Prologue Hello World
1. Martin Pawley, Buckminster Fuller: How Much Does the Building Weigh? (1990; London: Trefoil Publications, 1995), p. 12.
2. Elizabeth Flock, ‘Dennis Ritchie, Father of C Programming Language and Unix, Dies at 70’, Washington Post, 13 October 2011, http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/blogpost/post/dennis-ritchie-father-of-c-programming-language-and-unix-dies-at-70/2011/10/13/gIQADGNbhL_blog.html; Steve Lohr, ‘Dennis Ritchie, Trailblazer in Digital Era, Dies at 70’, The New York Times, 13 October 2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/14/technology/dennis-ritchie-programming-trailblazer-dies-at-70.html
1 What is design?
1. László Moholy-Nagy, Vision in Motion (Chicago, Ill.: Paul Theobald, 1947), p. 42.
2. Robin D. S. Yates, ‘The Rise of Qin and the Military Conquest of the Warring States’, in Jane Portal (ed.), The First Emperor: China’s Terracotta Army (London: British Museum Press, 2007), p. 31.
3. Ibid. pp. 42–50.
4. Michael Loewe, ‘The First Emperor and the Qin Empire’, in Portal, The First Emperor, pp. 75–8.
5. Hiromi Kinoshita, ‘Qin Palaces and Architecture’, in Portal, The First Emperor, pp. 84–5.
6. Jessica Rawson, ‘The First Emperor’s Tomb: The Afterlife Universe’, in Portal, The First Emperor, pp. 118–29.
7. Lukas Nickel, ‘The Terracotta Army’, in Portal, The First Emperor, pp. 158–79.
8. Henry Dreyfuss, Designing for People (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1955), p. 14.
9. William Little, H. W. Fowler and Jessie Coulson, The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary on Historical Principles, vol. 1, ed. C. T. Onions (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), p. 528.
10. John Heskett, Toothpicks & Logos: Design in Everyday Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 5.
11. The phrase ‘intelligent design’ had been bandied about by scientists for years in various guises, but in 1989 it appeared in Of Pandas and People: The Central Question of Biological Origins, a textbook for US high-school students written by Percival David and Dean H. Kenyon and published by the Foundation for Thought and Ethics in Texas. In the book, they mount a neo-creationist argument that parts of the universe were created, not by the organic process of evolution described by Charles Darwin, but by a rational process orchestrated by an ‘intelligent designer’. Most neo-creationists believe that the ‘intelligent designer’ was the Christian God. Some also contend that conventional interpretations of science were too narrow, and should be broadened to include super-natural phenomena. Their critics have accused them of being ultra-conservative cranks.
12. Giorgio Vasari, Lives of the Artists: Volume I (1550; London: Penguin Books, 1987), pp. 256–7. A fulling machine is used in the process of making woollen cloth. It cleans the cloth by scouring it repeatedly to remove oil, dirt and other impurities before thickening it.
13. Heskett, Toothpicks & Logos, p. 5.
14. Timo de Rijk, Norm = Form: On Standardisation and Design (Den Haag: Foundation Design den Haag; Gemeentemuseum Den Haag; Uitgeverij Thieme Art b.v., Deventer, 2010), pp. 32–5.
15. Ian Thompson, The Sun King’s Garden: Louis XIV, André Le Nôtre and the Creation of the Gardens of Versailles (London: Bloomsbury, 2006), p. 125.
16. Peter Burke, The Fabrication of Louis XIV (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1992), pp. 51–8.
17. Alison Kelly (ed.), The Story of Wedgwood (1962; London: Faber and Faber, 1975), p. 18.
18. Margarita Tupitsyn, ‘Being-in-Production: The Constructivist Code’, in Margarita Tupitsyn (ed.), Rodchenko & Popova: Defining Constructivism (London: Tate Publishing, 2009), p. 13.
19. Penny Sparke, Italian Design: 1870 to the Present (London: Thames & Hudson, 1988), pp. 10–14.
20. ‘Icons of Progress’ (2011), IBM, http://www.ibm.com/ibm100/us/en/icons/gooddesign/
21. Reyner Banham, Design by Choice, ed. Penny Sparke (London: Academy Editions, 1981).
22. Roland Barthes, Mythologies (1957; Frogmore, St Albans: Paladin, 1973); Jean Baudrillard, The System of Objects (1968; London: Verso, 2005).
23. Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour, Learning from Las Vegas: The Forgotten Symbolism of Architectural Form (1972; Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1977).
24. Janet Abrams, ‘Muriel Cooper: Biography by Janet Abrams’, AIGA website to mark the award of the 1994 AIGA Medal to Cooper, http://www.aiga.org/medalist-murielcooper/; reprinted from ‘Flashback: Muriel Cooper’s Visible Wisdom’, I.D. Magazine (September–October 1994).
25. Interview with John Maeda, August 2007, in Alice Rawsthorn, ‘Muriel Cooper: The Unsung Heroine of On-screen Style’, International Herald Tribune, 1 October 2007.
26. ‘Everything I Know’, Buckminster Fuller Institute, 6 March 2010, http://bfi.org/about-bucky/resources/everything-i-know
27. Calvin Tomkins, ‘In the Outlaw Area’, New Yorker, 8 January 1966, in K. Michael Hays and Dana Miller (eds), Buckminster Fuller: Starting with the Universe (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 2008), p.180.
28. Martin Pawley, Buckminster Fuller: How Much Does the Building Weigh? (1990; London: Trefoil Publications, 1995), p. 122.
29. Calvin Tomkins, ‘In the Outlaw Area’, in Hays and Miller, Buckminster Fuller, pp. 198–9.
30. Mark Oliver, ‘“Slowly but steadily, madness descended”’, Guardian, 10 February 2005, http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2005/feb/10/money.uknews; Sharon LaFraniere, ‘All iPhone Sales Suspended at Apple Stores in China’, The New York Times, 13 January 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/14/technology/apple-suspends-iphone-4s-sales-in-mainland-china-stores.html
31. Little, Fowler and Coulson, Shorter Oxford English Dictionary on Historical Principles, p. 528.
32. Interview with Nathaniel Corum, July 2010, in Alice Rawsthorn, ‘A Font of Ideas from a “Nomadic” Humanitarian Architect’, International Herald Tribune, 2 August 2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/02/arts/design/02iht-design2.html
33. Participle, http://www.participle.net/
34. For example, the American Society of Civil Engineers publishes an annual ‘Report Card’, which assesses the condition of fifteen aspects of public infrastructure in the United States, including drinking water, energy, hazardous waste, roads, schools and transit. The 2009 version produced four Cs and eleven Ds, and calculated that some $2.2 trillion of investment would be needed in the US over the next five years to patch up the damage and make the infrastructure fit for purpose.
35. Tim Brown, Change by Design: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation (New York: HarperCollins, 2009), pp. 6–7.
36. Jenny Uglow, The Lunar Men: The Friends Who Made the Future, 1730–1810 (London: Faber and Faber, 2002), p. 112.
37. IDEO, http://www.ideo.com
38. Interview with Peter Saville, February 2012.
39. Bernard Rudofsky, Architecture Without Architects: A Short Introduction to Non-Pedigreed Architecture (1964; Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1987); The Museum of Modern Art, Press Archive, 10 December 1964, https://www.moma.org/docs/press_archives/3348/releases/MOMA_1964_0135_1964-12-10_87.pdf?2010
40. ‘Gwangju Design Biennale 2011’, http://gb.or.kr/eng/gdb/. Ai Weiwei initiated the ‘Un-Named Design’ exhibition in his role as joint artistic director of the Gwangju Design Biennale in South Korea only to be arrested by the Chinese authorities in April 2011 and imprisoned for an indefinite period of time. A group of his collaborators, led by the curator Brendan McGetrick, continued work on the exhibition during his imprisonment. When Ai was released from prison in June 2011, he resumed work on the project the following day. However, the Chinese government rejected repeated requests from the biennale organizers to allow him to travel to Gwangju to supervise the installation of the exhibition that summer and to attend the official opening of the biennale in September 2011.
41. Steve Jones, Darwin’s Island: The Galapagos in the Garden of England (London: Little, Brown, 2009), pp. 146–8.
42. ‘A Short History of the Dalmatian’ from the American Kennel Club’s The Complete Dog Book (1992), posted on the Dalmatian Club of America website, http://www.thedca.org/dal_hist_by_akc.html; Ron Punter, ‘Origin and History of the Lakeland Terrier’, Lakeland Terrier Club, http://lakelandterrierclub.org.uk/profile.htm; ‘Who was Parson Jack Russell?’, ‘History of the Breed’ section of the Jack Russell Terrier website, http://www.jack-russell-terrier.co.uk/breed/who_was_jack_russell.html
43. Benoit Denizet-Lewis, ‘Can the Bulldog Be Saved?’, The New York Times Magazine, 22 November 2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/27/magazine/can-the-bulldog-be-saved.html
44. Jones, Darwin’s Island, pp. 81–3.
45. Denizet-Lewis, ‘Can the Bulldog Be Saved?’
2 What is a designer?
1. Victor Papanek, Design for the Real World: Human Ecology and Social Change (1971; Chicago, Ill.: Academy Chicago Publishers, 1985), p. 3.
2. Together with Keith Richards, Blackbeard is said to have been a role model for the styling of Johnny Depp’s character Captain Jack Sparrow in the Pirates of the Caribbean movies.
3. Captain Charles Johnson, A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious Pyrates (1724; London: Conway Maritime Press, 2002).
4. Interview with Tom Wareham, curator of maritime history at the Museum of London Docklands, April 2011.
5. Jamaica Rose and Michael MacLeod, A Book of Pirates: A Guide to Plundering, Pillaging and Other Pursuits (Layton, Utah: Gibbs M. Smith, 2010), p. 137.
6. Interview with Tom Wareham, April 2011.
7. BP Global, http://www.bp.com/; Prada, http://www.prada.com/
8. Jeremy Lewis, The Life and Times of Allen Lane (London: Penguin Books, 2006), pp. 244–5.
9. Interview with Rolf Fehlbaum, February 2010, in Alice Rawsthorn, ‘A Dash of Color at Vitra’s Eclectic Site’, International Herald Tribune, 15 February 2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/15/arts/15iht-design15.html
10. Architects can be equally dictatorial. Take Frank Lloyd Wright (supposedly the model for Howard Roark, the megalomaniacal architect played by Gary Cooper in King Vidor’s 1949 movie version of Ayn Rand’s novel The Fountainhead). His cousin, Richard Lloyd Jones, called to complain that the roof of Westhope, a house Wright had designed for him in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in the 1930s, was faulty. ‘Dammit, Frank, it is leaking on my desk,’ wailed Lloyd Jones. To which Wright replied, ‘Richard, why don’t you move your desk?’ Meryle Secrest, Frank Lloyd Wright: A Biography (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992), p. 372.
11. The British novelist Daniel Defoe published a heavily romanticized account of Henry Avery’s career in piracy in his 1719 novel The King of Pirates (London: Hesperus Classics, 2002). The dashing Douglas Fairbanks played the title role of the 1926 silent movie The Black Pirate, as did Errol Flynn in the 1935 film Captain Blood. Johnny Depp starred as Captain Jack Sparrow in the Pirates of the Caribbean movie franchise from 2003 onwards.
12. John Cooper, The Queen’s Agent: Francis Walsingham at the Court of Elizabeth I (London: Faber and Faber, 2011), pp. 144–5. Hindlip Hall was the home of the staunchly Catholic Abington family, and is now the headquarters of the West Mercia Police.
13. Nicholas Owen was canonized by Pope Paul VI in 1970 as one of the Forty Martyrs of England and Wales, all of whom were executed between 1535 and 1679. He was canonized for his courage, selflessness and for saving the lives of so many fellow Roman Catholics.
14. Robert Grudin, Design and Truth (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2010), p. 107.
15. Jefferson’s love of tinkering led to a fascination with design and manufacturing, which influenced his political work. As a young diplomat in Paris during the early 1780s, he had visited a musket workshop, owned and run by a gunsmith called Le Blanc, who had developed a progressive method of ensuring that his muskets were made from identical, interchangeable components. Le Blanc clashed with the French authorities after his rivals goaded them into questioning his methods, but Jefferson’s report on his workshop had a lasting impact on manufacturing in the United States. Henry Dreyfuss, Designing for People (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1955), p. 21; John Heskett, Industrial Design (London: Thames & Hudson, 1980), p. 50.
16. Charles Darwin’s family home, Down House, was in the village of Downe in Kent. The Post Office added an ‘e’ to the village’s name, but Darwin refused to do the same. Steve Jones, Darwin’s Island: The Galapagos in the Garden of England (London: Little, Brown, 2009), p. 2.
17. Jonathan Olivares, A Taxonomy of the Office Chair (London: Phaidon, 2011), p. 17.
18. Peter Burke, The Fabrication of Louis XIV (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1992), p. 58.
19. The Meissen manufactory was founded in 1710 by Augustus the Strong, Elector Prince of Saxony, at Albrechtsburg Castle in Germany. Augustus wished to emulate the finely crafted porcelain which was imported to Europe from China, and the artisans working for his court, including the goldsmith Johann Jakob Irminger, were instructed to design vessels and figures for the manufactory. Other pieces were designed by anonymous craftsmen who were employed there. ‘Our tradition’, Meissen, http://www.meissen.com/en/about-meissen®/our-tradition
20. By the time Wedgwood was apprenticed to him, Thomas Whieldon was already experimenting with new ways of organizing production at his factory by allotting different workers to specific tasks, such as throwing, turning, handling, modelling and decorating the pots. Similar systems had been used in the early 1700s by the Chinese porcelain industry, and were gradually becoming popular in Europe. The Scottish economist David Hume had analysed the benefits of what he called the ‘partition of employments’ in his 1739 book A Treatise of Human Nature, and his compatriot Adam Smith reaffirmed the importance of the ‘division of labour’ in An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, published in 1776. When Wedgwood rented a small factory in 1758 to open his own pottery, he introduced many of Whieldon’s experimental ideas there.
