The Design Of Everyday Life

How do common household items such as basic plastic house wares or high-tech digital cameras transform our daily lives? This title considers this question, from the design of products through to their use in the home. It looks at how everyday objects, ranging from screwdrivers to photo management software, are used on a practical level.

BIO 50 breaks with the traditional system of awards, choosing instead to award collaboration, its process and outcomes. Recognizing the idea that design is a discipline that permeates all layers of contemporary life, BIO launches an unprecedented effort to engage designers and agents from Slovenia and abroad in a collaborative approach that will address themes that affect everyday life. Guided by a group of mentors from various disciplines, eleven teams have tackled the topics Affordable Living Knowing Food Public Water, Public Space Walking the City Hidden Crafts The Fashion System Hacking Households Nanotourism Engine Blocks Observing Space Designing Life Each team has created specific projects that are developed and implemented during the Biennial. Drawing from the complex network generated around BIO 50, "Designing Everyday Life" serves as a reader, compiling written and visual material on the many layers that compose the biennial. Notes, essays, and interviews, along with sketches, photographs, and diagrams, are aggregating the manifold dimensions of each team s collaborative work process, and illuminate strategies and roles for design in a contemporary world. An opening section introduces the topics discussed throughout the different components of the publication, arguing new priorities for the design discipline in contemporary times. Essays and visual material come together to articulate new roles for a discipline that has changed beyond the universe of mass-made products and solutions, and instead inhabits a fundamentally new universe in a series of small-scale, customized scenarios. Exploring the changing definition of design will illuminate its possible future. The concluding chapter reflects on the history and legacy of the world s oldest design event. It uses the history of BIO as an opportunity to explore changes in the last fifty years within the design discipline, western society and everyday life. With contributions by Slovenian and international experts, a series of reflections on BIO as a meeting point for design between East and West in Central Europe allow to extrapolate conclusions about European design in the immediate future. "Designing Everyday Life" also features interviews with Alice Rawsthorn, design critic at New York Times, Konstantin Grcic, industrial designer, and Sasa Machtig, industrial designer. MAO co-produces "Designing Everyday Life" with "Z33," a space for contemporary art based in the Belgian city of Hasselt. Since 2002, Z33 has been realizing projects and exhibitions that encourage visitors to see everyday things in a new way. http: //www.z33.be/en/z33/mission "

A field manual to the technologies that are transforming our lives Everywhere we turn, a startling new device promises to transfigure our lives. But at what cost? In this urgent and revelatory excavation of our Information Age, leading technology thinker Adam Greenfield forces us to reconsider our relationship with the networked objects, services and spaces that define us. It is time to re-evaluate the Silicon Valley consensus determining the future. We already depend on the smartphone to navigate every aspect of our existence. We’re told that innovations—from augmented-reality interfaces and virtual assistants to autonomous delivery drones and self-driving cars—will make life easier, more convenient and more productive. 3D printing promises unprecedented control over the form and distribution of matter, while the blockchain stands to revolutionize everything from the recording and exchange of value to the way we organize the mundane realities of the day to day. And, all the while, fiendishly complex algorithms are operating quietly in the background, reshaping the economy, transforming the fundamental terms of our politics and even redefining what it means to be human. Having successfully colonized everyday life, these radical technologies are now conditioning the choices available to us in the years to come. How do they work? What challenges do they present to us, as individuals and societies? Who benefits from their adoption? In answering these questions, Greenfield’s timely guide clarifies the scale and nature of the crisis we now confront —and offers ways to reclaim our stake in the future.

Even the smartest among us can feel inept as we fail to figure out which light switch or oven burner to turn on, or whether to push, pull, or slide a door. The fault, argues this ingenious—even liberating—book, lies not in ourselves, but in product design that ignores the needs of users and the principles of cognitive psychology. The problems range from ambiguous and hidden controls to arbitrary relationships between controls and functions, coupled with a lack of feedback or other assistance and unreasonable demands on memorization. The Design of Everyday Things shows that good, usable design is possible. The rules are simple: make things visible, exploit natural relationships that couple function and control, and make intelligent use of constraints. The goal: guide the user effortlessly to the right action on the right control at the right time. In this entertaining and insightful analysis, cognitive scientist Don Norman hails excellence of design as the most important key to regaining the competitive edge in influencing consumer behavior. Now fully expanded and updated, with a new introduction by the author, The Design of Everyday Things is a powerful primer on how—and why—some products satisfy customers while others only frustrate them.

