Alice Rawsthorn

Critic; Writer; Lecturer / Architecture; Fashion Design; Graphic Design; Interior Design; Product Design / United Kingdom /

www.alicerawsthorn.com / www.facebook.com/alice.rawsthorn / www.twitter.com/alicerawsthorn

10 Great Books on Product Design

The toughest thing about choosing ten great books on product design was whittling down the long list. Product design may not have as erudite or provocative a critical culture as graphics or architecture, but it is so rich and complex a subject that it has inspired some wonderful books. . . . View the complete text

Some are monographs, of course. I chose one of my favorites—Sergio Polano’s study of the great Italian designer Achille Castiglioni. I could happily have added many more, such as Dieter Rams’s Less and More and Irma Boom’s beautifully designed survey of the history of Royal Tichelaar Makkum, the venerable Dutch ceramics manufacturer.

At a time when product designers are grappling with the challenge of transforming their way of working to embrace sustainability and inclusivity, it seems impossible not to include the book that anticipated those movements some 40 years ago, Victor Papanek’s Design for the Real World. The same can be said for two very different design manifestos: Christien Meindertsma’s Pig 05049, a stellar example of intellectually adroit, yet fully functional conceptual design; and Jasper Morrison’s A World Without Words.

Irma Boom’s eponymous mini-book on her work as a book designer is an exemplar of the book as an impeccably designed object, just as Reyner Banham’s Design by Choice is a template for thoughtful and engaging design writing. Product design has also benefited from being interrogated by gifted writers and thinkers from other disciplines. This list includes wonderful books by a social scientist in Richard Sennett, a semiologist in Roland Barthes, and a philosopher in Robert Grudin. Again, there were many more to choose from, notably The Lunar Men, a fascinating study of the role of pioneering scientists, inventors, and industrialists in Britain’s Industrial Revolution by the cultural historian Jenny Uglow.

Some of my favorite product-design books didn’t set out to explore design at all, yet do so adroitly, like the veteran war reporter C.J. Chivers’s study of the development and deadly impact of the AK-47 in The Gun.

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Nonfiction, Product/Industrial Design

title a–z

4 books

Design by Choice

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Reyner Banham

Penny Sparke Editor

My favorite design critic is the peerless Reyner Banham, who not only played an important part in the development of British pop art but also pioneered serious design writing in postwar Britain. I was tempted to choose one of his “proper” books, like Theory and Design in the First Machine Age, but plumped for a playful one, Design by Choice. It is a collection of Banham’s journalism for art, architecture, and political magazines in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, including Art in America, Architectural Review, and New Society, chosen by the British design historian Penny Sparke. Design by Choice shows off not only Banham’s wryly conversational writing style but also his intellectual depth and passion for design. . . . View the complete text

The Gun

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C. J. Chivers

The Gun is one of those books whose author did not intend to write about design, but ended up doing so by happy accident, because it turned out to be inseparable from his or her chosen theme. The author of this book, C. J. Chivers, a former infantry officer in the U.S. Marines turned Pulitzer Prize-winning war correspondent for the New York Times, set out to show how the course of history has been determined by the merits of various firearms from the Gatling Gun onward, and by the deadly Soviet assault rifle, the AK-47, in particular.

In doing so, he produced one of the best books on product design I have ever read. As well as depicting the picaresque characters—the chancers, desperados, and crooks—who have invented guns through the centuries, Chivers unpacks the mythology of the AK-47’s “invention” in the 1940s by the wounded Soviet tank sergeant Mikhail Kalashnikov. He also delivers an adroit analysis of “good” design in the AK-47, and “bad” in its flawed U.S. equivalent, the Colt M-16.

Irma Boom: Biography in Books

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Irma Boom

This is one of my favorite examples of a book as an extraordinary object. It is the first book on the work of the brilliant Dutch book designer Irma Boom. There are 704 pages bound into a tiny book—just 2 inches high, 1.5 inches wide, and 1 inch thick. When I first saw it, I presumed that the (lack of) size was a wry commentary on any or all of the following: a) the trend to produce very big, very blingy, often badly designed books; b) the realization that, since the microchip’s invention, the size of an object no longer necessarily bears any relation to its power; or c) the threat posed by the iPad, Kindle, and other electronic readers to the traditional books that Irma Boom has designed so beautifully. . . . View the complete text

A World Without Words

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Jasper Morrison

This book begins with a slightly battered photograph of a rumpled Jean Prouvé drawing an outline with chalk on a blackboard. The next page shows a section of one of Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion Cars, and the page after that what looks like Arabic calligraphy but turns out to be a visual record of the movement of the tip of a bird’s wing in flight. Each page bears a single image and among them are photographs of a matador, one of Charles and Ray Eames’s plywood leg splints, fishermen’s huts in the English seaside town of Hastings, an Yves Klein painting, a dust pan, the Piaggio scooter factory, and lots of chairs. . . . View the complete text

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Combining art, design, history, and quantitative analysis, transforms data sets into stunning artworks that underscore his positive view of human progress, inspiring us to think about the future with much-needed hope.

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Die Fläche: Design and Lettering of the Vienna Secession, 1902–1911 (Facsimile Edition) by Diane V. Silverthorne, Dan Reynolds, and Megan Brandow-Faller

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