21. Jenny Uglow, The Lunar Men: The Friends Who Made the Future, 1730-1810 (London: Faber and Faber, 2002), pp. 49–52; ‘William Hackwood’, Wedgwood Museum, http://www.wedgwoodmuseum.org.uk/learning/discovery_packs/___/pack/2182/chapter/2415
22. Uglow, The Lunar Men, pp. 349–54.
23. Alison Kelly (ed.), The Story of Wedgwood (1962; London: Faber & Faber, 1975), p. 18.
24. ‘Frog Service’, Victoria & Albert Museum, http://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O8065/plate-frog-service/
25. Kelly, The Story of Wedgwood, p. 34.
26. The most talented modellers honed their skills by working with Wedgwood on replicas of finely crafted antiquities. Their most challenging assignment was to make a copy of the Barberini Vase, an ancient Roman cameo glass vase, which was lent to Wedgwood by its owner the Duke of Portland in 1786. For four years they struggled to reproduce it accurately, developing special materials and production techniques to do so. The Portland Vase, as it was called as a ‘thank you’ to the duke, is still considered to be among Wedgwood’s finest works. Wedgwood held his modellers in high regard, Hackwood especially. ‘Hackwood is of the greatest value and consequence in finishing fine, small work,’ he wrote in 1774. Two years later, he wished that he had ‘half a dozen more Hackwoods’. ‘William Hackwood’, Wedgwood Museum.
27. Uglow, The Lunar Men, pp. 325–6.
28. Mary Shelley portrayed Victor Frankenstein, the hero of her 1818 novel, as an idealistic medical student whose scientific experiments produce a Creature who bears some physical resemblance to a (grotesque) human being. The novel then explores whether the Creature also shares the human capacity for language, emotions, empathy, vulnerability, the need for companionship, a moral conscience and a soul. Frankenstein sets up a second laboratory in the Orkney Islands where he intends to build a female companion for the Creature, but changes his mind halfway through the project and destroys her. The Creature is so enraged by grief that he kills Frankenstein’s friend Clerval and his wife Elizabeth in acts of vengeance. He then flees to the North Pole with Frankenstein in pursuit. The latter dies there, and the Creature disappears after plunging into the ice, never to be seen again. Mary Shelley, Frankenstein: Or, the Modern Prometheus (1818; London: Penguin Classics, 2003).
29. Richard Holmes, The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science (London: HarperPress, 2008), pp. 334–5. There were five theatrical versions of Frankenstein on the London stage during the 1820s alone.
30. George Eliot, Middlemarch (1874; London: Penguin Classics, 1985).
31. The fictional city of ‘Milton’ was modelled on Manchester, where Elizabeth Gaskell lived for much of her adult life with her husband, William, and their children. The model for ‘Darkshire’ is the nearby county of Lancashire. Elizabeth Gaskell, North and South (1855; Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics, 1987), p. 96.
32. Heskett, Industrial Design, p. 19.
33. Ibid., pp. 183–4.
34. Martin P. Levy, ‘Manufacturers at the World’s Fairs: The Model of 1851’, in Jason T. Busch and Catherine L. Futter, Inventing the Modern World: Decorative Arts at the World’s Fairs, 1851–1939 (New York: Skira Rizzoli International, 2012), pp. 34–49.
35. ‘The Great Exhibition’, British Library, http://www.bl.uk/learning/histcitizen/victorians/exhibition/greatexhibition.html
36. ‘National Art Library Great Exhibition collection’, Victoria & Albert Museum, http://www.vam.ac.uk/content/articles/n/national-art-library-great-exhibition-collection/
37. Richard Sennett, The Craftsman (London: Allen Lane, 2008), p. 112.
38. Fiona MacCarthy, The Last Pre-Raphaelite: Edward Burne-Jones and the Victorian Imagination (London: Faber and Faber, 2011), pp. 128–32.
39. ‘About Dresser’, Victoria & Albert Museum’s microsite for the 2004 exhibition ‘Christopher Dresser: A Design Revolution’, http://www.vam.ac.uk/vastatic/microsites/1324_dresser/whoisdresser.html. Christopher Dresser was noted for the quality of his metalware, and particularly for the pieces he developed for companies such as Hukin & Heath and Elkingtons in Birmingham and James Dixon in Sheffield.
40. Achim Borchardt-Hume (ed.), Albers and Moholy-Nagy: From the Bauhaus to the New World (London: Tate Publishing, 2006), pp. 163–7.
41. Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, Moholy-Nagy: Experiment in Totality (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1950), pp. 64–7.
42. László Moholy-Nagy, Vision in Motion (Chicago, Ill.: Paul Theobald, 1947), p. 42.
43. György Kepes’s books on visual theory included Language of Vision, published in 1944 (New York: Dover Publications, 1995), and a series of essays published in six volumes under the title ‘Vision + Value’, from 1965 to 1966.
44. Jennifer Bass and Pat Kirkham, Saul Bass: A Life in Film & Design (London: Laurence King, 2011); György Kepes (ed.), György Kepes: The MIT Years, 1945–1977 (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1978).
45. Time, 31 October 1949.
46. Raymond Loewy, Industrial Design (London: Faber and Faber, 1979), p. 25.
47. Adèle Cygelman, Palm Springs Modern: Houses in the California Desert (New York: Rizzoli International, 1999), pp. 38–49.
48. Raymond Loewy, Industrial Design (London: Faber & Faber, 1979), p. 36.
49. Olivier Boissière, Starck® (Cologne: Benedikt Taschen, 1991), pp. 84–7.
50. Charlotte and Peter Fiell, 1000 Chairs (Cologne: Taschen, 2000), p. 570.
51. ‘Louis Ghost’, Starck, http://www.starck.com/en/design/categories/furniture/chairs.html#louis_ghost
52. Victor Papanek pointed out disapprovingly in Design for the Real World (p. ix) that Raymond Loewy and other prominent American industrial designers of his day, including Henry Dreyfuss, Harold Van Doren and Norman Bel Geddes, had all started their careers either by designing stage sets for the theatre or department-store window displays.
53. Raymond Loewy, Industrial Design, p. 8.
54. Interview with Nathaniel Corum, July 2010, in Alice Rawsthorn, ‘A Font of Ideas from a “Nomadic” Humanitarian Architect’, International Herald Tribune, 2 August 2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/02/arts/design/02iht-design2.html; for Hilary Cottam, see Participle, http://www.participle.net/
55. Interview with Emily Pilloton, October 2011, in Alice Rawsthorn, ‘Humanitarian Design Project Aims to Build a Sense of Community’, International Herald Tribune, 24 October 2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/24/arts/24iht-design24.html
56. Hilary Cottam set up Participle in 2007 with Hugo Manassei, whose background is in digital technology.
57. Interview with Hilary Cottam, January 2012.
58. An example is the work of the American designers Ben Fry and Casey Reas, who developed Processing, a new computer programming language that provides a solution to the data crisis by distilling digital information into the luscious, constantly changing digital imagery of data visualizations. Rather than relying on a tech company to distribute it, as Dennis Ritchie and his colleagues did with the computer programming languages they devised at Bell Labs, Fry and Reas released it themselves through their website, http://www.processing.org/
59. The Swiss design theorist François Burkhardt observed that for as long as designers were restricted to commercial roles, their ability to pursue their own would be limited. ‘They are very ill-placed to set themselves up as a pressure group able to produce real change,’ he wrote, ‘for they are no more than employees, working for companies within which they have little autonomy.’ François Burkhardt, ‘Design and “Avantpostmodernism”’, in John Thackara (ed.), Design After Modernism: Beyond the Object (London: Thames & Hudson, 1988), p. 147.
60. Tim Brown, Change by Design: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation (New York: HarperCollins, 2009), p. 13.
61. An example is William Joyce, who worked for the animation studio Pixar before co-founding Moonbot Studios in Shreveport, Louisiana, which produced several acclaimed interactive books including The Fantastic Flying Books of Morris Lessmore and The Numberlys; http://www.moonbotstudios.com/. ‘Moonbot Studios Launches in Louisiana’, uploaded on to YouTube by louisianaeconomicdev on 12 April 2011, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ueBGHtOkyQ
62. Michael Braungart and William McDonough, Cradle to Cradle: Re-making the Way We Make Things (2002; London: Jonathan Cape, 2008).
63. Lilly Reich’s achievements were obscured by her close collaboration with her lover, Mies van der Rohe. When he emigrated to the United States in 1938, she stayed behind in Berlin during the Second World War only for her studio to be destroyed in a bomb raid. Two years after the war ended, Reich died at the age of sixty-one. Mies lived until 1969, by which time Reich was largely forgotten, and many of her achievements perceived as being his.
64. ‘America Meets Charles and Ray Eames’, from NBC’s Home show, presented by Arlene Francis and broadcast in 1956; uploaded on to YouTube by hermanmiller on 23 November 2011, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IBLMoMhlAfM
65. Esther da Costa Meyer, ‘Simulated Domesticities: Perriand before Le Corbusier’, in Mary McLeod (ed.), Charlotte Perriand: An Art of Living (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2003), pp. 36–7.
66. Megan Gambino, ‘Interview with Charles Harrison’, Smithsonian Magazine, 17 December 2008, http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/Interview-With-Intelligent-Designer-Charles-Harrison.html
67. In the United States, more than half the students at most design schools are now female. There are still fewer women at the top of the design profession than men there and in other countries, but the number of influential women designers is growing globally, notably Hella Jongerius in product design, Ilse Crawford in interiors, Paula Scher in graphics and Lisa Strausfeld in software. There has also been progress in terms of ethnic diversity, especially among African American designers. Stephen Burks is a leading figure in furniture design, as is Gail Anderson in graphics and Joshua Darden in typography. But comparatively few black teenagers choose to study design in North America or Europe, possibly because they are deterred by the dearth of role models, instead deciding to pursue careers in fields where they can realistically expect to have a better chance of success. Encouragingly, dynamic designers are emerging in Africa and Asia, including Sanga Moses in Uganda and Poonam Bir Kasturi in India, both of whom have executed sustainable design projects that promise to alleviate poverty and foster entrepreneurialism.
Tellingly, one area of design where women have thrived is the relatively recent one of software. As well as Muriel Cooper, the pioneers of digital imagery in the late twentieth century included Lillian Schwartz, Vera Molnar and Barbara Nessim. Elsewhere, Hilary Cottam and Emily Pilloton are among the leaders in social design, while Neri Oxman and Daisy Ginsberg are at the forefront of redefining the relationship between design and science.
68. Dennis Ritchie was instrumental in the design of the Unix computer operating system, which he developed at Bell Labs with a colleague, Ken Thompson. Unix later inspired the open source development of the free operating system Linux. Steve Lohr, ‘Dennis Ritchie, Trailblazer in Digital Era, Dies at 70’, The New York Times, 13 October 2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/14/technology/dennis-ritchie-programming-trailblazer-dies-at-70.html
69. Among the exhibits at Maker Faire Africa in Cairo were an automated car park, energy-efficient traffic lights and a human-powered vehicle that looked not unlike Buckminster Fuller’s beloved Dymaxion Car; http://makerfaireafrica.com/about/
70. Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs (London: Little, Brown, 2011), p. 501; ‘Apple’s Mac App Store Downloads Top 100 Million’, Apple, http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2011/12/12Apples-Mac-App-Store-Downloads-Top-100-Million.html
71. ‘The Third Industrial Revolution’, Economist, 21 April 2012, http://www.economist.com/node/21553017
3 What is good design?
1. Reyner Banham, ‘H.M. Fashion House’, New Statesman, 27 January 1961.
2. Fiona MacCarthy, William Morris (1994; London: Faber and Faber, 1995), p. 418.
3. William Morris, Hopes and Fears for Art (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1919).
4. Edgar Kaufmann Jnr, Good Design (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1950). The Good Design Awards were founded by Kaufmann Jnr, who had curated the original ‘Good Design’ exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, together with Charles and Ray Eames, Eero Saarinen, George Nelson and other designers.
5. Plato, Early Socratic Dialogues (1987; London: Penguin Classics, 2005).
6. C. J. Chivers, The Gun: The AK-47 and the Evolution of War (London: Allen Lane, 2010), p. 9.
7. Ibid., pp. 143–200; Max Hastings, ‘The Most Influential Weapon of Our Time’, New York Review of Books, 10 February 2011, http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/feb/10/most-influential-weapon-our-time/
8. Chivers, The Gun, pp. 313 and 335.
9. Donald Judd, ‘It’s Hard to Find a Good Lamp’ (1993), http://www.juddfoundation.org/furniture/essay.htm. This essay was originally published in the exhibition catalogue Donald Judd Furniture (Rotterdam: Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, 1993).
10. ‘Doodle History’, Doodle 4 Google, http://www.google.com/doodle4google/resources/history.html
11. ‘Doodles’, Google, http://www.google.com/doodles/finder/2012/All%20doodles
12. Jennifer Bass and Pat Kirkham, Saul Bass: A Life in Film & Design (London: Laurence King, 2011), pp. 9–11.
13. ‘Saul Bass Title Sequence – The Man with the Golden Arm (1955)’, uploaded on to YouTube by Movie Titles on 1 September 2010, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sS76whmt5Yc. The Man with the Golden Arm was directed by Otto Preminger and produced by Otto Preminger Films, Carlyle Productions.
14. ‘Vertigo Start Titles’, uploaded on to YouTube by VISUALPLUS 1 on 4 August 2010, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5qtDCZP4WrQ. Vertigo was directed by Alfred Hitchcock and produced by Paramount Pictures, Alfred Hitchcock Productions (uncredited).
15. ‘Casino (1995) opening title’, uploaded on to YouTube by reklamtuning on 20 September 2010, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HMva00IO0zA. Casino was directed by Martin Scorsese and produced by Universal Pictures, Syalis DA, Légende Entreprises, De Fina-Cappa.
