ABSTRACT
Since the 1990s, in response to dramatic transformations in the worlds of technology and the economy, design - a once relatively definable discipline, complete with a set of sub-disciplines - has become unrecognizable. Consequently, design scholars have begun to address new issues, themes and sub-disciplines such as: sustainable design, design for well-being, empathic design, design activism, design anthropology, and many more.
The Routledge Companion to Design Studies charts this new expanded spectrum and embraces the wide range of scholarship relating to design - theoretical, practice-related and historical - that has emerged over the last four decades. Comprised of forty-three newly-commissioned essays, the Companion is organized into the following six sections:
- Defining Design: Discipline, Process
- Defining Design: Objects, Spaces
- Designing Identities: Gender, Sexuality, Age, Nation
- Designing Society: Empathy, Responsibility, Consumption, the Everyday
- Design and Politics: Activism, Intervention, Regulation
- Designing the World: Globalization, Transnationalism, Translation
Contributors include both established and emerging scholars and the essays offer an international scope, covering work emanating from, and relating to, design in the United Kingdom, mainland Europe, North America, Asia, Australasia and Africa.
This comprehensive collection makes an original and significant contribution to the field of Design Studies.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
part |80 pages
Defining Design: Discipline, Process
chapter |11 pages
Wall Street bounded and unbinding
part |70 pages
Defining design: objects, spaces
chapter |13 pages
Beyond perfection
part |97 pages
Designing identities: gender, sexuality, age, nation
chapter |11 pages
Arranging the aspidistras
chapter |10 pages
From Bright Young Thing to vile body to posthumous reliquary
part |93 pages
Designing society: empathy, responsibility, consumption, the everyday
chapter |9 pages
How products satisfy needs beyond the functional
part |72 pages
Design and politics: activism, intervention, regulation
chapter |12 pages
Impossible maybe, perhaps quite likely
chapter |12 pages
Regulating design
part |98 pages
Designing the world: globalization, transnationalism, translation