Karl Holmqvist: ‘K Swedish artist and poet Karl Holmqvist (born 1960) makes text works that explore pattern and permutation, while also overtly alluding to twentieth-century culture (Arakawa, Cadere, Fischli, Xenakis). These works are designed for reproduction both on the page and on the gallery wall. This volume compiles several of his text sequences, and includes a fold-out poster with exhibition installation shots.

Karl Holmqvist: ‘K

Swedish artist and poet Karl Holmqvist (born 1960) makes text works that explore pattern and permutation, while also overtly alluding to twentieth-century culture (Arakawa, Cadere, Fischli, Xenakis). These works are designed for reproduction both on the page and on the gallery wall. This volume compiles several of his text sequences, and includes a fold-out poster with exhibition installation shots.
The Rings of Saturn W.G. Sebald Shortlisted for the 1998 Los Angeles Times Book Award in Fiction: “Stunning and strange … Sebald has done what every writer dreams of doing… . The book is like a dream you want to last forever… . It glows with the radiance and resilience of the human spirit.”—Roberta Silman, The New York Times Book Review“Ostensibly a record of a journey on foot through coastal East Anglia,” as Robert McCrum in the London Observer noted, The Rings of Saturn “is also a brilliantly allusive study of England’s imperial past and the nature of decline and fall, of loss and decay… . The Rings of Saturn is exhilaratingly, you might say hypnotically, readable… . It is hard to imagine a stranger or more compelling work.” The Rings of Saturn - with its curious archive of photographs - chronicles a tour across epochs as well as countryside. On his way, the narrator meets lonely eccentrics inhabiting tumble-down mansions and links them to Rembrandt’s “Anatomy Lesson,” the natural history of the herring, a matchstick model of the Temple of Jerusalem, the travels of Sir Thomas Browne’s skull, and the massive bombings of WWII. Cataloging change, oblivion, and memories, he connects sugar fortunes, Joseph Conrad, and the horrors of colonizing the Belgian Congo. The narrator finds threads which run from an abandoned bridge over the River Blyth to the terrible dowager Empress Tzu Hsi and the silk industry in Norwich. “Sebald,” as The New Yorker stated, “weaves his tale together with a complexity and historical sweep that easily encompasses both truth and fiction.” The Emigrants (hailed by Susan Sontag as an “astonishing masterpiece-perfect while being unlike any book one has ever read”) was “one of the great books of the last few years,” as Michael Ondaatje noted: “and now The Rings of Saturn is a similar and as strange a triumph.”

The Rings of Saturn

W.G. Sebald

Shortlisted for the 1998 Los Angeles Times Book Award in Fiction: “Stunning and strange … Sebald has done what every writer dreams of doing… . The book is like a dream you want to last forever… . It glows with the radiance and resilience of the human spirit.”—Roberta Silman, The New York Times Book Review“Ostensibly a record of a journey on foot through coastal East Anglia,” as Robert McCrum in the