16. American Red Cross, http://www.redcross.org/
17. Kaufmann Jnr, Good Design.
18. There are two conflicting explanations of why that shade of yellow was chosen for the original Post-it Note. One is that it was the colour of a scrap of paper in the office at the headquarters of 3M, the Post-it’s manufacturer, when the colour was being discussed. Another explanation is that 3M expected the principal purchasers of the product to be law firms, and decided to make the original Post-its in the same shade as US legal pads.
19. London 2012 Olympics, http://www.london2012.com/
20. The early version of the London 2012 logo was also criticized on functional grounds. Several people with epilepsy reported suffering seizures after seeing the original animated version on television after the logo’s launch in 2007. ‘Epilepsy Fears over 2012 Footage’, BBC News, 5 June 2007, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/6724245.stm
21. ‘Alternative London 2012 Olympic Games Logo Video’, uploaded on to YouTube by Artealee on 12 June 2007, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EJSsRILZpRg
22. Helvetica was designed by Max Miedinger and Eduard Hoffmann for the Haas type foundry in Münchenstein, Switzerland. Launched in 1957, it has become one of the most influential typefaces of modern times. Arial was introduced in 1982 by Monotype Typography. Gallingly for design purists, many more people use Arial than Helvetica on their computers, because until recently it was more widely available than the older font, even though the quality of its design is poorer.
23. Mark Simonson, ‘How to Spot Arial’, Mark Simonson Studio (February 2001), http://www.ms-studio.com/articlesarialsid.html
24. Mark Simonson, ‘The Scourge of Arial’, Mark Simonson Studio (February 2001) http://www.ms-studio.com/articles.html
25. In Search of Wabi Sabi with Marcel Theroux, Part 3, BBC4, first broadcast 16 March 2009, http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00kvr8m
26. Interview with Konstantin Grcic, August 2006, in Alice Rawsthorn, ‘Utility Man’, The New York Times Style Magazine, 8 October 2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/08/style/tmagazine/08tutility.html
27. Louise Schouwenberg (ed.), Hella Jongerius: Misfit (London, New York: Phaidon, 2010).
28. Naoto Fukasawa and Jasper Morrison, Super Normal: Sensations of the Ordinary (Baden, Switzerland: Lars Müller Publishers, 2007).
29. ‘Inventor of the Week Archive: Art Fry & Spencer Silver, Post-it® notes’, MIT School of Engineering, http://web.mit.edu/invent/iow/frysilver.html
30. Interview with Matthew Carter, June 2006, in Alice Rawsthorn, ‘Quirky Serifs Aside, Georgia Fonts Win on Web’, International Herald Tribune, 10 July 2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/09/style/09iht-dlede10.2150992.html
31. Robert Grudin, Design and Truth (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2010), p. 8.
32. Chivers, The Gun, pp. 25–6.
33. Raffi Khatchadourian, ‘The Gulf War: Were There Any Heroes in the BP Oil Disaster?’, New Yorker, 14 March 2008, pp. 36–59.
34. Flos, http://www.flos.com/int-en-Home
35. Grudin, Design and Truth, pp. 15–17.
36. Arnd Friedrichs and Kerstin Finger (eds), The Infamous Chair: 220°C Virus Monobloc (Berlin: Gestalten, 2010).
37. The biodegradable packaging of the bananas was cited as an example of a design project which tries, but fails, to be sustainable by Cameron Sinclair, co-founder of Architecture for Humanity, at the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland, in January 2010 during a debate on ‘Design for Sustainability’. Alice Rawsthorn, ‘Debating Sustainability’, International Herald Tribune, 31 January 2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/01/arts/01iht-design1.html
38. The Toyota Prius was introduced in Japan in 1997, and worldwide in 2001. ‘History of Toyota Prius’, uploaded on to YouTube by Nunofos on 30 October 2009, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NCtGshT0OpA
39. The Series 7 chair was designed by Arne Jacobsen in 1955, and the Egg in 1958. Charlotte and Peter Fiell, 1000 Chairs (Cologne: Taschen, 2000), pp. 345–6.
40. Jumana Farouky and Julian Isherwood, ‘A Seating Problem at McDonald’s’, Time, 11 October 2007, http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1670431,00.html
4 Why good design matters
1. Bruce Mau and the Institute Without Boundaries, Massive Change (London: Phaidon, 2004), p. 6.
2. Brigg Reilley, Michel Van Herp, Dan Sermand and Nicoletta Dentico, ‘SARS and Carlo Urbani’, New England Journal of Medicine, 15 May 2003, http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp030080; Elisabeth Rosenthal, ‘The Sars Epidemic: The Path; From China’s Provinces, a Crafty Germ Breaks Out’, The New York Times, 27 April 2003, http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/27/world/the-sars-epidemic-the-path-from-china-s-provinces-a-crafty-germ-breaks-out.html
3. John Heskett, Toothpicks & Logos: Design in Everyday Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 9.
4. Aimee Mullins, http://www.aimeemullins.com/index.php
5. Interview with Aimee Mullins, March 2012.
6. The ‘toes’ in those prostheses were described by Aimee Mullins as ‘figurative suggestions formed into the foot shape, not actual digits’.
7. Interview with Aimee Mullins, March 2012.
8. When she described seeing the mannequin at Madame Tussaud’s, Aimee Mullins said, ‘The important point here is that it was the calibre of work done on a Tussaud’s mannequin – with the layering of texture to propose tendons and muscles, and the specificity of colour and shape to produce the desired aesthetic – that was not present in prosthetic work where human beings would hugely benefit from such attention to detail. Most “mannequins” are basic human-like forms which only suggest “a leg” without an achilles tendon or toe digits or a calf muscle … which is actually what most standard-issue prosthetics have always mimicked, and still do.’
9. Interview with Aimee Mullins, March 2012.
10. ‘Aimee Mullins Returns to Dorset Orthopaedic’, http://www.dorset-ortho.com/aimeemullins-returns-to-dorset-orthopaedic/
11. Interview with Aimee Mullins, March 2012.
12. Aimee Mullins modelled in Alexander McQueen’s fashion show for his autumn/winter 1999 women’s ready-to-wear collection in London.
13. Matthew Barney’s film Cremaster 3 was released in 2002: http://www.cremaster.net/crem3.htm
14. Interview with Aimee Mullins, March 2012.
15. ‘Hugh Herr’, MIT Media Lab, http://www.media.mit.edu/people/hherr; MIT Media Laboratory Press Archive, ‘Powered Ankle-Foot Prosthesis’, http://www.media.mit.edu/press/ankle/
16. Interview with Aimee Mullins, March 2012.
17. Graham Pullin, Design Meets Disability (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2009), p. 33. The South African athlete Oscar Pistorius, who, like Aimee Mullins, was born without fibulas in both lower legs, faced similar criticism, but succeeded in proving that in his case his prostheses do not give him an unfair advantage. Pistorius was banned from entering 400-metre events against runners with intact biological legs when he was wearing bespoke J-shaped carbon fibre Flex-Foot Cheetah prosthetic lower legs, but successfully overturned the ban. He made history at the London 2012 Olympic Games by becoming the first amputee athlete to compete in the Olympics. His prostheses have earned him the nicknames ‘Blade Runner’ and ‘the fastest man on no legs’. Michael Sokolove, ‘The Fast Life of Oscar Pistorius’, The New York Times Magazine, 18 January 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/22/magazine/oscar-pistorius.html
18. Interview with David James, June 2006, in Alice Rawsthorn, ‘A Quest for Perfection for the Most Basic Thing: A Ball’, International Herald Tribune, 26 June 2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/25/style/25iht-dlede26.2045652.html
19. The Questra was reportedly 5 per cent faster in flight at the 1994 World Cup than its predecessor had been at the 1990 tournament. Andy Coghlan, ‘World Cup Players Face a Whole New Ball Game’, New Scientist, 9 July 1994.
20. Roger Cohen, ‘Germany Opens World Cup with Goals Galore’, International Herald Tribune, 9 June 2006, http://www.nytimes.com/iht/2006/06/10/sports/IHT-10cup.html. Another example of the +Teamgeist’s impact was the speed of the first of Tomas Rosicky’s two goals for the Czech Republic in its game against the USA. Jere Longman, ‘U.S. Is Routed by Czech Republic in World Cup’, The New York Times, 13 June 2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/13/sports/soccer/13soccer.html
21. Interview with David James, in Rawsthorn, ‘A Quest for Perfection’.
22. Interview with Steve Haake, June 2010, in Alice Rawsthorn, ‘Design and the World Cup: Best and Worst’, International Herald Tribune, 27 June 2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/28/arts/28iht-design28.html; Steve Haake and Simon Choppin, ‘Feeling the Pressure: The World Cup’s Altitude Factor’, New Scientist, 4 June 2010, http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20627635.800-feeling-the-pressure-the-world-cups-altitude-factor.html
23. Ruedi Rüegg died in 2011.
24. ‘Ruedi Rüegg’, Members, Alliance Graphique Internationale, http://www.a-g-i.org/2147/members/regg.html
25. ‘Contesting the Vote: Excerpts From Vice President’s Legal Challenge to the Results in Florida’, The New York Times, 28 November 2000, http://www.nytimes.com/2000/11/28/us/contesting-vote-excerpts-vice-president-s-legal-challenge-results-florida.html
26. Marcia Lausen, Design for Democracy: Ballot and Election Design (Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 2007), p. 11.
27. Ford Fessenden, ‘The 2000 Elections: The Ballot Design’, The New York Times, 10 November 2000, http://www.nytimes.com/2000/11/10/us/2000-election-ballot-design-candidates-should-be-same-page-experts-say.html; Don Van Natta Jnr and Dana Canedy, ‘The 2000 Elections: The Palm Beach Ballot: Democrats Say Ballot’s Design Hurt Gore’, The New York Times, 8 November 2000, http://www.nytimes.com/2000/11/09/us/2000-elections-palm-beach-ballot-florida-democrats-say-ballot-s-design-hurt-gore.html
28. David E. Rosenbaum, ‘The 2000 Elections: Florida; State Officials Don’t Expect Recount to Change Outcome’, The New York Times, 8 November 2000, http://www.nytimes.com/2000/11/09/us/2000-elections-florida-state-officials-don-t-expect-recount-change-outcome.html
29. Palm Beach County ended up rejecting some 4.1 per cent of its ballot papers in the 2000 presidential election because of multiple voting, four times more than the national average.
30. ‘Pat Buchanan’, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pat_Buchanan; Van Natta Jnr and Canedy, ‘The 2000 Elections’.
5 So why is so much design so bad?
1. Jeremy Lewis, The Life and Times of Allen Lane (London: Penguin Books, 2006), p. 89.
2. Penny Sparke, A Century of Car Design (London: Mitchell Beazley, 2002), pp. 20–21 and 187. The Citroën DS 19 was developed in the early 1950s by a team led by the Italian designer Flaminio Bertoni and the French design engineer André Lefèbvre. It was unveiled at the Paris Motor Show in 1955. By the end of the first day, Citroën had taken orders for some twelve thousand cars.
3. The French pronunciation of the letters D and S sounds exactly like déesse, the French word for goddess. Roland Barthes, ‘The New Citroën’, in his Mythologies (Frogmore, St Albans: Paladin, 1973), pp. 88–90.
4. Sparke, A Century of Car Design, pp. 176–7.
5. Esther da Costa Meyer, ‘Simulated Domesticities: Perriand before Le Corbusier’, in Mary McLeod, Charlotte Perriand: An Art of Living (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2003), p. 31. In 2006, Charles Harrison was given a Lifetime Achievement Award by the Smithsonian’s Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum in New York. Megan Gambino, ‘Interview with Charles Harrison’, 17 December 2008, http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/Interview-With-Intelligent-Designer-Charles-Harrison.html
6. Graham Pullin, Design Meets Disability (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press. 2009), p. 45.
7. There are cheering exceptions such as spectacles, which have been transformed from corrective devices for people with defective vision into stylish accessories that even those with perfect sight want to wear. The interaction designer Graham Pullin dedicated his 2009 book ‘Design Meets Disability to ‘Mr. Cutler and Mr. Gross’ of the London opticians Cutler & Gross.
8. Interview with Tom Shakespeare, June 2009, in Alice Rawsthorn, ‘Crafting for the Body and Soul’, International Herald Tribune, 7 July 2009, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/06/fashion/06iht-design6.html
9. Interview with Dieter Rams, November 2006, in Alice Rawsthorn, ‘Reviving Dieter Rams’ Pragmatism’, International Herald Tribune, 12 November 2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/12/style/12iht-design13.html
10. Tim Brown, Change by Design: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation (New York: HarperCollins, 2009), p. 25.
11. ‘In Praise of … Frank Pick’, Guardian, 17 October 2008.
12. Ken Garland, Mr Beck’s Underground Map (Harrow: Capital Transport Publishing, 2008).
13. Paul Shaw, Helvetica and the New York City Subway System: The True (Maybe) Story (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2010).
14. Suzy Menkes, ‘Alexander McQueen, Dark Star of International Fashion’, International Herald Tribune, 11 February 2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/12/fashion/12iht-mcqueen.html; Suzy Menkes, ‘Galliano’s Departure from Dior Ends a Wild Fashion Ride’, International Herald Tribune, 1 March 2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/02/business/global/02galliano.html
15. The outcome of such unexpected changes can be positive, as well as negative. To use an example from architecture, the Russian government’s sudden decision to increase titanium exports in the mid 1990s prompted such a sharp fall in the price of titanium that the US architect Frank Gehry could suddenly afford to clad the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao with that metal. Titanium is a beautiful material that looks especially lovely in the Basque light, and Gehry’s building benefits from it immensely. But often the impact of fluctuating commodity prices is negative. During the late 1960s, the Finnish architect Matti Suuronen sold nearly a hundred of his Futuro mobile homes as prefabricated kits of parts, which were delivered by helicopter and built in the form of an ellipsoid, an ancient shape resembling a flying saucer. So successful was the Futuro that Suuronen designed a larger range of mobile homes to be made in light plastic. But when the cost of that material soared after the 1973 oil price crisis, his new design became too expensive to produce and the Futuro project was scrapped.
