One of the best ways is to understand users' reasons for doing things. Mental Models gives you the tools to help you grasp, and design for, those reasons. Adaptive Path co-founder Indi Young has written a roll-up-your-sleeves book for designers, managers, and anyone else interested in making design strategic, and successful.

    Now, drawing on the green living lessons gained from 10 years of putting the Cradle to Cradle concept into practice with businesses, governments, and ordinary people, William McDonough and Michael Braungart envision the next step in the solution to our ecological crisis: We don't just use or reuse and recycle resources with greater effectiveness, we actually improve the natural world as we live, create, and build. For McDonough and Braungart, the questions of resource scarcity and sustainability are questions of design. They are practical-minded visionaries: They envision beneficial designs of products, buildings, and business practices—and they show us these ideas being put to use around the world as everyday objects like chairs, cars, and factories are being reimagined not just to sustain life on the planet but to grow it. It is an eye-opening, inspiring tour of our green future as it unfolds in front of us.The Upcycle is as ambitious as such classics as Rachel Carson's Silent Spring—but its mission is very different. McDonough and Braungart want to turn on its head our very understanding of the human role on earth: Instead of protecting the planet from human impact, why not redesign our activity to improve the environment? We can have a beneficial, sustainable footprint. Abundance for all. The goal is within our reach.

    Everything Explained through Flowcharts is your one-stop decision-making handbook, packed with meticulous diagrams that will illuminate life’s greatest mysteries—from your afterlife options to the best alien pick-up lines to the smoothest route to world domination. Distinctive and ingenious, Everything Explained through Flowcharts is the only book currently on the market that enables you to trace the labyrinthine connections that order the universe while causing eye strain in seniors.

    Blow by Blow is a captivating journey through Issie’s life, a one-of-a-kind look at her unforgettable impact on the fashion world, and a moving exploration of her inspiring and ultimately tragic tale.

    Often neglected in the various curricula of design schools, the new models of design research described in this book help designers to investigate people, form, and process in ways that can make their work more potent and more delightful. At the very least, Peter Lunenfeld writes in the preface, design research saves us from reinventing the wheel. At its best, a lively research methodology can reinvigorate the passion that so often fades after designers join the profession.The goal of the book is to introduce designers to the many research tools that can be used to inform design as well as to ideas about how and when to deploy them effectively. The chapter authors come from diverse institutions and enterprises, including Stanford University, MIT, Intel, Maxis, Studio Anybody, Sweden's HUMlab, and Big Blue Dot. Each has something to say about how designers make themselves better at what they do through research, and illustrates it with real world examples--case studies, anecdotes, and images. Topics of this multi-voice conversation include qualitative and quantitative methods, performance ethnography and design improvisation, trend research, cultural diversity, formal and structural research practice, tactical discussions of design research process, and case studies drawn from areas as unique as computer games, museum information systems, and movies. Interspersed throughout the book are one-page demos, snapshots of the design research experience. Design Research charts the paths from research methods to research findings to design principles to design results and demonstrates the transformation of theory into a richly satisfying and more reliably successful practice.

    Buying clothing through the mails had become an American institution, and entire families were often dressed via the U.S. Post Office. More conservative than the up-to-the-minute fashion shops, mail-order catalogs nevertheless offered surprisingly much of the haute couture. But, above all, they accurately record what men, women, and children were actually wearing in the 1920s.Now Stella Blum (Curator of the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York) has distilled into this volume the essence of the fashion pages of the Sears, Roebuck and other mail-order catalogs of the Twenties. Her informative text and selection of over 150 representative catalog pages — comprising over 750 illustrations with original captions — gradually trace the evolution of dress modes from the vogue of stodgy postwar fashions to the impact on costume of the crash of '29. In a year-by-year survey, Mrs. Blum's introductory texts relate the trends in fashion to the social changes of the dynamic and restless era, assessing the influence of war and technological developments on the high hemlines, flattened busts and hips, geometric patterns and "bobbed" hairstyles of the boyish flapper look. And as she notes, it was through the Sears catalogs that Parisian designers like Coco Chanel, Jeanne Lanvin, and Madeleine Vionnet made their influence felt on Midwestern farms and in urban ghettos.You'll find here a marvelous panorama of "smart," "modish," "chic," "stylish," and "ultra fashionable" apparel, as well as more traditional garments: for women and "misses" there are Middy blouses, Russian boots modeled by Gloria Swanson, "Bob" hats modeled by Clara Bow and Joan Crawford; coats, suits, dresses (including the first maternity dresses), sweaters, capes; silk and rayon stockings, corsets, chemises, camisoles, negligees; and accessories like necklaces, belts, combs, headbands, umbrellas, gloves, compacts, hand bags, wristwatches, and powderpuff cases. You'll see slower-to-change men's fashions — shirts, ties, suits, sweaters, and sports clothes — become trimmer, brighter, smarter. And you can follow the trends in children's fashions as well.For historians of costume, nostalgia buffs, and casual browsers, these pages afford a rare picture — unspoiled by recent myths about the Roaring Twenties — of how average people really dressed in the jazz age.

