Beyond ready-made solutions – design as a practice of critical questioningHow can design education foster hope in times of crisis? Authored by Anab Jain, Nikolas Heep, and Stefan Zinell from the Department of Design Investigations at the University of Applied Arts Vienna, this reader introduces a groundbreaking approach to design pedagogy.At its core are speculative practices, world-building, material engagement, and storyt...

In the tradition of Being Digital and The Tipping Point, Steven Johnson, acclaimed as a "cultural critic with a poet's heart" (The Village Voice), takes readers on an eye-opening journey through emergence theory and its applications.A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOKA VOICE LITERARY SUPPLEMENT TOP 25 FAVORITE BOOKS OF THE YEARAN ESQUIRE MAGAZINE BEST BOOK OF THE YEARExplaining wh...

**From the New York Times bestselling author of Clear Thinking and Farnam Street founder, Shane Parrish.The fourth and final installment in the timeless Great Mental Models series.**Time and time again, great thinkers such as Charlie Munger and Warren Buffett have credited their success to mental models–representations of how something works that can scale onto other fields.Mastering a small number of mental models enables you to rapidly grasp new ...

An invaluable guide for how to think—and not to think—about the future, from one of the leading futurists of our time.You might not know the name Nick Foster, but after just a moment of googling you’ll realize he’s been guiding the missions of companies that have been shaping the world you live in. From Sony, Nokia, and Dyson to Google itself, where he was the head of design at Google X, Foster has been at the forefront of innovation for over twenty-five years, but...

John Heskett wants to transform the way we think about design by showing how integral it is to our daily lives, from the spoon we use to eat our breakfast cereal, and the car we drive to work in, to the medical equipment used to save lives. Design combines 'need' and 'desire' in the form of a practical object that can also reflect the user's identity and aspirations through its form and decoration. This concise guide to contemporary design goes beyond style and taste to look at how differe...

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 predic...

How to design a world in which we rely less on stuff, and more on people.We're filling up the world with technology and devices, but we've lost sight of an important question: What is this stuff for? What value does it add to our lives? So asks author John Thackara in his new book, In the Bubble: Designing for a Complex World. These are tough questions for the pushers of technology to answer. Our economic system is centered on technology, so it would be no...

WHAT IS THE FUTURE OF THE IMAGE IN THE AGE OF CLIMATE CHANGE AND ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE?Hito Steyerl is one of the most celebrated artists of our time. Her work, both as an artist and a writer, has consistently challenged the political boundaries between art and technology. In this new collection of groundbreaking essays, she explores how AI, the use of large language models and the algorithmic creation of imagery transform our understanding of the world. She argu...

https://www.facebook.com/TheFuturesWeMake - Hobbies—now that sounds like a great idea. We all have them in various guises. Most of them are hands-on and can be done in our spare time. So can we harness our hobbies to help the world? To help save our planet? Not only is this eBook a call to celebrate and recognise the importance hands-on craftwork plays in humanity, i.e. craft as play (adults) and play as craft (children). It is also a call to use this craftwork for the planets future! This...

Does going green change the face of design or only its content? The first book to outline principles for the aesthetics of sustainable design, The Shape of Green argues that beauty is inherent to sustainability, for how things look and feel is as important as how they’re made.In addition to examining what makes something attractive or emotionally pleasing, Hosey connects these questions with practical design challenges. Can the shape of a car make it more aerodynamic and m...

A clash between the ideology of growth and the growth of ideas, between control and creativity, between measurement and the immeasurable, between predictability and the fickle muses of inspiration in engulfing our boardrooms.In this scathing swipe at the institutionalised idiocy that is stifling creativity just at the time the world needs it most Gordon Torr draws from the leading lights of creativity research to demolish the myths that surround the generation of ideas in the moder...

An argument for a design philosophy of better, not more.Never have we wanted, owned, and wasted so much stuff. Our consumptive path through modern life leaves a wake of social and ecological destruction--sneakers worn only once, bicycles barely even ridden, and forgotten smartphones languishing in drawers. By what perverse alchemy do our newest, coolest things so readily transform into meaningless junk? In Meaningful Stuff, Jonathan Chapm...