Since I came to architecture through classical archeology, writing about design was kind of like coming home. I made the switch to journalism after moving to Tokyo. At that time, Japan’s economy was going strong, boom cranes were everywhere, and the worldwide appetite for information about new construction was robust. An outgrowth of my success documenting architecture, my interest in design was sparked partly by the chairs and teapots created by Japanese architects but also by the superb array of daily-use goods available in Japan. The dearth of information about these items and their designers led me to cover design at various scales.
Several years ago, when I was living in Tokyo, I needed a blender.
So, I went to MUJI and bought the one they had on offer. It was smaller than a US model, but the components fit together so easily, and the blades did their job so efficiently. I had to marvel. Unsurprisingly, the appliance I purchased was the product of Naoto Fukasawa who has a gift for making ordinary, everyday goods better. They practically intuit the user’s movement. Like my blender, these are things one buys to fulfill a basic need. But then cannot imagine living without them.
Filled with first-person explanations, this book is a window into the mind of one of Japan’s most accomplished designers.
A brand new monograph on one of Japan's best-known product designers, featuring more than 100 of his latest works
Naoto Fukasawa's simple, restrained, and user-friendly products have an extraordinarily universal appeal. Featuring more than 100 of his latest designs, including furniture, phones, watches, fashion, luggage, and accessories, Naoto Fukasawa: Embodiment perfectly captures Fukasawa's perspective on the dynamic interplay between people, places, and things.
It places the designer's products into the context of the contemporary design world and offers a first-hand account of Fukasawa's design philosophy.
Jeff Miller is one of the country’s leading furniture designer/craftsmen. He is also a dedicated teacher and a prolific writer, with over 40 articles and 4 books (with a fifth in preparation). Jeff has exhibited furniture in shows from coast to coast, and has a piece in the permanent collection of the Chicago History Museum. Jeff’s work is heavily influenced by his former career as a professional musician, and he strives to make each of his pieces feel musical in some way.
Jeff is a runner and – despite the hindrance of living in the flat mid-west – an avid skier. A substantial chunk of his time is taken up by dialysis treatments, but he tries not to let that slow him down too much.
This is a beautiful and thoughtful book. And much like others on this list, it offers up a personal take on woodworking. Mike feels that shop time should be devoted to engagement in the work, and offers up strategies for achieving that goal. He also offers beautiful projects, from simple to fairly advanced, that foster learning a slew of techniques for accurate work. The book also includes a discussion of design and its role for the woodworker.
The Why and How of Woodworking reflects the growing appreciation for the handmade, a movement toward simplifying and uncluttering. There is a growing understanding of the need to fill our lives with meaningful and useful objects. How can woodworkers answer that call? Instagram sensation Mike Pekovich explains how to make work that is worth the time and effort it takes to make it, work that makes a difference, and work that will add to the quality of our lives. . Explains the basics of woodworking, from choosing lumber with care, cutting joinery accurately, and preparing and finishing the surfaces. .…
I’m an author and former journalist with a fascination with design and consumer culture. I’ve been writing about design and pop culture since completing an assignment on Jack Telnack’s Ford Taurus and Thunderbird designs for a national news magazine. My interest deepened when I moved to daily journalism and wrote about Raymond Loewy’s design for the S-1 Pennsylvania Railroad locomotive. When the newspaper industry began cratering in a blizzard of mergers, buyouts, and bad management, I spent 25 years working in media relations at Penn State and Juniata College. I looked for an involving side project as a respite from writing professorial profiles and found safe haven with the life and legacy of Raymond Loewy.
Populuxe was the first book I read that connected art, consumerism, and industrial design in clear, pointed, and witty language. Hine, an author as well as a critic for the Philadelphia Inquirer, covers what he calls “America’s spending spree” decade (1954-1964), by showing the connections revealed by shoppers’ choice of cars, homes, furniture, and appliances. Populuxe resonated for me because Hine wielded the tools of the critic and the historian and explained the art and design influences to be found in dishwashers, tailfins, and Naughyde. My curiosity about why people buy certain products was piqued by Hine’s analysis and showed readers that not all essays on art and design need to drip with impenetrable prose or obtuse insights.
