. To have an attitude that is pure and effortless, yet sexy and classy.'
Stella McCartney

'The little black dress must be luxurious, rich, sensual, diaphanous, exotic, severe, lush, demure, demanding, frivolous, amusing, and it must linger in memory, but above all, it must be simple and little and black.'
Carolina Herrera

From the excesses of world expositions to myths of better living through technology, modernist design, in its European-based guises, has excluded and oppressed the very people whose lands and lives it reshaped. Decolonizing Design first asks how modernist design has encompassed and advanced the harmful project of colonization--then shows how design might address these harms by recentering its theory and practice in global Indigenous cultures and histories.

A leading figure in the movement to decolonize design, Dori Tunstall uses hard-hitting real-life examples and case studies drawn from over fifteen years of working to transform institutions to better reflect the lived experiences of Indigenous, Black, and People of Color communities. Her book is at once enlightening, inspiring, and practical, interweaving her lived experiences with extensive research to show what decolonizing design means, how it heals, and how to practice it in our institutions today.

For leaders and practitioners in design institutions and communities, Tunstall's work demonstrates how we can transform the way we imagine and remake the world, replacing pain and repression with equity, inclusion, and diversity--in short, she shows us how to realize the infinite possibilities that decolonized design represents.

The designed things, experiences, and symbols that we use to perceive, understand, and perform our everyday lives are much more than just props. They directly shape how we live. In Design after Capitalism, Matthew Wizinsky argues that the world of industrial capitalism that gave birth to modern design has been dramatically transformed. Design today needs to reorient itself toward deliberate transitions of everyday politics, social relations, and economies. Looking at design through the lens of political economy, Wizinsky calls for the field to transcend the logics, structures, and subjectivities of capitalism--to combine design entrepreneurship with social empowerment in order to facilitate new ways of producing those things, symbols, and experiences that make up everyday life.

After analyzing the parallel histories of capitalism and design, Wizinsky offers some historical examples of anticapitalist, noncapitalist, and postcapitalist models of design practice. These range from the British Arts and Crafts movement of the nineteenth century to contemporary practices of growing furniture or biotextiles and automated forms of production. Drawing on insights from sociology, philosophy, economics, political science, history, environmental and sustainability studies, and critical theory--fields not usually seen as central to design--he lays out core principles for postcapitalist design; offers strategies for applying these principles to the three layers of project, practice, and discipline; and provides a set of practical guidelines for designers to use as a starting point. The work of postcapitalist design can start today, Wizinsky says--with the next project.

Sought-after, sophisticated and versatile, the Hermès carré is wearable art that never goes out of fashion. Unveiling the history and artistry of the brand's silk accessory from the first designs in the early twentieth century to today, this fashion story includes a detailed behind-the-scenes look at the artisanship involved at the company's ateliers in France, as well as reviews on different scarf designs, colour palettes, dates of issue and rarity (the 'Grail' scarves).

The book includes the collaborators who have helped in the creation of over 2,000 designs, including limited editions, anniversary and tribute scarves, with highlights from renown artists and illustrators such as Hugo Grygkar, Philippe Ledoux, Kermit Oliver and Annie Faivre (who hides a monkey in her designs). Here you will discover the fashion of scarf styles throughout the decades, how to wear and tie a scarf, and the scarf in film and popular culture, along with those who made the Hermès carré a hallmark of their own - such as Queen Elizabeth II, Grace Kelly and Jackie Kennedy Onassis.

When it comes to tech, the mainstream headlines are bleak: Algorithms control and oppress. AI will destroy democracy and our social fabric, and possibly even drive us to extinction. While legitimate concerns drive these fears, we need to equally account for the fact that tech affords young people something incredibly valuable--a rare space for self-actualization. In From Pessimism to Promise, award-winning author Payal Arora explains that, outside the West, where most of the world's youth reside, there is a significant different outlook on tech: in fact, there is a contagion of optimism toward all things digital. These users, especially those in marginalized contexts, are full of hope for new tech.

As AI disrupts sectors across industries, education, and beyond, who better to shine the light forward, Arora argues, than the Global South, the navigator of all manner of forced disruptions, leapfrogging obstructive systems, norms, and practices to rapidly reinvent itself? Drawing on field insights in diverse global contexts such as Brazil, India, and Bangladesh, Payal describes what drives Gen Z to embrace new technologies. From Pessimism to Promise discusses the shift to relationally-driven approaches to design; how to create algorithms of aspiration; how to reimagine the digital space for sex, pleasure, and care; and, what we can learn from feminist digital activists and women's collectives in the Global South on shared digital provenance and value, as well as indigenous approaches to sustainability, that challenges sacred ideas on degrowth, circular economy, and the doughnut economy. Arora also takes heart in the power in numbers, as the users from the majority world infuse algorithms with everyday aspirations, pushing for a new digital order.

Timely and urgent, From Pessimism to Promise makes a deeply compelling case that it is not naïve to be optimistic about our digital future. On the contrary, it is our moral imperative to design with hope.

Here is a groundbreaking, comprehensive overview of Japanese design during the last eight decades that will appeal to artists, craftspeople, designers, and historians.

For the Japanese, the concept of design is not limited to functionality and materiality--it is deeply connected with culture and tradition. In this sense, everyday objects become more than their function: They are to be reflected upon, to be touched and cherished.

