Design Culture: Objects and Approaches

Offers the reader an excellent deep dive into the concepts of design culturing in a very accessible way ... Overall this authoritative book instills a great sense of the many attributes and values of design culture.

Reinvigorates the study of design by offering an alternative to other cross-disciplinary terms such as ‘design studies’ or ‘design thinking’.

This stimulating introduction to the approaches and ideas which inform design culture should do much to promote new ways of thinking about both design and culture, and the dialectic between them.

Design Culture is an essential contribution to the field of design studies. It addresses the ubiquity of the term ’design’ from a cross sectional perspective, while introducing a precise, conceptual and methodological focus.

A stimulating, must-read overview of the interdisciplinary debates around Design Culture as a discipline and object of study for all those interested in the phenomenon of Design.

Design Culture manages to break through the noise, providing an enlightening view of design as a dominating feature of everyday life. From the influence of Turkish paper doilies to the rise of the global sex toy industry, it gives a multi-layered account of seemingly insignificant designs. Filled as it is with impressive philosophical insights and amusing historical connections, Design Culture offers much to ponder. Indeed, designers, historians as well as many non-specialists will find this book both enriching and enjoyable.

Designers often claim they seek to “improve or maintain the habitability of the world of their fellow citizen”. Design Culture may well be the appropriate theoretical framework I am longing for to better understand and explain what “habitability” is about.