Book picks similar to
Universal Design: Creating Inclusive Environments by Edward Steinfeld
architecture
design
disability-philosophy-course
graphic-design
Interdisciplinary Interaction Design: A Visual Guide to Basic Theories, Models and Ideas for Thinking and Designing for Interactive Web Design and Dig
James Pannafino - 2012
It addresses how people deal with words, read images, explore physical space, think about time and motion, and how actions and responses affect human behavior. Various disciplines make up interaction design, such as industrial design, cognitive psychology, user interface design and many others. It is my hope that this book is a starting point for creating a visual language to enhance the understanding of interdisciplinary theories within interaction design. The book uses concise descriptions, visual metaphors and comparative diagrams to explain each term's meaning. Many ideas in this book are based on timeless principles that will function in varying contexts.
What Is a Designer: Things, Places, Messages
Norman Potter - 1999
The work adds up to a powerful and endlessly rewarding resource for students of all ages. First published in 1969, the book is now reissued to present the enduring core of Potter's arguments. An afterword by Robin Kinross sets the work andits author in their contexts.
Designing Social Interfaces
Christian Crumlish - 2009
Designing sites that foster user interaction and community-building is a valuable skill for web developers and designers today, but it's not that easy to understand the nuances of the social web. Now you have help. Christian Crumlish and Erin Malone share hard-won insights into what works, what doesn't, and why. You'll learn how to balance opposing factions and grow healthy online communities by co-creating them with your users.Understand the overarching principles you need to consider for every website you createLearn basic design patterns for adding social components to an existing siteRein in misbehaving users on an active community siteBuild a social experience around a product or service and invite people to joinDevelop a social utility without having to build an entirely new infrastructureEnable users of your site's content to interact with one anotherOffer your members the opportunity to connect in the real worldLearn to recognize and avoid antipatterns: emergent bad practices in the social network and social media space
How Designers Think
Bryan Lawson - 1980
This extended work is the culmination of forty years' research and shows the belief that we all can, and do, design, and that we can learn to design better. The creative mind continues to have the power to surprise and this book aims to nurture and extend this creativity. Neither the earlier editions, nor this book, are intended as authoritative prescriptions of how designers should think but provide helpful advice on how to develop an understanding of design.In this fourth edition, Bryan Lawson continues to try and understand how designers think, to explore how they might be better educated and to develop techniques to assist them in their task. Some chapters have been revised and three completely new chapters added. The book is now intended to be read in conjunction with What Designers Know which is a companion volume. Some of the ideas previously discussed in the third edition of How Designers Think are now explored more thoroughly in What Designers Know. For the first time this fourth edition works towards a model of designing and the skills that collectively constitute the design process.
The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action
Donald A. Schön - 1983
social scientist and consultant examines five professions - engineering, architecture, management, psychotherapy, and town planning - to show how professionals really go about solving problems. The best professionals, Donald Sch�n maintains, know more than they can put into words. To meet the challenges of their work, they rely less on formulas learned in graduate school than on the kind of improvisation learned in practice. This unarticulated, largely unexamined process is the subject of Sch�n's provocatively original book, an effort to show precisely how 'reflection-in-action' works and how this vital creativity might be fostered in future professionals.
Geometry of Design: Studies in Proportion and Composition
Kimberly Elam - 2001
Kimberly Elam takes the reader on a geometrical journey, lending insight and coherence to the design process by exploring the visual relationships that have foundations in mathematics as well as the essential qualities of life. Geometry of Design-the first book in our new Design Briefs Series-takes a close look at a broad range of twentieth-century examples of design, architecture, and illustration (from the Barcelona chair to the Musica Viva poster, from the Braun handblender to the Conico kettle), revealing underlying geometric structures in their compositions. Explanations and techniques of visual analysis make the inherent mathematical relationships evident and a must-have for anyone involved in graphic arts. The book focuses not only on the classic systems of proportioning, such as the golden section and root rectangles, but also on less well known proportioning systems such as the Fibonacci Series. Through detailed diagrams these geometric systems are brought to life giving an effective insight into the design process.
The Laws of Simplicity: Design, Technology, Business, Life
John Maeda - 2006
We're rebelling against technology that's too complicated, DVD players with too many menus, and software accompanied by 75-megabyte "read me" manuals. The iPod's clean gadgetry has made simplicity hip. But sometimes we find ourselves caught up in the simplicity paradox: we want something that's simple and easy to use, but also does all the complex things we might ever want it to do. In The Laws of Simplicity, John Maeda offers ten laws for balancing simplicity and complexity in business, technology, and design—guidelines for needing less and actually getting more.Maeda—a professor in MIT's Media Lab and a world-renowned graphic designer—explores the question of how we can redefine the notion of "improved" so that it doesn't always mean something more, something added on.Maeda's first law of simplicity is "Reduce." It's not necessarily beneficial to add technology features just because we can. And the features that we do have must be organized (Law 2) in a sensible hierarchy so users aren't distracted by features and functions they don't need. But simplicity is not less just for the sake of less. Skip ahead to Law 9: "Failure: Accept the fact that some things can never be made simple." Maeda's concise guide to simplicity in the digital age shows us how this idea can be a cornerstone of organizations and their products—how it can drive both business and technology. We can learn to simplify without sacrificing comfort and meaning, and we can achieve the balance described in Law 10. This law, which Maeda calls "The One," tells us: "Simplicity is about subtracting the obvious, and adding the meaningful."
