Quinn, Bradley. Textile Futures: Fashion, Design and Technology. Oxford and New York: Berg Press, 2010.  320 pp., 150 halftones, 60 color, references, index. Cloth, $99.95; Paper $34.95 . Reviewed by Beverly Gordon, Professor, Design Studies Department, University of Wisconsin-Madison. Bradley Quinn, independent British journalist and scholar, admits to a “burning all- consuming interest in textiles”

“Designing Tomorrow: America’s World’s Fairs of the 1930s.” National Building Museum, Washington, D. C., United States, October 2, 2010-September 5, 2011. Designing Tomorrow: America’s World’s Fairs of the 1930s, edited by Robert W. Rydell and Laura Burd Schiavo (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2010). Reviewed by Catherine L. Futter, The Helen Jane and

ABSTRACT This analysis of the article “Der Henkel. Ein ästhetischer Versuch” (The Handle: An Aesthetic Study) by Georg Simmel is intended to be a contribution to the history of the meaning of things. Later critiques by Ernst Bloch and Theodor W. Adorno have shifted how we understand Simmel. Integrating Simmel’s text within a chronological progression

ABSTRACT Set against a backdrop of high-profile food scares in Britain at the end of the twentieth century, where economics seemingly preempted health and food security, this article considers the 1999-2001 print advertising campaign of Waitrose supermarkets. The campaign was at the vanguard of a new rhetoric of authenticity and tapped directly into the public’s

SHANA AGID This article originally appeared in Design and Culture, Volume 4, Number 1, March 2012 In design we can see the representation of arguments about how life ought to be lived. Design is the result of choices. Who makes those choices and why? What views of the world underlie them and in what ways

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