Completed projects receive more public attention than the process of their creation and so the myth that architects design buildings alone lives on. In fact, architects work with a great many others and the relationships that develop, particularly with clients, have a significant impact on design. Design through Dialogue explores the relationship between client and architect through the lens of four overlapping activities that occur during any project: relating, talking, exploring and transforming. Cases of design and collaboration range from smaller scale retail, residential and educational projects in the US, Sweden, the UK and the Pacific Rim to large institutions, including Seattle’s Central Library, the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington DC, the Supreme Court in Jerusalem and the Museum of New Zealand. Material is taken from interviews with clients and architects and research in psychotherapy, group dynamics and design studies. Throughout the book aspects of process are linked to design outcomes to illustrate how architects and clients collaborate creatively.

Experience-centered design, experience-based design, experience design, designing for experience, user experience design. All of these terms have emerged and gained acceptance in the Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and Interaction Design relatively recently. In this book, we set out our understanding of experience-centered design as a humanistic approach to designing digital technologies and media that enhance lived experience. The book is divided into three sections. In Section 1, we outline the historical origins and basic concepts that led into and flow out from our understanding of experience as the heart of people's interactions with digital technology. In Section 2, we describe three examples of experience-centered projects and use them to illustrate and explain our dialogical approach. In Section 3, we recapitulate some of the main ideas and themes of the book and discuss the potential of experience-centered design to continue the humanist agenda by giving a voice to those who might otherwise be excluded from design and by creating opportunities for people to enrich their lived experience with and through technology.

Program sponsored by the American Institute of Graphic Arts, New York Chapter and held annually since 1984.

Architecture in Dialogue with an Activated Ground sets out to validate the role of the unreasonable in the design process. Using case study projects, architect Urs Bette gives an insight into the epistemological processes of his creative practice, and unveils the strategies he deploys in order to facilitate the poetic aspects of architecture within a discourse whose evaluation parameters predominantly involve reason. Themes discussed include the emergence of space from the staged opposition between the architectural object and the site, and the relationship between emotive cognition and analytic synthesis in the design act. In both cases, there is a necessary engagement with forms of ‘unreasonable’ thought, action or behaviours. By arguing for the usefulness and validity of the unreasonable in architecture, and by investigating the performative relationship between object and ground, Bette contributes to the discourse on extensions, growth and urban densification that tap into local histories and voices, including those of the seemingly inanimate – the architecture itself and the ground it sits upon – to inform the site-related production of architectural character and space. In doing so, he raises debates about the values pursued in design approval processes, and the ways in which site-relatedness is both produced and judged.

The last 30 years have seen a revolution in the production of graphics. Computers have had a profound effect on an industry which previously relied on working by hand. Focusing on the collaboration between graphic designers and their clients, this forward-looking book takes account of the many different applications for graphic design: brand identity; retail; film; architecture; civic identity; fashion; art; exhibitions; magazines and books; and the web. Through interviews with the designers, the clients, commissioning bodies, consumers and critics, it will offer an insight into the practice of graphic design in today's global culture.

This publication shows the ambitious transformation of Skanderbeg Square, in Tirana, Albania. The project was initiated by the then Mayor of Tirana and current Prime Minister of Albania Edi Rama and realized under current mayor Erion Veliaj. It is the result of a collaboration between Belgian architecture office 51N4E, Albanian artist Anri Sala, Belgian environmental designers Plant en Houtgoed, and Albanian company for project implementation iRI. Transforming the central square of a nation that is founded only in 1912 and that is now a developing young democracy, the project compresses all the hope and tension that come with that transition. With its focus on transition, this publication is a pilot episode of a series called Chapters, a progressive documentation of the work of architecture office 51N4E and its collaborations with related people and practices. Every Chapter combines the presentation of one or more projects with a forward-looking reflection on the key issues that shape them. Produced progressively over the course of the next years, the ambition of the whole series is to outline how 51N4E aims to engage with contemporary society in all of its complexity.