Design Books

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  1. Just Enough Design

    Just Enough Design

    The Japanese phrase hodo-hodo originates in ancient times. When contemporary designer Taku Satoh applies it to his work, it means 'just enough.' Hodo-hodo design deliberately holds back, leaving room for individuals to engage with objects according to their unique sensibilities. In his new book 'Just Enough Design,' Taku Satoh explains his design philosophy through tangible examples. By urging readers to appreciate everyday objects and spaces, he delivers a message rooted in the past yet perfectly suited to our times. He shows how 'just enough' offers an alternative way for us to engage with our possessions, our environment, our history, and each other.

  2. How Design Makes Us Think - And Feel and Do Things

    How Design Makes Us Think: And Feel and Do Things

    From posters to cars, design is everywhere. While we often discuss the aesthetics of design, we don't always dig deeper to unearth the ways design can overtly, and covertly, convince us of a certain way of thinking. How Design Makes Us Think collects hundreds of examples across graphic design, product design, industrial design, and architecture to illustrate how design can inspire, provoke, amuse, anger, or reassure us.

  3. Intercultural Design Basics

    Intercultural Design Basics

    Intercultural Design Basics presents an intercultural and innovative approach to design education. The book gives intercultural insights when discussing the basic principles of design, typography and color theory. It incorporates contrasting ideas on design and various design teaching methods. Through examples of intercultural design workshops, it inspires collaboration with international teams. Practical methods used in these international perspectives encourage the development of cultural and social awareness, inspire different design styles helping you perceive cultural diversity.

  4. Design Things That Make Sense

    Design Things That Make Sense

    Design Things That Make Sense is the first and complete guide to designing technology-based products and services. Through case studies, practical insights, examples, tips, and tools, readers will learn how to adopt a user-centered mindset and apply technologies in a meaningful way. The book contains over 50 design strategies to design strong benefits and minimize the resistance people might have against new technologies.

  5. Design Innovation and Integration

    Design Innovation and Integration

    Design Innovation and Integration is a guidebook for the industry leaders of tomorrow. This book provides a holistic understanding of the approaches, practices and tools required to go beyond creative ideas to integrating design strategically within an organization.

  6. Visual Discoveries - A Collection of Sections

    Visual Discoveries: A Collection of Sections

    Visual Discoveries: A Collection of Sections is an image-forward book that is devoted to showcasing notable section drawings throughout history and demonstrating that the section drawing, while having roots in architecture, has spread to many other professions and disciplines. These professions include medicine, transportation, product design, geology, and landscape architecture.

  7. Design and Culture - A Transdisciplinary History

    Design and Culture: A Transdisciplinary History

    Design and Culture: A Transdisciplinary History offers an inclusive overview that crosses disciplinary boundaries and helps define the next phase of global design practice. This book examines the interaction of design with advances in technology, developments in science, and changing cultural attitudes. It looks to the past to prepare for the future and is the first book to offer an innovative transdisciplinary design history that integrates multidisciplinary sources of knowledge into a mindful whole.

  8. The Business of Design - Balancing Creativity and Profitability

    The Business of Design: Balancing Creativity and Profitability

    The Business of Design debunks the myth that business sense and creative talent are mutually exclusive, showing design professionals that they can pursue their passion and turn a profit. The book covers all aspects of running a successful design business, including human resources, client management, product development, marketing, and licensing.

  9. Design Anthropology in Context

    Design Anthropology in Context

    This book explores the broad territory of design anthropology, covering key approaches, ways of working and areas of debate and tension. It understands design as fundamentally human-centered and argues for design anthropology based primarily on collaboration and communication. Adam Drazin suggests the most important collaborative knowledge which design anthropology develops is heuristic, emerging as engagements between fieldwork sites and design studios. The chapters draw on material culture literature and include a wide range of examples of different projects and outputs. Highlighting the importance of design as a topic in the study of contemporary culture, this is valuable reading for students and scholars of anthropology and design as well as practitioners.

  10. User Friendly - How the Hidden Rules of Design Are Changing the Way We Live, Work, and Play

    User Friendly: How the Hidden Rules of Design Are Changing the Way We Live, Work, and Play

    In User Friendly, Cliff Kuang and Robert Fabricant reveal the untold story of a paradigm that quietly rules our modern lives: the assumption that machines should anticipate what we need. Spanning over a century of sweeping changes, from women's rights to the Great Depression to World War II to the rise of the digital era, this book unpacks the ways in which the world has been - and continues to be - remade according to the principles of the once-obscure discipline of user-experience design.

