Discursive Design
Critical, Speculative, and Alternative Things
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- $52.99
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- $52.99
Publisher Description
Exploring how design can be used for good—prompting self-reflection, igniting the imagination, and affecting positive social change.
Good design provides solutions to problems. It improves our buildings, medical equipment, clothing, and kitchen utensils, among other objects. But what if design could also improve societal problems by prompting positive ideological change? In this book, Bruce and Stephanie Tharp survey recent critical design practices and propose a new, more inclusive field of socially minded practice: discursive design. While many consider good design to be unobtrusive, intuitive, invisible, and undemanding intellectually, discursive design instead targets the intellect, prompting self-reflection and igniting the imagination. Discursive design (derived from “discourse”) expands the boundaries of how we can use design—how objects are, in effect, good(s) for thinking.
Discursive Design invites us to see objects in a new light, to understand more than their basic form and utility. Beyond the different foci of critical design, speculative design, design fiction, interrogative design, and adversarial design, Bruce and Stephanie Tharp establish a more comprehensive, unifying vision as well as innovative methods. They not only offer social criticism but also explore how objects can, for example, be used by counselors in therapy sessions, by town councils to facilitate a pre-vote discussions, by activists seeking engagement, and by institutions and industry to better understand the values, beliefs, and attitudes of those whom they serve. Discursive design sparks new ways of thinking, and it is only through new thinking that our sociocultural futures can change.
Customer Reviews
Cannot highlight text, add bookmarks, nor add notes
I strongly advise NOT to purchase this through Apple Books because of the formatting, unable to highlight or add notes. The format of this book is that of a locked PDF.
The book content is excellent, however as I have purchased this book for academic research, being unable to highlight and add notes to text is unequivocally a failure—I’d ask for my money back if I could. This ‘book’ is a locked PDF—that’s it; which also means one cannot change font sizes for legibility and background colours to reduce intense contrast. The publishers must update the publication on Apple Books to enable the most basic of expected e-book interactions.
Until then I encourage purchasing a hard copy of the book...