16. Steven Heller, Paul Rand (London: Phaidon, 1999), pp. 188–9; Michael Bierut, ‘The Sins of St Paul’, Observatory: Design Observer, 31 January 2004, http://observatory.designobserver.com/entry.html?entry=1847
17. ‘Brand Identity’, Citroën, http://www.citroen.co.uk/home/#/about-us/history
18. The new brand name, which was inspired by one adopted by the house’s founding designer Yves Saint Laurent in the 1960s, was introduced solely for the company’s ready-to-wear fashion collections. Cassandre’s initialled YSL symbol was retained for other products including perfumes and cosmetics. Yves Saint Laurent coined the brand name ‘Saint Laurent Paris’ in 1966 for the company’s then-new ready-to-wear collection to distinguish it from the traditional haute couture line. The company later adopted a different brand name – Rive Gauche – for ready-to-wear. Hedi Slimane faced fierce criticism for his decision to remove Cassandre’s symbol from the ready-to-wear collections. Jess Cartner-Morley, ‘Yves Saint Laurent to be Renamed by Creative Director Hedi Slimane’, Guardian, 21 June 2012, http://www.guardian.co.uk/fashion/2012/jun/21/yves-saint-laurent-renamed
19. After registering his patent for the automatic pop-up toaster in 1919, Charles Strite, a mechanic working in a production plant in Stillwater, Minnesota, co-founded the Waters Genter Company to manufacture the toaster as the Model 1-A-1.
20. George Nelson, Chairs (New York: Whitney, 1953), p. 9.
21. Interview with Steve Haake, June 2010, in Alice Rawsthorn ‘Design and the World Cup: Best and Worst’, International Herald Tribune, 27 June 2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/28/arts/28iht-design28.html?ref=arts Steve Haake and Simon Choppin, ‘Feeling the Pressure: The World Cup’s Altitude Factor’, New Scientist, 4 June 2010, http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20627635.800-feeling-the-pressure-the-world-cups-altitude-factor.html
6 Why everyone wants to ‘do an Apple’
1. ‘The First iMac Introduction’, uploaded on to YouTube by peestandingup on 30 January 2006, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0BHPtoTctDY
2. Leander Kahney, Inside Steve’s Brain (New York: Portfolio, 2008), pp. 15 and 16.
3. David Streitfield, ‘Jobs Steps Down at Apple, Saying He Can’t Meet Duties’, The New York Times, 24 August 2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/25/technology/jobs-stepping-down-as-chief-of-apple.html
4. ‘Steve Jobs Shrines around the World – in Pictures’, Guardian, 6 October 2011, http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/gallery/2011/oct/06/steve-jobs-apple-shrines-world&/?picture=379996403#index=0
5. Nick Bilton, ‘The Rise of the Fake Apple Store’, The New York Times: Bits Blog, 20 July 2011, http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/07/20/the-rise-of-the-fake-apple-store/
6. ‘A Genius Departs’, Economist, 8 October 2011, http://www.economist.com/node/21531530
7. Alex Williams, ‘Short Sainthood for Steve Jobs’, The New York Times, 2 November 2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/03/fashion/the-steve-jobs-backlash.html. There were, inevitably, some dissenters, including ‘MikeinOhio’, who posted ‘Was Steve Jobs a Good Man or an Evil Corporate CEO and Wall Street Shill?’ on the Occupy Wall Street website on 6 October 2011, but such critics were in the minority: http://occupywallst.org/forum/was-steve-jobs-a-good-man-or-an-evil-corporate-ceo/
8. Alison Weir, Henry VIII: King and Court (London: Jonathan Cape, 2001), pp. 186–94.
9. Alison Kelly (ed.), The Story of Wedgwood (1962; London: Faber and Faber, 1975), p. 18.
10. Elizabeth Templetown and her husband, Clotworthy Upton, who was given the title Baron Templetown, commissioned Robert Adam to remodel their country home in 1783. It was a sixteenth-century castle built on the site of a medieval fort at Templepatrick in County Antrim, Northern Ireland, that the Upton family had bought in the early seventeenth century and renamed Castle Upton.
11. Novalis was the nom de plume of Georg Philipp Friedrich Freiherr von Hardenberg. Novalis: Philosophical Writings (1798; Albany: State University of New York Press, 1977), p. 111.
12. Herbert Read and Bernard Rackham, English Pottery (London: Ernest Benn, 1924), p. 26.
13. Andrea Gleiniger, The Chair No. 14 by Michael Thonet (Frankfurt am Main: form, 1998), pp. 7–17.
14. Alexander von Vegesack, Thonet: Classic Furniture in Bent Wood and Tubular Steel (London: Hazar, 1996), pp. 32–4 and 116.
15. Interview with Konstantin Grcic, September 2008.
16. Von Vegesack, Thonet, pp. 34 and 36–7.
17. Ibid., p. 109.
18. Siegfried Gronert, ‘From Material to Model: Wagenfeld and the Metal Workshops at the Bauhaus and the Bauhochschule in Weimar’, in Beate Manske (ed.), Wilhelm Wagenfeld (1900–1990) (Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz, 2000), pp. 12–18.
19. Dieter Rams, Less but Better (Hamburg: Jo Klatt Design+Design, 1995), pp. 9–10.
20. Ibid., pp. 15–16.
21. Bernd Polster, ‘Kronberg Meets Cupertino: What Braun and Apple Really Have in Common’, in Sabine Schulze and Ina Grätz (eds), Apple Design (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2011), pp. 68–9.
22. Keiko Ueki-Polet and Klaus Kemp (eds), Less and More: The Design Ethos of Dieter Rams (Berlin: Gestalten, 2009), p. 115.
23. Rams, Less but Better, p. 19.
24. Klaus Kemp, ‘Dieter Rams, Braun, Vitsoe and the Shrinking World’, in Ueki-Polet and Kemp, Less and More, p. 467.
25. Sophie Lovell, Dieter Rams: As Little Design as Possible (London: Phaidon, 2011), p. 235.
26. Rams, Less but Better, pp. 57–8.
27. Lovell, Dieter Rams, p. 239.
28. Klaus Kemp, ‘Dieter Rams, Braun, Vitsoe and the Shrinking World’, in Ueki-Polet and Kemp, Less and More, p. 465.
29. Ibid., p. 467.
30. Lovell, Dieter Rams, p. 13.
31. Steve Jobs introducing the first iMac on 6 May 1998 in the Flint Auditorium at De Anza Community College in Cupertino, California. ‘The First iMac Introduction’ uploaded on to YouTube by peestandingup on 30 January 2006, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0BHPtoTctDY
32. Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs (London: Little, Brown, 2011), p. 126.
33. Steve ‘Woz’ Wozniak was five years older than Steve Jobs and the star student in the pioneering electronics class at Homestead High School in Silicon Valley. They had both attended the school, but at different times. Woz’s younger brother had been on the school swim team with Jobs. Ibid., pp. 21–5.
34. Mark Frauenfelder, The Computer (London: Carlton Books, 2005), p. 135.
35. Isaacson, Steve Jobs, pp. 73 and 83.
36. David Sheff, ‘Playboy Interview: Steven Jobs’, Playboy, 1 February 1985, http://www.txtpost.com/playboy-interview-steven-jobs/
37. Ina Grätz, ‘Stylectrical: On Electro-Design That Makes History’, in Schulze and Grätz, Apple Design, p. 14.
38. Isaacson, Steve Jobs, p. 126.
39. Thomas Wagner, ‘Think Different! Users and Their Darlings: On Apples, Machines, Interfaces, Magic, and the Power of Design’, in Schulze and Grätz, Apple Design, p. 35.
40. Isaacson, Steve Jobs, pp. 133 and 186.
41. Ibid., pp. 220–21.
42. James B. Stewart, ‘How Jobs Put Passion into Products’, The New York Times, 7 October 2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/08/business/how-steve-jobs-infused-passion-into-a-commodity.html
43. Isaacson, Steve Jobs, p. 350.
44. Lovell, Dieter Rams, p. 13.
45. ‘New iPad 2: Thinner, Lighter, Faster’, uploaded on to YouTube by marvinsc on 2 March 2011, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iy017Af_V0o
46. Isaacson, Steve Jobs, pp. 458–9.
47. Ibid., pp. 344–5.
48. Malcolm Gladwell, ‘The Tweaker: The Real Genius of Steve Jobs’, New Yorker, 14 November 2011, http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/11/14/111114fa_fact_gladwell
49. Steve Jobs, ‘Apple’s One-Dollar-A-Year Man’, Fortune, 24 January 2000, http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2000/01/24/272277/
50. ‘Apple Steve Jobs on Design’, a 2002 corporate film clip in which Steve Jobs and Jonathan Ive discuss Apple’s approach to design, uploaded on to YouTube by DirkBeveridge1340 on 16 October 2010, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sPfJQmpg5zk
51. Jobs, ‘Apple’s One-Dollar-A-Year Man’.
52. Isaacson, Steve Jobs, p. 389.
53. Ibid., p. 373.
54. Jobs, ‘Apple’s One-Dollar-A-Year Man’.
55. Brad King and Farhad Manjoo, ‘Apple’s “Breakthrough” iPod’, Wired, 23 October 2001, http://www.wired.com/gadgets/miscellaneous/news/2001/10/47805
56. Jacqui Cheng, ‘Steve Jobs on MobileMe: The Full E-mail’, Ars Technica (August 2008), http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2008/08/steve-jobs-on-mobileme-the-full-e-mail.ars
57. Isaacson, Steve Jobs, pp. 344–5.
58. A report by Charles Duhigg and David Barboza published in The New York Times in January 2012 into the working conditions for the employees of some of Apple’s Chinese subcontractors sparked a controversy about Apple’s ethical record. Charles Duhigg, David Barboza, ‘In China, Human Costs Are Built into an iPad’, The New York Times, 25 January 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/26/business/ieconomy-apples-ipad-and-the-human-costs-for-workers-in-china.html; John Cassidy, ‘Rational Irrationality: How Long Will the Cult of Apple Endure?’, New Yorker Blog, 20 March 2012, http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/johncassidy/2012/03/how-long-will-the-cult-of-apple-last-for.html
59. Objectified, directed by Gary Hustwit, produced by Plexi Productions, Swiss Dots (2009).
60. ‘Apple Steve Jobs on Design’, uploaded on to YouTube. The American designer Charles Eames said, ‘The details are not the details. They make the product’ when narrating a film on the ECS contract storage system he designed with his wife, Ray Eames: ‘Charles Eames’, Art Directors Club, http://www.adcglobal.org/archive/hof/1984/?id=245
7 Why design is not – and should never be confused with – art
1. Bruno Munari, Design as Art (1966; London: Penguin Books, 2008), p. 25.
2. Richard Morphet (ed.), Richard Hamilton (London: Tate Gallery Publications, 1992), p. 164.
3. As Sophie Lovell pointed out in her book on Dieter Rams, he did not design the HT 2 toaster, which was the work of a Braun colleague, Reinhold Weiss. However, Rams was in overall charge of Braun’s design team during its development. Dieter Rams: As Little Design as Possible (London: Phaidon, 2011), p. 293.
4. Morphet, Richard Hamilton, p. 164. Richard Hamilton remade Toaster using chromium-plated steel, rather than aluminum, as in the original piece.
5. Plato, The Republic (1955; London: Penguin Classics, 2007), p. 340.
6. Giorgio Vasari, Lives of the Artists: Volume I (1550; London: Penguin Books, 1987), pp. 256–7.
7. Ibid., pp. 232–40.
8. Herbert Read, Art and Industry (London: Faber and Faber, 1934), p. 9.
9. The Académie des Beaux-Arts was founded in Paris in 1648 as the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture when Louis XIV was a child at the behest of his chief minister, Cardinal Mazarin. It was restructured under the aegis of Jean-Baptiste Colbert in 1663, and used as part of his strategy of ‘glorifying’ Louis’s reputation under Charles Le Brun as director. Peter Burke, The Fabrication of Louis XIV (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1992), pp. 50–51.
10. Celina Fox, The Arts of Industry in the Age of Enlightenment (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2009), p. 453.
11. Fiona MacCarthy, The Last Pre-Raphaelite: Edward Burne-Jones and the Victorian Imagination (London: Faber and Faber, 2011), p. 33.
12. Magdalena Bushart, ‘It Began with a Misunderstanding: Feininger’s Cathedral and the Bauhaus Manifesto’, in Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin, Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau and Klassik Stiftung Weimar, Bauhaus: A Conceptual Model (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2009), pp. 30–32.
13. Nicholas Fox Weber and Pandora Tabatabai Asbaghi, Anni Albers (New York: Guggenheim Museum Publications, 1999), p. 155.
14. Ulrich Herrmann, ‘Practice, Program, Rationale: Johannes Itten and the Preliminary Course at the Weimar Bauhaus’, in Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin et al., Bauhaus, pp. 68–70.
15. Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, Moholy-Nagy: Experiment in Totality (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1950), pp. 32–47.
16. Franz Schulze, Philip Johnson: Life and Work (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994), p. 54.
17. Philip Johnson, Machine Art (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1934).
18. Kai-Uwe Hemken, ‘Cultural Signatures: László Moholy-Nagy and the “Room of Today”’, in Ingrid Pfeiffer and Max Hollein (eds), László Moholy-Nagy Retrospective (Munich: Prestel, 2009), pp. 168–71; Hans Ulrich Obrist (ed.), A Brief History of Curating (Zurich: J. R. P. Ringier, 2008).
19. Alexander Dorner, catalogue for Herbert Bayer exhibition at the London Gallery, 8 April to 1 May 1937, p. 6.
20. Time, 31 October 1949.
21. Steven Heller, Paul Rand (London: Phaidon, 1999), p. 149.
22. John Neuhart, Marilyn Neuhart and Ray Eames, Eames Design: The Work of the Office of Charles and Ray Eames (London: Thames & Hudson, 1989), pp. 285–91.
