Designing Worlds
Designing Worlds

Author: Kjetil Fallan

Publisher: Berghahn Books

Published: 2016-06-01

Total Pages: 296

ISBN-13: 1785331566

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From consumer products to architecture to advertising to digital technology, design is an undeniably global phenomenon. Yet despite their professed transnational perspective, historical studies of design have all too often succumbed to a bias toward Western, industrialized nations. This diverse but rigorously curated collection recalibrates our understanding of design history, reassessing regional and national cultures while situating them within an international context. Here, contributors from five continents offer nuanced studies that range from South Africa to the Czech Republic, all the while sensitive to the complexities of local variation and the role of nation-states in identity construction.

Design Development
Design Development

Author: Gabriel Patrocínio

Publisher: Editora Blucher

Published: 2019-10-10

Total Pages: 263

ISBN-13: 8521219032

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"The subject of Design Policies is slowly growing to be broadly discussed, although most of the time from within a design practitioners' and design enthusiasts' bubble. Public administration is gradually embracing design from another perspective - using Design Thinking to develop programmes and services. Lawmakers and government executives are still distant, frequently without a real knowledge of design and its potential. Governments (and designers as well) seem to be contented by design promotion actions or programmes, which are frequently wrongly accepted as a design policy. From this prospect, this book intends to be a contribution to the debate of Design Policies nourished by past experiences and reflections, but also from current practices - as in Europe and China, for example. The book was originally meant in hindsight of a document produced in the seventies by the United Nations Industrial Development Organization, UNIDO, within the context of a partnership with the International Council of Societies of Industrial Design, ICSID. This partnership resulted in a document discussing design as a driver of economic growth, prepared by Gui Bonsiepe in 1973, and then summarized by the UNIDO Secretariat in 1975 as the Basic guidelines for policy of industrial design in developing countries. Both documents were made available for this book by UNIDO, and are reproduced here as appendices. Although originally aimed at developing countries, after these four decades of unsettling growth of wicked problems, this theme deserves to be reviewed and discussed thoroughly. Design might play a very significant role when approaching contemporary problems such as rearranging urban spaces, urban mobility, tourism, immigration, housing, violence, and environment among others. These - not so new - wicked problems prompts to a whole new perspective on design and public design policies that goes beyond the original context here. The perspective of the "Third World" economy (as it was known at the time) might offer insights to understand and perhaps solve problems of any size economy - especially if we consider the aspects of local or regional problems. It is time to exercise empathy towards someone else's problems and to reflect under different scales and measures, and design seem to be the perfect instrument for it. Mugendi M'Rithaa, former President of ICSID (currently the WDO, World Design Organization) saluted the book as "the most important contribution on this field in the last ten years" (cited in the final remarks of his interview in the chapter Design in Africa: I participate, therefore I am). In Brazil the book was awarded twice - initially at the Objeto:Brasil International Design Award in May 2016, and then later at the same year at the MCB (Museum of the Brazilian Home) Design Awards of 2016. The jury of this later has acclaimed the book as "a theoretical and academic milestone, with potential to change the current practice and understanding of Design." After the successful launch in Portugal with conferences in three design schools in 2016, the book was selected in 2017 to the exhibition Brasil: Hoje at MUDE, Lisbon's Museum of Fashion and Design. The curator, Frederico Duarte, highlighted in the catalogue: "The first and indispensable book on design and development in the Portuguese language." In 2018 the book was selected in Spain to be part of BID, the Ibero-American Design Biennial, in Madrid. In the same year was published an e-book edition in Portuguese to make it more accessible, at the same time that this first English edition started being prepared."

Scandinavian Design
Scandinavian Design

Author: Kjetil Fallan

Publisher: Berg

Published: 2013-05-09

Total Pages: 484

ISBN-13: 0857852183

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Scandinavian design is still seen as democratic, functional and simple, its products exemplifying the same characteristics now as they have done since the 1950s. But both the essence and the history of Scandinavian design are much more complex than this. Scandinavian Design: Alternative Histories presents a radically new assessment, a corrective to the persistent mythologies and reductive accounts of Scandinavian design. The book brings together case studies from the early twentieth century to today. Drawn from fields as diverse as transport, engineering, packaging, photography, law, interiors, and corporate identity, these studies tell new or unfamiliar stories about the production, mediation and consumption of design. An alternative history is created, one much more alive to national and regional differences and to types of product. Scandinavian Design analyses a century of design culture from Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden and, in so doing, presents a sophisticated introduction to Scandinavian design.

