Zoë Ryan

Curator; Academic; Writer; Editor; Lecturer / Architecture; Product Design / United States / The Art Institute of Chicago

Books Every Product Designer Should Read

As the field of design becomes ever more complex, reaching into increasingly diverse areas of practice, designers are arming themselves with an expanded toolbox of methodologies and approaches in an effort to create projects that defy traditional disciplinary boundaries and more effectively speak to contemporary modes of practice and ways of living. . . . View the complete text
3 books
Cameron Sinclair Architecture for Humanity, Editor
Kate Stohr Architecture for Humanity, Editor

This book illustrates the power of design to change lives and emphasizes the crucial work of organizations such as Architecture for Humanity.

Philip Kasinitz

A fantastic compendium of texts on the city, including American historian Lewis Mumford’s 1938 essay “The Culture of Cities,” in which he includes this memorable description of city life. “By the diversity of its time-structures, the city in part escapes the tyranny of a single present, and the monotony of a future that consists in repeating only a single beat heard in the past. Through its complex orchestration of time and space, no less than through the social division of labor, life in the city takes on the character of a symphony: specialized human aptitudes, specialized instruments, give rise to sonorous results which, neither in volume nor in quality, could be achieved by any single piece.”

Setha M. Low

An ambitious anthropological study of twelve cities in the Americas, Africa, Asia, and Europe that looks at issues of race, class, gender, and politics as understood within an urban context.

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