Lucy Kimbell ABSTRACT At a time when many design professionals concern themselves with designing interactions, experiences, and services, it seems timely to reconsider the role of objects in design. This interview with philosopher Graham Harman offers a summary of his thinking about objects and uses it to reconsider their role in design. Strongly influenced by

Stephen Hayward, Keith Jones, Noam Toran, Onkar Kular ABSTRACT The exhibition I Cling to Virtue took place at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, in 2010. The project was organized around the narrative, material, and visual memories of Monarch Lövy Singh, a character created by the artists Onkar Kular and Noam Toran in collaboration with

Catharine Rossi ABSTRACT Attending to production and appropriating the handmade has been a persistent thread in critical and conceptual design practice from its origins in 1970s Italian radicalism and reemergence in Dutch conceptualism, to its current fashionability among designers today. Practitioners such as Tejo Remy and Thomas Thwaites are among those to envisage the designer

Stephen Knott ABSTRACT This article establishes a taxonomy of consumer response to the possibility of becoming a producing consumer (prosumer), through an analysis of the prosumer’s relationship to the tools and materials that facilitate production. I have developed three characterizations of the prosumer dependent on how the tools, materials, and advice provided by companies who

Jonathan Massey ABSTRACT Through his design of the United States Pavilion at Expo 67 and other projects, Buckminster Fuller has become a reference point for a range of contemporary approaches to sustainable development and design. By examining the Pavilion and an unpublished 1939 manuscript, “Ballistics of civilization,“ in conjunction with the sociological theory of reflexive

Grace Ong Yan ABSTRACT A bright future for aluminum was envisioned in the 1950s, as the reynolds Metals company boldly set out to reinvent the material from military applications to domestic use in the American “good life.“ the company literally wrapped a number of new products for the American lifestyle with aluminum, prompting comparisons today

Simon Sadler ABSTRACT The concept of the “diagram“ has been promoted since the 1990s as an advanced mode of designing and thinking about design. This article proposes that the diagram helps us understand a different architectural moment wrestling with the convergence of overwhelming political, technical, and philosophical challenges: that of the pioneering ecological scene associated

Daniel M. Abramson ABSTRACT This article traces the idea of architectural obsolescence in twentieth-century architecture and urbanism: where the idea comes from that buildings and cities can suddenly lose their value and utility, and how architects and others around the world responded to the perception that obsolescence characterized modernity. Evolving out of early twentieth-century Us income

LUCY KIMBELL This article originally appeared in Design and Culture, Volume 4, Number 2, July 2012 Introduction Accounts of design thinking often hinge on descriptions of the ways designers do things. Researchers do not have direct access to what goes on in designers’ minds, so they are left with what they believe is going on as

Eileen Gray and the Design of Sapphic Modernity: Staying in, by Jasmine Rault Surrey, England: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2011. 184 pages, introduction, 25 black-and-white illustrations, bibliography, index. Hardback, US$104.95. reviewed by Sarah Froelich Jasmine Rault’s feminist dissertation-turned-book begins with a reassessment of earlier writings about the late designer Eileen Gray, and elucidates how Gray’s non-heterosexual relationships, independent lifestyle, and