23. Ibid., pp. 440–41; ‘Powers of Ten (1977)’, uploaded on to YouTube by Eames Office on 26 August 2010, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fKBhvDjuy0
24. László Moholy-Nagy, Vision in Motion (Chicago, Ill.: Paul Theobald, 1947), p. 42.
25. György Kepes, Language of Vision (1944; New York: Dover Publications, 1995).
26. Emily King, Robert Brownjohn: Sex and Typography (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2005), pp. 194–223.
27. Achille and Pier Giacomo Castiglioni worked together from the opening of their Milan studio in 1944 until the latter’s death in 1968. Their brother Livio worked with them until he left to open his own office in 1952.
28. Fulvio and Napoleone Ferrari, The Furniture of Carlo Mollino (London: Phaidon, 2006); Chris Dercon (ed.), Carlo Mollino: Maniera Moderna (Cologne: Walther König, 2011).
29. Yves Saint Laurent’s autumn/winter 1966 haute couture women’s wear collection was inspired by Andy Warhol’s art and dedicated to him. Warhol had met and befriended Saint Laurent and his then-lover and business partner Pierre Bergé during a visit to Paris in the summer of 1966, and the three men remained close friends until the artist’s death in 1987.
30. Katya García-Antón, ‘Performative Shifts in Art and Design’, in Katya García-Antón, Emily King and Christian Brandle, Wouldn’t It Be Nice … Wishful Thinking in Art and Design (Geneva: Centre d’Art Contemporain de Genève, 2007), p. 57.
31. Peter Weiss (ed.), Alessandro Mendini: Design and Architecture (Milan: Electa, 2001), p. 79.
32. Glenn Adamson and Jane Pavitt (eds), Postmodernism: Style and Subversion, 1970–1990 (London: V&A Publishing, 2011), p. 15.
33. Another of Alessandro Mendini’s Redesign pieces was his take on the Dutch designer Thomas Gerrit Rietveld’s 1932–4 Zig Zag chair with its wooden spine, which extended to create the shape of a cross. Weiss, Alessandro Mendini, pp. 80–81.
34. Barbara Radice, Ettore Sottsass: A Critical Biography (New York: Rizzoli International, 1993), pp. 212–16.
35. Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour, Learning from Las Vegas: The Forgotten Symbolism of Architectural Form (1972; Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1977).
36. Emily King (ed.), Designed by Peter Saville (London: Frieze, 2003).
37. Wolfgang Tillmans in Heike Munder (ed.), Peter Saville Estate 1–127 (Zurich: Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst Zürich and JRP|Ringier, 2007).
38. Raymond Williams, ‘Culture’, in his Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (1976; London: Fontana, 1983), p. 27.
39. Nicolas Bourriaud first mentioned the term ‘Relational Aesthetics’ in the catalogue for ‘Traffic’, an exhibition he curated in 1996 at the CAPC Musée d’Art Contemporain de Bordeaux. He then expanded upon the concept in a book, Esthétique Relationnelle’ (or ‘Relational Aesthetics’) (Dijon: Les Presses du Réel, 1998).
40. Ai Weiwei was co-director of the Gwangju Design Biennale 2011, entitled ‘Design Is Design Is Not Design’. His section of the biennale was the ‘Un-Named’ exhibition featuring design projects which would not conventionally be considered to have been ‘designed’, such as a computer virus and an activists’ plan for a protest in Cairo during the Arab Spring uprising in 2011; http://gb.or.kr/?mid=main_eng
41. ‘Common Cause: Elizabeth Schambelan Talks with Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev about Documenta 13’, Artforum (May 2012).
42. Phillips later changed its name to Phillips de Pury, then back to Phillips.
43. Judd Tully, ‘Marc Newsons Falter at Lackluster Phillips Design Auction’, Blouin Art Info, 10 June 2010, http://www.artinfo.com/news/story/34882/marc-newsons-falter-at-lackluster-phillips-design-auction/
44. Calvin Tomkins, Duchamp: A Biography (New York: Henry Holt, 1996); Thierry de Duve, ‘Echoes of the Readymade: Critique of Pure Modernism’, in Martha Buskirk and Mignon Nixon (eds), The Duchamp Effect: Essays, Interviews, Round Table (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1996), pp. 93–129.
45. The concept of the film-maker as an auteur, which literally translates as ‘author’, was a central tenet of the Nouvelle Vague, or ‘new wave’ of French film-makers in the 1950s. The auteur was defined by the critic and film-maker François Truffaut in an essay for the January 1954 issue of the journal Cahiers du Cinéma, entitled ‘Une Certaine Tendance du Cinema Français’ (‘A Certain Tendency in French Cinema’) as a film-maker who treated his or her work as a medium of self-expression by imbuing it with his or her sensibility, ideas and principles. Truffaut referred to the rise of the auteur in French cinema as ‘La politique (or policy) des auteurs’, but the American film critic Andrew Sarris gave it the new name of ‘the auteur theory’. David A. Cook, A History of Narrative Film (New York: W.W. Norton, 1990), p. 552.
46. Bill Moggridge and Olga Viso’s ‘Directors’ Foreword’, in Andrew Blauvelt and Ellen Lupton (eds), Graphic Design: Now in Production (Minneapolis, Minn.: Walker Art Center, 2011), p. 6.
47. Rick Poynor, No More Rules: Graphic Design and Postmodernism (London: Laurence King, 2003).
48. Blauvelt and Lupton, Graphic Design.
49. Irma Boom (ed.), Irma Boom: Biography in Books (Amsterdam: University of Amsterdam Press, 2010), pp. 512–14.
50. Metahaven and Marina Vishmidt, Uncorporate Identity (Baden: Lars Müller Publishers with the Jan van Eyck Academie, Maastricht, 2010).
51. The term ‘critical design’ was first used in Anthony Dunne’s Hertzian Tales: Electronic Products, Aesthetic Experience and Critical Design (London: Royal College of Art Computer Related Design Research Studio, 1999). Dunne and Fiona Raby refined the concept through their design practice, teaching, writing and curation, notably in the 2007 exhibition ‘Designing Critical Design’ at Z33 in Hasselt, Belgium, where their work was exhibited alongside that of the Dutch designer Jurgen Bey and the Spanish designer Martí Guixé: ‘Nr. 15 Designing Critical Design’, Z33, http://www.z33.be/en/projects/nr-15-designing-critical-design
52. Christian Brandle, ‘Dunne & Raby and Michael Anastassiades’, in García-Antón, King and Brandle, Wouldn’t It Be Nice, pp. 153–66.
53. Martí Guixé, http://www.guixe.com; Martí Guixé (ed.), Libre de Contexte, Context Free (Basel: Birkhäuser, 2003).
54. ‘Julia: Cow benches, 2005’, Julia Lohmann, http://www.julialohmann.co.uk/work/gallery/cow-benches/
55. Coralie Gauthier (ed.), Mathieu Lehanneur (Berlin: Gestalten, 2012).
56. Donald Judd, ‘It’s Hard to Find a Good Lamp’ (1993), http://www.juddfoundation.org/furniture/essay.htm This essay was originally published in the exhibition catalogue Donald Judd Furniture (Rotterdam: Museum Boijmans van Beuningen,1993).
57. Brandle, ‘Dunne & Raby and Michael Anastassiades’, in García-Antón, King and Brandle, Wouldn’t It Be Nice, p. 154.
58. Charles Eames was interviewed by Yolande Amic in 1972 to mark the exhibition ‘Qu’est-ce Que le Design?’ at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris. ‘Design Q&A with Charles Eames (1972)’, uploaded on to YouTube by myuichirou on 13 February 2010, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z8qs5-BDXNU&feature=BFa&list=PL0054AB7E04F53D0E&lf=results_video
8 Sign of the times
1. Raymond Loewy, Industrial Design (London: Faber and Faber, 1979), p. 32.
2. Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs (London: Little, Brown, 2011), p. 63.
3. Ibid., p. 80.
4. Andrew Hodges, Alan Turing: The Enigma (1983; London: Vintage, 2012), pp. 487–96.
5. Apple, http://www.apple.com
6. Thomas K. Grose, ‘Naughty But Nice’, Time, 24 October 1999, http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,33155,00.html
7. Ann Summers, http://www.annsummers.com
8. Robert Graves, Greek Myths (1955; London: Cassell, 1991), pp. 22–4. The olive branch also appeared as a symbol of peace in Aristophanes’ fifth-century BC play Peace, and later in Virgil’s epic poem The Aeneid.
9. Robert Recorde, The Whetstone of Witte (1557; Mountain View, Calif.: Creative Commons, 2009).
10. Captain Charles Johnson, A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious Pyrates (1724; London: Conway Maritime Press, 2002).
11. Typographica, 3 and 4 (1961). Typographica was a design magazine specializing in typography, founded by the British designer, editor and writer Herbert Spencer in 1949, when he was only twenty-five years old, and published until 1967.
12. Rick Poynor (ed.), Communicate: Independent British Graphic Design since the Sixties (London: Barbican Art Gallery and Laurence King, 2004), p. 81.
13. Interview with Margaret Calvert in 2005.
14. Benno Wissig’s 1967 signage scheme for Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport used highly legible lettering and strict colour-coding to produce a clear and coherent information system. To minimize confusion, Wissig banned any other signs in his chosen colours of yellow and green from the airport. Even Hertz, the hire-car company, had to ditch its customary yellow signs. Wissig’s original design scheme for Schiphol was revised in 1991 by Paul Mijksenaar, who has since maintained it with skill and sensitivity.
15. Paola Antonelli, ‘@ at MoMA’, Inside/Out: A MoMA/MoMA PS1 Blog, 22 March 2010, http://www.moma.org/explore/inside_out/2010/03/22/at-moma
16. Chris Messina, ‘how do you feel about using …’, Twitter, https://twitter.com/#!/chrismessina/status/223115412
17. Twitter Fan Wiki, http://twitter.pbworks.com/w/page/1779812/Hashtags
18. Randal C. Archibald, ‘California Fires Force 500,000 from Homes’, The New York Times, 23 October 2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/23/us/23cnd-fire.html
19. Nate Ritter, http://nateritter.com/
20. Antonelli, ‘@ at MoMA’.
21. The Nazis’ homosexual prisoners remained incarcerated in concentration camps for considerably longer than many of their fellow inmates. Homosexuality was a criminal offence in pre-war Germany under the notorious Paragraph 175, which remained in force in West Germany after the Second World War until its repeal in 1969. Only then, some twenty-four years after the end of the war, were the Nazi regime’s surviving homosexual prisoners released.
22. ‘The CND Symbol’, CND, http://www.cnduk.org/about/item/435
23. The average number of corporate symbols seen by a typical Western consumer each day is generally estimated at 3,000, although it is not clear how this number has been calculated or how accurate it is.
24. BMW Group, http://www.bmwgroup.com; Fiat, http://www.fiat.com; Officina Profumo Farmaceutica di Santa Maria Novella, http://www.smnovella.it
25. ‘Our Heritage’, Kellogg’s, http://www.kelloggcompany.com/company.aspx?id=39
26. Stephen Banham, Characters: Cultural Stories Revealed through Typography (Melbourne: Thames & Hudson, 2011), p. 70.
27. ‘125 Years of Coca-Cola logos’, Coca-Cola, http://www.coca-cola.co.uk/125/history-of-coca-cola-logo.html
28. Hermès, http://www.hermes.com
29. Manchester United Official Website, http://www.manutd.com
30. ‘Citroën’s History’, Citroën, http://www.citroen.co.uk/home/#/about-us/history/brand-identity/
31. ‘Symbols of NASA’, http://www.nasa.gov/audience/forstudents/5-8/features/symbols-of-nasa.html
32. Steven Heller, Paul Rand (London: Phaidon Press, 1999), pp. 149–73.
33. Steve Jobs recalled working with Paul Rand on the development of the NeXT identity, and Rand’s love for eating at Gold’s Delicatessen in Newport, Connecticut, in a video interview filmed in 1993. ‘1993 Steve Jobs interview about working with Paul Rand’, http://www.paul-rand.com/foundation/video_stevejobs_interview/#.UECi2xz5Mbo
34. Heller, Paul Rand, p. 156.
35. Alan Hess, ‘The Origins of McDonald’s Golden Arches’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, 45:1 (March 1986), pp. 60–67.
36. ‘About FedEx’, FedEx, http://about.van.fedex.com/taxonomy/term/2938
37. Nike’s ‘swoosh’ was designed by Carolyn Davidson when she was studying graphic design at Portland State University near Nike’s headquarters. Nike’s co-founder Phil Knight taught an accounting class there to make ends meet while he and his partner, Bill Bowerman, were building up the business, which was then called Blue Ribbon Sports Inc. They had one full-time employee, Jeff Johnson, whom Knight had met while studying for his MBA at Stanford University, and it was he who invented the name Nike in 1971. When Knight noticed Davidson working on an assignment during one of his visits to Portland State, he asked her to design a logo for the renamed company. The first time Knight saw the swoosh he said, ‘I don’t love it, but it will grow on me.’ Nike paid Davidson $35 for designing the symbol, but also gave her a job. ‘History & Heritage’, Nike, http://nikeinc.com/pages/history-heritage
38. Isaacson, Steve Jobs, pp. 220–21.
39. ‘The Michelin Man’, Michelin Corporate, http://www.michelin.com/corporate/EN/group/michelin-man
40. ‘Nunc est Bibendum’ is the title of a poem written by Horace in 23 BC, which translates from Latin as ‘Now is the time for drinking’.