  11. Dot Line Shape - The Basic Elements of Design and Illustration

    Dot Line Shape: The Basic Elements of Design and Illustration

    Going back to basics, Dot Line Shape is a comprehensive collection of projects that manifest the three elements in inspiring and ingenious ways to bring unique creative visions to life. No matter how trends or platforms change over time, they serve as timeless components that provide designers and artists around the world with infinite means of expression to make a lasting impact.

  12. Critical Fabulations - Reworking the Methods and Margins of Design

    Critical Fabulations: Reworking the Methods and Margins of Design

    Critical Fabulations is a proposal to redefine design in a way that not only challenges the field's dominant paradigms but also changes the practice of design itself. In this book, Daniela Rosner proposes redefining design as investigative and activist, personal and culturally situated, responsive and responsible. Challenging the field's dominant paradigms and reinterpreting its history, Rosner wants to change the way we historicize the practice, reworking it from the inside. Focusing on the development of computational systems, she takes on powerful narratives of innovation and technology shaped by the professional expertise that has become integral to the field's mounting status within the new industrial economy.

  13. The V&A Book of Color in Design

    The V&A Book of Color in Design

    The V&A Book of Color in Design is a celebration and exploration of color, as revealed through objects in the world-class collections of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. Structured by color, it offers fascinating insights into the choices made by designers and makers from across the world and throughout history. Each chapter begins with a brief introduction that considers the history, symbolism, and use of an individual color. Objects - from items of jewelry, textiles, glassware, and ceramics to furniture and more - are reproduced in a visual selection that explores the varied hues of every color. However different objects within each section may be in their detail and meaning, they are united by their common color, revealing surprising connections between them.

  14. Mid-Century Modern Design - A Complete Sourcebook

    Mid-Century Modern Design: A Complete Sourcebook

    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, collectible, 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.

  15. Design Your Thinking

    Design Your Thinking

    Creative problem-solving is at the heart of innovation, and some of the world's most innovative companies are very systematic in following this approach. This book attempts to offer a practitioner's perspective on how the tenets, methods and discipline of design thinking can be applied across a range of domains, including to everyday problems, and help us become expert problem-solvers through the use of the appropriate toolsets, skill sets and mindsets.

  16. Design in Asia - The New Wave

    Design in Asia: The New Wave

    'Design in Asia: The New Wave' is a major survey of Asia's next generation of designers, featuring the work of over eighty rising stars from across the region.

  17. The Design Book

    The Design Book

    The Design Book presents iconic pieces by Le Corbusier, Philippe Starck, the Eames, and Apple, alongside classic objects such as the paper clip, the hurricane lantern, and the martini glass. Each entry pairs an image with a descriptive caption, providing accessible information about the product, designer, manufacturer, and history. This new, mini edition features 30 new products, expertly selected and curated from the last 15 years.

  18. Moving Objects - A Cultural History of Emotive Design

    Moving Objects: A Cultural History of Emotive Design

    Moving Objects deals with emotive design: designed objects that demand to be engaged with rather than simply used. If postmodernism depended upon ironic distance, and Critical Design is all about questions, then emotive design runs hotter than this, confronting how designers are using feelings in what they make. Damon Taylor's original study considers these emotionally laden, highly authored works, often produced in limited editions and sold like art - objects such as a chair made from cuddly toys, a leather sofa that resembles a cow, and a jewelry box fashioned from human hair.

  19. Design Thinking - The Handbook

    Design Thinking: The Handbook

    This book is for all who intend to understand and practice the design thinking method in the most rapid and uncomplicated way. The first part describes in depth what this method is all about. The second part of this comprehensive book offers you a step-by-step guide to practically apply design thinking. The subsequent sample cases show how to put theory into practice.

  20. Articulating Design Decisions

    Articulating Design Decisions

    This practical guide focuses on principles, tactics, and actionable methods for presenting your designs. Whether you design apps, websites, or products, you'll learn how to get support from people who have influence over the project with the goal of creating the best user experience.

  21. Materialising Colour

    Materialising Colour

    Materialising Colour is a coffee table book that dives into the work and methodologies of master colorist Giulio Ridolfo, the man behind the success of many of Kvadrat's beloved contemporary fabric collections and color palettes.

