Dan Formosa

Product/Industrial Designer / United States / Smart Design

www://danformosa.com / www.smartdesignworldwide.com

Dan Formosa started his design career at the Eliot Noyes office, designing IBM’s first personal computer. In 1981, he helped establish Smart Design to explore how design can positively impact people’s lives.

With his undergraduate degree in product design and a doctorate in ergonomics and biomechanics, Formosa’s approach calls for first understanding people. Through design, his work has increased fuel efficiency in automobiles, improved drug compliance, and made people’s day-to-day lives easier.

Dan Formosa’s work is included in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art. In 2010, on behalf of Smart Design, he received the Smithsonian’s Cooper-Hewitt National Design Award. Also that year, he helped establish the Masters in Branding program at the School of Visual Arts in New York City—the first program of its kind. In 2012, Formosa received IxDA’s first annual Interaction Design Award. He also co-authored the best-selling book Baseball Field Guide, explaining the complex rules of Major League Baseball.

In addition to consulting, Formosa frequently writes and lectures on various aspects of design research, the future of design, and the human experience.

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If Walls Could Speak: My Life in Architecture by Moshe Safdie

If Walls Could Speak: My Life in Architecture

By Moshe Safdie
Publisher: Grove/Atlantic
Published: September 2022

One of the world’s greatest and most thoughtful architects recounts his extraordinary career and the iconic structures he has built—from Habitat in Montreal to Marina Bay Sands in Singapore—and offers a manifesto for the role architecture should play in society.

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Design Emergency: Building a Better Future by Alice Rawsthorn and Paola Antonelli

Design Emergency: Building a Better Future

By Alice Rawsthorn and Paola Antonelli
Publisher: Phaidon Press
Published: May 2022

Rawsthorn and Antonelli tell the stories of the remarkable designers, architects, engineers, artists, scientists, and activists who are at the forefront of positive change worldwide. Focusing on four themes—Technology, Society, Communication, and Ecology—the authors present a unique portrait of how our great creative minds are developing new design solutions to the major challenges of our time, while helping us to benefit from advances in science and technology.

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Why Design Matters: Conversations with the World’s Most Creative People by Debbie Millman

Why Design Matters: Conversations with the World's Most Creative People

By Debbie Millman
Publisher: Harper Design
Published: February 22, 2022

Debbie Millman—author, educator, brand consultant, and host of the widely successful and award-winning podcast “Design Matters”—showcases dozens of her most exciting interviews, bringing together insights and reflections from today’s leading creative minds from across diverse fields.

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Milton Glaser: POP: by Steven Heller, Mirko Ilić, and Beth Kleber

Milton Glaser: POP

By Steven Heller, Mirko Ilić, and Beth Kleber
Publisher: The Monacelli Press
Published: March 2023

This collection of work from graphci design legend Milton Glaser’s Pop period features hundreds of examples of the designer’s work that have not been seen since their original publication, demonstrating the graphic revolution that transformed design and popular culture.

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Meet Me by the Fountain: An Inside History of the Mall by Alexandra Lange

Meet Me by the Fountain: An Inside History of the Mall

By Alexandra Lange
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Published: June 2022

Chronicles postwar architects’ and merchants’ invention of the shopping mall, revealing how the design of these marketplaces played an integral role in their cultural ascent. Publishers Weekly writes, “Contending that malls answer ‘the basic human need’ of bringing people together, influential design critic Lange advocates for retrofitting abandoned shopping centers into college campuses, senior housing, and ‘ethnocentric marketplaces’ catering to immigrant communities. Lucid and well researched, this is an insightful study of an overlooked and undervalued architectural form.”

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Women Holding Things by Maira Kalman

Women Holding Things

By Maira Kalman
Publisher: Harper Design
Published: October 2022

In the spring of 2021, Maira and Alex Kalman created a small, limited-edition booklet, “Women Holding Things,” which featured select recent paintings by Maira, accompanied by her insightful and deeply personal commentary. The booklet quickly sold out. Now, the Kalmans have expanded that original publication into an extraordinary visual compendium. We see a woman hold a book, hold shears, hold children, hold a grudge, hold up, hold her own. In visually telling their stories, Kalman lays bare the essence of women’s lives—their tenacity, courage, vulnerability, hope, and pain.

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