Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum

The word grotesque was first coined at the end of the fifteenth century in Italy to describe a style of painting found in Ancient Roman ruins in which foliage intertwines and merges with human and animal forms. The re-discovery of these ruins was deeply influential to artists and designers. Through drawings and prints, grotesque motifs were disseminated as patterns for decoration in architecture, metalwork, textiles and ceramics. The fantastic nature of the grotesque enabled artists to incorporate imagery that pushed the boundaries of the known world. Within the confines of ornamental designs, artists turned elements from nature into otherworldly beings. Creatures, fearsome or playful, graceful or rigid, take their place in dense and sinuous designs for locks, ewers, rings, tapestries, stained glass and more. These intimately scaled works, often measuring just a few inches, are at times erotically charged and at others moralizing. Centuries later, these drawings and prints open a window to the imagination of artists and designers as the Age of Exploration unfolded around them.

The twentieth century offered up countless visions of domestic life, from the aspirational to the radical. Whether it was the dream of the fully mechanised home or the notion that technology might free us from home altogether, the domestic realm was a site of endless invention and speculation. But what happened to those visions? Are the smart homes of today the future that architects and designers once predicted, or has `home' proved resistant to radical change? Home Futures: Living in Yesterday's Tomorrow -accompanying a major Design Museum exhibition of the same title-explores a number of different attitudes toward domestic life, tracing the social and technological developments that have driven change in the home. It proposes that we are already living in yesterday's tomorrow, just not in the way anyone predicted. This book begins with a lavishly illustrated catalogue portraying the `home futures' of the twentieth century and beyond, from the work of Ettore Sottsass and Joe Colombo to Google's recent forays into the smart home. The catalogue is followed by a reader consisting of newly commissioned essays by writers such as Dan Hill and Justin McGuirk, which explore the changes in the domestic realm in relation to space, technology, society, economy and psychology.

An exploration of the ways in which designers are striving to transform our relationship with the natural world. Designers today are striving to transform our relationship with the natural world. While the modern industrial age gave way to designs that vastly improved human enterprise through technology, there were unintended and destructive consequences for the environment. Humans are intrinsically linked to nature yet our actions have frayed this relationship, forcing designers to think more intentionally and to consider the impact of every design decision, from an artifact's manufacture and use to its obsolescence. Designers are aligning with biologists, engineers, agriculturists, environmentalists and many other disciplines to design a more harmonious and regenerative future. Based on these new partnerships, designers are asking different questions and anticipating future challenges, which not only change the design process, but also what design means. Nature: Collaborations in Design includes over sixty-five international projects from the fields of architecture, product design, landscape design, fashion, interactive and communication design, and material research. More than 300 compelling and exquisite photographs, illustrations and content from data visualizations illustrate seven essays, which explain and explore designers' strategies around understanding, simulating, salvaging, facilitating, augmenting, remediating and nurturing nature. Four conversations between scientists and designers delve into topics related to synthetic biology, scientific versus design lexicon, and recent shifts in the meaning of nature with a glossary illuminating scientific, technological and theoretical concepts and processes invoked by the designers.

This book brings together all the nominations and winners for the Design Museum's annual Designs of the Year Award over the last decade. It is a unique worldwide survey of contemporary design, reflecting a period of enormous social and technological change that began with the launch of the iPhone in 2007. In politics we have gone from Shepard Fairey's `Hope' poster for Barack Obama, to the Pussyhat protest against Donald Trump. Selected by 205 expert nominators, a total of 840 innovative and thought-provoking designs from across the world are featured, ranging from the scale of Zaha Hadid's architecture to Harvard's human organs-on-chips project. The designs that have defined this moment in history include Herzog & de Meuron's Beijing Olympic stadium, the Plumen light bulb, Google's self-driving car and many more. This book is divided per the categories for the Designs of the Year award: architecture, digital, fashion, graphics, product and transport. Introduced by acclaimed writer, editor and director of the Design Museum, Deyan Sudjic, the book features all of the Designs of the Year winners over the past decade.

Arrive. Survive. Thrive. Getting humans to Mars has become one of the great challenges of our time. Mars holds the potential of human settlement, and the promise of life after Earth. Some of the world's greatest entrepreneurs, architects and engineers are dedicated to conquering this next frontier. Moving to Mars: Design for the Red Planet is one of the first books to focus on the crucial role that design will play in this collective endeavour. From the capsules that will need to keep passengers in harmony during their nine-month journey, to the habitats that they will live in, to the terraforming of the landscape to make it life-sustaining, every detail needs to be designed. This task is falling to the traditional space agencies such as NASA, and to private entrepreneurs such as Elon Musk and Richard Branson, and to architects such as Norman Foster. As well as technical and practical solutions, this book will examine how design and design thinkers are approaching our move to Mars in unexpected ways. With striking, rarely-seen imagery and a unique design-led focus, this book will appeal to 'space junkies' and design enthusiasts alike.

A playbook for creative thinking, created for contemporary students and practitioners working across the fields of graphic design, product design, service design and user experience. Design is Storytelling is a guide to thinking and making created for contemporary students and practitioners working across the fields of graphic design, product design, service design, and user experience. By grounding narrative concepts in fresh, concrete examples and demonstrations, this compelling book provides designers with tools and insights for shaping behaviour and engaging users. Compact, relevant and richly illustrated, the book is written with a sense of humour and a respect for the reader's time and intelligence. Design is Storytelling unpacks the elements of narrative into a fun and useful toolkit, bringing together principles from literary criticism, narratology, cognitive science, semiotics, phenomenology and critical theory to show how visual communication mobilizes instinctive biological processes as well as social norms and conventions. The book uses 250 illustrations to actively engage readers in the process of looking and understanding. This lively book shows how designers can use the principles of storytelling and visual thinking to create beautiful, surprising and effective outcomes. Although the book is full of practical advice for designers, it will also appeal to people more broadly involved in branding, marketing, business and communication.

Designing Peace asks, how might we collectively put our creative forces together to envision a future we want to live in and take action to create it now? This book is an intersectional snapshot of the actions-culturally diverse and wide-ranging in scale-that are currently in play around the world. Offering perspectives on peace through essays, interviews, critical maps, project profiles, data visualizations, and art, this book conveys the momentum that design can gain in effecting a peace-filled future. From activists, scholars, and architects to policymakers, graphic, game, and landcape designers, Desiging Peace flips the conversation: peace is not simply a passive state signifying the absence of war, it is a dynamic concept that requires effort, expertise, and multi-dimensional solutions to address its complexity. Designers engage with individuals, communities, and organizations to create a more sustainable peace-from creative confrontations that challenge existing structures, to designs that demand embracing justice and truth in a search for reconciliation. This publication aims to expand the discourse on what is possible if society were to design for peace.