A new approach to design traces its role throughout history, focusing on the special relationship between people and objects, and examines the role of design in architecture, multimedia, computers, software, and government.

A celebration culture and technology, as seen through the history of the humble yet ubiquitous toothpick, from the best-selling author of The Pencil. From ancient Rome, where emperor Nero made his entrance into a banquet hall with a silver toothpick in his mouth, to nineteenth-century Boston, where Charles Forster, the father of the American wooden toothpick industry, ensured toothpicks appeared in every restaurant, the toothpick has been an omnipresent, yet often overlooked part of our daily lives. Here, with an engineer's eye for detail and a poet's flair for language, Henry Petroski takes us on an incredible tour of this most interesting invention. Along the way, he peers inside today's surprisingly secretive toothpick-manufacturing industry, and explores a treasure trove of the toothpick's unintended uses and perils, from sandwiches to martinis and beyond.

A celebration culture and technology, as seen through the history of the humble yet ubiquitous toothpick, from the best-selling author of The Pencil. From ancient Rome, where emperor Nero made his entrance into a banquet hall with a silver toothpick in his mouth, to nineteenth-century Boston, where Charles Forster, the father of the American wooden toothpick industry, ensured toothpicks appeared in every restaurant, the toothpick has been an omnipresent, yet often overlooked part of our daily lives. Here, with an engineer's eye for detail and a poet's flair for language, Henry Petroski takes us on an incredible tour of this most interesting invention. Along the way, he peers inside today's surprisingly secretive toothpick-manufacturing industry, and explores a treasure trove of the toothpick's unintended uses and perils, from sandwiches to martinis and beyond.

Designing for sustainability is an innovation shaping both the design industry and design education today.Yet architects, product designers, and other key professionals in this new field have so far lacked a resource that addresses their sensibilities and concerns. The Designer's Atlas of Sustainability now explores the basic principles, concepts, and practice of sustainable design in a visually sophisticated and engaging style. The book tackles not only the ecological aspects of sustainable design-designers' choice of materials and manufacturing processes have a tremendous impact on the natural world-but also the economic and cultural elements involved. The Atlas is neither a how-to manual nor collection of recipes for sustainable design, but a compendium of fresh approaches to sustainability that designers can incorporate into daily thinking and practice. Illuminating many facets of this exciting field, the book offers ideas on how to harmonize human and natural systems, and then explores practical options for making the business of design more supportive of long-term sustainability. An examination of the ethical dimensions of sustainable development in our public and private lives is the theme present throughout. Like other kinds of atlases, The Designer's Atlas of Sustainability illustrates its subject, but it goes far beyond its visual appeal, stimulating design solutions for "development that cultivates environmental and social conditions that will support human well-being indefinitely."

Each logo element in 999 Logo Design Elements is a distinct and standalone piece that offers designers the capability to develop hundreds of thousands of logo variations on themes. The elements include banners, arrows, ovals, swooshes, geometric shapes, and hundreds of creative parts that can be pulled together to create original logo designs. Featured throughout the book are examples of logos and identities built with elements from the book.also includes links to all of the resources included in the book for easy access to books, tutorials, and websites focused on logo design. Graphic editing software, such as Adobe Photoshop(R) and Illustrator(R), are required.

Some of the most creative artists from today’s maker scene discuss their process, workspaces and more in this inspiring guide to tinkering. The Art of Tinkering is an unprecedented celebration of what it means to tinker: to take things apart, explore tools and materials, and build wondrous, wild art that’s part science, part technology, and entirely creative. Join 150+ makers as they share the stories behind their beautiful and bold work—then do some tinkering yourself! This collection of exhibits, artwork, and projects explores a whole new way to learn, in which people expand their knowledge through making and doing, working with readily available materials, getting their hands dirty, collaborating with others, and problem-solving in the most fun sense of the word. Each artist featured in The Art of Tinkering shares their process and the backstory behind their work. Whether it’s dicussing their favorite tools (who knew toenail clippers could be so handy?) or offering a glimpse of their workspaces (you’d be amazed how many electronics tools you can pack into a pantry!), the stories, lessons, and tips in The Art of Tinkering offer a fascinating portrait of today’s maker scene. Artists include: Scott Weaver, Arthur Ganson, Moxie, Tim Hunkin, AnnMarie Thomas, Ranjit Bhatnajar and Jie Qi.