41. Frank Olinsky, http://www.frankolinsky.com/mtvstory1.html
42. ‘Cook Books, Food Writing & Recipes’, Penguin Books, http://www.penguin.co.uk/static/cs/uk/0/penguin_food/index.html
43. Interview with Bruce Mau, February 2007, in Alice Rawsthorn, ‘The New Corporate Logo: Dynamic and Changeable Are All the Rage’, International Herald Tribune, 11 February 2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/11/style/11iht-design12.html
44. British Airways replaced half of the multi-ethnic tail fins with a more conventional Union Jack-inspired design scheme in 1999, and announced in 2001 that it was to replace the rest. ‘R.I.P. British Airways’ Funky Tailfins’, BBC News, 11 May 2001, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/1325127.stm
45. ‘Avant-garde Shoreditch E1’, http://www.telfordhomes.plc.uk/avantgardetower/
46. Occupy Wall Street, http://www.occupywallst.org/
9 When a picture says more than words
1. Janet Abrams, ‘Muriel Cooper’, AIGA website to mark the award of the 1994 AIGA Medal to Cooper, http://www.aiga.org/medalist-murielcooper/; reprinted from ‘Flashback: Muriel Cooper’s Visible Wisdom’, I.D. Magazine (September–October 1994).
2. ‘Charles Booth (1840–1914) – a Biography’, Charles Booth Online Archive, http://booth.lse.ac.uk/static/a/2.html
3. Charles Booth continued to campaign against poverty throughout his life, as did many of his researchers. Clara Collet became an authority on the rights of women workers. Beatrice Webb made an important contribution to the foundation of the welfare state. Booth himself lobbied for the introduction of state pensions to alleviate the hardship of the elderly.
4. Deborah McDonald, Clara Collet, 1860–1948: An Educated Working Woman (London: Routledge, 2004).
5. Charles Booth, Life and Labour of the People in London: Volume 1 (London: Macmillan, 1902), pp. 33–62.
6. ‘Poverty Maps of London’, Charles Booth Online Archive, http://booth.lse.ac.uk/static/a/4.html#i
7. ‘Inquiry into the Life and Labour of the People in London (1886–1903)’, Charles Booth Online Archive, http://booth.lse.ac.uk/static/a/3.html#ii
8. Edward R. Tufte, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information (Cheshire, Conn.: Graphics Press, 2001), p. 20.
9. Edward Tufte, Beautiful Evidence (Cheshire, Conn.: Graphics Press, 2006), pp. 20–21 and 97–103.
10. Tufte, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, pp. 32–4.
11. Tufte, Beautiful Evidence, pp. 22–3.
12. Tufte, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, p. 24.
13. Tufte, Beautiful Evidence, pp. 134–5.
14. Tufte, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, pp. 40–41.
15. Otto Neurath, From Hieroglyphics to Isotype: A Visual Autobiography (London: Hyphen Press, 2010), pp. 23–39 and 69–72.
16. Ed Annink and Max Bruinsma (eds), Gerd Arntz: Graphic Designer (Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 2010).
17. The Isotype team left Vienna in the mid 1930s when the Nazis came to power. Otto Neurath and Marie Reidemeister fled to the Netherlands with Gerd Arntz, who remained there and severed his links with Isotype after they left for Britain in 1940. They set up the Isotype Institute in Oxford and assembled a new team of researchers there. After Neurath died in 1945, Reidemeister continued their work at the institute, notably by undertaking public education projects in Africa.
18. Lella Secor Florence, Our Private Lives: America and Britain (London: George G. Harrap, 1944), pp. 4–6.
19. Marie Neurath and Robert S. Cohen (eds), Otto Neurath: Empiricism and Sociology (Dordecht: D. Reidel, 1973), p. 217.
20. Ken Garland, Mr Beck’s Underground Map (Harrow: Capital Transport Publishing, 2008), p. 15.
21. Ibid., p. 17.
22. Ibid., p. 19.
23. Ibid., p. 35.
24. Ibid., p. 19.
25. Ibid., p. 44.
26. Ibid., pp. 21 and 26.
27. Ibid., pp. 50–61.
28. Ibid., p. 67.
29. Born in Milan in 1931, Massimo Vignelli studied architecture there and in Venice, and visited the United States on a research fellowship in the late 1950s. He moved to New York in 1965 to run the office of Unimark International, a design group he had co-founded earlier that year with Ralph Eckerstrom, former design director of the Container Corporation of America. Herbert Bayer, the former Bauhaüsler, acted as a consultant to Unimark. In 1966, Unimark was appointed to advise the New York City Transit Authority on design at the suggestion of the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Vignelli and his wife Leila co-founded Vignelli Associates in 1971, where their clients have included IBM, Knoll, Bloomingdales and American Airlines.
30. Paul Shaw, Helvetica and the New York City Subway System: The True (Maybe) Story (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2010), p. 125. The New York-based graphic designer Michael Bierut posted a tribute to the purist design of Massimo Vignelli’s subway map on the Design Observer website in September 2010: ‘Mr. Vignelli’s Map’, http://observatory.designobserver.com/entry.html?entry=2647
31. Michael Kimmelman ‘The Grid at 200: Lines That Shaped Manhattan’, The New York Times, 2 January 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/03/arts/design/manhattan-street-grid-at-museum-of-city-of-new-york.html
32. ‘Massimo Vignelli and His 1972 NY Subway Map’, uploaded on to YouTube by swissdots on 21 June 2008, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uhMKHXLBZrc
33. ‘The Data Deluge: Businesses, Governments and Society are Only Starting to Tap Its Vast Potential’, Economist, 27 February 2010, http://www.economist.com/node/15579717
34. Gordon E. Moore predicted in a 1965 paper published in Electronics Magazine that the processing power and storage capacity of computer chips would double, or their prices would halve, roughly every two years for at least the next decade. His principle is known in the tech industry as ‘Moore’s law’. Intel subsequently reduced the time frame from two years to eighteen months, and computing power has continued to increase at a similar rate since passing Moore’s original 1975 deadline.
35. ‘Cisco Visual Networking Index: Forecast and Methodology, 2011–2016’, Cisco Systems, http://www.cisco.com/en/US/solutions/collateral/ns341/ns525/ns537/ns705/ns827/white_paper_c11-481360_ns827_Networking_Solutions_White_Paper.html
36. ‘Data, Data Everywhere: A Special Report on Managing Information’, Economist, 27 February 2010, http://www.economist.com/node/15557443
37. Achim Borchardt-Hume (ed.), Albers and Moholy-Nagy: From the Bauhaus to the New World (London: Tate Publishing, 2006), pp. 69–70. The Light Space Modulator was originally known as ‘Light Prop for an Electric Stage’ when Moholy-Nagy first used it in Berlin; ibid., pp. 95–6.
38. Judith Wechsler, ‘György Kepes’, in György Kepes (ed.), György Kepes: The MIT Years, 1945–1977 (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1978), pp. 11–19.
39. György Kepes, Language of Vision (1944; New York: Dover Publications, 1995); Abrams, ‘Muriel Cooper’.
40. Honor Beddard and Douglas Dodds, Digital Pioneers (London: V&A Publishing, 2009).
41. Desmond Paul Henry, http://www.desmondhenry.com/index.html
42. Interview with Elaine O’Hanrahan (daughter of Desmond Paul Henry), February 2011, in Alice Rawsthorn, ‘When Desmond Paul Henry Traded His Pen for a Machine’, International Herald Tribune, 27 February 2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/28/arts/28iht-design28.html
43. ‘Visualization: A Way to See the Unseen’, National Science Federation, http://www.nsf.gov/about/history/nsf0050/pdf/visualization.pdf
44. Bruce H. McCormick, Thomas A. DeFanti and Maxine D. Brown, ‘Visualization in Scientific Computing’, Computer Graphics, 21:6 (November 1987), http://www.evl.uic.edu/files/pdf/ViSC-1987.pdf
45. An example of the early visualizations of Internet traffic is the Opte Project developed by Darren Lyon from October 2003 onwards; http://www.opte.org/
46. ‘Overview: A Short Introduction to the Processing Software and Projects from the Community’, Processing, http://www.processing.org/about/
47. Ben Fry, ‘Humans vs Chimps’, http://benfry.com/humansvschimps/
48. ‘The Weekender’, http://www.mta.info/weekender.html. Massimo Vignelli had the last laugh after the furore over his 1972 New York Subway Map, when the MTA invited him to reinterpret that design scheme for ‘The Weekender’. He agreed to do so on condition that it was described as a ‘diagram’, not as a map. One of the amendments Vignelli made to the original was to erase the parks, including Central Park.
49. The Blue Brain project began in 2005 with an agreement between the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne and IBM, which supplied the BlueGene/L supercomputer acquired by EPFL to build the virtual brain. Creating each simulated neuron requires the equivalent processing power of a laptop computer, and there are billions of neurons in the whole brain. A human cortex may have as many as two million columns, each of which consists of some hundred thousand neurons. The speed with which the project is completed will be determined by the pace of developments in supercomputing technology. So far those advances have been faster than originally expected; http://bluebrain.epfl.ch/
50. Joost Grootens, I swear I use no art at all: 10 years, 100 books, 18,788 pages of book design (Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 2010).
51. Interview with Joost Grootens, January 2011, in Alice Rawsthorn, ‘Designing Books for a Digital Age’, International Herald Tribune, 30 January 2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/31/arts/31iht-design31.html
10 It’s not that easy being green
1. György Kepes, ‘Comments on Art’, in Abraham H. Maslow (ed.), New Knowledge in Human Values (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1959), p. 91.
2. The phrase ‘Make it a green peace’ was coined at that meeting of the Don’t Make a Wave Committee by the ecologist Bill Darnell.
3. ‘Amchitka: The Founding Voyage’, Greenpeace International, http://www.greenpeace.org/international/en/about/history/amchitka-hunter/
4. Victoria Finlay, Colour (London: Sceptre, 2002), pp. 289–98.
5. Interview with Michael Braungart, March 2010, in Alice Rawsthorn, ‘The Toxic Side of Being, Literally, Green’, International Herald Tribune, 4 April 2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/05/arts/05iht-design5.html
6. ‘Sesame Street: Kermit Sings Being Green’, uploaded on to YouTube by Sesame Street on 11 December 2008, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=51BQfPeSK8k
7. The New York Times Magazine published a haunting series of photographs by Pieter Hugo of the Agbogbloshie digital dump in 2010. ‘A Global Graveyard for Dead Computers in Ghana’, http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2010/08/04/magazine/20100815-dump.html
8. R. H. Horne and Robin Nagle, ‘To Love a Landfill: Dirt and the Environment’, in Kate Forde (ed.), Dirt: The Filthy Reality of Everyday Life (London: Profile Books, 2009), p. 196.
9. A Greenpeace team identified traces of lead, cadmium, antimony and chlorinated dioxins among other toxins in the charred soil of the Agbogbloshie dump.
10. Tim Brown, Change by Design: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation (New York: HarperCollins, 2009), p. 194.
11. ‘Great Pacific Garbage Patch’, National Geographic Education, http://education.nationalgeographic.com/education/encyclopedia/great-pacific-garbage-patch/?ar_a=4&ar_r=3
12. William J. Mitchell, Christopher E. Borroni-Bird and Lawrence D. Burns, Reinventing the Automobile: Personal Mobility for the 21st Century (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2010), pp. 2–3.
13. Giles Tremlett, ‘Madrid Reverses the Chargers with Electric Car Plan’, Guardian, 8 September 2009, http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/sep/08/electric-car-plan-spain
14. Sally McGrane, ‘Copenhagen Journal: Commuters Pedal to Work on Their Very Own Superhighway’, The New York Times, 17 July 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/18/world/europe/in-denmark-pedaling-to-work-on-a-superhighway.html
15. ‘What Goes Around’, Economist, 19 November 2011, http://www.economist.com/node/21543220
16. Mitchell, Borroni-Bird and Burns, Reinventing the Automobile, pp. 38–51.
17. ‘Morals and the Machine’, Economist, 2 June 2012, http://www.economist.com/node/21556234; ‘Driverless Cars and How They Would Change Motoring’, BBC News, 10 May 2012, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-18012812
18. Zipcar, http://www.zipcar.com; Vélib’, http://en.velib.paris.fr/; Ecobici, http://www.ecobici.df.gob.mx/; ‘Shifting up a Gear’, Economist, 15 July 2010, http://www.economist.com/node/16591116
19. Raymond Loewy, Industrial Design (London: Faber and Faber, 1979), p. 8.
20. Henry Dreyfuss, Designing for People (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1955).
21. K. Michael Hays, ‘Fuller’s Geological Engagements with Architecture’, in K. Michael Hays and Dana Miller (eds), Buckminster Fuller: Starting with the Universe (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 2008), pp. 2–3.
22. Charlotte and Peter Fiell, 1000 Chairs (Cologne: Taschen, 2000), p. 222.
23. Ibid., pp. 153 and 216.
24. Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac: And Sketches Here and There (1949; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992); Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (1962; London: Penguin Classics, 2000).
25. Glenn Adamson, ‘J.B. Blunk: California Spirit’, Woodwork (October 1999).
26. Alastair Fuad-Luke, Design Activism: Beautiful Strangeness for a Sustainable World (London: Earthscan, 2009), pp. 45–6.
27. Victor Papanek, Design for the Real World: Human Ecology and Social Change (1971; Chicago, Ill.: Academy Chicago Publishers, 1985), pp. ix and xi–xvi.
