Core77

Imagine a famous product designer saying, "It's critical that companies wake up to the fact that the product itself is the most powerful brand-building and business tool they have." I doubt this would make much news. It's something a lot of us have probably said and agree with, but the problem seems to be when we say it, it appears too self-serving or falls on deaf ears. This time is different. This time we aren't saying it, Ad men are.

The crux of what Brown is getting at is what McKinsey & Company referred to as the "T-Shaped" person, where the vertical axis represents the depth of the skill set that forms their core competency. Valuable design thinkers, however, "cross the T," holding not only deep familiarity with their core role, but also a disposition for collaboration across enterprises.

While not exactly summer beach reading, Hartmut Esslinger's new book on Design Strategy, A Fine Line crams as many ideas, themes and disparate story arcs into its 180 pages as a Dan Brown novel. For the first few chapters Esslinger follows the tried and true business book methodology of using real world examples to illustrate lessons in leadership and strategy.

The collapse of the US auto industry stands as one of the national tragedies of this generation, but it also provides boundless opportunities for ironic reflection when looking through a book like Heimann and Patton's Classic Cars. The first time we opened their book of historic auto ads, it revealed a blue '67 Olds Toronodo, complete with a matador against a red background, framed against the caption, "After you've walked off with all the honors, what do you do for an encore?"

Anyone who thinks that minimalist or clean product design begins and ends with Jonathan Ive would be well served to check out the latest exhibit on Dieter Rams. Unfortunately, the exhibit in question was already held at the Suntory Museum in Osaka, Japan—but the contents of the retrospective have also been catalogued in a book, Less and More available in limited numbers through the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum.

No strangers to industrial design, both authors work at IDEO, with Bone as design director and Kara Johnson leading the materials team. A series of 12 projects done for the sheer joy of creation, I Miss My Pencil reads like a student's wet dream of industrial design 101. The book is broken into three sections: Aisthetika, which deals with sense and experience, Punk Manufacturing, which combines craft and mass production, and Love+Fetish, which might be enough to titillate any objectophiles out there.

While the Aeron looks like it could have been inspired by H.R. Giger's Alien and sports levers that promise comfort, the sparse Scandinavian design of Opsvik's chairs belies their versatility. Most chairs are composed of simple bent birch and cotton padded supports, with nary a lever to be found, but once a human being sits on it, the chairs deform, flex and rock into a variety of positions. While sitting in one of his chairs for an extended period of time remains the most visceral way to understand his designs, Rethinking Sitting does an admirable job of presenting ergonomics to those of us in less comfortable postures.

Historically, artists have often self-edited their sketchbooks by tearing out pages or censoring their output. While it's hard to discern exactly what editorial oversight Richard Brereton performed when he chose which particular plates would make it into his compilation of sketchbooks by design professionals, he clearly did not limit his search to classically drawn figures. Instead, Sketchbooks presents a diverse range of styles, subject matter, and even artistic skills, and that's a good thing.

"This isn't a book about sustainable design. Instead, it's a book about how the design industry can approach the world in a more sustainable way. Design is interconnected—to engineering, management, production, customer experiences, and to the planet. Discussing and comprehending the relationship between design and sustainability requires a systems perspective to see these relationships clearly....."

For a graphic designer or a product designer interested in applique, New Skateboard Graphics is an eyeful. In the foreword, Michael Leon explains the realities of the modern sales environment where the consumer tends to observe the boards with the bottom graphics visible at a distance on a wall or in miniature in a catalog. Hardisty follows up with a short essay on the two-way connection between the branding of the company and the aesthetics of the riders, but from there it's all about the graphics.

There's no reason why every finished design can't be built from a cornucopia of failures, so much so that perhaps the very nomenclature of failure needs to be reconsidered. Perhaps we designers have already subliminally assimilated this lesson. After all, most people I know don't call it failure, we call it process. For me, success and failure are the same things, just on a different timeline.

Looking at the actual work contained within, I couldn't help but notice that stereotypes about the feminine aesthetic seemed to apply more broadly to the client than the designer, which strongly indicates that the capacity of a designer to produce good work for a client has little to do with gender.

