Cooper-Hewitt Museum – förlag

A playbook for creative thinking, created for contemporary students and practitioners working across the fields of graphic design, product design, service design and user experience. Design is Storytelling is a guide to thinking and making created for contemporary students and practitioners working across the fields of graphic design, product design, service design, and user experience. By grounding narrative concepts in fresh, concrete examples and demonstrations, this compelling book provides designers with tools and insights for shaping behaviour and engaging users. Compact, relevant and richly illustrated, the book is written with a sense of humour and a respect for the reader’s time and intelligence. Design is Storytelling unpacks the elements of narrative into a fun and useful toolkit, bringing together principles from literary criticism, narratology, cognitive science, semiotics, phenomenology and critical theory to show how visual communication mobilizes instinctive biological processes as well as social norms and conventions. The book uses 250 illustrations to actively engage readers in the process of looking and understanding. This lively book shows how designers can use the principles of storytelling and visual thinking to create beautiful, surprising and effective outcomes. Although the book is full of practical advice for designers, it will also appeal to people more broadly involved in branding, marketing, business and communication.

Tools, the catalogue for Cooper Hewitt’s reopening exhibition, showcases objects from ten of the Smithsonian Institutions museums to explore how diverse cultures, time periods and multifarious activities provide a means of realizing design’s critical role in understanding our world, and to examine how tools offer insights into scientific, technological, and cultural changes in societies. It shows the interconnectedness of scientist, designer, historian, anthropologist, engineer and artist through design-thinking and problemsolving while also revealing distinct perspectives and methodologies.

Beauty celebrates design objects and practices that are exuberant, ethereal, atmospheric, experiential, exceptional or sublime. Objects of beauty provoke immediate reactions and demand judgment – asking us to redefine what is lovely or grotesque, formed or malformed, virtuous or subversive. They exalt experience as a living, unfolding exchange between people and things. Beauty honours the voices of designers from 26 countries around the world by conducting original interviews about their works and processes – showing that aesthetic innovation can drive change, whether materially, structurally or ethically. Beauty is an object to be touched, smelled and savoured. Each of the book’s seven sections is printed on a luxurious Japanese matte paper with its own fifth accent colour. A smaller signature of pages – printed on its own creamy pink paper at the centre of the book – is called the heart. It contains front and back matter and the responses from designers to the questions: What comes to mind when you hear the word beauty? What is the most beautiful time of day? What is the most beautiful place you’ve visited? The authors/edited selected the designers for the book and exhibition with a group of international curatorial advisors: Adélia Borges (Brazil), Claire Catterall (England), Kenya Hara (Japan), Mugendi M’Rithaa (South Africa), Sarah Scaturro (United States), Annemartine van Kesteren (Netherlands) and Suvi Saloniemi (Finland).

An exploration of the ways in which designers are striving to transform our relationship with the natural world. Designers today are striving to transform our relationship with the natural world. While the modern industrial age gave way to designs that vastly improved human enterprise through technology, there were unintended and destructive consequences for the environment. Humans are intrinsically linked to nature yet our actions have frayed this relationship, forcing designers to think more intentionally and to consider the impact of every design decision, from an artifact’s manufacture and use to its obsolescence. Designers are aligning with biologists, engineers, agriculturists, environmentalists and many other disciplines to design a more harmonious and regenerative future. Based on these new partnerships, designers are asking different questions and anticipating future challenges, which not only change the design process, but also what design means. Nature: Collaborations in Design includes over sixty-five international projects from the fields of architecture, product design, landscape design, fashion, interactive and communication design, and material research. More than 300 compelling and exquisite photographs, illustrations and content from data visualizations illustrate seven essays, which explain and explore designers’ strategies around understanding, simulating, salvaging, facilitating, augmenting, remediating and nurturing nature. Four conversations between scientists and designers delve into topics related to synthetic biology, scientific versus design lexicon, and recent shifts in the meaning of nature with a glossary illuminating scientific, technological and theoretical concepts and processes invoked by the designers.

Designing Peace asks, how might we collectively put our creative forces together to envision a future we want to live in and take action to create it now? This book is an intersectional snapshot of the actions—culturally diverse and wide-ranging in scale—that are currently in play around the world. Offering perspectives on peace through essays, interviews, critical maps, project profiles, data visualizations, and art, this book conveys the momentum that design can gain in effecting a peace-filled future. From activists, scholars, and architects to policymakers, graphic, game, and landcape designers, Desiging Peace flips the conversation: peace is not simply a passive state signifying the absence of war, it is a dynamic concept that requires effort, expertise, and multi-dimensional solutions to address its complexity.  Designers engage with individuals, communities, and organizations to create a more sustainable peace—from creative confrontations that challenge existing structures, to designs that demand embracing justice and truth in a search for reconciliation. This publication aims to expand the discourse on what is possible if society were to design for peace.