28. Bruce Mau Design, http://www.brucemaudesign.com; ‘Work with John Thackara’, http://www.doorsofperception.com/working-with-john-thackara/; DESIS Network, http://www.desis-network.org/
29. INDEX: Design to Improve Life, http://www.designtoimprovelife.dk/; The Buckminster Fuller Challenge, http://challenge.bfi.org/
30. ‘About Us’, Daily Dump, http://www.dailydump.org/about
31. ‘Poonam Bir Kasturi: Designing the Daily Dump’, Eco Walk the Talk, http://www.ecowalkthetalk.com/blog/2010/07/25/poonam-bir-kasturi-designing-the-daily-dump/
32. ‘FAQs’, Daily Dump, http://www.dailydump.org/faqs
33. ‘Services’, Daily Dump, http://www.dailydump.org/services
34. ‘Clone Daily Dump’, Daily Dump, http://www.dailydump.org/clone_daily_dump
35. ‘Home’, FARM:, http://farmlondon.weebly.com/
36. Something & Son, http://www.somethingandson.com/
37. Interview with Andy Merritt and Paul Smyth, September 2011, in Alice Rawsthorn, ‘Making Food Seriously Local’, International Herald Tribune, 18 September 2011,http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/19/arts/19iht-DESIGN19.html
38. Interface, http://www.interface.com
39. ‘The Carpet-tile Philosopher’, Economist, 10 September 2011, http://www.economist.com/node/21528583
40. Paul Hawken The Ecology of Commerce: A Declaration of Sustainability (New York: HarperBusiness, 2002).
41. Paul Vitello, ‘Ray Anderson, Businessman Turned Environmentalist, Dies at 77’, The New York Times, 10 August 2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/11/business/ray-anderson-a-carpet-innovator-dies-at-77.html
42. Cornelia Dean, ‘Ray Anderson: Executive on a Mission: Saving the Planet’, The New York Times, 22 May 2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/22/science/earth/22ander.html
43. Ray Anderson used this phrase when addressing a group of business people in Toronto in 2005. Vitello, ‘Ray Anderson, Businessman Turned Environmentalist, Dies at 77’.
44. Ray Anderson, Confessions of a Radical Industrialist: How Interface Proved That You Can Build a Successful Business Without Destroying the Planet (New York: Random House, 2010).
45. ‘The Carpet-tile Philosopher’, Economist, 10 September 2011, http://www.economist.com/node/21528583
11 Why form no longer follows function
1. Paola Antonelli (ed.), Talk to Me: Design and Communication between People and Objects (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2011), pp. 7–8.
2. The phrase ‘form follows function’ has also been misattributed to the nineteenth-century American sculptor Horatio Greenough. The thinking behind the phrase is reflected in Greenough’s writing on art, design and architecture, but he did not use those specific words. However, another source of confusion is that a collection of Greenough’s essays published in 1947 is entitled Form and Function: Harold A. Small (ed.), Form and Function: Remarks on Art, Design and Architecture by Horatio Greenough (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1947).
3. Louis H. Sullivan, ‘The Tall Office Building Artistically Considered’, Lippincott’s Magazine (March 1896).
4. The original title of Charles Darwin’s book when it was first published in 1859 was On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. The short title of the book was abbreviated to The Origin of Species upon the publication of the sixth edition in 1872.
5. Henk Tennekes, The Simple Science of Flight: From Insects to Jumbo Jets (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2009).
6. The phrase ‘less is more’ is usually attributed to Mies van der Rohe, who did use it, but it previously appeared in an 1855 poem, ‘Andrea del Sarto’, by Robert Browning. The poem is written as a dramatic monologue in which Del Sarto, an Italian artist during the Renaissance, addresses his wife Lucrezia del Fede with: ‘Well, less is more, Lucrezia: I am judged.’ ‘Andrea del Sarto’, Robert Browning, The Poetry Foundation, http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/173001
7. ‘Axes’, Fiskars UK, http://eng-uk.fiskars.com/Products/Wood-Preparation/Axes
8. Michael Sheridan, Room 606: The SAS House and the Work of Arne Jacobsen (London: Phaidon, 2003), pp. 246–9.
9. When it came to improving the performance of a soup spoon, Arne Jacobsen knew exactly what was needed. He loved soup, and consumed it for lunch most days. Usually, he took a portion of soup to his design studio in one of the stainless-steel cocktail shakers he had designed for the Danish company Stelton.
10. Sheridan, Room 606, p. 247.
11. Henry Dreyfuss, Designing for People (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1955), p. 71.
12. Dieter Rams wrote the ‘Ten Principles of Design’ during the 1980s at the suggestion of Braun’s then head of communications, who recommended that he define the design values of the company for the benefit of the members of its board of directors and the design team, and Rams’s students. Originally Rams chose ‘The Ten Commandments on Design’ as the English name, but came to regard this as too preacherly, and changed it to the ‘Ten Principles of Good Design’ in 2003. The wording of each point was refined too, but the meaning remained consistent. Dieter Rams, Less but Better (Hamburg: Jo Klatt Design+Design, 1995), p. 7.
13. ‘Moore’s law’ is named after Gordon E. Moore, a co-founder of Intel, who published a paper in 1965 noting that the number of components squeezed into integrated circuits had doubled every year since the microchip’s invention in 1958. He predicted that this trend would continue for at least another ten years. Moore was correct, and his ‘law’ has remained accurate ever since. However, current estimates expect the rate of increase to start to slow.
14. James Gleick, The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood (London: Fourth Estate, 2012), pp. 88–124.
15. George Dyson, Turing’s Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe (London: Allen Lane, 2012), p. 243.
16. The first stored program computer to be developed at the University of Manchester was the Small-Scale Experimental Machine, nicknamed ‘Baby’, which completed its first program in June 1948. Alan Turing, who had been working on a similar machine at the National Physics Laboratory in Teddington, Middlesex, moved to Manchester and contributed to the development of the next machine, the Manchester Mark 1.
17. Dyson, Turing’s Cathedral, pp. 257–60. A persistent myth among Apple devotees is that the company’s choice of name is a reference to Alan Turing’s tragic death in 1954. Turing committed suicide after being convicted of ‘gross indecency’ with another man and subjected to chemical castration. A half-eaten apple was found near his corpse, fuelling suspicions that he had laced it with cyanide to take a fatal dose of poison.
18. Dyson, Turing’s Cathedral, pp. ix–x.
19. ‘IBM 701’, IBM Archives, http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/701/701_intro.html
20. ‘IBM 5100 Portable Computer’, IBM Archives, http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/pc/pc_2.html; http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/pc/pc_3.html
21. Smaller computers to be used by one person had existed since the 1950s, when a former insurance analyst, Edmund C. Berkeley, developed one named Simon and set up in business as Berkeley Associates in Massachusetts to sell it as a kit of parts for $500 each. Simon could only do simple sums, but its successor, the Geniac Electric Brain Construction Kit, which was introduced by Berkeley in 1955 for $17.95, solved puzzles and played games too. But the ‘personal computer’ remained a hobbyists’ cult until the turn of the 1980s. Mark Frauenfelder, The Computer (London: Carlton Books, 2005), pp. 114–43.
22. The mouse was developed in the 1960s by an American technologist, Doug Engelbart, with Bill English, a colleague at the Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park, California. The name was coined because the shape of their tiny wheeled pointing device resembled the body of a real mouse and its long skinny cord looked like a mouse’s tail. Bill Moggridge, Designing Interactions (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2007), pp. 17–18.
23. Ibid., pp. 53–4.
24. Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs (London: Little, Brown, 2011), p. 127.
25. Moggridge, Designing Interactions, p. 101.
26. The ‘1984’ commercial for the Apple Macintosh was broadcast during the Superbowl on 22 January 1984. ‘“1984” Apple Macintosh Commercial (Full advert, Hi-Quality)’, uploaded on to YouTube by miniroll32 on 27 August 2008, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HhsWzJo2sN4
27. ‘Minority Report (2002)’, http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0181689/
28. Rob Walker, ‘Freaks, Geeks and Microsoft: How Kinect Spawned a Commercial Ecosystem’, The New York Times Magazine, 31 May 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/03/magazine/how-kinect-spawned-a-commercial-ecosystem.html
29. Among the first personal monitoring devices in the form of sensor-controlled wristbands were Nike’s Fuelband and Jawbone’s UP.
30. David Rothenberg, Survival of the Beautiful: Art, Science, and Evolution (New York: Bloomsbury, 2011), pp. 5–6.
31. Charles Darwin defined his theory of ‘sexual selection’ in his 1871 book The Descent of Man: Selection in Relation to Sex by explaining how the females of some species are instinctively attracted to particular traits in the males that seemingly serve no practical function, as peahens are to the spectacular tails of peacocks. The value of the male’s highly aestheticized appearance lies in its appeal to the female, and thereby in its role in perpetuating the species through breeding. Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man: Selection in Relation to Sex (1871; London: Penguin Classics, 2004).
32. Kraftwerk’s single ‘Pocket Calculator’, co-written by Karl Bartos, Ralf Hütter and Emil Schult, was released in 1981 in seven different languages. It appeared on the band’s 1981 album Computer World. ‘Kraftwerk – Pocket Calculator’, uploaded on to YouTube by scatmanjohn3001 on 2 August 2009, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eSBybJGZoCU
33. John Maeda, The Laws of Simplicity: Design, Technology, Business, Life (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2006), p. 3.
34. ‘Apple Unveils the New iPod shuffle’, Apple Press Info, http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2006/09/12Apple-Unveils-the-New-iPod-shuffle.html
12 Me, myself and I
1. Stefan Zweig, The Post Office Girl (1982; London: Sort of Books, 2009), p. 6.
2. The British scientist Tim Berners-Lee unveiled a proposal for a global hypertext project to be known as the World Wide Web in 1989 while working at CERN, the European Particle Physics Laboratory near Geneva. The World Wide Web program was made available to his colleagues at CERN in December 1990, and went live on the Internet in 1991. ‘Longer Bio for Tim Berners-Lee’, http://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/Longer.html
3. ‘Iris Recognition Immigration System (IRIS)’, Home Office, http://www.ukba.homeoffice.gov.uk/customs-travel/Enteringtheuk/usingiris/
4. ‘Zadie Smith’s Rules for Writers’, Guardian, 22 February 2010, http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/feb/22/zadie-smith-rules-for-writers
5. Jaron Lanier, You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto (London: Allen Lane, 2010).
6. This phenomenon applies to everyone who uses digital media, but has had a particularly powerful effect on those who were born since the mid 1970s and have grown up with it – the ‘Net Generation’ or ‘Net Geners’ as the Canadian business strategist Don Tapscott has dubbed them. Rather than having to adapt their behaviour to accommodate advances in digital technology, ‘Net Geners’ have never known anything else. Don Tapscott, Growing Up Digital: The Rise of the Net Generation (New York: McGraw-Hill Books, 1997).
Research by Don Tapscott suggests that avid gamers also score highly for spatial skills, the ability to manipulate 3D objects and hand–eye coordination. He has argued that this makes them well equipped for careers in design, architecture and medicine, especially in surgery, where gamers have proved adept at the laparoscopic techniques which require them to respond to the images transmitted on to a screen from a tiny camera inside the patient’s body. Don Tapscott, Grown Up Digital: How the Net Generation Is Changing the World (New York: McGraw-Hill Books, 2009), pp. 101–4.
7. Edward Rothstein, ‘Typography Fans Say Ikea Should Stick to Furniture’, The New York Times, 4 September 2009, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/05/arts/design/05ikea.html
8. Dylan Tweney, ‘The Undesigned Web’, Atlantic (November 2011), http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2010/11/the-undesigned-web/65458/
9. Each stone in a drystone wall is chosen to occupy a particular place in the interlocking structure by dint of its size, shape, weight and texture. Such walls date back to the first farming communities in Greece at the start of the Neolithic Age there in 7,000 BC, when people began to supplement the food they found in the wild by cultivating plants and animals, and are still constructed in the same way today. Mariana Cook, Stone Walls: Personal Boundaries (Bologna: Damiani Editore, 2011).
10. Frederick Winslow Taylor, The Principles of Scientific Management (1911; Mineola, New York: Dover Publications, 2003).
11. Timo de Rijk, Norm = Form: On Standardisation and Design (Den Haag: Thieme Art/Foundation Design den Haag, 2010), pp. 48–53.
12. Henry Ford quoted himself as having said ‘Any customer can have a car painted any colour that he wants so long as it is black’ in his autobiography My Life and Work (New York: Doubleday, Page and Company, 1922).
13. ‘Martha Reeves & The Vandellas – Nowhere to Run (1965) HD’, uploaded on to YouTube by MyMotownTunes0815007 on 13 September 2011, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=17yfqxoSTFM&feature=fvst
14. Interview with Hella Jongerius, January 2010, in Alice Rawsthorn, ‘Daring to Play with a Rich Palette’, International Herald Tribune, 18 January 2009, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/18/arts/18iht-design18.html
15. Hella Jongerius designed Repeat fabric for Maharam in 2002: http://www.jongeriuslab.com/site/html/work/repeat/. She designed the B-Set for the Dutch ceramics manufacturer Royal Tichelaar Makkum in 1997; http://www.jongeriuslab.com/site/html/work/b_set/
16. Masaki Kanai, ‘Not “This Is What I Want” but “This Will Do”’, in Masaki Kanai (ed.), Muji (New York: Rizzoli International, 2010), p. 14.
17. Farshid Moussavi, The Function of Form (Barcelona: Actar, with Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Graduate School of Design, 2009), pp. 18–19.
18. Terence Riley and Barry Bergdoll (eds), Mies in Berlin (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2001), pp. 242–3.