The Aesthetics of Design offers the first full treatment of design in the field of philosophical aesthetics, challenging the discipline to broaden its scope to include the quotidian objects and experiences of our everyday lives and concerns. In doing so, it contributes to the growing field of Everyday Aesthetics.

Our gadgets, appliances, and cars are sleeker and more elegant than they’ve ever been; in our free time, we trawl the internet for pictures of flawless minimalist interiors; and even the great industrialist of our time—Steve Jobs—is admired more for his visual savvy than his technological inventiveness. And yet with Instagram and Pinterest at our fingers and great design more available—and more affordable—than ever, we’ve had no guidebook to this ever-fascinating field. Though it’s an inescapable part of our lives, there has been no single book that could, in one fell swoop, tell us everything we need to know about design. Enter Hello World. The design critic for the International Heard Tribune, Alice Rawsthorn has spent many years reckoning with the history of design and with its place in contemporary life, and Hello World is the extraordinary summation of her research and reporting. Rawsthorn takes us on a trip through design that ranges across continents and centuries, and wherever she goes, she discovers inspiring, thrilling examples of resourcefulness, inventiveness, and sheer vision. From the macabre symbol with which eighteenth-century pirates terrorized their victims into surrender, to one woman’s quest for the best prosthetic legs, to the evolution of the World Cup soccer ball, Hello World describes how warlords, scientists, farmers, hackers, activists, and professional designers have used the complex, often elusive process of design to different ends throughout history. Hailed as a “rapid-fire and illuminating ode to contemporary design†? (Telegraph) and “an extremely readable tour of the subject†? (Financial Times), Hello World is a major work that radically broadens our understanding of what design can mean, and explains how we can use it to make sense of our ever-changing universe.

There currently exists an abundance of materials selection advice for designers suited to solving technical product requirements. In contrast, a stark gap can be found in current literature that articulates the very real personal, social, cultural and economic connections between materials and the design of the material world. In Materials Experience: Fundamentals of Materials and Design, thirty-four of the leading academicians and experts, alongside 8 professional designers, have come together for the first time to offer their expertise and insights on a number of topics common to materials and product design. The result is a very readable and varied panorama on the world of materials and product design as it currently stands. - Contributions by many of the most prominent materials experts and designers in the field today, with a foreword by Mike Ashby - The book is organized into 4 main themes: sustainability, user interaction, technology and selection - Between chapters, you will find the results of interviews conducted with internationally known designers - These 'designer perspectives' will provide a 'time out' from the academic articles, with emphasis placed on fascinating insights, product examples and visuals