As mass production became widespread in the postwar period, fascinating cross-cultural exchanges began to take place between Japan and the West. And in recent years, a new generation of designers has taken Japanese creativity into entirely new territory, reconceptualizing the very meaning of design.

Author Naomi Pollock writes, It doesn't really matter what the medium is, whether plastic or metal, manufacturers treat the material with the same kind of reverence . . . the attention to detail and, above all, respect for the hand of the artisan, whether a traditional craftsperson or a factory worker. Even the mass-produced or computer-generated can be created with the pride and care of the handmade.

Huge in scope and scale, featuring tables and chairs, cameras, and telephones, fashion, buildings, vehicles, and more, featuring hundreds of objects and contributions from both Japanese and Western designers inspired by Japan, this volume stands as the definitive work on the subject.

Some names will be familiar (Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa of SANAA, Issey Miyake, Shigeru Ban) as will be some of the designs (the Sony Walkman, Panasonic's Panapet R-70 radio, the Aibo robot dog, Yamaha motorcycles, and Shiro Kuramata's rose-filled Miss Blanche acrylic chair). But there is so much here that even knowledgeable designers will find something new and the different.

This is a unique resource--beautiful, educational, and entertaining--that will appeal to anyone with an interest in Japanese culture, a passion for international design, or just a taste for beautiful products of all kinds.

Paula Scher: Works presents the most extensive monograph of Scher's career to date, featuring over three hundred projects from her early days in the music industry as an art director with CBS and Atlantic Records; through the launch of her first studio, Koppel & Scher; to her decades-long engagement with Pentagram.

Coedited by Tony Brook and Adrian Shaughnessy, the book organizes Scher's work chronologically into several thematic sections. It opens with a long interview with the designer, then moves into her record covers from the 1970s and '80s. Central chapters look at her innovative approach to identity design and environmental graphics and its impact on contemporary New York's urban fabric--as seen in work for clients such as MoMA, Charter Schools, the High Line, and Shake Shack--as well as her logos for global corporations and cultural institutions.

A large section on authorship is devoted to the designer's socially and politically motivated posters, New York Times Op-Ed illustrations, and campaign work. The book also provides the most up-to-date look at Scher's idiosyncratic, hand-painted maps, a prolific artistic practice that complements her still-growing graphic legacy, as well as her longstanding collaboration with The Public Theater, which spans over twenty years.

On the conditions and limits of critical thinking for design culture under capitalism

Design schools increasingly urge students to address social, political and environmental issues in their work. But who can afford to work in this way after graduation?
In a dynamic style that draws from multiple contributors, Who Can Afford to Be Critical? discusses the limits that affordability, class and labor impose upon the educational promise of holding a critical practice. Why do we tend to ignore the material and socioeconomic constraints that bind us as designers, claiming instead that we can be powerful agents of change? Instead of focusing on the dream of ethical work under capitalism, could we instead focus first on designers' own working conditions, as one immediate site for collective action? Over the course of four chapters, this publication delves into the modes of precarity in critical graphic work and possible paths toward emancipation from that position.

If you were accused of a crime, who would you rather decide your sentence--a mathematically consistent algorithm incapable of empathy or a compassionate human judge prone to bias and error? What if you want to buy a driverless car and must choose between one programmed to save as many lives as possible and another that prioritizes the lives of its own passengers? And would you agree to share your family's full medical history if you were told that it would help researchers find a cure for cancer?

These are just some of the dilemmas that we are beginning to face as we approach the age of the algorithm, when it feels as if the machines reign supreme. Already, these lines of code are telling us what to watch, where to go, whom to date, and even whom to send to jail. But as we rely on algorithms to automate big, important decisions--in crime, justice, healthcare, transportation, and money--they raise questions about what we want our world to look like. What matters most: Helping doctors with diagnosis or preserving privacy? Protecting victims of crime or preventing innocent people being falsely accused?

Hello World takes us on a tour through the good, the bad, and the downright ugly of the algorithms that surround us on a daily basis. Mathematician Hannah Fry reveals their inner workings, showing us how algorithms are written and implemented, and demonstrates the ways in which human bias can literally be written into the code. By weaving in relatable, real world stories with accessible explanations of the underlying mathematics that power algorithms, Hello World helps us to determine their power, expose their limitations, and examine whether they really are improvement on the human systems they replace.

A fascinating and provocative new way of looking at the things we use and the spaces we inhabit, and a call to imagine a better-designed world for us all.

Furniture and tools, kitchens and campuses and city streets--nearly everything human beings make and use is assistive technology, meant to bridge the gap between body and world. Yet unless, or until, a misfit between our own body and the world is acute enough to be understood as disability, we may never stop to consider--or reconsider--the hidden assumptions on which our everyday environment is built.

In a series of vivid stories drawn from the lived experience of disability and the ideas and innovations that have emerged from it--from cyborg arms to customizable cardboard chairs to deaf architecture--Sara Hendren invites us to rethink the things and settings we live with. What might assistance based on the body's stunning capacity for adaptation--rather than a rigid insistence on normalcy--look like? Can we foster interdependent, not just independent, living? How do we creatively engineer public spaces that allow us all to navigate our common terrain? By rendering familiar objects and environments newly strange and wondrous, What Can a Body Do? helps us imagine a future that will better meet the extraordinary range of our collective needs and desires.