London Observer noted, The Rings of Saturn “is also a brilliantly allusive study of England’s imperial past and the nature of decline and fall, of loss and decay… . The Rings of Saturn is exhilaratingly, you might say hypnotically, readable… . It is hard to imagine a stranger or more compelling work.” The Rings of Saturn - with its curious archive of photographs - chronicles a tour across epochs as well as countryside. On his way, the narrator meets lonely eccentrics inhabiting tumble-down mansions and links them to Rembrandt’s “Anatomy Lesson,” the natural history of the herring, a matchstick model of the Temple of Jerusalem, the travels of Sir Thomas Browne’s skull, and the massive bombings of WWII. Cataloging change, oblivion, and memories, he connects sugar fortunes, Joseph Conrad, and the horrors of colonizing the Belgian Congo. The narrator finds threads which run from an abandoned bridge over the River Blyth to the terrible dowager Empress Tzu Hsi and the silk industry in Norwich. “Sebald,” as The New Yorker stated, “weaves his tale together with a complexity and historical sweep that easily encompasses both truth and fiction.” The Emigrants (hailed by Susan Sontag as an “astonishing masterpiece-perfect while being unlike any book one has ever read”) was “one of the great books of the last few years,” as Michael Ondaatje noted: “and now The Rings of Saturn is a similar and as strange a triumph.”
The Meaning of Things: Domestic Symbols and the Self Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi The meaning of things is a study of the significance of material possessions in contemporary urban life, and of the ways people carve meaning out of their domestic environment. Drawing on a survey of eighty families in Chicago who were interviewed on the subject of their feelings about common household objects, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Eugene Rochberg-Halton provide a unique perspective on materialism, American culture, and the self. They begin by reviewing what social scientists and philosophers have said about the transactions between people and things. In the model of ‘personhood’ that the authors develop, goal-directed action and the cultivation of meaning through signs assume central importance. They then relate theoretical issues to the results of their survey. An important finding is the distinction between objects valued for action and those valued for contemplation. The authors compare families who have warm emotional attachments to their homes with those in which a common set of positive meanings is lacking, and interpret the different patterns of involvement. They then trace the cultivation of meaning in case studies of four families. Finally, the authors address what they describe as the current crisis of environmental and material exploitation, and suggest that human capacities for the creation and redirection of meaning offer the only hope for survival. A wide range of scholars - urban and family sociologists, clinical, developmental and environmental psychologists, cultural anthropologists and philosophers, and many general readers - will find this book stimulating and compelling.

The Meaning of Things: Domestic Symbols and the Self

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

The meaning of things is a study of the significance of material possessions in contemporary urban life, and of the ways people carve meaning out of their domestic environment. Drawing on a survey of eighty families in Chicago who were interviewed on the subject of their feelings about common household objects, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Eugene Rochberg-Halton provide a unique perspective on materialism, American culture, and the self. They begin by reviewing what social scientists and philosophers have said about the transactions between people and things. In the model of ‘personhood’ that the authors develop, goal-directed action and the cultivation of meaning through signs assume central importance. They then relate theoretical issues to the results of their survey. An important finding is the distinction between objects valued for action and those valued for contemplation. The authors compare families who have warm emotional attachments to their homes with those in which a common set of positive meanings is lacking, and interpret the different patterns of involvement. They then trace the cultivation of meaning in case studies of four families. Finally, the authors address what they describe as the current crisis of environmental and material exploitation, and suggest that human capacities for the creation and redirection of meaning offer the only hope for survival. A wide range of scholars - urban and family sociologists, clinical, developmental and environmental psychologists, cultural anthropologists and philosophers, and many general readers - will find this book stimulating and compelling.
Designing Interactions Bill Moggridge Digital technology has changed the way we interact with everything from the games we play to the tools we use at work. Designers of digital technology products no longer regard their job as designing a physical object—beautiful or utilitarian—but as designing our interactions with it. In Designing Interactions, award-winning designer Bill Moggridge introduces us to forty influential designers who have shaped our interaction with technology. Moggridge, designer of the first laptop computer (the GRiD Compass, 1981) and a founder of the design firm IDEO, tells us these stories from an industry insider’s viewpoint, tracing the evolution of ideas from inspiration to outcome. The innovators he interviews—including Will Wright, creator of The Sims, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the founders of Google, and Doug Engelbart, Bill Atkinson, and others involved in the invention and development of the mouse and the desktop—have been instrumental in making a difference in the design of interactions. Their stories chart the history of entrepreneurial design development for technology.Moggridge and his interviewees discuss such questions as why a personal computer has a window in a desktop, what made Palm’s handheld organizers so successful, what turns a game into a hobby, why Google is the search engine of choice, and why 30 million people in Japan choose the i-mode service for their cell phones. And Moggridge tells the story of his own design process and explains the focus on people and prototypes that has been successful at IDEO—how the needs and desires of people can inspire innovative designs and how prototyping methods are evolving for the design of digital technology.Designing Interactions is illustrated with more than 700 images, with color throughout. Accompanying the book is a DVD that contains segments from all the interviews intercut with examples of the interactions under discussion.Interviews with:Bill Atkinson • Durrell Bishop • Brendan Boyle • Dennis Boyle • Paul Bradley • Duane Bray • Sergey Brin • Stu Card • Gillian Crampton Smith • Chris Downs• Tony Dunne • John Ellenby • Doug Englebart • Jane Fulton Suri • Bill Gaver • Bing Gordon • Rob Haitani • Jeff Hawkins • Matt Hunter • Hiroshi Ishii • Bert Keely • David Kelley • Rikako Kojima • Brenda Laurel • David Liddle • Lavrans Løvlie • John Maeda • Paul Mercer • Tim Mott • Joy Mountford • Takeshi Natsuno • Larry Page • Mark Podlaseck • Fiona Raby • Cordell Ratzlaff • Ben Reason • Jun Rekimoto • Steve Rogers • Fran Samalionis • Larry Tesler • Bill Verplank • Terry Winograd • Will Wright

