Glimmer
How Design Can Transform Your Life, Your Business, and Maybe Even the World
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- $10.99
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
The first mainstream book to explore how the problem-solving, creative and insightful powers of Bruce Mau and the world’s other great designers can be applied to our everyday lives and businesses — and spawn creative epiphanies around the world.
What can be learned from great designers? How can design improve our lives? Answers abound in Glimmer. In the cutting-edge studios of Canadian design phenomenon Bruce Mau and other visionary designers, everything is ripe for reinvention — including how businesses function, children learn and communities thrive. Warren Berger, with the full cooperation of Mau, tallies and explores the deceptively simple principles that steer design’s vanguard — “ask stupid questions,” “begin anywhere” and “make hope visible” — and illustrates how these and other such principles can provide the means for finding hope in these anxious times.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Humanity's problems can be designed away with ingenious products and catchy marketing, according to this giddy manifesto. Journalist Berger (Advertising Today) channels the insights of celebrity designer Bruce Mau, whose grandiose projects he's helping the University of Arizona to "reinvent higher education" yield such pens es as "everything communicates." He distills Mau's wisdom into high-concept "glimmer principles," including "work the metaphor" and "design for emergence," and applies them to everything from disaster relief to personal life. Berger tries to both abstract and systematize the process of innovative design and to give it a populist spin: you don't need expertise or money to solve problems, just optimism, an attentive eye and a childlike readiness to "Ask Stupid Questions." Nifty gadgets are showcased, including a nut-sheller for Third World farmers and a wheelchair that climbs stairs. But much of the book is just a retread of self-help bromides ("you have to be willing to grow") and familiar business buzz concepts, one that treats a pet food company's promotion of an international holiday for dogs as a humanitarian crusade. The result is an overhyped brief for a shallow approach to the world's ills.
