"It's easy, for me at least, to be cynical about the state of design. Our visual environment can feel bland, everything from brands to buildings homogenized around similar styles. The ever-impending AI takeover can make the future of this work uncertain. My reading around design this year tended to focus on two things: looking back and looking ahead. In looking through design history, I was looking for glimpses of alternative ways of designing: the experimental, the absurd, the weird."
"Maggie Gram's excellent new book, The Invention of Design, is one of those books I'm surprised didn't already exist, and now I don't know how I've lived without it for so long. This is not a history book of famous designers or trends or movements but rather an intellectual history of how the "idea" of design came to be what it is today."
The visual environment often feels bland and homogenized across brands and buildings, and the rise of AI creates uncertainty about design's future. Exploration of design history searches for experimental, absurd, and unconventional approaches as alternatives to prevailing styles. Forward-looking inquiry seeks hope and strategies for moving design and design industries beyond perceived stasis. Combining historical and future perspectives aims to clarify what design is, what it has been, and what it could become. An intellectual framing treats the "idea" of design through major conceptions—beauty, problem solving, thinking, experience—and positions design as optimistic yet frequently falling short of its promises.
Read at Fast Company
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]