Designing Interactions

Bill Moggridge

Digital technology has changed the way we interact with everything from the games we play to the tools we use at work. Designers of digital technology products no longer regard their job as designing a physical object—beautiful or utilitarian—but as designing our interactions with it. In Designing Interactions, award-winning designer Bill Moggridge introduces us to forty influential designers who have shaped our interaction with technology. Moggridge, designer of the first laptop computer (the GRiD Compass, 1981) and a founder of the design firm IDEO, tells us these stories from an industry insider’s viewpoint, tracing the evolution of ideas from inspiration to outcome. The innovators he interviews—including Will Wright, creator of The Sims, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the founders of Google, and Doug Engelbart, Bill Atkinson, and others involved in the invention and development of the mouse and the desktop—have been instrumental in making a difference in the design of interactions. Their stories chart the history of entrepreneurial design development for technology.Moggridge and his interviewees discuss such questions as why a personal computer has a window in a desktop, what made Palm’s handheld organizers so successful, what turns a game into a hobby, why Google is the search engine of choice, and why 30 million people in Japan choose the i-mode service for their cell phones. And Moggridge tells the story of his own design process and explains the focus on people and prototypes that has been successful at IDEO—how the needs and desires of people can inspire innovative designs and how prototyping methods are evolving for the design of digital technology.Designing Interactions is illustrated with more than 700 images, with color throughout. Accompanying the book is a DVD that contains segments from all the interviews intercut with examples of the interactions under discussion.Interviews with:Bill Atkinson • Durrell Bishop • Brendan Boyle • Dennis Boyle • Paul Bradley • Duane Bray • Sergey Brin • Stu Card • Gillian Crampton Smith • Chris Downs• Tony Dunne • John Ellenby • Doug Englebart • Jane Fulton Suri • Bill Gaver • Bing Gordon • Rob Haitani • Jeff Hawkins • Matt Hunter • Hiroshi Ishii • Bert Keely • David Kelley • Rikako Kojima • Brenda Laurel • David Liddle • Lavrans Løvlie • John Maeda • Paul Mercer • Tim Mott • Joy Mountford • Takeshi Natsuno • Larry Page • Mark Podlaseck • Fiona Raby • Cordell Ratzlaff • Ben Reason • Jun Rekimoto • Steve Rogers • Fran Samalionis • Larry Tesler • Bill Verplank • Terry Winograd • Will Wright
Graphic Design in America: A Visual Language History Mildred Friedman Graphic design has had a profound impact upon American life in the 19th and 20th centuries. Essays by specialists in the field examine areas that include graphic design’s role as a social force as well as the effect of technological developments and political change.