It may seem strange to claim that it is difficult to design innovative information technology (IT) in a time when the technological progress leaps forward like never before. However, despite the numerous opportunities that this rapid progress provides, we often design IT that is similar to existing artifacts, making IT design incremental rather than radical. At the same time, IT innovations are pointed out as crucial to meet the societal challenges we are facing, not least in the public sector, including a growing and older population, increasing demands from citizens and reduced tax revenues. This calls for us to better understand why it is difficult to design innovative IT. Previous research on this topic have mainly focused on human and social aspects, not paying close attention to IT. In this thesis, it is suggested that the sociomaterial theory agential realism can help shed light on the role of IT in innovative IT design, acknowledging the sociomateriality of IT. Thus, the overarching aim of this thesis is to apply agential realism on an empirical case in order to explore and explain why it is difficult to design innovative IT. To fulfill the aim, a qualitative case study was conducted in publicly funded healthcare. The empirical case is an example of an attempt to design innovative IT in a healthcare context. The empirical material was generated through participant observations, including video recordings, and semi-structured interviews. The material was analyzed in several rounds, with and without a theoretical lens. In the agential realist analysis, IT has been viewed as entangled with the world. The analysis focused on what boundaries IT produced and how these boundaries were consequential for what was possible and impossible to design. The thesis illustrates how IT is produced and productive in terms of both matter and meaning, and thus, is agential – IT makes differences in the world. What is possible to design is not only constrained by social structures but by the materiality of IT, what boundaries IT helps produce and the material-discursive practices that enact IT. Innovative IT design means to design material configurations that produce boundaries that are different from what have been enacted before and, thus, deviate from existing material-discursive practices. However, it is difficult to deviate from these since material-discursive practices are agential and define what boundaries are meaningful and legitimate. Hence, it is difficult to design innovative IT since innovative IT design has to both enact boundaries that deviate from agential material-discursive practices and also gain legitimacy. Through this explanation, the thesis makes an explanatory knowledge contribution which differs from and adds to earlier explanations. It also makes a contribution to conceptualizing the IT artifact by emphasizing IT as sociomaterial and providing examples of how IT can be understood as produced, productive, agential and entangled. Finally, the thesis also makes an empirical and methodological contribution in the sense that it demonstrates how an agential realist case study can be conducted in the field of Information Systems. Det kan verka märkligt att påstå att det är svårt att designa innovativ informationsteknik (IT) i en tid då den tekniska utvecklingen går snabbare än någonsin förr. Men trots de många möjligheter som den snabba utvecklingen erbjuder så designar vi ofta IT som liknar existerande artefakter, vilket resulterar i inkrementell snarare än radikal IT-design. Samtidigt pekas IT-innovation ut som kritisk för att möta de samhälleliga utmaningar som vi står inför, inte minst i den offentliga sektorn där en växande och åldrande befolkning, ökade krav från medborgare och minskade skatteintäkter ställer stora krav på offentliga organisationer. Av denna anledning behöver vi förbättra vår förståelse för varför det är svårt att designa innovativ IT. Tidigare forskning inom detta ämne har främst fokuserat på mänskliga och sociala aspekter men inte uppmärksammat IT. I denna avhandling föreslås att den sociomateriella teorin agentiell realism kan bidra till att belysa ITs roll i innovativ IT-design genom att se IT som sociomateriell. Därmed är avhandlingens övergripande syfte att applicera agentiell realism på ett empiriskt fall för att utforska och förklara varför det är svårt att designa innovativ IT. För att uppfylla syftet har en kvalitativ fallstudie genomförts i offentlig sjukvård. Det empiriska fallet är ett exempel på ett försök att designa innovativ IT i en sjukvårdskontext. Det empiriska materialet genererades genom deltagande observationer, inklusive videofilmning, och semistrukturerade intervjuer. Materialet analyserades i flera omgångar, både med och utan teoretisk lins. I analysen där agentiell realism applicerades sågs IT som entangled (’intrasslad’) med världen. Denna analys fokuserade på vilka gränser som IT producerade och hur dessa gränser hade konsekvenser för vad som var möjligt respektive omöjligt att designa. Denna avhandling illustrerar hur IT är producerad och producerande både vad gäller materia och betydelser, och därmed är agentiell – IT gör skillnad i världen. Vad som är möjligt att designa är inte enbart begränsat av sociala strukturer utan också av ITs materialitet, vilka gränser som IT bidrar till att producera och de materiell-diskursiva praktiker som framställer IT. Innovativ ITdesign innebär att designa materiella konfigurationer som skapar gränser vilka skiljer sig från vad som blivit till innan och därmed avviker från rådande materiell-diskursiva praktiker. Det är dock svårt att avvika från dessa eftersom materiell-diskursiva praktiker är agentiella och definierar vilka gränser som är meningsfulla och legitima. Det är därmed svårt att designa innovativ IT då innovativ IT-design behöver både producera gränser som avviker från agentiella materiell-diskursiva praktiker och också uppnå legitimitet. Med denna förklaring ger avhandlingen ett kunskapsbidrag och bidrar till ny förståelse för varför det är svårt att designa innovativ IT. Avhandlingen bidrar också till att konceptualisera IT-artefakten genom att betona ITs sociomaterialitet och att ge exempel på hur IT kan förstås som producerad, producerande, agentiell och entangled. Slutligen ger avhandlingen också ett empiriskt och metodologiskt bidrag genom att demonstrera hur en agentiell realistisk fallstudie kan utföras inom informatikfältet.