Design Unbound

As everyday tasks grow more confusing, and as social and global problems grow more complex, the information designer's role in bringing clarity has reached a new level of importance. In order to have a positive impact, they must go beyond conventional approaches to uncover real needs, make insightful connections, and develop effective solutions. Information Design Unbound provides a clear, engaging introduction to the field, and prepares students to be strategic thinkers and visual problem solvers who can confidently make sense in a changing world. Sheila Pontis and Michael Babwahsingh present a holistic view of information design, synthesizing decades of research, cross-disciplinary knowledge, and emerging practices. The book opens by laying a foundation in the field, first painting the bigger picture of what it is and how it originated, before explaining the scientific and cultural dimensions of how people perceive and understand visual information. A discussion of professional practices, ethical considerations, and the expanding scale of challenges sheds light on the day-to-day work of information designers today. Detailed chapters then delve into the four areas that are integral to all types of information design work: visual thinking, research, sensemaking, and design. The final section of the book puts everything together, with detailed project walk-throughs in areas such as icon design, instructions, wayfinding, organizational strategy, and healthcare system change. Written and designed with students' needs in mind, this book brings information design fundamentals to life: exercises allow students to put lessons directly into practice, case studies demonstrate how information designers think and work, and generous illustrations clarify concepts in a visually engaging way. Information Design Unbound helps beginning designers build the mindset and skillset to navigate visual communication challenges wherever they may arise.

Tools for navigating today's hyper-connected, rapidly changing, and radically contingent white water world. Design Unbound presents a new tool set for having agency in the twenty-first century, in what the authors characterize as a white water world—rapidly changing, hyperconnected, and radically contingent. These are the tools of a new kind of practice that is the offspring of complexity science, which gives us a new lens through which to view the world as entangled and emerging, and architecture, which is about designing contexts. In such a practice, design, unbound from its material thingness, is set free to design contexts as complex systems. In a world where causality is systemic, entangled, in flux, and often elusive, we cannot design for absolute outcomes. Instead, we need to design for emergence. Design Unbound not only makes this case through theory but also presents a set of tools to do so. With case studies that range from a new kind of university to organizational, and even societal, transformation, Design Unbound draws from a vast array of domains: architecture, science and technology, philosophy, cinema, music, literature and poetry, even the military. It is presented in five books, bound as two volumes. Different books within the larger system of books will resonate with different reading audiences, from architects to people reconceiving higher education to the public policy or defense and intelligence communities. The authors provide different entry points allowing readers to navigate their own pathways through the system of books.

Tools for navigating today's hyper-connected, rapidly changing, and radically contingent white water world. Design Unbound presents a new tool set for having agency in the twenty-first century, in what the authors characterize as a white water world—rapidly changing, hyperconnected, and radically contingent. These are the tools of a new kind of practice that is the offspring of complexity science, which gives us a new lens through which to view the world as entangled and emerging, and architecture, which is about designing contexts. In such a practice, design, unbound from its material thingness, is set free to design contexts as complex systems. In a world where causality is systemic, entangled, in flux, and often elusive, we cannot design for absolute outcomes. Instead, we need to design for emergence. Design Unbound not only makes this case through theory but also presents a set of tools to do so. With case studies that range from a new kind of university to organizational, and even societal, transformation, Design Unbound draws from a vast array of domains: architecture, science and technology, philosophy, cinema, music, literature and poetry, even the military. It is presented in five books, bound as two volumes. Different books within the larger system of books will resonate with different reading audiences, from architects to people reconceiving higher education to the public policy or defense and intelligence communities. The authors provide different entry points allowing readers to navigate their own pathways through the system of books.

Tools for navigating today's hyper-connected, rapidly changing, and radically contingent white water world.Design Unbound presents a new tool set for having agency in the twenty-first century, in what the authors characterize as a white water world--rapidly changing, hyperconnected, and radically contingent. These are the tools of a new kind of practice that is the offspring of complexity science, which gives us a new lens through which to view the world as entangled and emerging, and architecture, which is about designing contexts. In such a practice, design, unbound from its material thingness, is set free to design contexts as complex systems.In a world where causality is systemic, entangled, in flux, and often elusive, we cannot design for absolute outcomes. Instead, we need to design for emergence. Design Unbound not only makes this case through theory but also presents a set of tools to do so. With case studies that range from a new kind of university to organizational, and even societal, transformation, Design Unbound draws from a vast array of domains: architecture, science and technology, philosophy, cinema, music, literature and poetry, even the military. It is presented in five books, bound as two volumes. Different books within the larger system of books will resonate with different reading audiences, from architects to people reconceiving higher education to the public policy or defense and intelligence communities. The authors provide different entry points allowing readers to navigate their own pathways through the system of books.