U.S. International Exhibitions during the Cold War
U.S. International Exhibitions during the Cold War

Author: Andrew James Wulf

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2015-01-30

Total Pages: 357

ISBN-13: 144224643X

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Although cultural diplomacy has become an increasingly fashionable term embraced by academics, foreign-service personnel, and private sector commercial and cultural interests, the very practice of this idea remains conspicuously challenging to define. This book takes on this problem, advancing a new understanding of cultural diplomacy that results from a historical investigation of a single area of government and private sector partnership, and what became in the mid-twentieth century the most prominent manifestation of this alliance—the cultural exhibitions sent abroad to “tell America’s story” with the goal of “winning hearts and minds.” To illustrate this point, selected exhibitions and the intentions of the policymakers who proposed them are interrogated for the first time beside archival documentation, writings from the history of design, advertising, science, as well as art historical and museum studies theories that address various aspects of the history of collecting and display, all of which explore the reality of how these exhibitions were conceived and prepared for foreign audiences. Most importantly, personal interviews with the designers and government representatives responsible for the ultimate appearance of these events upturn preconceived notions of how these events came to be. Seventy-five photographs from the exhibits make this history come alive. Through this discussion these questions are answered: What was America showing of itself through these exhibitions? And, more urgently, what do these exhibitions tell us about U.S. interest in verisimilitude? This investigation spans the crucial years of American exhibitions abroad (1955-1975), beginning with the formation of an official system of exhibiting American commercial wares and political ideas at trade fairs, through official exchanges with the U.S.S.R., to pavilions at world's fairs, and finally to museum exhibitions that signaled a return to the display of founding American values. They are thus complex ideological symbols in which concepts of national identity, globalization, technology, consumerism, design, and image management both coincided and clashed. The investigation of these exhibitions enhances the understanding of a significant chapter of U.S. cultural diplomacy at the height of the Cold War and how America constantly reimagined itself.

Voiture Minimum
Voiture Minimum

Author: Antonio Amado

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2011-02-11

Total Pages: 363

ISBN-13: 0262015366

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A colorful account of Le Corbusier's love affair with the automobile, his vision of the ideal vehicle, and his tireless promotion of a design that industry never embraced. Le Corbusier, who famously called a house “a machine for living,” was fascinated—even obsessed—by another kind of machine, the automobile. His writings were strewn with references to autos: “If houses were built industrially, mass-produced like chassis, an aesthetic would be formed with surprising precision,” he wrote in Toward an Architecture (1923). In his “white phase” of the twenties and thirties, he insisted that his buildings photographed with a modern automobile in the foreground. Le Corbusier moved beyond the theoretical in 1936, entering (with his cousin Pierre Jeanneret) an automobile design competition, submitting plans for “a minimalist vehicle for maximum functionality,” the Voiture Minimum. Despite Le Corbusier's energetic promotion of his design to several important automakers, the Voiture Minimum was never mass-produced. This book is the first to tell the full and true story of Le Corbusier's adventure in automobile design. Architect Antonio Amado describes the project in detail, linking it to Le Corbusier's architectural work, to Modernist utopian urban visions, and to the automobile design projects of other architects including Walter Gropius and Frank Lloyd Wright. He provides abundant images, including many pages of Le Corbusier's sketches and plans for the Voiture Minimum, and reprints Le Corbusier's letters seeking a manufacturer. Le Corbusier's design is often said to have been the inspiration for Volkswagen's enduringly popular Beetle; the architect himself implied as much, claiming that his design for the 1936 competition originated in 1928, before the Beetle. Amado Lorenzo, after extensive examination of archival and source materials, disproves this; the influence may have gone the other way. Although many critics considered the Voiture Minimum a footnote in Le Corbusier's career, Le Corbusier did not. This book, lavishly illustrated and exhaustively documented, restores Le Corbusier's automobile to the main text.