The decade from 1954 to 1964 was one of America's great shopping sprees. Never before were there so many people able to acquire so many things, and never before was there such a choice. Thomas Hine calls it Populuxe--populism and popularity and luxury, plus a totally unnecessary "e" to give it a little class; the word itself is as synthetic as the world it denotes. With the help of more than 250 amazing and amusing pictures in black and white and color (and what colors!), Thomas Hine explores, recaptures and explains this glorious, vanished world of hopes and dreams and…
Since I came to architecture through classical archeology, writing about design was kind of like coming home. I made the switch to journalism after moving to Tokyo. At that time, Japan’s economy was going strong, boom cranes were everywhere, and the worldwide appetite for information about new construction was robust. An outgrowth of my success documenting architecture, my interest in design was sparked partly by the chairs and teapots created by Japanese architects but also by the superb array of daily-use goods available in Japan. The dearth of information about these items and their designers led me to cover design at various scales.
I first encountered this book many years before I began my own.
It accompanied a marvelous exhibit launched by the Philadelphia Museum of Art which, sadly, I did not see in person. Arranged by decade, the body of the book features individual products from the 1950s to the 1990s.
This reveals the overlap between different design disciplines and the cross-fertilization of ideas. I love the large photos which pull you in and make you want to read the texts. The supporting essays were contributed by many of the most important design luminaries at work in Japan.
By the time I was working on my book, many of them were already gone.
Since I came to architecture through classical archeology, writing about design was kind of like coming home. I made the switch to journalism after moving to Tokyo. At that time, Japan’s economy was going strong, boom cranes were everywhere, and the worldwide appetite for information about new construction was robust. An outgrowth of my success documenting architecture, my interest in design was sparked partly by the chairs and teapots created by Japanese architects but also by the superb array of daily-use goods available in Japan. The dearth of information about these items and their designers led me to cover design at various scales.
This was one of the first books I read when I began my research.
Authored by Japan’s most important product designer, this essay collection covers a wide range of topics, including the stories behind some of his most iconic designs. I particularly enjoy Yanagi’s explanation of the Cellulose Tape Table Dispenser whose white, sculptural form swivels. How cool is that?
Happily, when the dispenser was briefly re-released a few years ago by a Japanese office goods manufacturer, I was able to purchase one of my own. It sits on my desk, a source of inspiration.
I would like to consider myself an experienced and successful designer, researcher, and educator. I'm an Associate Professor in Communication Design and the Head of Education for the School of Design at Northumbria University in the United Kingdom, where I've taught and researched for the last twenty years so I'm super passionate about this subject and love explaining how design works. Before joining academia, I worked internationally as a designer and creative director for numerous prestigious design and media organizations, including Philips, Time-Warner, Windmill Lane Pictures, and WPP in the UK, Ireland, USA, and Southeast Asia. Working in these different businesses and locations gave me a broad perspective on the role and importance of design.
This essential book by Don Norman does not need any more plugging, but it would be impossible to leave it out.
The book forms a brilliant introduction to User Experience Design by explaining how the design of everyday objects relies on an intuitive understanding of how they work. Once we translate this thinking from the physical to the digital world, we are halfway there as UX/UI designers.
Even the smartest among us can feel inept as we fail to figure out which light switch or oven burner to turn on, or whether to push, pull, or slide a door. The fault, argues this ingenious,even liberating,book, lies not in ourselves, but in product design that ignores the needs of users and the principles of cognitive psychology. The problems range from ambiguous and hidden controls to arbitrary relationships between controls and functions, coupled with a lack of feedback or other assistance and unreasonable demands on memorization. The Design of Everyday Things shows that good, usable design is possible. The…
I am an information architect, writer, and community organizer on a mission to make information architecture education accessible to everybody. I started practicing IA in pure pursuit of stronger visual design, but in the two decades since have developed an insatiable appetite for understanding and teaching the practical skills that make people better sensemakers, regardless of their role or medium. The books I chose for this list are all foundational to me becoming the sensemaker that I am today. I offer them as suggestions because they are not the books you will find should you search for “Information Architecture” yet they have all become my go-to recommendations for helping others to strengthen their own sensemaking.
A mental model is our unique map of all our knowledge. Each person has their own, and we can’t see each other’s mental models or even see our own. Yet those maps dictate everything about how we show up and how we interpret the world around us.
Mental Models by Indi Young is the best deep dive into this subject and stands as a must-read for anyone making things for other humans to make sense of. If you are going to succeed in practicing information architecture, you must become increasingly adept at understanding how other people think about the world.