Secret Language of Color: Science, Nature, History, Culture, Beauty of Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Violet
Joann Eckstut - 2013
In these chapters we learn about how and why we see color, the nature of rainbows, animals with color vision far superior and far inferior to our own, how our language influences the colors we see, and much more. Between these chapters, authors Joann Eckstut and Ariele Eckstut turn their attention to the individual hues of the visible spectrum?red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and violet?presenting each in fascinating, in-depth detail.Including hundreds of stunning photographs and dozens of informative, often entertaining graphics, every page is a breathtaking demonstration of color and its role in the world around us. Whether you see red, are a shrinking violet, or talk a blue streak, this is the perfect book for anyone interested in the history, science, culture, and beatuty of color in the natural and man-made world.
Utopia or Oblivion: The Prospects for Humanity
R. Buckminster Fuller - 1969
This comprehensive volume is composed of essays derived from the lectures he gave all over the world during the 1960's. Fuller's thesis is that humanity - for the first time in its history - has the opportunity to create a world where the needs of 100% of humanity are met. This is Fuller in his prime, relaying his urgent message for earthians critical moment and presenting pioneering solutions which reflect his commitment to the potential of innovative design to create technology that does "more with less" and thereby improves human lives . . . "This is what man tends to call utopia. It's a fairly small word, but inadequate to describe the extraordinary new freedom of man in a new relationship to universe - the alternative
The Secret Lives of Color
Kassia St. Clair - 2016
From blonde to ginger, the brown that changed the way battles were fought to the white that protected against the plague, Picasso's blue period to the charcoal on the cave walls at Lascaux, acid yellow to kelly green, and from scarlet women to imperial purple, these surprising stories run like a bright thread throughout history.In this book, Kassia St. Clair has turned her lifelong obsession with colors and where they come from (whether Van Gogh's chrome yellow sunflowers or punk's fluorescent pink) into a unique study of human civilization. Across fashion and politics, art and war, the secret lives of color tell the vivid story of our culture.
The Chair: Rethinking Culture, Body, and Design
Galen Cranz - 1998
With over ninety illustrations, this book traces the history of the chair as we know it from its crudest beginnings up through the modern office variety. Drawing on anecdotes, literary references, and famous designs, Galen Cranz documents our ongoing love affair with the chair and how its evolution has been governed not by a quest for comfort or practicality, but by the designation of status.Relating much of the modern era's rampant back pain to an increasingly sedentary lifestyle spent in traditional seating, Cranz goes beyond traditional ergonomic theory to formulate new design principles that challenge the way we think and live. A farsighted and innovative approach to our most intimate habitat, this book offers guidelines that will assist readers in choosing a chair-and designing a lifestyle-that truly suits our bodies. Praise for The Chair: "[A] concise, multidisciplinary gem."—Publishers Weekly "Cranz is no sedentary historian. The Chair is a call to action."—Jonathan Levi, Los Angeles Times "Galen Cranz has written a provocative book. Pull up a comfortable chair-if you can find one-and read it."—Witold Rybczynski
Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code
Ruha Benjamin - 2019
Presenting the concept of the "New Jim Code," she shows how a range of discriminatory designs encode inequity by explicitly amplifying racial hierarchies; by ignoring but thereby replicating social divisions; or by aiming to fix racial bias but ultimately doing quite the opposite. Moreover, she makes a compelling case for race itself as a kind of technology, designed to stratify and sanctify social injustice in the architecture of everyday life.This illuminating guide provides conceptual tools for decoding tech promises with sociologically informed skepticism. In doing so, it challenges us to question not only the technologies we are sold but also the ones we ourselves manufacture.If you adopt this book for classroom use in the 2019-2020 academic year, the author would be pleased to arrange to Skype to a session of your class. If interested, enter your details in this sign-up sheet https: //buff.ly/2wJsvZr
Hello World: Where Design Meets Life
Alice Rawsthorn - 2012
When deployed wisely, it can bring us pleasure, choice, strength, decency and much more. But if its power is abused, the outcome can be wasteful, confusing, humiliating, even dangerous. None of us can avoid being affected by design, whether or not we wish to. It is so ubiquitous that it determines how we feel and what we do, often without our noticing.Hello World explores design's influence on our lives. Written by the renowned design critic Alice Rawsthorn and designed by the award-winning book designer Irma Boom, it describes how warlords, scientists, farmers, hackers, activists and designers have used design to different ends throughout history: from the macabre symbol invented by 18th century pirates to terrorise their victims into surrender, to one woman's quest for the best possible prosthetic legs and the evolution of the World Cup ball.At a time when we face colossal changes, unprecedented in their speed, scale and intensity - from the deepening environmental crisis, to giant leaps in science and technology - Hello World explains how design can help us to make sense of them andto turn them to our advantage.
The Ten Principles Behind Great Customer Experiences (Financial Times Series)
Matt Watkinson - 2012
They have a loud voice, a wealth of choice and their expectations are higher than ever. This book covers ten principles you can use to make real world improvements to your customers’ experiences, whatever your business does and whoever you are. For managers, leaders and those starting a new business, the book shows that making improvements customers will appreciate doesn’t need to be complicated or cost a fortune.
Information Design Workbook: Graphic approaches, solutions, and inspiration + 30 case studies
Kim Baer - 2008
The back half of the book contains a wide range of case studies from design firms around the world so designers can see the techniques previously outlined in the first half of the book. The author also critiques and explains why the design is successful in terms of formal quality (Aesthetics) and function (How does it improve communication?).