19. ‘CCTV – Headquarters’, OMA, http://oma.eu/news/2012/cctv-completed
20. Peter Cook, ‘Plug-In City’, in his Guide to Archigram 1961–1974 (London: Academy Editions, 1994), pp. 110–23.
21. Lucia Allais, ‘Interview with Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec’, in Ronan Bouroullec and Erwan Bouroullec (eds), Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec (London: Phaidon, 2003), pp. 47–8. An equally versatile modular product developed by Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec is Algue, a spindly twig of plastic, which is ten inches long and just over twelve inches wide. It was designed by them in 2004 and manufactured by Vitra. Any number of pieces can be slotted together to create screens, friezes or room dividers of different shapes, sizes and densities. http://www.bouroullec.com
22. The Swedish designer Reed Kram and his German colleague Clemens Weisshaar began the Breeding Tables project in 2003: http://www.kramweisshaar.com/projects/breeding-tables.html
23. Reed Kram and Clemens Weisshaar designed the My Private Sky project for the German porcelain maker Nymphenburg in 2007: http://www.kramweisshaar.com/projects/my-private-sky.html
24. Tomáš Gabzdil Libertíny developed the first version of the Honeycomb Vase as his graduation project at Design Academy Eindhoven in the Netherlands in 2006: http://www.tomaslibertiny.com/?portfolio=the-honeycomb-vase
25. Nike Store, http://www.nike.com/us/en_us/lp/nikeid
26. Local Motors, http://www.local-motors.com/
27. ‘Print Me a Stradivarius’, Economist, 12 February 2011, http://www.economist.com/node/18114327
28. A group of designers and software developers at Digital Forming in London deploys 3D printing to enable people to personalize simple plastic objects including bowls, vases and pens. They can only be adapted to a limited degree, because the designers have specified how far the form of each one can be changed before it becomes useless or unstable. http://www.digitalforming.com/index.html
29. ‘Special Reports: The Third Industrial Revolution’, Economist, 21 April 2012, http://www.economist.com/node/21552901
30. Moussavi, The Function of Form, p. 25.
31. The Belgian designer Thomas Lommée formed the OpenStructures network in Brussels to develop collaborative design and production systems; http://www.openstructures.net/. Unfold, which is based in Antwerp, was founded in 2002 by Claire Warnier and Dries Verbruggen after graduating from Design Academy Eindhoven; http://unfold.be/pages/projects
13 What about ‘the other 90%’?
1. Interview with Paul Polak, April 2007, in Alice Rawsthorn, ‘Design for the Unwealthiest 90 Per Cent’, International Herald Tribune, 30 April 2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/27/style/27iht-design30.1.5470390.html
2. Interview with Emily Pilloton, October 2011, in Alice Rawsthorn, ‘Humanitarian Design Project Aims to Build a Sense of Community’, International Herald Tribune, 24 October 2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/24/arts/24iht-design24.html
3. Project H Design, http://www.projecthdesign.org/#studio-h
4. Interview with Emily Pilloton, August 2009, in Alice Rawsthorn, ‘Design for Humanity’ International Herald Tribune, 7 September 2009. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/07/fashion/07iht-design7.html
5. ‘About Architecture for Humanity’, http://architectureforhumanity.org/about
6. Interview with Emily Pilloton, August 2009, in Rawsthorn, ‘Design for Humanity’.
7. ‘Kutamba AIDS Orphans School’, http://openarchitecturenetwork.org/node/1756
8. Emily Pilloton, Design Revolution: 100 Products That Empower People (New York: Metropolis Books, 2009), pp. 160–61.
9. Interview with Emily Pilloton, August 2009, in Rawsthorn, ‘Design for Humanity’.
10. Interview with Emily Pilloton, August 2010, in Alice Rawsthorn, ‘Putting New Tools in Students’ Hands’, International Herald Tribune, 23 August 2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/23/arts/23iht-design23.html
11. Interview with Emily Pilloton, January 2012. To promote Pilloton’s book on role models of humanitarian and sustainable design, Design Revolution, she and Miller converted the Airstream into a mobile design gallery, which they drove around the United States with Junebug, a border collie they bought on impulse in Harper, Texas. http://www.projecthdesign.org/#design-revolution-road-show; ‘Need to Know | Design Revolution Road Show | PBS’, uploaded on to YouTube by PBS on 13 May 2010, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lGdRHykBY8A
12. Interview with Emily Pilloton, October 2011, in Rawsthorn, ‘Humanitarian Design Project Aims to Build a Sense of Community’.
13. Ibid.
14. ‘Recap of Grand Opening Ceremony’, Studio H, http://www.studio-h.org/recap-of-grand-opening-ceremony
15. Interview with Emily Pilloton, October 2011, in Rawsthorn, ‘Humanitarian Design Project Aims to Build a Sense of Community’.
16. Interview with Emily Pilloton, January 2012.
17. Interview with Emily Pilloton, October 2011, in Rawsthorn, ‘Humanitarian Design Project Aims to Build a Sense of Community’.
18. The principal funders for year one of Studio H in Bertie County were the W. K. Kellogg Foundation and the Adobe Foundation. ‘From Bertie to Berkeley: The Next Generation of Studio H’, Studio H, http://www.studio-h.org/from-bertie-to-berkeley-the-next-generation-of-studio-h
19. Paul Polak, founder of International Design Enterprises, coined the term ‘design for the other 90%’ when speaking at the Aspen Design Summit 2006. ‘India’, http://blog.paulpolak.com/?cat=11
20. Rick Poynor (ed.), Communicate: Independent British Graphic Design since the Sixties (London: Barbican Art Gallery and Laurence King, 2004), pp. 22–3.
21. The many other examples of strategic social design projects include We Are What We Do’s work in developing a Young Activist Programme to raise political awareness among young people in Britain. ReD Associates has worked with CopenhagenCity council to reduce absenteeism by its workforce, and with the Danishgovernment to try to foster greater understanding of the West among people in the Muslim world.
22. Interview with Hilary Cottam, April 2012.
23. Hilary Cottam set up Participle in partnership with Hugo Manassei, an Internet entrepreneur who is now co-principal partner with her. ‘Hilary Cottam’, Participle, http://www.participle.net/about/people/24/hilaryc/
24. Interview with Hilary Cottam, April 2012.
25. Interview with Hilary Cottam, October 2008 in Alice Rawsthorn, ‘A New Design Concept: Creating Social Solutions for Old Age’, International Herald Tribune, 27 October 2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/27/arts/27iht-design27.1.17228735.html
26. Interview with Hilary Cottam, April 2012.
27. Interview with Hilary Cottam, October 2008, in Rawsthorn, ‘A New Design Concept’.
28. ‘The Circle Movement’, Participle, http://www.participle.net/projects/view/5/101/
29. Eric Kindel and Sue Walker with Christopher Burke, Matthew Eve and Emma Minns, ‘Isotype Revisited’, originally published in Italian translation in Progetto grafico, 18 (September 2010); http://www.isotyperevisited.org/2010/09/isotype-revisited.html
30. ‘Visual Education Expert Visits Ibadan Schools’, an article by an unknown author on Marie Reidemeister’s work in West Africa, originally submitted to Nigerian newspapers for publication in 1954, posted on Isotype Revisited, http://www.isotyperevisited.org/1954/07/visual-education-expert-visits-ibadan-schools.html
31. Amelia Gentleman, ‘Letter from India: Avant-garde City of Chandigarh, India, Loses Overlooked Treasure’, The New York Times, 29 February 2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/29/world/asia/29iht-letter.1.10571360.html
32. Jason Burke, ‘Le Corbusier’s Indian masterpiece Chandigarh Is Stripped for Parts’, Guardian, 7 March 2011, http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2011/mar/07/chandigarh-le-corbusier-heritage-site
33. Paul Polak, Out of Poverty: What Works When Traditional Approaches Fail (San Francisco, Calif.: Berrett-Koehler, 2008).
34. ‘History of Architecture for Humanity’, http://architectureforhumanity.org/about/history
35. Dan Rockhill and Jenny Kivett, ‘Studio 804 in Greensburg, Kansas’, in Marie J. Aquilino (ed.), Beyond Shelter: Architecture and Human Dignity (New York: Metropolis Books, 2011), pp. 234–45; Studio 804, http://studio804.com/
36. Acumen Fund, http://www.acumenfund.org/
37. John Thackara, In the Bubble: Designing in a Complex World (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2006); Alex Steffen (ed.), Worldchanging: A User’s Guide for the 21st Century (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2006); Kate Stohr and Cameron Sinclair (eds), Design Like You Give a Damn: Architectural Responses to Humanitarian Crises (New York: Metropolis Books, 2006).
38. ‘India’, http://blog.paulpolak.com/?cat=11
39. Exhibitions Archive, Smithsonian Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum in New York, http://archive.cooperhewitt.org/other90/other90.cooperhewitt.org/
40. ‘Nicholas Negroponte’, MIT Media Lab, http://www.media.mit.edu/people/nicholas; John Markoff, ‘New Economy: Taking the Pulse of Technology at Davos’, The New York Times, 31 January 2005, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/31/technology/31newcon.html
41. One Laptop per Child (OLPC), http://laptop.org/en/vision/project/index.shtml
42. John Markoff, ‘Microsoft Would Put Poor Online by Cellphone’, The New York Times, 30 January 2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/30/technology/30gates.html
43. Interview with Nicholas Negroponte, November 2006, in Alice Rawsthorn, ‘One Laptop Per Child: Computer Designed for Those Who Can Least Afford Them’, International Herald Tribune, 20 November 2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/19/style/19iht-design20.html
44. One Laptop Per Child (OLPC), http://laptop.org/en/vision/project/index.shtml
45. Interview with Nicholas Negroponte, November 2006, in Rawsthorn, ‘One Laptop Per Child’.
46. Interview with Yves Béhar, November 2006, in Rawsthorn, ‘One Laptop Per Child’.
47. Interview with Nicholas Negroponte, May 2008, in Alice Rawsthorn, ‘Design Accolades for One Laptop Per Child’, International Herald Tribune, 19 May 2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/16/arts/16iht-design19.1.12963222.html
48. One Laptop per Child (OLPC), http://laptop.org/en/vision/project/index.shtml
49. Interview with Yves Béhar, May 2008, in Rawsthorn, ‘Design Accolades for One Laptop Per Child’.
50. Interview with Nicholas Negroponte, November 2009, in Alice Rawsthorn, ‘Nonprofit Laptops: A Dream Not Yet Over’, International Herald Tribune, 9 November 2009, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/09/arts/09iht-design9.html
51. ‘Education in Uruguay: Laptops for All’, Economist, 3 October 2009, http://www.economist.com/node/14558609
52. Interview with Suneet Singh Tuli, chief executive of Datawind, December 2011, in Alice Rawsthorn, ‘A Few Stumbles on the Road to Connectivity’, International Herald Tribune, 19 December 2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/19/arts/design/a-few-stumbles-on-the-road-to-connectivity.html
53. ‘PlayPumps International’, uploaded on to YouTube by National Geographic on 9 January 2008, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qjgcHOWcWGE
54. Ralph Borland, ‘The Problem with the PlayPump’, in Ralph Borland, Michael John Gorman, Bruce Misstear and Jane Withers, Surface Tension: The Future of Water (Dublin: Science Gallery, 2011), pp. 70–71.
55. Andrew Chambers, ‘Africa’s Not-so Magic Roundabout’, Guardian, 24 November 2009, http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/nov/24/africa-charity-water-pumps-roundabouts. After PlayPumps International closed, its inventory was given to the nonprofit group Water for People, based in Denver, Colorado, which is committed to supporting the development of locally sustainable drinking-water resources and sanitation facilities for people in developing countries; http://www.waterforpeople.org/extras/playpumps/update-on-playpumps.html
56. Bruce Nussbaum, ‘Is Humanitarian Design the New Imperialism? Does Our Desire to Help Do More Harm than Good?’, Co.Design, 7 July 2010, http://www.fastcodesign.com/1661859/is-humanitarian-design-the-new-imperialism
57. Nathaniel Corum studied product design for his first degree at Stanford University, took a master’s in architecture at the University of Texas, and then worked with tribal groups, first with Berber communities in Morocco and then, back in the US, in Montana and North Dakota. In Montana he met Cameron Sinclair and Kate Stohr, and joined them at Architecture for Humanity when they opened an office in the Bay Area in 2006. He has since developed AfH’s education programme, and continued his work with tribal groups, undertaking a long-term project to build sustainable, off-grid homes for Navajo elders in New Mexico and Arizona. Describing himself as ‘nomadic’, Corum has a base near AfH’s office, but spends most of the year travelling from project to project, whether it is contributing to AfH’s reconstruction work after the Haiti earthquake; setting up education programmes at schools and universities in Australia and New Zealand; or participating in ad hoc ventures like The Plastiki’s voyage. If he has any spare time, he usually goes to New Mexico and Arizona to work on the elders’ homes. Interview with Nathaniel Corum, July 2010, in Alice Rawsthorn, ‘A Font of Ideas from a “Nomadic” Humanitarian Architect’, International Herald Tribune, 2 August 2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/02/arts/design/02iht-design2.html
58. Alongside its work for OLPC, fuseproject embarked upon a safe-sex programme in New York, and developed a free glasses scheme for children in Mexico. Interview with Yves Béhar, December 2011, in Rawsthorn, ‘A Few Stumbles on the Road to Connectivity’.
59. Victor Papanek, Design for the Real World: Human Ecology and Social Change (1971; Chicago, Ill.: Academy Chicago Publishers, 1985), p. xvii.
60. Interview with Sanga Moses, July 2012.
61. ‘About Us’, Eco-Fuel Africa, http://www.ecofuelafrica.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=59&Itemid=882
62. ‘Eco-Fuel Africa Limited’, The Buckminster Fuller Challenge, http://challenge.bfi.org/2012Finalist_EcoFuel
63. ‘Our Team’, Eco-Fuel Africa, http://www.ecofuelafrica.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=62:our-team&catid=21:about-ecofuel&Itemid=887
64. Interview with Sanga Moses, July 2012.
Epilogue Redesigning design
1. Emily Pilloton, Design Revolution: 100 Products That Empower People (New York: Metropolis Books, 2009), p. 10.
2. Interview with Mathieu Lehanneur, January 2012, in Alice Rawsthorn, ‘Blending Fields, Connecting Ideas’, International Herald Tribune, 16 January 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/16/arts/16iht-design16.html
3. Coralie Gauthier (ed.), Mathieu Lehanneur (Berlin: Gestalten, 2012), pp. 57–65.
4. Interview with Mathieu Lehanneur, July 2012.
5. ‘Design Takes Over, Says Paola Antonelli’, Economist, 22 November 2010, http://www.economist.com/node/17509367
6. William Little, H. W. Fowler and Jessie Coulson, The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary on Historical Principles, vol. 1, ed. C. T. Onions (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), p. 528.