The dramatic acceleration of digital technologies and their integration into physical products is transforming everyday objects. Our domestic appliances, furniture, clothing, are growing in intelligence. Smart objects are increasingly capable of interacting with humans in a purposeful manner with intentionality. This collection of essays, descriptions of empirical work, and design case studies brings together perspectives from interaction design, the humanities, science and technology studies, and engineering, to map, explore and interrogate ways in which our relationships with everyday smart objects might expand and be re-imagined. By offering a critical assessment on the growing place of smart technology in everyday environments, this book outlines a transdisciplinary research agenda for the future of 'smartness' to help define, envision, and inspire future collaborative design practices. These essays propose an understanding and design of smart objects that embrace their hybrid nature as shifting and blending tools, agents, machines, or even 'creatures'. Authors argue that smart objects have the potential to enter into multiple kinds of relationships with humans, and form complex human-nonhuman ecologies that are both meaningful and empowering in the context of everyday life. This book also shines a light on the hidden infrastructures behind the functioning of smart objects with stirring debates tackling questions of technology, human values, and economic and ecological impact. Whether you are a design scholar, design practitioner or design activist this book will inspire through offering theoretical insights, design concepts and practical ways on how to engage in this research agenda for future smartness.

One of the world's great designers shares his vision of "the fundamental principles of great and meaningful design", that's "even more relevant today than it was when first published" (Tim Brown, CEO, IDEO). Even the smartest among us can feel inept as we fail to figure out which light switch or oven burner to turn on, or whether to push, pull, or slide a door. The fault, argues this ingenious -- even liberating -- book, lies not in ourselves, but in product design that ignores the needs of users and the principles of cognitive psychology. The problems range from ambiguous and hidden controls to arbitrary relationships between controls and functions, coupled with a lack of feedback or other assistance and unreasonable demands on memorization. The Design of Everyday Things shows that good, usable design is possible. The rules are simple: make things visible, exploit natural relationships that couple function and control, and make intelligent use of constraints. The goal: guide the user effortlessly to the right action on the right control at the right time. The Design of Everyday Things is a powerful primer on how -- and why -- some products satisfy customers while others only frustrate them.

In this paradigm-shattering book, leading behavioural economist and food psychologist Brian Wansink - dubbed the 'Sherlock Holmes of food' and the 'wizard of why' - offers a radical new philosophy for weight loss. The answer isn't to tell people what to do: it's to set up their living environments so that they will naturally lose weight. Using cutting-edge, never-before-seen research from his acclaimed Food and Brand Lab at Cornell University, Wansink reveals how innovative and inexpensive design changes - from home kitchens to restaurants, from grocery stores to schools and workplaces - can make it mindlessly easy for people to eat healthier and make it more profitable for the companies who sell the food. In Slim by Design, Wansink argues that the easiest, quickest and most natural way to reverse weight gain is to work with human nature, not against it. He demonstrates how schools can nudge kids to take an apple instead of a cookie, how restaurants can increase profits by selling half-size portions, how supermarkets can double the amount of fruits and vegetables they sell, and how anyone can cut plate refills at home by more than a third. Interweaving drawings, charts, floor plans and scorecards with new scientific studies and compelling insights that will make you view your surroundings in an entirely fresh way, this entertaining, eye-opening book offers practical solutions for changing your everyday environment to make you, your family and even your community slim by design.

Library of Science Book Club selection Discover magazine “What to Read” selection “A really great book.” —IRA FLATOW, Science Friday “One of the finest science writers I’ve ever read.” —Los Angeles Times “Ellard has a knack for distilling obscure scientific theories into practical wisdom.” —New York Times Book Review “[Ellard] mak[es] even the most mundane entomological experiment or exegesis of psychological geekspeak feel fresh and fascinating.” —NPR “Colin Ellard is one of the world’s foremost thinkers on the neuroscience of urban design. Here he offers an entirely new way to understand our cities—and ourselves.” —CHARLES MONTGOMERY, author of Happy City: Transforming Our Lives Through Urban Design Our surroundings can powerfully affect our thoughts, emotions, and physical responses, whether we’re awed by the Grand Canyon or Hagia Sophia, panicked in a crowded room, soothed by a walk in the park, or tempted in casinos and shopping malls. In Places of the Heart, Colin Ellard explores how our homes, workplaces, cities, and nature—places we escape to and can’t escape from—have influenced us throughout history, and how our brains and bodies respond to different types of real and virtual space. As he describes the insight he and other scientists have gained from new technologies, he assesses the influence these technologies will have on our evolving environment and asks what kind of world we are, and should be, creating. Colin Ellard is the author of You Are Here: Why We Can Find Our Way to the Moon, but Get Lost in the Mall. A cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Waterloo and director of its Urban Realities Laboratory, he lives in Kitchener, Ontario.