One of very few books to bring together business and design, this collection features essays on topics ranging from branding and sustainability to business-driven design education. The centrepiece of the volume is an essay on simplicity in design by Per Mollerup, a distinguished Scandinavian designer, professor and author. Bolstering this are transcripts of two interviews with the former global art director for Nike for the 2012 London Olympics, paired with a paper on Nike’s design and marketing strategies for the Olympic Games. Other features include a transcript of an interview with Dan Formosa, a New York-based design consultant, design researcher and founding member of the iconic Smart Design studio; an essay on the importance of a research-led design practice in typography; a consideration of colour and brand identity; an essay on packaging design testing methods; a study of greenwashing, sustainability, and communication design; a case study on organizational management by design; an essay on strategic decision-making in new product development; research on how Australian businesses are hiring designers; and an exciting case study on the design partnership between the hearing aid company BHS and the design studio Designworks that has revolutionized a health care sector.

Today, designers design services, processes and organizations; craft skills no longer suffice. We need to discover, define and solve problems based upon evidence. We need to demonstrate the validity of our claims. We need a guide to design research that can educate students and be a reference for professionals. And here it is: a masterful book for 21st century designers.′ - Don Norman, Professor and Director of Design Lab, University of California San Diego, and former Vice President, Advanced Technologies, Apple ′Muratovski provides a structured approach to introducing students and researchers to design research and takes the reader through the research process from defining the research problem to the literature review on to data collection and analysis. With such practical and useful chapters, this book should prove to be essential reading in design schools across the world.′ - Tracy Bhamra, Professor of Sustainable Design and Pro Vice-Chancellor of Enterprise, Loughborough University Design is everywhere: it influences how we live, what we wear, how we communicate, what we buy, and how we behave. In order for designers to design for the real world, defining strategies rather than just implementing them, they need to learn how to understand and solve complex, intricate and often unexpected problems. This book is a guide to this new creative process. With this book in hand, students of design will: understand and apply the vocabulary and strategies of research methods learn how to adapt themselves to unfamiliar situations develop techniques for collaborating with non-designers find and use facts from diverse sources in order to prove or disprove their ideas make informed decisions in a systematic and insightful way use research tools to find new and unexpected design solutions. Research for Designers is an essential toolkit for a design education and a must-have for every design student who is getting ready to tackle their own research.

Examining pathways from creative education to work, and preparation for these pathways within higher education programs, in the light of long standing labour debates, this book explores the creative launch experiences, destinations, and contributions of graduates emerging into an enormously diverse and heterogeneous creative workforce. Coming from university degree programs that tend to focus on the development of specialist creative disciplinary skills, graduates emerge into the diverse workforce with fairly narrow career identities. With contributions ranging from quantitative analyses of large longitudinal data sets to in-depth qualitative cases, the book aims to provide a range of studies that speak to the complexity found in creative careers. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Education and Work.

As a cultivated form of invention, product design is a deeply human phenomenon that enables us to shape, modify and alter the world around us – for better or worse. The recent emergence of the sustainability imperative in product design compels us to recalibrate the parameters of good design in an unsustainable age. Written by designers, for designers, the Routledge Handbook of Sustainable Product Design presents the first systematic overview of the burgeoning field of sustainable product design. Brimming with intelligent viewpoints, critical propositions, practical examples and rich theoretical analyses, this book provides an essential point of reference for scholars and practitioners at the intersection of product design and sustainability. The book takes readers to the depth of our engagements with the designed world to advance the social and ecological purpose of product design as a critical twenty-first-century practice. Comprising 35 chapters across 6 thematic parts, the book’s contributors include the most significant international thinkers in this dynamic and evolving field.

There is now a widespread interest in reuse in many domains, from opera houses built over old warehouses, to vintage clothes and everyday goods incorporating repurposed materials or parts. Despite its ubiquity, this extensive creative work is typically seen in narrowly environmental terms, as a means of reducing carbon, resource use or waste. However, as this volume shows, reuse also has aesthetic and cultural dimensions and a rich social currency, invoked to consciously subvert the accelerated consumer culture responsible for our unfolding environmental crisis. In three parts, the essays in this book consider reuse in terms of values, aesthetics and meaning, its application in contemporary urban and spatial settings, and the revival of social practices involving a more conscious recourse to reuse and repair. These are bookended by the editors' essays: the first, on the significant relationship between reuse and technological and social acceleration evident in the surrounding consumer society; and the last, on the multiple forms of reuse deployed in a contemporary alternative building practice, and their contributions to presenting alternative ways of living in the world. Challenging dominant understandings of ‘waste’ and ‘consumption’, Subverting Consumerism shows how reuse has become a means for many to creatively engage with the past, and to discover a continuity and sense of place eroded by the accelerative regimes of contemporary consumerism. Becoming a means of resistance, and offering a range of aesthetic, social and economic possibilities, reuse can be found to subvert and challenge the obsessive quest for the new found in contemporary consumerism.

This book, at the crossroads of creativity, design and interdisciplinary studies, offers an overview of these major trends in scientific research, society, culture and economics. It brings together different approaches and communities around a common reflection on interdisciplinary creative design thinking. This collective effort provides a unique dialogical and convergent space that deals with the challenges and opportunities met by researchers and practitioners working on design thinking, creativity and inter- and transdisciplinarity, or at the interface between these areas.

Gold winner of the AXIOM Business Book Award in the category of Philanthropy, Non-Profit, Sustainability. Please see: http://www.axiomawards.com/77/award-winners/2017-winners Consumerism promises a shortcut to a 'better' life through the accumulation of certain fashionable goods and experiences. Over recent decades, this has resulted in a rising tide of cheap, short-lived goods produced, used and discarded in increasingly rapid cycles, along the way depleting resources and degrading environmental systems.Somebody Else’s Problem calls for a radical change in how we think about our material world, and how we design, make and use the products and services we need. Rejecting the idea that individuals alone are responsible for the environmental problems we face, it challenges us to look again at the systems, norms and values we take for granted in daily life, and their cumulative role in our environmental crisis.Robert Crocker presents an overview of the main forces giving rise to modern consumerism, looks closely at today’s accelerating consumption patterns and asks why older, more ‘custodial’ patterns of consumption are in decline. Avoiding simplistic quick-fix formulas, the book explores recommendations for new ways of designing, making and using goods and services that can reduce our excess consumption, but still contribute to a good and meaningful life.