Graphic Design in America: A Visual Language History

Mildred Friedman

Graphic design has had a profound impact upon American life in the 19th and 20th centuries. Essays by specialists in the field examine areas that include graphic design’s role as a social force as well as the effect of technological developments and political change.
The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot Robert Macfarlane From the acclaimed author of The Wild Places, an exploration of walking and thinkingIn this exquisitely written book, Robert Macfarlane sets off from his Cambridge, England, home to follow the ancient tracks, holloways, drove roads, and sea paths that crisscross both the British landscape and its waters and territories beyond. The result is an immersive, enthralling exploration of the ghosts and voices that haunt old paths, of the stories our tracks keep and tell, and of pilgrimage and ritual.Told in Macfarlane’s distinctive voice, The Old Ways folds together natural history, cartography, geology, archaeology and literature. His walks take him from the chalk downs of England to the bird islands of the Scottish northwest, from Palestine to the sacred landscapes of Spain and the Himalayas. Along the way he crosses paths with walkers of many kinds—wanderers, pilgrims, guides, and artists. Above all this is a book about walking as a journey inward and the subtle ways we are shaped by the landscapes through which we move.  Macfarlane discovers that paths offer not just a means of traversing space, but of feeling, knowing, and thinking.

The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot

Robert Macfarlane

From the acclaimed author of The Wild Places, an exploration of walking and thinking

In this exquisitely written book, Robert Macfarlane sets off from his Cambridge, England, home to follow the ancient tracks, holloways, drove roads, and sea paths that crisscross both the British landscape and its waters and territories beyond. The result is an immersive, enthralling exploration of the ghosts and voices that haunt old paths, of the stories our tracks keep and tell, and of pilgrimage and ritual.

Told in Macfarlane’s distinctive voice, The Old Ways folds together natural history, cartography, geology, archaeology and literature. His walks take him from the chalk downs of England to the bird islands of the Scottish northwest, from Palestine to the sacred landscapes of Spain and the Himalayas. Along the way he crosses paths with walkers of many kinds—wanderers, pilgrims, guides, and artists. Above all this is a book about walking as a journey inward and the subtle ways we are shaped by the landscapes through which we move.  Macfarlane discovers that paths offer not just a means of traversing space, but of feeling, knowing, and thinking.
ECM: A Cultural Archaeology As stunning and complex as the music it celebrates, this book presents essays, photographs, archival material, and artworks that pay tribute to one of the world’s most daring and innovative record labels. Founded by the legendary producer Manfred Eicher in 1969, a moment when contemporary music was being redefined across all genres, ECM (Edition of Contemporary Music) aimed to bring jazz, improvised, and written music out of the studio and into living rooms around the world. Acoustically rich and expansive, ECM’s productions set new standards in sonic complexity. ECM recorded some of the world’s most extraordinary music, and its stable features some of the most influential musicians of the 20th century, including Keith Jarrett, Chick Corea, Steve Reich, Carla Bley, Meredith Monk, Marion Brown, Codona, the Art Ensemble of Chicago, and Arvo Pärt. Renowned for its high standards of quality, clarity, and freshness, ECM remains a cornerstone in the industry today. This comprehensive volume showcases ECM’s cultural breadth, not just in the music world but also within the broader artistic universe. It highlights aspects of African American music of the 1960s in Europe, during the height of the American Civil Rights era, as well as the changing relationships between musicians, music, and listeners. In exploring the work of ECM, this catalog brings together a range of visual arts—installation pieces, photography, and film—alongside essays and an anthology of liner notes.

ECM: A Cultural Archaeology

As stunning and complex as the music it celebrates, this book presents essays, photographs, archival material, and artworks that pay tribute to one of the world’s most daring and innovative record labels. Founded by the legendary producer Manfred Eicher in 1969, a moment when contemporary music was being redefined across all genres, ECM (Edition of Contemporary Music) aimed to bring jazz, improvised, and written music out of the studio and into living rooms around the world. Acoustically rich and expansive, ECM’s productions set new standards in sonic complexity. ECM recorded some of the world’s most extraordinary music, and its stable features some of the most influential musicians of the 20th century, including Keith Jarrett, Chick Corea, Steve Reich, Carla Bley, Meredith Monk, Marion Brown, Codona, the Art Ensemble of Chicago, and Arvo Pärt. Renowned for its high standards of quality, clarity, and freshness, ECM remains a cornerstone in the industry today. This comprehensive volume showcases ECM’s cultural breadth, not just in the music world but also within the broader artistic universe. It highlights aspects of African American music of the 1960s in Europe, during the height of the American Civil Rights era, as well as the changing relationships between musicians, music, and listeners. In exploring the work of ECM, this catalog brings together a range of visual arts—installation pieces, photography, and film—alongside essays and an anthology of liner notes.
Spacesuit: Fashioning Apollo Nicholas de de Monchaux How the twenty-one-layer Apollo spacesuit, made by Playtex, was a triumph of intimacy over engineering.

