An online textbook for the popular college course

that deals with the impact and meaning of images.

We live in a world of images.  What we know about the world and even

about ourselves, is coming to us more and more from the images we

create in science, communications, entertainment, media.

This book was created for a college course that explores the impact of

this world of the image in terms of how we think, what we presume, and

how we feel.

It is based on the idea that if we do not understand the impact of images

on us, we can very easily become victims to those who would manipulate

them.

A collection of essays exploring the ways in which we cope with - and often fail to adjust to - changes in technology.

Many essays from this book appeared in The New York Times

Business Section.

These essays explore the premise that technology is a complex system of change that interacts with other systems, gets feedback and feeds forward, influences and is influenced.  This evolution leads to unexpected patterns

of convergence, synergence, emergence.  So although we can envision and fashion technology, design and refine it, make it and break it, we cannot

rule, dominate, or otherwise whip it into submission.

Subtitled a Guide to Life with Devices, these essays explore techniques for living in a world of technology that is not always under our control.

Essays investigating the creative process and the methods

we can use to improve our creative habits.

Imagine building a creativity machine – a biological one like a desktop terrarium. What ingredients would you need?

An Ingenarium like that – that worked the way creativity works – would not

be a very neat machine at all.  Fancies, half-baked notion, urges, forgetting, quirks of personality, and pure blind luck would all be part of it.  Sparks of insight too and plenty of dead ends.

Under the right conditions, you might get a nice growth of creativity to nurture and play with.

The essays in this collection explore creativity from this unique point of view.

Reflections of a designer on the ways in which the

made world works and, just as often, does not.

The study of design is the study of making things.

It is about our very human need to remake the world in our image, to fix

what is, to stubbornly refuse to accept things as they are.  Design is what changes the world and knowing the difference between good design and

bad can be the difference between life working and failing.

This collection of essay by a designer is about how the made world works

and why it doesn’t work when it doesn’t.

A Longman Topics Reader on the subject of visuality, semiotics,

and images in the media.

Thought-provoking essays from a variety of experts in the fields of

visuality, visual ecology, and image theory.  Topics include the mechanism

of vision, image as mirror, the use of images for coercion, and other

issues.

Each chapter includes an introduction, a writing, and discussion prompts.

For use in college level classes but also of interest to the general reader.

Based on an exhibition at The Design Center, this book looks at breakthrough designs that influenced the modern world.

The modern world that is so familiar to us, is really just the latest

moment in the long story of design evolution.  Each new breakthrough

is an innovention that ushers in a new age.

This book offers a glimpse into the inventions and innovations that made

the world modern and the ways in which such changes came about.

A meditation on the power of the circle, based on an exhibition at The Design Center.

Circles are everywhere…in the world as we envision it, in the shape of

things, and at the center of our designs.

This book presents a number of examples and reflections on the circle –

that most essential of shapes – and the ways we think about what we see,

and see the world according to the way we think

Based on an exhibition at The Design Center, this book presents images that influenced or changed the world in important ways.

We live in a pictured world, as images become both more ubiquitous

and increasingly important to our daily lives as forms of communication, information, and influence.

This book presents 75 images throughout history and from all corners of

the world that seemed to change our attitudes, assumptions, and beliefs

when they first appeared, and that still resonate today.

Essays and opinions about art, design, daily life and other matters of interest about the way the world works...or does not work.

A collection of essays, short opinion pieces, letters to the editor, and other

writings either submitted to or published in a variety of books, magazines,

newspapers, and other publications.

Expanded from the catalog for an exhibition at The Design Center, this book explores the visual meaning and impact of written languages and text.

This book is about the design of language. It presents the rich history,

evolution, and wide variety of methods that have been devised to

communicate through writing.

From the meanings of ancient Ice Age cave markings to the deciphering

of the Egyptian hieroglyphs, the advent of early alphabets, the evolution

of modern scripts, and even the power of binary code, writing is explored

as both an art and a craft.

Based on an exhibition at The Design Center, this book presents 100 designs from the past one thousand years that helped to define modern world.

This book is a tour of world-changing designs from a variety of fields

 including engineering, advertising, science, technology, communication,

and more.  Some had social impact, others changed the way we work

or live or communicate, but what they all have in common is the way

in which they helped to define the world that we live in today.