Pretense Design

Pretense Design
Author: Per Mollerup
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 219
Release: 2019-04-23
Genre: Design
ISBN: 0262039486

How some design appears to be something that it is not—by beautifying, amusing, substituting, or deceiving. Pretense design pretends to be something that it is not. Pretense design includes all kinds of designed objects: a pair of glasses that looks like a fashion accessory rather than a medical necessity, a hotel in Las Vegas that simulates a Venetian ambience complete with canals and gondolas, boiler plates that look like steel but are vinyl. In this book, Danish designer Per Mollerup defines and describes a ubiquitous design category that until now has not had a name: designed objects with an intentional discrepancy between surface and substance, between appearance and reality. Pretense design, he shows us, is a type of material rhetoric; it is a way for physical objects to speak persuasively, most often to benefit users but sometimes to deceive them. After explaining the means and the meanings of pretense design, Mollerup describes four pretense design applications, providing a range of examples for each: beautification, amusement, substitution, and deception. Beautification, he explains, includes sunless tanning, high heels, and even sporty accessories for a family car. Amusement includes forms of irrational otherness—columns that don't hold anything up, an old building's façade that hides a new building, a new Chinese town that mimics an old European town. Substitution pretends to be a natural thing: plastic laminate is a substitute for wood, Corian a substitute for marble, and prosthetics substitute for human organs. Deception doesn't just bend the truth; it suspends it. Soldiers wear camouflage to hide; hunters use decoys to attract their prey; malware hides in a harmless program only to wreak havoc on a user's computer. With Pretense Design, Per Mollerup adds a new concept to design thinking.

Design Strategy

Design Strategy
Author: Nancy C. Roberts
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 523
Release: 2023-11-14
Genre: Design
ISBN: 0262376598

A new approach to addressing the contemporary world’s most difficult challenges, such as climate change and poverty. Conflicts over “the problem” and “the solution” plague the modern world and land problem solvers in what has been called “wicked problem territory”—a social space with high levels of conflict over problems and solutions. In Design Strategy, Nancy C. Roberts proposes design as a strategy of problem solving to close the gap between an existing state and a desired state. Utilizing this approach, designers and change agents are better able to minimize self-defeating conflicts over problems and solutions, break the logjam of opposition, and avoid the traps that lock problem solvers into a never-ending cycle of conflict. Design as a field continues to grow and evolve, but Design Strategy focuses on three levels of design where “wicked problems” tend to lurk—strategic design (of private and public organizations), systemic design (of networked and overlapping economic, technical, political, and social subsystems), and regenerative design (of life-giving realignment between humanity and nature). Within this framework, Roberts presents refreshingly interdisciplinary case studies that integrate theory and practice across diverse fields to guide professionals in any domain—from business and nonprofit organizations to educational and healthcare systems—and finally offers hope that humanity can tackle the existential challenges we face in the twenty-first century.

Design, Empathy, Interpretation

Design, Empathy, Interpretation
Author: Ilpo Koskinen
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 205
Release: 2023-09-12
Genre: Design
ISBN: 0262546922

A new, empathic approach to design research, drawn from the informed experiences of a leading design research program in Finland. Design, Empathy, Interpretation tells the story of empathic design, a design research program at Aalto University in Helsinki, Finland, that has developed an interpretive approach to design over the past twenty years. As one of the leaders of the Helsinki group, Ilpo Koskinen draws on his own experiences to offer readers a general intellectual and professional history of design research, and argues for what he calls an interpretive approach. Design, Empathy, Interpretation shows how the group has created connections all across the globe, and how a seemingly soft approach to design research can be useful in both industry and government. Koskinen follows design research’s transformation from questions of usability, in the 1980s, through to the revolution in personal electronics and the “user-centered” turn of the 1990s. Using the research community in Helsinki as a case study, and moving between specific projects and theoretical debates, he offers readers a focused introduction to the major methodological and intellectual challenges—as well as the opportunities—of design research. He argues that all design tasks, however simple or complex, begin with understanding the way humans ascribe meaning, both as individuals and as actors in complex societies. Thus all design research must be interpretive at its core.A new, empathic approach to design research, drawn from the informed experiences of a leading design research program in Finland.

Things We Could Design

Things We Could Design
Author: Ron Wakkary
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 313
Release: 2021-08-24
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0262542994

How posthumanist design enables a world in which humans share center stage with nonhumans, with whom we are entangled. Over the past forty years, designers have privileged human values such that human-centered design is seen as progressive. Yet because all that is not human has been depleted, made extinct, or put to human use, today's design contributes to the existential threat of climate change and the ongoing extinctions of other species. In Things We Could Design, Ron Wakkary argues that human-centered design is not the answer to our problems but is itself part of the problem. Drawing on philosophy, design theory, and numerous design works, he shows the way to a relational and expansive design based on humility and cohabitation. Wakkary says that design can no longer ignore its exploitation of nonhuman species and the materials we mine for and reduce to human use. Posthumanism, he argues, enables a rethinking of design that displaces the human at the center of thought and action. Weaving together posthumanist philosophies with design, he describes what he calls things--nonhumans made by designers--and calls for a commitment to design with more than human participation. Wakkary also focuses on design as "nomadic practices"--a multiplicity of intentionalities and situated knowledges that shows design to be expansive and pluralistic. He calls his overall approach "designing-with": the practice of design in a world in which humans share center stage with nonhumans, and in which we are bound together materially, ethically, and existentially.