Amazon's publicity blurb for The L.A. Earthquake Sourcebook bills it as "the coolest earthquake preparedness-book ever published," which I imagine to be true, but I also can't think of much competition. A collaboration between Stefan Sagmeister and The Art Center College of Design in association with the L.A. Earthquake Get Ready Project, the Sourcebook juxtaposes essays by experts like FEMA Director James Lee Witt with excerpts from authors like Joan Didion.

George asks why such a fundamental aspect of our designed lives remains on the margins of polite conversation. After all, she points out, Le Corbusier called the toilet "one of the most beautiful objects industry has ever invented." Its purpose is unremittingly crucial. "The toilet is a physical barrier," she writes, "that takes care of the physical dangers of excrement."

Clearly, there's something about using human detritus that's uniquely resistant to industrialization, and work like Splan's seems more suited to the Gugenhiem than to the Cooper-Hewitt, but it still provides a valuable commentary on human society (e.g. Why does a skin negligee seem utterly unmanufacturable, when we've already done such a marvelous job industrializing the skinning of cows, lizards and some small furry mammals?)

The concept of "needsfinding" seems unique to our consumer culture. True needs like air, sleep or hunger announce themselves with neurochemical fury, tearing animals away from what they think they should be doing and dragging them into the immediacy of their body. So when we industrial designers talk about the customer's undiscovered needs and how our products can address them, we should admit to ourselves that needsfinding, as we know it, is an oxymoron.

For me, it isn't the Tom Luedecke's gorgeous laser etched Nike's, or even I Have Pop's Concrete Dunks (so real you can only tell the material from the chipped bits) that impress me, but that big brands like Nike and Adidas have received that Midas touch of legitimacy. I don't quite know whether to be dismayed that rebel art forms like graffiti or skateboarding have been co-opted by corporate America, or thrilled that antiestablishment icons are finally getting their dues. The work in Art & Sole provides a microcosm of fashion through which to gaze upon consumer trends.

The inside cover of Daniel Eatock's monograph Imprint is covered with a rather exhaustive list of tasks that could be construed as either design projects or performance art pieces depending upon one's point of view. While certain items like "I have spent twenty-four hours in a pitch-black room, lying on a mattress with ear plugs in my ears, without eating or visiting the toilet," suggest David Blaine's feats of endurance, others stray from conceptual art into true iterative design.

The Design Entrepreneur is structured with introductions written by Heller and Talarico, followed by a series of case studies. Each case study consists of an interview with the designer, along with photos of finished products and inspirations. The main emphasis, however, is on the entrepreneurial process.

Glossy product design books usually relegate details like ideation sketches, prototypes, parting lines, and injection molds to a supporting role, but Jennifer Hudson's Process: 50 Product Designs from Concept to Manufacture puts them front and center. Highlighting projects from both up-and-coming designers and design luminaries, Process showcases the hours of effort that disappear behind the scenes and are rarely seen by the consumer.

Since the first use of tools to achieve goals, design has been born as a response to problems and needs. Sadly, since we now live in a thoroughly designed world, many of our problems are themselves secondary consequences of prior acts of design. Collecting striking photographs with interviews and original essays, Actar's latest book/magazine hybrid addresses architectural and design responses to the problems of our modern age.

As advertised, Le Corbusier Le Grand weighs in at a whopping 20 plus pounds and measures 19.6 by 14.3 by 3.9 inches with over 600 pages. It stands (or lays) as a comprehensive archive of the work of Charles-Edouard Jeanneret-Gris, otherwise known as Le Corbusier and arguably one of the most important modernist architects of the twentieth century.

But the truth is far more complex, and the days and hours of work and sketching they put in comes through in the volume of photographs within. In their work and their success, these two brothers amply illustrate that the old aphorism that luck is when preparation meets timing.

In any problem this large and complex, there are no easy answers, and Bottlemania should leave most readers with as many questions as answers. I would also hope, however, that readers realize that the problems it poses are far more universal than just fixating on Nestle's Poland Spring, Coke's Dasani, or Pepsi's Aquafina....Perhaps this summer a few of us should give reality a page-turning try.