Spacesuit: Fashioning Apollo

Nicholas de de Monchaux

How the twenty-one-layer Apollo spacesuit, made by Playtex, was a triumph of intimacy over engineering.
The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project Susan Buck-Morss Walter Benjamin’s magnum opus was a book he did not live to write. In The Dialectics of Seeing, Susan Buck-Morss offers an inventive reconstruction of the Passagen Werk, or Arcades Project, as it might have taken form.Working with Benjamin’s vast files of citations and commentary which contain a myriad of historical details from the dawn of consumer culture, Buck-Morss makes visible the conceptual structure that gives these fragments philosophical coherence. She uses images throughout the book to demonstrate that Benjamin took the debris of mass culture seriously as the source of philosophical truth.The Paris Arcades that so fascinated Benjamin (as they did the Surrealists whose “materialist metaphysics” he admired) were the prototype, the 19th century “ur-form” of the modern shopping mall. Benjamin’s dialectics of seeing demonstrate how to read these consumer dream houses and so many other material objects of the time - from air balloons to women’s fashions, from Baudelaire’s poetry to Grandville’s cartoons - as anticipations of social utopia and, simultaneously, as clues for a radical political critique.Buck-Morss plots Benjamin’s intellectual orientation on axes running east and west, north and south - Moscow Paris, Berlin-Naples - and shows how such thinking in coordinates can explain his understanding of “dialectics at a standstill.” She argues for the continuing relevance of Benjamin’s insights but then allows a set of “afterimages” to have the last word.Susan Buck-Morss is Professor of Political Philosophy and Social Theory at Cornell University. The Dialectics of Seeing is included in the series Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought, edited by Thomas McCarthy.

The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project

Susan Buck-Morss

Walter Benjamin’s magnum opus was a book he did not live to write. In The Dialectics of Seeing, Susan Buck-Morss offers an inventive reconstruction of the Passagen Werk, or Arcades Project, as it might have taken form.Working with Benjamin’s vast files of citations and commentary which contain a myriad of historical details from the dawn of consumer culture, Buck-Morss makes visible the conceptual structure that gives these fragments philosophical coherence. She uses images throughout the book to demonstrate that Benjamin took the debris of mass culture seriously as the source of philosophical truth.The Paris Arcades that so fascinated Benjamin (as they did the Surrealists whose “materialist metaphysics” he admired) were the prototype, the 19th century “ur-form” of the modern shopping mall. Benjamin’s dialectics of seeing demonstrate how to read these consumer dream houses and so many other material objects of the time - from air balloons to women’s fashions, from Baudelaire’s poetry to Grandville’s cartoons - as anticipations of social utopia and, simultaneously, as clues for a radical political critique.Buck-Morss plots Benjamin’s intellectual orientation on axes running east and west, north and south - Moscow Paris, Berlin-Naples - and shows how such thinking in coordinates can explain his understanding of “dialectics at a standstill.” She argues for the continuing relevance of Benjamin’s insights but then allows a set of “afterimages” to have the last word.Susan Buck-Morss is Professor of Political Philosophy and Social Theory at Cornell University. The Dialectics of Seeing is included in the series Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought, edited by Thomas McCarthy.
Networks Without a Cause: A Critique of Social Media Geert Lovink With the vast majority of Facebook users caught in a frenzy of ‘friending’, ‘liking’ and ‘commenting’, at what point do we pause to grasp the consequences of our info-saturated lives? What compels us to engage so diligently with social networking systems? *Networks Without a Cause *examines our collective obsession with identity and self-management coupled with the fragmentation and information overload endemic to contemporary online culture. With a dearth of theory on the social and cultural ramifications of hugely popular online services, Lovink provides a path-breaking critical analysis of our over-hyped, networked world with case studies on search engines, online video, blogging, digital radio, media activism and the Wikileaks saga. This book offers a powerful message to media practitioners and theorists: let us collectively unleash our critical capacities to influence technology design and workspaces, otherwise we will disappear into the cloud. Probing but never pessimistic, Lovink draws from his long history in media research to offer a critique of the political structures and conceptual powers embedded in the technologies that shape our daily lives.

