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.

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.

By examining the interface between consumer behavior and new product development, People and Products: Consumer Behavior and Product Design demonstrates the ways in which consumers contribute to product design, enhance product utility, and determine brand identity. With increased connectedness and advances in technology, consumers and marketers are more closely connected than ever before. Yet consumer behavior texts often overlook the application of the subject to product design, testing, and success. This is the first book to explore this interface in detail, exploring such issues as: the attributes and qualities that consumers demand from products and services, and social and cultural forces to be aware of; design and form and how they facilitate product usage; technological developments and the ways they have changed how consumers interact with products; product disposal and sustainability; emerging and future trends in consumer behavior and product development and design. This exciting volume is relevant to anyone interested in marketing, consumer behavior, product development, technology, engineering, design, and brand management.

This book provides the reader with a comprehensive, relevant, and visually rich insight into the world of research methods specifically aimed at product designers. It includes practical case studies and tutorials that will inform, inspire and help you to conduct product design research better. Product designers need a comprehensive understanding of research methods as their day-to-day work routinely involves them observing people, asking questions, searching for information, making and testing ideas, and ultimately generating 'solutions' to 'problems'. Manifest in the design process is the act of research. Huge technological advances in information, computing and manufacturing processes also offer enormous opportunities to product designers such as the development of 'intelligent' products and services, but at the same time raise important research questions that need to be dealt with. Product designers are, in many ways, best placed to address these challenges because of the manner in which they apply their design thinking to problems. This book demonstrates in a clear, highly visual and structured fashion how research methods can support product designers and help them address the very real issues the world currently faces in the 21st century.

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.

Essays, photo-essays, interviews, manifestos, diagrams, and a play explore the varied legacies, influences, and futures of the Bauhaus. What would keep the Bauhaus up at night if it were practicing today? A century after its founding by Walter Gropius in Weimar, Germany, as an “experimental laboratory of the future,” who are the pioneering experimentalists who reinscribe or resist Bauhaus traditions? This book explores the varied legacies, influences, and futures of the Bauhaus. Many of the animating issues of the Bauhaus—its integration of research, teaching, and practice; its experimentation with materials; its democratization of design; its open-minded, heterogeneous approach to ideas, theories, methods, and styles—remain relevant. The contributors to Bauhaus Futures address these but go further, considering issues that design has largely ignored for the last hundred years: gender, race, ethnicity, class, sexuality, and disability. Their contributions take the form of essays, photo-essays, interviews, manifestos, diagrams, and even a play. They discuss, among other things, the Bauhaus curriculum and its contemporary offshoots; Bauhaus legacies at the MIT Media Lab, Black Mountain College, and elsewhere; the conflict between the Bauhaus ideal of humanist universalism and current approaches to design concerned with race and justice; designed objects, from the iconic to the precarious; textile and weaving work by women in the Bauhaus and the present day; and design and technology. Contributors Alice Arnold, Jeffrey Bardzell, Shaowen Bardzell, Karen Kornblum Berntsen, Marshall Brown, Stuart Candy, Jessica Charlesworth, Elizabeth J. Chin, Taeyoon Choi, B. Coleman, Carl DiSalvo, Michael J. Golec, Kate Hennessy, Matthew Hockenberry, Joi Ito, Denisa Kera, N. Adriana Knouf, Silvia Lindtner, Shannon Mattern, Ramia Mazé, V. Mitch McEwen, Oliver Neumann, Paul Pangaro, Tim Parsons, Nassim Parvin, Joanne Pouzenc, Luiza Prado de O. Martin, Daniela K. Rosner, Natalie Saltiel, Trudi Lynn Smith, Carol Strohecker, Alex Taylor, Martin Thaler, Fred Turner, Andre Uhl, Jeff Watson, Robert Wiesenberger