Design Aesthetics

Design Aesthetics
Author: Mads Nygaard Folkmann
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 385
Release: 2023-09-19
Genre: Design
ISBN: 0262375702

An original exploration of the role of aesthetics in contemporary design, uniquely combining philosophical aesthetics and cultural analysis of design. As a product of human ingenuity, design functions as an artificial interface through which we meet the world. While the ubiquity of design seems to render it imperceptible, when we truly reflect on design, we see that it is inextricably entwined with our experience of the world. In Design Aesthetics, Mads Nygaard Folkmann provides an engaging introduction to the field of design aesthetics and its role as a concept. Engaging with sensual, conceptual, and contextual considerations of design aesthetics, this book investigates design experience in tandem with design practice, objects, and perception. Part one of Design Aesthetics lays the theoretical foundation by differentiating between sensual, conceptual, and contextual dimensions of design aesthetics and clarifying what “aesthetic experience” means in relation to design. The second part of the book consists of studies in implications of design aesthetics for design practice, design objects with embedded technology, and the construction of perception of aesthetic qualities in objects. In its focus on design aesthetics, the book is intended for everyone working with design—design students, designer researchers, and designers—as well as students and researchers in aesthetics in general.

The Space between Look and Read

The Space between Look and Read
Author: Susan M. Hagan
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 243
Release: 2023-04-18
Genre: Design
ISBN: 0262374293

Unleashing the potential that can be found in the space between words and images. Designers have long understood that image, text, and typeface can work together to produce new meanings, creating semiotic registers impossible to achieve with image or text alone. In The Space Between Look and Read, a study of complementary meaning in design, Susan Hagan presents a framework, called Inter-play, which explains how these new meanings emerge. Inter-play is not simply an analytical tool; it is also a method for using complementary meaning to encourage critical thinking in design audiences. Drawing from cognitive psychology, art theory, discourse analysis, design, and rhetoric, Hagan breaks down the synthesis of looking and reading into a complex series of registers, which are revealed through examples of excellent design. Thus, the book is both a theoretical exploration of how designers communicate and a casebook in communication well achieved. From the physiology of vision to the limits of language, from Allan Paivio to Uwe Loesch, The Space Between Look and Read expands our understanding of complementary design and argues that by engaging audiences through multiple cognitive registers, complementary design serves as a cognitive tool, helping audiences reach new conclusions about complex problems.

Meaningful Stuff

Meaningful Stuff
Author: Jonathan Chapman
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 235
Release: 2021-08-03
Genre: Design
ISBN: 0262045729

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 Chapman investigates why we throw away things that still work, and shows how we can design products, services, and systems that last. Obsolescence is an economically driven design decision--a plan to hasten a product's functional or psychological undesirability. Many electronic devices, for example, are intentionally impossible to dismantle for repair or recycling, their brief use-career proceeding inexorably to a landfill. A sustainable design specialist who serves as a consultant to global businesses and governmental organizations, Chapman calls for the decoupling of economic activity from mindless material consumption and shows how to do it. Chapman shares his vision for an "experience heavy, material light" design sensibility. This vital and timely new design philosophy reveals how meaning emerges from designed encounters between people and things, explores ways to increase the quality and longevity of our relationships with objects and the systems behind them, and ultimately demonstrates why design can--and must--lead the transition to a sustainable future.

Being and the Screen

Being and the Screen
Author: Stephane Vial
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 278
Release: 2019-11-12
Genre: Design
ISBN: 0262043165

How digital technology is profoundly renewing our sense of what is real and how we perceive. Digital technologies are not just tools; they are structures of perception. They determine the way in which the world appears to us. For nearly half a century, technology has provided us with perceptions coming from an unknown world. The digital beings that emerge from our screens and our interfaces disrupt the notion of what we experience as real, thereby leading us to relearn how to perceive. In Being and the Screen, Stéphane Vial provides a philosophical analysis of technology in general, and of digital technologies in particular, that relies on the observation of experience (phenomenology) and the history of technology (epistemology). He explains that technology is no longer separate from ourselves—if it ever was. Rather, we are as much a part of the machine as the machine is part of us. Vial argues that the so-called difference between the real and the virtual does not exist and never has. We are living in a hybrid environment—which is both digital and nondigital, online and offline. With this book, Vial endows philosophical meaning to what we experience daily in our digital age. In A Short Treatise on Design, Vial offers a concise introduction to the discipline of design—not a history book, but a book built of philosophical problems, developing a theory of the effect of design. This book is published with the support of the University of Nîmes, France.

How Artifacts Afford

How Artifacts Afford
Author: Jenny L. Davis
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 210
Release: 2020-08-11
Genre: Technology & Engineering
ISBN: 0262358891

A conceptual update of affordance theory that introduces the mechanisms and conditions framework, providing a vocabulary and critical perspective. Technological affordances mediate between the features of a technology and the outcomes of engagement with that technology. The concept of affordances, which migrated from psychology to design with Donald Norman's influential 1988 book, The Design of Everyday Things, offers a useful analytical tool in technology studies--but, Jenny Davis argues in How Artifacts Afford, it is in need of a conceptual update. Davis provides just such an update, introducing the mechanisms and conditions framework, which offers both a vocabulary and necessary critical perspective for affordance analyses.