Decoding Design addresses shape and form numerically, but it also does a lot more, and that's why, as someone who does know something about number theory (as opposed to numerology), Maggie Macnab's book is both wonderfully fascinating and endlessly frustrating.

By presenting both uber-consumers and the professionals who deal with trying to sell us the stuff to fill our endless appetites, or the holes in our souls, Walker indirectly addresses what he coins the "pretty good" problem: What distinguishes a product when assembly lines or underpaid third-world workers can make even the cheapest products "pretty good?"

An enormous orange compendium, The Endless City approaches architecture itself in scale, scope and design. All of the little details are right, from its visually comfortable grid to the stunning panoramic long-exposure photos of cities and urban sprawl.

What is Exhibition Design illuminates the thread of history spanning from the cabinets of curiosities popular in the Renaissance, through church reliquaries, worlds fairs, and department stores.

Zen Buddhism has a history of impermanent art. From the fleeting beauty of a sandpainted Tibetan mandala to a carefully pruned bonsai tree, it is accepted that all beautiful things must come to an end. Christopher Salyers's Face Food continues that tradition...or maybe that's a stretch.

As someone who has gone to art school and seen that the act of repetitive practice can turn a mediocre sketcher into someone the world sees as "talented," I have no trouble understanding where Dan Roam is coming from in his book The Back of the Napkin when he speaks to his readers about visual thinking. Frankly, it doesn't matter whether or not people can draw when they present their ideas.

One of the most remarkable things about reading the interviews contained in Debbie Millman's How to Think Like a Great Graphic Designer is noticing just how many of the interviewees seemed to know even in their earliest memories that graphic design was their calling.

The opening sentence of Kenya Hara's recent book Designing Design states that "verbalizing design is another act of design." For those of us involved as much in design criticism as "design" itself, those are welcome words. They stand in stark contrast to another popular maxim, "Those who can't do, teach," so common in Western business circles.

Contests offered by the Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia and showcased in their book Self-Sufficient Housing display a range of paradigm breaking, but widely divergent "solutions" to this problem, that seem far more at ease promoting the visible aspects of sustainability than delving into the deepest layers of our economy to find true efficiencies.

Everyday Engineering is subtitled "How Engineers See," and Burroughs makes no apologies to designers for his engineering sensibilities. Everyday Engineering contains very little text, instead relying on nearly two-hundred pictures of design details submitted by IDEO employees that explain the hidden world that design details can communicate and laypeople often miss.

Since corporate value and image are commingled with branding, it's virtually impossible to assess whether Nike would still be "Nike" if it had used a more literal representation of the goddess's wing instead. Capsule's Logos 01: an essential primer for today's competitive market tackles the many facets of this chicken and egg problem in its pretty pages.

In their book The Function of Ornament, Farshid Moussavi and Michael Kubo attempt to explain the paradox of the seemingly purposeless vestiges people emblazon on top of "functional" architecture. After a short introduction tracing the popularity of ornament from the Romans to the modernists, Moussavi and Kubo jump right into examples.

Whether due to its iconoclastic founding, its multicultural "melting pot" constituency or its extraordinarily protective intellectual property rights, popular wisdom has always held America to be a nexus of innovation. The serial entrepreneur has always had a place to flourish here, from Edison's Menlo Park to Sergey Brin and Larry Page's Google headquarters in Mountain View, California.

Fukasawa himself opens the book with an introduction that talks through page fifteen, not about the author, not about the objects, but about people. The photographs in Fukasawa's introduction are all in hard-focus. No light-boxes here. Instead, the introduction is crammed with pictures of human behavior in man-made environments gone wrong.

It is often cited, however, that nonverbal communication makes up the bulk of information flow between individuals, and the perplexing popularity of emoticons provides ample testimony that words aren't always enough to get the point across. For creative teams, these adages hold even more fully.

Aluminum foam, heat sensitive compounds and color changing fabrics are all included, with details on the manufacturers, including addresses, websites and phone contacts. While I cannot guarantee that simply knowing the name of the manufacturer will provide entree into purchasing novel technologies like LiTraCon transparent concrete (that's TRANSPARENT CONCRETE folks), it certainly is a step in the right direction.