CAMERON TONKINWISE This article originally appeared in Design and Culture, Volume 1, Number 2, July 2009 “There seems to be only one cause behind all forms of social misery: bigness… Whenever something is wrong, something is too big.” Leopold Kohr The Breakdown of Nations1 Flip through any design magazine and you will see singular objects, usually

MICHAEL GOLEC This article originally appeared in Design and Culture, Volume 1, Number 2, July 2009 The familiar grounds the unfamiliar.  In order to contend with the variables of the universe and the human body, these two short films by Charles and Ray Eames represent the unknown at disparate scales and magnitudes of viewing, beginning, most

LUCY KIMBELL This article originally appeared in Design and Culture, Volume 3, Number 3, November 2011 Abstract The term design thinking has gained considerable attention over the past decade in a wide range of organizations and contexts beyond the traditional preoccupations of designers. The main idea is that the ways professional designers problem solve is of

ABSTRACT In May 2007, media artist Jonathan Harris spent nine days living with an Inupiat family in Barrow, Alaska, where he documented the ancient tradition of the whale hunt in a series of 3,214 photographs, which he later assembled into an interactive database documentary aptly named The Whale Hunt. As designed object, The Whale Hunt

ABSTRACT The past five years have brought several exhibitions, conferences, and other events that examine the past, present, and future of architectural periodicals. Incited in large part by the transformations wrought by new digital and social media in both architecture and publishing, these events reflect a desire among their participants to shape the materiality of

ABSTRACT A sustainable material culture is perhaps more about making new relationships than making new things. This paper explores the topography of what we are calling “Design’s already made,” including its artifacts, practices, and perceptions, via the lens of practice theory and in response to the problem of the largely unsustainable material cultures of design.

ABSTRACT The word collection alludes to seasonal haute couture collections and also to museum collections, respectively created and curated. But here, the term design collection includes a number of objects created independently by several designers (unlike fashion collections), but nonetheless conceived as an entity at the time of creation (unlike museum collections). Several design collections

ABSTRACT While the act of reading engages a reader through intense interiorization and reflection, reading is placed within more exteriorized social contexts through ubiquitous computing, networking and densely designed public spaces. The proliferation of these contexts elaborate and compete with the primacy of a traditional reader’s experience with a codex. Using semantic/episodic/procedural ideas of cognition

ABSTRACT This paper considers one of the first personal computers to be marketed to a mainstream American audience in the late 1970s: the Apple II. Lewis Mumford’s notion of “ideological and social preparation” is adapted to describe this period as a preparatory phase for the later ubiquity and absorbing quality of our relationship with personal

TODD CRONAN This article originally appeared in Design and Culture, Volume 3, Number 2, July 2011 … Milieu-molders of the world, unite. —Richard Neutra (Neutra 1989: 185) 1 Design in the Nuclear Age When Richard Neutra published Survival Through Design in 1954 he intended the title to be taken literally. Mankind risked sudden annihilation unless it