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...

From New York Times bestselling author Sarah Wilson comes a deeply moving, wise guide to finding joy and meaning in a world that seems to be falling apart.Things are not going back to ‘normal’. How we choose to live will shape the next era.“A book for dark times that is filled with light and hope.”— Peter FrankopanIt's hard to escape the feeling that something is deeply wrong . . . that life has be...

**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...

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 technol�ogy. 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 argues that such practices cannot be divorced from the economic and political conditions of the times.Med...

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...

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...

How to develop an ethical design practice and build a better world.The choices made by designers have a significant effect on the world. Yet so much of the discourse on design focuses on aesthetics rather than ethics. In The New Designer, acclaimed author Manuel Lima aims to change this by challenging common myths and preconceptions about what comprises good design. He argues that designers must take responsibility for the personal, societal, cultural, and...