Private and Executive Offices (Office Book Design Series)

Szenasy, Susan

Business & Money

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Arts & Photography

Architecture

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What makes us love our things? Why do we attach certain sentiments to certain items? How is it that sometimes objects can tell stories more eloquently than people? These are questions explored and answered in The Uncommon Life of Common Objects. Author Akiko Busch devotes a chapter to each of 12 common objects, and discusses her and others' experiences that give everyday things their significance. Through her examination of: a video camera, a cellular phone, a vegetable peeler, a snowboard, a baby carriage, a chair, a refrigerator, a mailbox, a medicine cabinet, a cereal box, a backpack and a desk, Busch illuminates the social and personal issues that shape our lives and the ownership of our things. Lovingly illustrated, always touching, sometimes nostalgic and often hilarious, The Uncommon Life of Common Objects, is a topical reader that is at once a personal manifesto, a look at how design influences and responds to our changing lives, and a study of society and its values and the infusion of meaning into inanimate objects. Each of the 12 chapters is accompanied by a four-color drawing.

The Uncommon Life Of Common Objects: Essays on Design and the Everyday

BUSCH, Akiko

Biographies & Memoirs

Metropolis Books

In Chasing the Perfect writer/designer Natalia Ilyin delivers her astute, incisive and humorous observations on design and the world it has molded. According to Ilyin, “Modern design is based on deeply idealist notions, and its inherent perfectionism has dovetailed beautifully with our commodity-based economy's need to keep people itching so that they will buy things and keep the society chugging along. I began Chasing the Perfect because I started to become aware of this collusion, this silent pressure that a language of design based in perfectionism had brought to bear on how I developed as a person.” Chasing the Perfect is especially relevant in our times as interest in graphic, industrial and architectural design moves more and more into mainstream culture. Each of the ten chapters features Ilyin's accessible and often hilarious writing, which is highlighted with a broad range of images--some quite unexpected--from the designed world around us. An excerpt: “The choices that designers and architects have made in the last hundred years silently mold us, silently direct us through the tunnels of Penn Station or up to the fifty-third floor of the Sears Tower. But they direct more than our movements. They direct us to notice one thing and not another, to value one thing over another, to identify with one thing rather than with another. Modernism, the guts of it, the strength of it, the egotistic beauty of it, carries with it effects we did not expect and fosters attitudes about ourselves and others that may have been dandy in a utopia, but do little good in our world. Why have we not changed this idea, moved on with our thinking? For even after the disbanding of the Bauhaus, the disintegration of the International Style, the exhausting of postmodernism, we're all still chasing the perfect.”

Chasing The Perfect: Thoughts On Modernist Design In Our Time

Ilyin, Natalia

Reference

For more than 30 years, Susan S. Szenasy’s voice has resonated as an editor-in-chief, writer, teacher, moderator, filmmaker and lecturer. In all of these roles, her advocacy for ethical, sustainable, human-centered design has been her guiding light. Known for decades as the editor-in-chief (and now publisher) of Metropolis magazine, one of the most influential design magazines in the world, Szenasy has led the charge on issues ranging from universal design to emerging trends of consumer excess, from design for disassembly to the recovery of Lower Manhattan’s communities after 9/11, from design education to the social and environmental impacts of the buildings and products we manufacture. This volume--the first published collection of Szenasy’s writings--brings together editorials, reviews, stories, profiles, industry event presentations, classroom lectures, commencement addresses and more. Szenasy’s honest, thought-provoking and often challenging opinions are present in all of these pieces. So, too, is her ongoing commitment to informed dialogue, which has influenced and guided generations of design professionals, architects, journalists, retailers, manufacturers, legislators, educators and the next generation of designers.

Szenasy, Design Advocate: Writings and Talks by Metropolis Magazine Editor Susan S. Szenasy

Drawing

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Books by Szenasy, Susan