"[This book] is an anthology of key writings written over the past 55 years by leading proponents, researchers, and practitioners shaping the emergence of socially responsible design as a concept, as a nascent field of study, and as a developing discipline within professional design practice."--Preface (page [xiii]).
The Social Design Reader explores the ways in which design can be a catalyst for social change. Bringing together key texts of the last fifty years, editor Elizabeth Resnick traces the emergence of the notion of socially responsible design. This volume represents the authentic voices of the thinkers, writers and designers who are helping to build a 'canon' of informed literature which documents the development of the discipline. The Social Design Reader is divided into three parts. Section 1: Making a Stand includes an introduction to the term 'social design' and features papers which explore its historical underpinnings. Section 2: Creating the Future documents the emergence of social design as a concept, as a nascent field of study, and subsequently as a rapidly developing professional discipline, and Section 3: A Sea Change is made up of papers acknowledging social design as a firmly established practice. Contextualising section introductions are provided to aid readers in understanding the original source material, while summary boxes clearly articulate how each text fits with the larger milieu of social design theory, methods, and practice.
From the lost art of show-card writing and the tumultuous days of guerrilla magazine publishing to the latest in electronic leaflet design and hot magazine covers, acclaimed graphic designer and author Steven Heller provides dozens of stunning examples of how graphic design has transformed from a subset of pop culture to a cultural driving force on its own.
How insights from the social sciences, including social psychology and economics, can improve the design of online communities. Online communities are among the most popular destinations on the Internet, but not all online communities are equally successful. For every flourishing Facebook, there is a moribund Friendster—not to mention the scores of smaller social networking sites that never attracted enough members to be viable. This book offers lessons from theory and empirical research in the social sciences that can help improve the design of online communities. The authors draw on the literature in psychology, economics, and other social sciences, as well as their own research, translating general findings into useful design claims. They explain, for example, how to encourage information contributions based on the theory of public goods, and how to build members' commitment based on theories of interpersonal bond formation. For each design claim, they offer supporting evidence from theory, experiments, or observational studies.
The role of design, both expert and nonexpert, in the ongoing wave of social innovation toward sustainability. In a changing world everyone designs: each individual person and each collective subject, from enterprises to institutions, from communities to cities and regions, must define and enhance a life project. Sometimes these projects generate unprecedented solutions; sometimes they converge on common goals and realize larger transformations. As Ezio Manzini describes in this book, we are witnessing a wave of social innovations as these changes unfold—an expansive open co-design process in which new solutions are suggested and new meanings are created. Manzini distinguishes between diffuse design (performed by everybody) and expert design (performed by those who have been trained as designers) and describes how they interact. He maps what design experts can do to trigger and support meaningful social changes, focusing on emerging forms of collaboration. These range from community-supported agriculture in China to digital platforms for medical care in Canada; from interactive storytelling in India to collaborative housing in Milan. These cases illustrate how expert designers can support these collaborations—making their existence more probable, their practice easier, their diffusion and their convergence in larger projects more effective. Manzini draws the first comprehensive picture of design for social innovation: the most dynamic field of action for both expert and nonexpert designers in the coming decades.
When you start to deconstruct or question design, all sorts of questions emerge: How does design affect our behaviour, our use of resources, our choices and freedoms to participate in social, political or economic decision-making, and the extent to which we feel we have agency over our lives? Jan Boelen in conversation with Michael Kaethlers Social matter, social design' challenges the way we look at, think of, and interact with the social world by emphasising the role of materiality. This enlarged field for engagement demands that design incorporates a more nuanced and complex reading of how the social is intertwined with the material, which confronts the often reductive or simplistic notion of ?social design?, and offers novel forms of critical and meaningful engagement at a time of mounting social contradictions.0The essays in this book explore and unveil uncanny, disconcerting or discordant connections, bricolages, assumptions or breaches at critical junctures for transformation. They are centred around four major themes: the body; earth; the political; and technology.
The first systematic and comprehensive reader on Design History, this book examines the role of design and designed objects within social and cultural history. Extracts range from the 18th century, when design and manufacture separated, to the present day. Drawn from scholarly and polemical books, research articles, exhibition catalogues, and magazines, the extracts are placed in themed sections, with each section separately introduced and each concluded with an annotated guide to further reading. Covering both primary texts (such as the writings of designers and design reformers) and secondary texts (in the form of key works of design history), the reader provides an essential resource for understanding the history of design, the development of the discipline, and contemporary issues in design history and practice. Selected authors: Judy Attfield, Jeremy Aynsley, Rayner Banham, Roland Barthes, Jean Baudrillard, Walter Benjamin, Pierre Bourdieu, Christopher Breward, Denise Scott Brown, Ruth Schwarz Cowan, Clive Dilnot, Buckminster Fuller, Paul Greenhalgh, Dick Hebdige, Steven Heller, John Heskett, Pat Kirkham, Adolf Loos, Victor Margolin, Karl Marx, Jeffrey Meikle, William Morris, Gillian Naylor, Victor Papanek, Nikolaus Pevsner, John Ruskin, Adam Smith, Penny Sparke, John Styles, Nancy Troy, Thorstein Veblen, Robert Venturi, John Walker, Frank Lloyd Wright.