I recommend this book because it takes something theoretical and presents a solid methodological approach that anyone can grasp and adapt to their process as long as they are curious. This book also served as a major inspiration when writing How to Make Sense of Any Mess, as it…
There is no single methodology for creating the perfect product—but you can increase your odds. One of the best ways is to understand users' reasons for doing things. Mental Models gives you the tools to help you grasp, and design for, those reasons. Adaptive Path co-founder Indi Young has written a roll-up-your-sleeves book for designers, managers, and anyone else interested in making design strategic, and successful.
I ‘pick the brains’ of expert software developers to understand what makes them expert. I’ve spent decades studying how professional software developers reason and communicate about design and problem solving. Informed by the seminal books I’ve highlighted (among many others), my research is grounded in empirical studies of professionals in industry and draws on cognitive and social theory. Observing, talking to, and working with hundreds of professional software developers in organisations ranging from start-ups to the world’s major software companies has exposed actionable insights into the thinking that distinguishes high-performing teams.
Nigel Cross was one of the first design researchers to express the notion of ‘designerly’ ways of thinking and knowing – “the application of scientific and other organised knowledge to practical tasks…” – as means of addressing ill-defined and ill-structured problems.
The attention to ‘messy’ problems, and to the iterative and fluid nature of the design process, is what first drew me to his work; what kept me coming back was a combination of Cross’s clarity of thought, and the way he grounds his perspectives in studies of outstanding designers and real-world examples.
In this compilation of key lectures and essays, he reflects on the nature of design and discusses what sorts of cognitive skills, strategies, and abilities effective designers bring to bear.
A revised and edited collection of key parts of Professor Cross's published work, this book offers a timeline of scholarship and research over the course of 25 years, and a resource for understanding how designers think and work. Coverage includes the nature and nurture of design ability; creative cognition in design; the natural intelligence of design; design discipline versus design science; and expertise in design.
I ‘pick the brains’ of expert software developers to understand what makes them expert. I’ve spent decades studying how professional software developers reason and communicate about design and problem solving. Informed by the seminal books I’ve highlighted (among many others), my research is grounded in empirical studies of professionals in industry and draws on cognitive and social theory. Observing, talking to, and working with hundreds of professional software developers in organisations ranging from start-ups to the world’s major software companies has exposed actionable insights into the thinking that distinguishes high-performing teams.
This book is a delightful example of what happens when someone engages eyes and mind: it provides important insights into the cussedness of things people design, by looking thoughtfully at simple, ‘everyday things’.
In doing so, Norman both illustrates the constructive application of cognitive science in understanding design, and provides a compelling argument for user-centred design.
Even the smartest among us can feel inept as we fail to figure our which light switch or oven burner to turn on, or whether to push, pull, or slide a door. The fault, argues this fascinating, ingenious,even liberating,book, lies not in ourselves, but in product design that ignores the needs of users and the principles of cognitive psychology.The problems range from ambiguous and hidden controls to arbitrary relationships between controls and functions, coupled with a lack of feedback or other assistance and unreasonable demands on memorization. The book presents examples aplenty,among them, the VCR, computer, and office telephone, all…
Art, technology, and science…I have been seamlessly traversing domains all my life. I grew up with twin interests in physical sciences and visual arts, finding beauty in math and art and seeing creativity as being one thing rather than something living in compartments. Art influenced my research in chaos and complexity, and blurring boundaries characterized my work as dean of engineering when creating educational/research initiatives in design, art, entrepreneurship, energy, and sustainability. I also received visible external recognition as a Guggenheim Fellow and member of both the National Academy of Engineering and the National Academy of Sciences, as well as the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
This book will inspire you, make you see possibilities, and widen your thinking.
The back cover’s proclamation, “It is not about the world of design, it is about the design of world”, says it all. The design of this book itself opened new frontiers; text and images interspersed as they had never been seen before, intertwining technologies, inventions, and pivotal events that are affecting humanity worldwide.
Massive Change is a modern, illustrated primer on the new inventions, technologies, and events that are affecting the human race worldwide. This book is part of a broader research project by Bruce Mau Design, intended to provoke debate and discussion about the future of design culture - defined generally as the 'familiar objects and techniques that are transforming our lives'.
Through an original selection of essays, interviews and provocative imagery aimed at a broad audience, Massive Change explores the changing forces of design in the contemporary world and, from this angle, expands the definition of design to include the built…
