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Description
designing designing is one of the most extraordinary books on design ever written. First published in 1984 and reprinted with this title and cover in 1991, the book was the product of ten years of auto-critique, reflection and experimentation on writing on designing.
Offering a savage auto-critique of his own work on “methods”, as well as of the wider methods and ends of advanced industrial societies as a whole, this book challenges the traditional product- and progress- orientated focus on design by insisting that the world now coming into being requires designing to be understood as 'a response to the whole of life.'
But designing designing is also unique in modern design thinking in its exploration of what writing on designing might be. Combining essays, interviews, reflections, performances, plays, poems, chance procedures, photographs, collages and quotes, Jones experiments with both form and content in an attempt to make a book which 'is not simply about designing but is instead itself an instance of the ideas and processes explored within it.'
Table of Contents
Introduction to the revised edition by Clive Dilnot
Foreword by C. Thomas Mitchell
Author's Note
Preface to the 1984 edition
Acknowledgements
Introductory Essay: The Future of Breathing
1. A Thought Revolved
Love, hate and architecture
How my thoughts about design methods have changed during the years
Now we are numerous
Beyond rationalism
Principles in design
2. The World Without Imagination
St Ives by chance
Composing by chance
Some reflection on chance
Designing designing
3. It Must Give Pleasure
Opus one, number two
"... in the dimension of Time"
Continuous design and redesign
Things
4. Things of August
Is designing a response to the whole of life?
35 wishes
Voices at the conference conference
The design of modern life
Utopia and Numeroso
Afterword by John Thackara
Index
Product details
Published | 25 Feb 2021 |
---|---|
Format | Ebook (Epub & Mobi) |
Edition | 1st |
Extent | 440 |
ISBN | 9781350070684 |
Imprint | Bloomsbury Visual Arts |
Series | Radical Thinkers in Design |
Publisher | Bloomsbury Publishing |
About the contributors
Reviews
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Designing Designing is a particularly redemptive text ... not only because of the immense self-awareness and epistemic humility Jones demonstrates, but also because it explores in both its content and its form what else design and designing could be. In stark contrast to the predictable and stolid reification of design methods, principles, and practices today, this open-ended flexibility and responsiveness in design practice reflects in the structure of the book itself: a diverse collection of essays, personal reflections, anecdotes, conversations, interviews, and poetry.
Design and Culture
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Foregrounding the performing of designing as an ongoing experimental lived practice that is at once personal, social and institutional, this astonishingly prescient book offers fresh insights into how design expertise can be mobilized to address contemporary challenges. This re-issue should inspire a new generation of designers to think deeply and critically about designing, what makes it possible or constrains it, and its positive and negative unfolding consequences.
Lucy Kimbell, Director, Social Design Institute and Professor of Contemporary Design Practices at the University of Arts London, UK

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Bloomsbury Collections
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