Examines the influence of twentieth-century avant-garde movements on the contemporary architectural landscape through the work of “disruptors” such as Frank Gehry, Rem Koolhaas, and Zaha Hadid. With an irregular format designed by celebrated graphic designer Abbott Miller of Pentagram. In Architecture Unbound, noted architecture critic Joseph Giovannini proposes that our current architectural landscape ultimately emerged from transgressive and progressive art movements that had roiled Europe before and after World War I. By the 1960s, social unrest and cultural disruption opened the way for investigations into an inventive, antiauthoritarian architecture. Explorations emerged in the 1970s, and built projects surfaced in the 1980s, taking digital form in the 1990s, with large-scale projects finally landing on the far side of the millennium. Architecture Unbound traces all of these developments and influences, presenting an authoritative and illuminating history not only of the sources of contemporary currents in architecture but also of the twentieth-century avant-garde and the twenty-first-century digital revolution in form-making, and profiling the most influential practitioners and their most notable projects, including Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Bilbao and Walt Disney Concert Hall, Zaha Hadid’s Guangzhou Opera House, Daniel Libeskind’s master plan for the World Trade Center, Rem Koolhaas’s CCTV Tower, and Herzog and de Meuron’s Bird’s Nest Olympic Stadium in Beijing.

Reimagining Adult Education as World Building offers a new way of thinking about adult education by re-envisaging how adult education works. It explores how the process of world building, or the invention of a new world or a set of concepts, can be translated into actual and feasible action when turning towards complex, real-life problems. Cultivating contexts where adult educators can become change agents, who recognize that the individual and community are intricately entangled, demands that educators grow new capacities, make new tools, develop thicker networks, and cultivate intentional links amongst each other to foster ecologies of transformation. This book shows how educators can create an ecology or environment for transformative thinking where students can learn to collaborate and use world building tools to create new responses to current issues. It begins by explaining the philosophical underpinnings of world building and the tools that translate pragmatic imagination into scaffolds for individual and collective capacity building. It also illustrates how the worldbuilding protocol makes a difference in adult learning and how this pedagogical tool introduces the ecological approach to adult education. Each chapter explores a practical case study, showing how learners have applied worldbuilding tools to complex challenges. Showing how to apply the world building protocol in a classroom setting, this edited collection will be valuable to Adult Education scholars, researchers, practitioners, and learning facilitators.

This book tells the story of how two of America's closest allies, Canada and Britain, have sought to reconcile their security concerns with their legal obligations during two of the most significant international conflicts since the Second World War.

Every plan, pro-forma, design, building contract, and construction schedule is a proposal about future places. To help improve such proposals, Foresight and Design: Composing Future Places presents conceptual tools to inform design and outline the need for designers to rigorously think about potential futures. Our built compositions are constantly transforming due to continuing urbanization, demographic shifts, climate change, the evolution of virtual worlds, economic and health disparities, and other unforeseen trends. If we envision and plan for alternative futures, we are better able to purposefully respond. This book presents emerging practices of foresight, including signals of change, thick descriptions, pace layers, (re)framing, prototyping, scenarios, maps of change, storytelling, and world-building, to indicate how robust contemplation of multiple potential futures can help us compose places that are durable, resilient, and adaptable. Five brief case studies interspersed between the chapters serve as examples of practitioners exercising foresight through these practices. Contributions include a description of a regional design process in Afghanistan by Anthony Fettes of Sasaki Architects, and an exploration into the Indigenous Futurism model-making competition by Anjelica Gallegos. Written for architects, designers, planners, developers, city councilmembers, and engineers, this book encourages all composers of the built environment to envision alternative futures and purposefully respond.