Designing History
On graphic design's complicity in power and what can be done to transform the fieldMoving beyond the usual forms endemic to the graphic design canon, Designing History studies bureaucratic instruments such as money, passports, certificates, property deeds and more. Such documents produce identity, assign ownership and ascribe value. They stabilize claims, memory and knowledge that would otherwise be vulnerable to contestation or obliteration. Despite their apparent banality, such documents are perhaps graphic design's most profoundly consequential forms. This book is the revised edition of Immutable: Designing History (2022). It includes an extended essay that contextualizes the project as one concerned primarily with prompting a remapping of graphic design's historical and practical assumptions.Chris Lee is a graphic designer and educator based in Brooklyn. His practice explores graphic design's entanglement with capitalism and colonialism through the genre of the document. He is Assistant Professor in the Undergraduate Communications Design Department at Pratt Institute.
Dutch Designers Yearbook 2024-25
How designers can find inspiration and balance in an increasingly complicated, interconnected worldFor the 2024-25 edition, the central theme of the Dutch Designers Yearbook is "(Off) Balance." Is it business as usual for designers, or are new forms of functionality and meaning being sought amid polarization, global conflicts, climate change and technological innovation?
Permaculture
Essential reading for permaculture designers and accessible to a wide range of critical thinkers. This revised edition is more accessible than the original, with redrawn graphics, corrected and amended text, new references and a newly designed layout that invites the reader into the world of whole systems thinking that is permaculture.When it was originally published in 2002, Permaculture: Principles and Pathways Beyond Sustainability explained the systems of permaculture in 12 design principles that together with three central ethics provided a foundation for a diversity of ecological solutions that characterise permaculture design, teaching, development and activism. Fifteen years on the book has been translated into nine languages and has proved to be the seminal text for extending permaculture beyond its agrarian roots.Principles and Pathways draws together and integrates 25 years of thinking and teaching to show a whole new way of understanding and action behind a simple set of design principles. Relevant to every aspect of how we reorganise our lives, communities and landscapes to creatively adapt to ecological realities which shape human destiny.Essential reading for permaculture designers and accessible to a wide range of critical thinkers. For students and teachers of permaculture this book provides something more fundamental and distilled than Mollison's encyclopedic Designers Manual. For the general reader this book provides refreshing perspectives on a range of environmental issues and shows how permaculture is much more than a system of gardening. For anyone seriously interested in understanding the foundations for sustainable design and culture, this book is essential reading.
Thinking Through Fashion
A vital update to the definitive guide to fashion and cultural theory, featuring four new chapters and essential revisions throughout in light of key developments in fashion and fashion studies. Across 19 major thinkers from the 19th to the 21st century, the second edition of this comprehensive collection introduces readers to the process of thinking through rich cultural fields such as fashion with the help of social and cultural theory, and thinking through social and cultural theory with the help of fashion. Each chapter guides you through the work of a major thinker and considers their historical context, the role of fashion within their theory, how their theoretical frameworks apply to contemporary fashion studies, and the strengths and limitations of their approach. Featuring new chapters on key theorists Edward Said, bell hooks, Frantz Fanon and W.E.B. Du Bois, this new edition prepares readers to question and diversify the field of fashion. A revised introduction resituates theories in relation to each other and reflects on changing approaches to fashion studies, while revisions to existing chapters equip readers with the most up-to-date critical perspectives and developments in fashion and fashion theory.
