Design History, Theory & Criticism

Design and Designing provides a broad and critical understanding of what is essentially a practical subject. Designing today is less a craft and more a part of the knowledge economy. It's all about knowing how to acquire knowledge and how to apply it creatively.Design...

How some design appears to be something that it is not - by beautifying, amusing, substituting, or deceiving. Pretense design pretends to be something that it is not. Pretense design includes all kinds of designed objects: a pair of glasses that looks like a...

A new approach to theory development for practice-driven research, proposing that theory is something made in and through design. Tendencies toward “academisation” of traditionally practice-based fields have forced design to articulate itself as an academic discipline, in theoretical terms. In this book, Johan Redström...

This book looks at how product design criticism has rescued some products from the trash and consigned others to the landfill. Product design criticism operates at the very brink of the landfill site, salvaging some products with praise but consigning others to its depths...

Just Enough: Design Microstories offers a collection of insights, a series of hypotheses about the transversality and interdisciplinarity that characterise the process of creating design. A succession of micro-narratives that take reality as a source of inspiration. The evolution of materials and techniques, art...

In September 2015 the world lost Phil Patton – prolific design writer, teacher and tantalising wordsmith. Patton’s insatiable curiosity, sense of humour and keen eye made for the most compelling reads. Whether he was chronicling design minutiae, quirky anecdotes or bizarre tales, Phil’s hundreds...

Digital Design Theory bridges the gap between the discourse of print design and interactive experience by examining the impact of computation on the field of design. As graphic design moves from the creation of closed, static objects to the development of open, interactive frameworks,...

This book presents three interconnected palimpsest essays - A Note on the Type, Letter and Sprit and A Note on the Time. A Note on the Type tells the backstory of a “meta” font updated by Dexter Sinister and used to typeset the Contemporary Condition...

Richly illustrated with images from Jan Tschichold’s little-known private collection of design ephemera, this important book explores a legendary figure in the history of modern graphic design through the artists, ideas, and texts from the Bauhaus that most influenced him. Tschichold (1902–1974), a prolific...

A bold, theoretical look at an emerging generation of architects, this volume is devoted to five contemporary practices-Bureau Spectacular, Erin Besler, Fake Industries Architectural Agonism, Formlessfinder, and John Szot Studio-and the diverse methods and approaches that drive their work. Chatter, whose title refers to...

How do designers get ideas? Many spend their time searching for clever combinations of forms, fonts, and colours inside the design annuals and monographs of other designers' work. For those looking to challenge the cut-and-paste mentality there are few resources that are both informative...

Extra Bold is the inclusive, practical, and informative career handbook for designers that we've all been waiting for. Written collaboratively by a diverse team of authors, the book opens with critical essays that rethink design principles and practices through theories of feminism, racism, inclusion, and...

Rare & Collectible In The Modern Architectural Landscape Caroline Constant examines diverse approaches to landscape in the work of architects practicing in Europe and the United States between 1915 and the mid-1980s. Case studies highlight landscapes in the public realm rather than the private garden,...

Killer Ideas. They're out there. Wild, unpredictable and dangerous. So powerful they can stop a person in their tracks, turn a life around, start a revolution, or even change the world. Hunting the Killer Idea takes the intrepid reader through the jungle of the...

Ancient history, midcentury modernism, Cinemascope, humanism and monumentality, totalitarianism and democracy: transformations in American culture and architecture. In Flintstone Modernism, Jeffrey Lieber investigates transformations in postwar American architecture and culture. He considers sword-and-sandal films of the 1950s and 1960s - including forgotten gems such...

Infinite Suburbia is the culmination of the MIT Norman B. Leventhal Center for Advanced Urbanism's year-long study of the future of suburban development. Following extensive research, an exhibition, and a conference at MIT's Media Lab, this groundbreaking collection presents fifty-two essays by seventy-four authors...

The modular did not have to be invented: it can be found everywhere. We divide surfaces into grids, spaces into parts, and time into rhythmic units. Modular structures are also increasingly being recognised as a way of communicating, where the aim is not to...

This book analyses the current digital evolution of architecture through a series of considerations related to several aspects of the ongoing digital era, ranging from the problem of authorship and human creativity in computational design to notions related to architectural pedagogy, professional practice and...

Light is the material of Architecture. Ian Ritchie is one of the UK’s most visionary architects, and remarkable for synthesising multiple creative disciplines to bring the essence of his architectural projects into focus. A poet and artist as well as an architect, Ritchie distills...

In recent years, the boundaries between art and design have become more and more blurred. It is not the object itself, but rather its economic functionality that determines where design stops and art begins and this functionality is reassessed at every link in the...