Networks Without a Cause: A Critique of Social Media

Geert Lovink

With the vast majority of Facebook users caught in a frenzy of ‘friending’, ‘liking’ and ‘commenting’, at what point do we pause to grasp the consequences of our info-saturated lives? What compels us to engage so diligently with social networking systems? *Networks Without a Cause *examines our collective obsession with identity and self-management coupled with the fragmentation and information overload endemic to contemporary online culture.

With a dearth of theory on the social and cultural ramifications of hugely popular online services, Lovink provides a path-breaking critical analysis of our over-hyped, networked world with case studies on search engines, online video, blogging, digital radio, media activism and the Wikileaks saga. This book offers a powerful message to media practitioners and theorists: let us collectively unleash our critical capacities to influence technology design and workspaces, otherwise we will disappear into the cloud. Probing but never pessimistic, Lovink draws from his long history in media research to offer a critique of the political structures and conceptual powers embedded in the technologies that shape our daily lives.
Schwitters Arp Gottfried Boehm

Schwitters Arp

Gottfried Boehm
Every Thing Design Glenn Adamson The great Dutch book designer Irma Boom designed this handsome, hefty gem, which features 700 prints, posters and other objects from the collection of Zurich’s Gestaltung Museum. It is a collection renowned worldwide for its unsurpassed holdings of design masterpieces: Ettore Sottsass’s iconic red “Valentine” typewriter from 1969, Paul Rand’s 1950 poster for the film No Way Out, as well as graphic works by Toulouse-Lautrec and El Lissitzky, and a range of works by Richard Paul Lohse, Harry Bertoia, Willy Guhl, Makoto Saito, FHK Henrion and many other great designers. Founded in 1875, the museum’s collection focuses on twentieth-century mass-manufactured products, comprising over 10,000 objects and 20,000 examples of packaging, from famous designs to anonymous everyday objects; a graphics collection containing over 100,000 items from around the world, dating from the fifteenth century to the present; a collection of 300,000 posters and an applied arts collection, showcasing work from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that covers the overlap between industrial manufacturing, design and art. With beautiful, full-page spreads, Every Thing Design, like the Gestaltung Museum itself, expands our conceptions of what design is, unpacking how a designed object is perceived and how this perception changes over time. It examines the criteria museums use for acquisition, and how the objects’ significance and value are established. The result is a surprising reconsideration of trends, production techniques and public reception.

Every Thing Design

Glenn Adamson

The great Dutch book designer Irma Boom designed this handsome, hefty gem, which features 700 prints, posters and other objects from the collection of Zurich’s Gestaltung Museum. It is a collection renowned worldwide for its unsurpassed holdings of design masterpieces: Ettore Sottsass’s iconic red “Valentine” typewriter from 1969, Paul Rand’s 1950 poster for the film No Way Out, as well as graphic works by Toulouse-Lautrec and El Lissitzky, and a range of works by Richard Paul Lohse, Harry Bertoia, Willy Guhl, Makoto Saito, FHK Henrion and many other great designers. Founded in 1875, the museum’s collection focuses on twentieth-century mass-manufactured products, comprising over 10,000 objects and 20,000 examples of packaging, from famous designs to anonymous everyday objects; a graphics collection containing over 100,000 items from around the world, dating from the fifteenth century to the present; a collection of 300,000 posters and an applied arts collection, showcasing work from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that covers the overlap between industrial manufacturing, design and art. With beautiful, full-page spreads, Every Thing Design, like the Gestaltung Museum itself, expands our conceptions of what design is, unpacking how a designed object is perceived and how this perception changes over time. It examines the criteria museums use for acquisition, and how the objects’ significance and value are established. The result is a surprising reconsideration of trends, production techniques and public reception.
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