Design Studies

Design as Future-Making brings together leading international designers, scholars, and critics to address ways in which design is shaping the future. The contributors share an understanding of design as a practice that, with its focus on innovation and newness, is a natural ally of futurity. Ultimately, the choices made by designers are understood here as choices about the kind of world we want to live in. Design as Future-Making locates design in a space of creative and critical reflection, examining the expanding nature of practice in fields such as biomedicine, sustainability, digital crafting, fashion, architecture, urbanism, and design activism. The authors contextualize design and its affects within issues of social justice, environmental health, political agency, education, and the right to pleasure and play. Collectively, they make the case that, as an integrated mode of thought and action, design is intrinsically social and deeply political.

Design Studies: A Reader is the ideal entry point for any student who wants to understand the many complex roles of design--as process, product, function, symbol, and use. Reflecting the diverse range of perspectives on design, the reader brings together over 70 key texts. The essays are presented in themed sections covering history, methods, theory, visuality, identity, consumption, labor, industrialization, new technology, sustainability, and globalization. Each section is separately introduced and each concluded with a guide to further reading. Authors include: Theodor Adorno, Arjun Appadurai, Rayner Banham, Jean Baudrillard, Pierre Bourdieu, Cheryl Buckley, Michel de Certeau, Margaret Crawford, Michel Foucault, Buckminster Fuller, Paul du Gay, Erving Goffman, Donna Haraway, John Chris Jones, Guy Julier, Naomi Klein, Ezio Manzini, Victor Margolin, and many others. In addition, a final section of specially commissioned essays analyzes 10 seminal designs of the 20th Century, from Helvetica to the cell phone. Bringing together the best classic and contemporary writing, Design Studies: A Reader will be invaluable to all students of Design as well as to students of Architecture, Art, Material Culture and Sociology.

We are conditioned over time to regard environmental forces such as dust, mud, gas, smoke, debris, weeds, and insects as inimical to architecture. Much of today's discussion about sustainable and green design revolves around efforts to clean or filter out these primitive elements. While mostly the direct result of human habitation, these 'subnatural forces' are nothing new. In fact, our ability to manage these forces has long defined the limits of civilized life. From its origins, architecture has been engaged in both fighting and embracing these so-called destructive forces. In Subnature, David Gissen, author of our critically acclaimed Big and Green, examines experimental work by today's leading designers, scholars, philosophers, and biologists that rejects the idea that humans can somehow recreate a purely natural world, free of the untidy elements that actually constitute nature. Each chapter provides an examination of a particular form of subnature and its actualization in contemporary design practice. The exhilarating and at times unsettling work featured in Subnature suggests an alternative view of natural processes and ecosystems and their relationships to human society and architecture. R&Sie(n)'s Mosquito Bottleneck house in Trinidad uses a skin that actually attracts mosquitoes and moves them through the building, while keeping them separate from the occupants. In his building designs the architect Philippe Rahm draws the dank air from the earth and the gasses and moisture from our breath to define new forms of spatial experience. In his Underground House, Mollier House, and Omnisport Hall, Rahm forces us to consider the odor of soil and the emissions from our body as the natural context of a future architecture. [Cero 9]'s design for the Magic Mountain captures excess heat emitted from a power generator in Ames, Iowa, to fuel a rose garden that embellishes the industrial site and creates a natural mountain rising above the city's skyline. Subnature looks beyond LEED ratings, green roofs, and solar panels toward a progressive architecture based on a radical new conception of nature.