  22. Culture Sensitive Design - A Guide to Culture in Practice

    Culture Sensitive Design: A Guide to Culture in Practice

    Societies worldwide are increasingly interconnected through trade, migration, education, and digitization. This has resulted in a profound new complexity of cultural groups. Consequently, designers are confronted with the challenge of gaining a clear understanding of this cultural diversity. Culture Sensitive Design provides an overview of theory as well as practical models and methods, aimed to motivate and inspire design students, practitioners, and educators to get in touch with different cultural values, customs, and symbols. It is in order to avoid mistakes that may be obstructive for certain groups of people; to enable cross-cultural cooperation; to learn more about the diverse and complex layers of culture that define who we are, how we think, how we imagine, and how we create; and to open up the design space, thereby creating a tremendous source of new ideas.

  23. Inspired by Method - Creative Tools for the Design Process

    Inspired by Method: Creative Tools for the Design Process

    Inspired by Method is both a guide to and a source of inspiration. Designing involves individuality and a systematic approach, which we may apply consciously or subconsciously, depending on the project. The 5D-method for inspiration, created by Alexandra Martini, is an incisive little tool that you can use in any design process. It takes away the fear of starting a new project. This method uses the following five dimensions: Formal-Aesthetic Dimension, Haptic Dimension, Production Dimension, Cultural Dimension and Interactive Dimension. It will help you analyze, experiment with and realize your ideas.

  24. Creative Content Kit - A Method to Ideate and Create Content Strategy

    Creative Content Kit: A Method to Ideate and Create Content Strategy

    Creative Content Kit is a toolkit with a four-step process for creating a content strategy. Each stage contains a set of cards with methods, content types, platforms and tools. The deck of 65 cards is made for content professionals and non-specialist to ideate, test and solve content problems. It provides a helpful visual structure to ease communication in planning alone, with your team and clients.

  25. The Pocket Complete Color Harmony

    The Pocket Complete Color Harmony

    This pocket-size version of The Complete Color Harmony features the color explorations, insights, and palettes included in the original version in a handy, take-along size. Get an introduction to using the color wheel and discover the key aspects of color, such as warm, cool, pale, and bright. Then, delve into moods and color and see how a wide variety of palettes can come across as earthy, powerful, regal, calm, dependable, and more.

  26. How Design Makes the World

    How Design Makes the World

    In How Design Makes The World, bestselling author and designer Scott Berkun reveals how designers, from software engineers to city planners, have succeeded and failed us. From the airplane armrest to the Facebook 'like' button, and everything in between, Berkun shows how design helps or hinders everyone, and offers a new way to think about the world around you.

  27. The Design Thinking Toolbox

    The Design Thinking Toolbox

    The Design Thinking Toolbox explains the most important tools and methods to put Design Thinking into action. Based on the largest international survey on the use of design thinking, the most popular methods are described in four pages each by an expert from the global Design Thinking community.

  28. Scandinavian Design and the United States, 1890-1980

    Scandinavian Design and the United States, 1890-1980

    This stunning book examines design exchanges between the United States and Scandinavia over nearly a century and explores the fascinating reasons why Scandinavian design has continued to resonate with Americans. Focusing on the extensive influence of Scandinavian design in the United States, this book shows how Nordic ideas about modern design and the objects themselves had an indelible impact on American culture and material life. It also considers America's influence on Scandinavian design, showing how the cultural exchange is mutual by nature.

  29. Design Dedication - Adaptive Mentalities in Design Education

    Design Dedication: Adaptive Mentalities in Design Education

    Design Dedication makes a plea for adaptive mentalities within design pedagogy, with a non-normative approach to design practices. It explores an attitude in and towards design education that is socially engaged, politically aware, generous in approach, lyrical in tone, experimental in form and collaborative in practice.

  30. The Practical Guide to Experience Design

    The Practical Guide to Experience Design

    Shannon E. Thomas, a design and strategy consultant and the founder of Artificial Design, leverages her years of experience in design team management and product development to guide readers through the steps, from discovery to production, helping them to understand the big picture of how these processes work together and inform one another. Thomas leads the reader through the process in four phases: discovering, defining, refining, and building. Each chapter covers a single methodology, providing insight via detailed descriptions, step-by-step guidance, and high-fidelity examples.