Thinking: Objects: Contemporary Approaches to Product Design discusses influences on modern product design such as globalization, technology, the media and the need for a sustainable future, and demonstrates how readers can incorporate these influences into their own work. The book also discusses how readers can learn to read the signals an object sends, interpret meaning and discover historical context. Thinking: Objects provides an essential reference tool that will enable you to find your own style and succeed in the industry.

This book takes an in-depth look at design processes, with twenty-five depictions of "the making of" products from a wide variety of industries. Its primary focuses are furniture design, transportation design, and household appliances. Renowned designers like Konstantin Grcic, the Bouroullecs, Stefan Diez, Hella Jongerius, and Sir Norman Foster offer step by step accounts of how they go about designing products for Vitra, Grundig, Jura, and Authentics – the tools they use for visualization and how projects change during the model phase. Plus: an interview with design legend Dieter Rams on realized and unrealized products for Braun.

Product Design offers a broad and comprehensive introduction to the field of product design and the key role of product designers. It follows through all the stages and activities involved in the creation of a new product – from concept design to manufacture, prototyping to marketing. It encourages the reader to challenge conventions and to think about the subject in new and exciting ways. The book also explores the diverse nature of product design, including new and emerging forms of practice. A rich overview of influential design movements and individuals are covered, together with interviews and examples from prominent product designers, and working practices and career guidance relevant to today. Full of visual examples and practical information, the book is an essential guide for students or anyone interested in product design.

How do we learn about the objects that surround us? As well as gathering sensory information by viewing and using objects, we also learn about objects through the written and spoken word - from shop labels to friends' recommendations and from magazines to patents. But, even as design commentators have become increasingly preoccupied with issues of mediation, the intersection of design and language remains under-explored.Writing Design provides a unique examination of what is at stake when we convert the material properties of designed goods into verbal or textual description. Issues discussed include the role of text in informing design consumption, designing with and through language, and the challenges and opportunities raised by design without language. Bringing together a wide range of scholars and practitioners, Writing Design reveals the difficulties, ethics and politics of writing about design.

Imaginative design will be a crucial factor in enacting sustainability in people's daily lives. Yet current design practice is trapped in consumerist cycles of innovation and production, making it difficult to imagine how we might develop a more meaningful and sustainable rendition of material culture. Through fundamental design research, The Spirit of Design challenges a host of common assumptions about sustainability, progress, growth and globalization. Walker's practice-based explorations of localisation, human meaning and functional objects demonstrate the imaginative potential of research-through-design and yield a compelling, constructive and essentially hopeful direction for the future - one that radically re-imagines our material culture by meshing mass-production with individuality, products with place, and utilitarian benefit with environmental responsibility. In so doing, the author explores: - How understandings of human meaning affect design and how design can better incorporate issues of personal meaning - How mass production needs to become integrated with localised production and service provision - How short-lived electronic goods can be brought into a more sustainable design paradigm - The changing role of the designer in a post-consumerist world Taking a design-centred approach - a combination of creative, propositional design practice, reasoned argument and theoretical discussion - the book will impel readers to investigate the nature of contemporary material culture and its relationship to both the natural environment and to deeper notions of human meaning.

Bad design is everywhere, and its cost is much higher than we think. In this thought-provoking book, authors Jonathan Shariat and Cynthia Savard Saucier explain how poorly designed products can anger, sadden, exclude, and even kill people who use them. The designers responsible certainly didn’t intend harm, so what can you do to avoid making similar mistakes? Tragic Design examines real case studies that show how certain design choices adversely affected users, and includes in-depth interviews with authorities in the design industry. Pick up this book and learn how you can be an agent of change in the design community and at your company. You’ll explore: Designs that can kill, including the bad interface that doomed a young cancer patient Designs that anger, through impolite technology and dark patterns How design can inadvertently cause emotional pain Designs that exclude people through lack of accessibility, diversity, and justice How to advocate for ethical design when it isn’t easy to do so Tools and techniques that can help you avoid harmful design decisions Inspiring professionals who use design to improve our world

How to use design as a tool to create not only things but ideas, to speculate about possible futures. Today designers often focus on making technology easy to use, sexy, and consumable. In Speculative Everything, Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby propose a kind of design that is used as a tool to create not only things but ideas. For them, design is a means of speculating about how things could be—to imagine possible futures. This is not the usual sort of predicting or forecasting, spotting trends and extrapolating; these kinds of predictions have been proven wrong, again and again. Instead, Dunne and Raby pose “what if” questions that are intended to open debate and discussion about the kind of future people want (and do not want). Speculative Everything offers a tour through an emerging cultural landscape of design ideas, ideals, and approaches. Dunne and Raby cite examples from their own design and teaching and from other projects from fine art, design, architecture, cinema, and photography. They also draw on futurology, political theory, the philosophy of technology, and literary fiction. They show us, for example, ideas for a solar kitchen restaurant; a flypaper robotic clock; a menstruation machine; a cloud-seeding truck; a phantom-limb sensation recorder; and devices for food foraging that use the tools of synthetic biology. Dunne and Raby contend that if we speculate more—about everything—reality will become more malleable. The ideas freed by speculative design increase the odds of achieving desirable futures.