California Designing Freedom

This book examines California's enormous impact on contemporary design, from the counterculture of the 1960s to the tech culture of Silicon Valley. On a more expansive level, California: Designing Freedom explores the idea that California has pioneered tools of personal liberation - from LSD to surfboards and iPhones. This ambitious survey brings together political posters and portable devices, but also looks beyond hardware to explore how user interface designers in the San Francisco Bay Area are shaping some of our most common daily experiences. Californian products have influenced contemporary life across the globe to such an extent that in some ways we are all now Californians. Put simply, 'Designed in California' is the new 'Made in Italy'.

Drawing from deep archival research and extensive interviews, Atari Design is a rich, historical study of how Atari's industrial and graphic designers contributed to the development of the video game machine. Innovative game design played a key role in the growth of Atari – from Pong to Asteroids and beyond – but fun, challenging and exciting game play was not unique to the famous Silicon Valley company. What set it apart from its competitors was innovation in the coin-op machine's cabinet. Atari did not just make games, it designed products for environments. With “tasteful packaging”, Atari exceeded traditional locations like bars, amusement parks and arcades, developing the look and feel of their game cabinets for new locations such as fast food restaurants, department stores, country clubs, university unions, and airports, making game-play a ubiquitous social and cultural experience. By actively shaping the interaction between user and machine, overcoming styling limitations and generating a distinct corporate identity, Atari designed products that impacted the everyday visual and material culture of the late 20th century. Design was never an afterthought at Atari.

This full-color book uses real-world examples, museum and exhibition design studio profiles, historical and contemporary voices, and draw on the author's own creative practice and exhibition making experience, as well as contributions from his extensive network of international museum, attraction, and design professionals.

Critique of Architecture offers a renewed and radical theorization of the relations between capital and architecture. It explicates the theoretical gymnastics through which architecture legitimates its services to neoliberalism, examines the discipline’s production of platforms for happily compliant consumers, and challenges its entrepreneurial self-image. Critique of Architecture also addresses the discourse of autonomy, questioning its capacity to engage effectively with the terms and conditions of capitalism today, analyses the post-political turns of contemporary architecture theory, and reckons with the legacies and limitations of critical theory.

Illustrating the development of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and changes it has generated in the economy, society and culture, this expansive book continues the debate concerning the digital revolution and the rise of the algorithmic society.

How ecological design emerged in Scandinavia during the 1960s and 1970s, building on both Scandinavia’s design culture and its environmental movement. Scandinavia is famous for its design culture, and for its pioneering efforts toward a sustainable future. In Ecological by Design, Kjetil Fallan shows how these two forces came together in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when Scandinavian designers began to question the endless cycle in which designed objects are produced, consumed, discarded, and replaced in quick succession. The emergence of ecological design in Scandinavia at the height of the popular environmental movement, Fallan suggests, illuminates a little-known reciprocity between environmentalism and design: not only did design play a role in the rise of modern environmentalism, but ecological thinking influenced the transformation in design culture in Scandinavia and beyond that began as the modernist faith in progress and prosperity waned. Fallan describes the efforts of Scandinavian designers to forge an environmental ethics in a commercial design culture sustained by consumption; shows, by recounting a quest for sustainability through Norwegian wood(s), that one of the main characteristics of ecological design is attention to both the local and the global; and explores the emergence of a respectful and sustainable paradigm for international development. Case studies trace key connections to continental Europe, Britain, the US, Central America, and East Africa. Today, ideas of sustainability permeate design discourse, but the historical emergence of ecological design remains largely undiscussed. With this trailblazing book, Fallan fills that gap.

International best-selling author and spiritual guide Kamlesh D. Patel explains how to use the spiritual practices of Heartfulness to expand your consciousness, evolve your mind, find true happiness, and live your purpose. What does destiny mean in the course of our lives? What is fixed and what can we change? We create our destiny, step-by-step, through the journey of life. Every choice leads us in a certain direction-either toward or away from our life's purpose. We can learn to become purposeful architects of our fate with the practices and lifestyle changes described by Kamlesh D. Patel, founder of the Heartfulness Institute and fourth spiritual guide of this global movement. In Designing Destiny, you will discover: o A practical approach to the fundamental principles of destiny o The four core practices of Heartfulness-relaxation, meditation, cleaning, and prayer-that will expand your consciousness from mundane to divine o The lifestyle changes that lead to true happiness o How to transform your relationships and raise the vibration of our communities o How to progress through the levels of evolution through spiritual practice Heartfulness offers a simple, scientific approach to expand our consciousness, realize our full human potential, and live a purposeful life. As our lifestyle evolves, our ability to design our own destiny-and that of the world-becomes natural and effortless.