This is the essential student s guide to Design its practice, its theory and its history. Drawing from a wide range of international examples, respected design writer Catherine McDermott explores key topics including:

• international design from Europe to Africa
• design history from Art Nouveau to punk
• sustainable design, recycling and green design
• design theory from semiotics to gender, to postcolonialism
• design technology, graphic design and the web.

Fully cross-referenced, with up-to-date guides for further reading, Design:...

Design History has become a complex and wide-ranging discipline. It now examines artefacts from conception to development, production, mediation, and consumption. Over the last few decades, the discipline has developed a diverse range of theories and methodologies for the analysis of objects. Design History presents the most comprehensive overview and guide to these developments.

The book first traces the development of the discipline, explaining how it draws from Art History, Industrial Design, Cultural History and Material Culture Studies. The core of the book then analyses...

Design as Politics confronts the inadequacy of contemporary politics to deal with unsustainability. Current "solutions" to unsustainability are analysed as utterly insufficient for dealing with the problems but, further than this, the book questions the very ability of democracy to deliver a sustainable future. Design as Politics argues that finding solutions to this problem, of which climate change is only one part, demands original and radical thinking. Rather than reverting to failed political ideologies, the book proposes a post-democratic politics. In this, design...

"If good design tells the truth," writes Robert Grudin in this path-breaking book on esthetics and authority, "poor design tells a lie, a lie usually related . . . to the getting or abusing of power."

From the ornate cathedrals of Renaissance Europe to the much-maligned Ford Edsel of the late 1950s, all products of human design communicate much more than their mere intended functions. Design holds both psychological and moral power over us, and these forces may be manipulated, however subtly, to surprising effect. In an argument that touches upon subjects as seemingly unrelated as...

The Philadelphia Museum of Art was founded in 1876, after its home city hosted the Centennial, with the primary goal of acquiring important examples of contemporary design and decorative arts. Collecting Modern explores for the first time the development and significance of this extraordinary collection, making unprecedented use of the Museum's archival resources, much of which has never been published. This overview reveals changing attitudes toward collecting over time, as Philadelphia (historically a conservative city) and its flagship museum were confronted with the dramatic...

Beginning around 1910, vanguard artists demanded that true art go beyond the intellectual and transform daily life. This volume highlights the work of six influential European artists who took this idea into the wider world, where it merged enthusiastically with demands in the industrial marketplace, the nascent mass media, and urban popular culture.

Featured are Piet Zwart, a Dutch designer who brought his minimalist aesthetic vision to ubiquitous items like biscuit boxes and postage stamps; Karel Teige, leader of the Czech avant-garde, who produced brilliant book and journal...

Beyond Rosie the Riveter takes readers back to a time before television's dominance, to the golden age of print art and its...