Books
What Design Can’t Do -
Essays on Design and Disillusion
Silvio Lorusso
This book probes the disillusionment that permeates design. It tackles the deskilling effects provoked by digital semi-automation, the instances of ornamental politics fashioned to please the museum-educational complex, the nebulous promises of design schools. While reviving historical expressions of disenchantment, Silvio Lorusso examines present-day memes and social media rants. To depict this disheartening crisis, he crafts a new critical vocabulary for readers to build upon. What this exposé reveals is both worrying and refreshing: rather than producing a meaningful order, design might be just about inhabiting chaos. Link︎︎︎
Who Can Afford To Be Critical
Afonso Matos
‘Critical Designers’ produced by an increasing number of design schools are prompted to address social, political and environmental issues through their practices. Yet, who can afford to continue such effort after graduation? Link︎︎︎
Designing Peace :
Building a Better Future Now
Cynthia E. Smith
Offering perspectives on peace through essays, interviews, critical maps, project profiles, data visualizations, and art, this book conveys the momentum that design can gain in effecting a peace-filled future. From activists, scholars, and architects to policymakers and graphic, game, and landscape designers, Designing Peace flips the conversation: peace is not simply a passive state signifying the absence of war, it is a dynamic concept that requires effort, expertise, and multidimensional solutions to address its complexity. This publication aims to expand the discourse on what is possible if society were to design for peace.Link︎︎︎
Link for digital exhibition︎︎︎
The Politics of Design
Ruben Pater
The Politics of Design explores the cultural and political context of the typography, colours, photography, symbols, and information graphics that we use every day. This book examines cultural contexts and stereotypes with visual examples from around the world. It demonstrates that communication tools are never neutral, and encourages its users to rethink global cultural understanding. Additional works by contemporary artists and designers show that political awareness does not limit creativity, but opens up new explorations for a critical visual culture. Link︎︎︎
Discursive Design: Critical, Speculative, and Alternative Things
Bruce M. Tharp and Stephanie M. Tharp
Exploring how design can be used for good—prompting self-reflection, igniting the imagination, and effecting positive social change. Link︎︎︎
Design as Politics
Tony Fry
Design as Politics confronts the inadequacy of contemporary politics to deal with unsustainability. Current 'solutions' to unsustainability are analysed as utterly insufficient for dealing with the problems but, further than this, the book questions the very ability of democracy to deliver a sustainable future. Link︎︎︎
Design as an Attitude
Alice Rawsthron
Design as an Attitude explains how design is responding to an age of intense economic, political, and ecological instability. It shows how resourceful designers are using new digital tools to help to tackle the environmental and refugee crises, and to reinvent dysfunctional social services.Link︎︎︎
Lo—TEK. Design by Radical Indigenism
Julia Watson
In an era of high-tech and climate extremes, we are drowning in information while starving for wisdom. Enter Lo—TEK, a design movement building on indigenous philosophy and vernacular infrastructure to generate sustainable, resilient, nature-based technology. With a foreword by anthropologist Wade Davis and spanning 18 countries from Peru and the Philippines to Tanzania and Iran, this book explores millennia-old human ingenuity on how to live in symbiosis with nature. Manifesting the disclosure of hidden knowledge, the book’s artful Swiss binding showcases an open spine, revealing the construction of the book.Link︎︎︎
Designs for Different Futures
Kathryn B. Hiesinger, Michelle Millar Fisher, Emmet Byrne, Maite Borjabad López-Pastor, and Zoë Ryan
Designs for Different Futures records the concrete ideas and abstract dreams of designers, artists, academics, and scientists exploring how design might reframe our futures, socially, ethically, and aesthetically. With perspectives ranging from historical visions of the future to the use of biological materials in production processes, this is essential reading for anyone interested in how design might shape the world to come. Link︎︎︎
︎ Additional article from the book: The Design Imagination by Zoë Ryan
The Politics of Design
Victor Papanek
This book documents countless photographs, artistic works and designs, objects, drawings, letters, and other materials, some of which are published here for the first time. Papanek’s close exchange with contemporaries such as Richard Buckminster Fuller, George Nelson, and Marshall McLuhan is also examined. Contemporary work by Tomás Saraceno, Catherine Sarah Young, Gabriel Ann Maher, Thomas Thwaites, and Forensic Architecture, as well as Flui Coletivo and Questtonó, among others, rounds off the publication and demonstrates that Papanek’s interpretation of design as a tool for social transformation is as relevant as ever and continues to shape debate on social design, critical design, and design thinking. Link︎︎︎
Design for the Real World: Human Ecology and Social Change
Victor Papanek
Design for the Real World has, since its first appearance twenty-five years ago, become a classic. Translated into twenty-three languages, it is one of the world's most widely read books on design. In this edition, Victor Papanek examines the attempts by designers to combat the tawdry, the unsafe, the frivolous, the useless product, once again providing a blueprint for sensible, responsible design in this world which is deficient in resources and energy.
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Link for online PDF︎︎︎
CAPS LOCK
HOW CAPITALISM TOOK HOLD OF GRAPHIC DESIGN AND HOW TO ESCAPE FROM IT
Ruben Pater
CAPS LOCK uses clear language and striking visual examples to show how graphic design and capitalism are inextricably linked. The book contains many case studies of designed objects related to capitalist societies and cultures, and also examines how the education and professional practice of (graphic) designers supports the market economy and how design practice is caught within that very system.Link︎︎︎
Culture Strike:Art and Museums in an Age of Protest
Laura Raicovich
In this book, Raicovich explains some of the key museum flashpoints, and she also provides historical context for the current controversies. She shows how art museums arose as colonial institutions bearing an ideology of neutrality that masks their role in upholding capitalist values. And she suggests how museums can be reinvented to serve better, public ends.
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