    Urban sketching--the process of sketching on the go as a regular practice--is a hot trend in the drawing world. In this aspirational guide, French artist France Belleville-Van Stone offers motivation to move beyond the comfort zone, as well as instruction on turning rough sketches into finished work. By sharing her own creative process, which includes sketching by hand and digitally, Belleville-Van Stone emboldens readers to craft a method of their own and devote more time to art, even if it's just 10 minutes a day. "Sketch Your World" will inspire artists both established and aspiring to rethink their daily practice, sketch for the pure joy of it, and document their lives and the world around them.

    Everyone wishes they could sketch stylish scenes, but busy lives leave almost no room for sitting down with a pad and pen to practicing. Many people give up on their potential hobby (and artistic outlet) because they feel they just don’t have the time to lay the groundwork. Here’s a secret though: you do! All you is a strategy for incorporate sketching into your daily life.Sketch Now, Think Later covers the tools, techniques and tips that author and Urban Sketching Correspondent of Boston Mike Daikubara has developed in his more than 15 years as a practicing artist, and will show you how to fully dive into any sketching situation with limited time and tools, and still be able to produce memorable, great looking, fun sketches!

    Now, he drills down into specific challenges of making sketches on location, rain or shine, quickly or slowly, and the most suitable techniques for every situation, in The Urban Sketching Handbook series. It's easy to overlook that ample variety of buildings and spaces and the differences from city to city, country to country. From houses, apartments and shopping malls to public buildings and places of worship, the structures humans have created over the centuries, for shelter, commerce, industry, transportation or recreation, are fascinating subjects to study and sketch.In The Urban Sketching Handbook: Architecture and Cityscapes, Gabriel lays out keys to help make the experience of drawing architecture and cityscapes fun and rewarding. Using composition, depth, scale, contrast, line and creativity, sketching out buildings and structure has never been more inspirational. This guide will help you to develop your own creative approach, no matter what your skill level may be today. As much as The Urban Sketching Handbook: Architecture and Cityscapes may inspire you to draw more urban spaces, it can also help to increase your appreciation of the built environment. Drawing the places where we live, work and play, is a great way to show appreciation and creativity.

    Everyone can ask questions, right? Unfortunately, that's not the case. Interviewing Users provides invaluable interviewing techniques and tools that enable you to conduct informative interviews with anyone. You'll move from simply gathering data to uncovering powerful insights about people.Interviewing Users will explain how to succeed with interviewing, including:* Embracing how other people see the world* Building rapport to create engaging and exciting interactions* Listening in order to build rapport.With this book, Steve Portigal uses stories and examples from his 15 years of experience to show how interviewing can be incorporated into the design process, helping you learn the best and right information to inform and inspire your design.

    In truth, each chapter provides detailed, step-by-step instructions and examples, with many chapters providing multiple examples.There are also over 50 mind map images, illustrations, and diagrams - more than any other book. Unlike images in other books, which are only 1 or 2 levels deep, many images in this book go 3 to 4 levels.Some reviews claim the quality of the images is low. The reality is most books and e-readers do a poor job of reproducing mind maps. This is the only book that provides links under each image to see a larger, fuller, and more detailed version online.Seeing all the examples and illustrations is the only way to understand the true power and flexibility of this tool.In short, this the most comprehensive book on mind mapping & visual learning, enhancing your skills in reading, writing, learning, note taking, brainstorming, planning, productivity, and so much more.Give it a shot, it will change the way you interact with information, no matter how complex.

    This book presents an abundance of information on type - the cornerstone of graphic design - succinctly and to the point, so that designers can get the information they need quickly and easily.Whereas many other books on type are either very technical or showcase oriented, this book offers ideas and inspiration through hundreds of real-life projects showing successful, well-crafted usage of type. The book also offers a variety of other content, including choosing fonts, sizes, and colors; incorporating text and illustrations; avoiding common mistakes in text usage; and teaching rules by which to live (and work) by.

    Or the blissful abandon of a golden retriever racing with glee across a lawn. This is the joy of play. By definition, play is purposeless and all-consuming. And, most important, it’s fun. As we become adults, taking time to play feels like a guilty pleasure—a distraction from “real” work and life. But as Dr. Stuart Brown illustrates, play is anything but trivial. It is a biological drive as integral to our health as sleep or nutrition. In fact, our ability to play throughout life is the single most important factor in determining our success and happiness. Dr. Brown has spent his career studying animal behavior and conducting more than six thousand “play histories” of humans from all walks of life—from serial murderers to Nobel Prize winners. Backed by the latest research, Play explains why play is essential to our social skills, adaptability, intelligence, creativity, ability to problem solve, and more. Play is hardwired into our brains—it is the mechanism by which we become resilient, smart, and adaptable people. Beyond play’s role in our personal fulfillment, its benefits have profound implications for child development and the way we parent, education and social policy, business innovation, productivity, and even the future of our society. From new research suggesting the direct role of three-dimensional-object play in shaping our brains to animal studies showing the startling effects of the lack of play, Brown provides a sweeping look at the latest breakthroughs in our understanding of the importance of this behavior. A fascinating blend of cutting-edge neuroscience, biology, psychology, social science, and inspiring human stories of the transformative power of play, this book proves why play just might be the most important work we can ever do.