The article employs Walter Ballmer's experience as a Swiss graphic designer working in Milan in the second half of the twentieth century as a case study to think about national design discourses outside national borders, show their constructed nature, and explore their impact on individual lives and careers. Drawing on primary sources collected in the archive and through interviews, it maps out the

This issue of Design Issues explores topics of continuing relevance. It first contains a major collection of special issue essays on the construction of a design history. Also included is a book review on the significance of time in the design of history, a reflective essay on the evolution of design for disability locating it in a new climate of postUniversal Design, and an exhibition review offering

In the postwar period, the Swiss living abroad were considered as the vanguard of Swiss culture and as economic outposts of the country. Swiss graphic designers established in Paris were no exception. Through a close analysis of archival documents and visual material, this article sheds light on the ways the Swiss studio Hollenstein actively contributed to promote Swiss graphic design in the French

The role of British graphic designers and authors in spreading Swiss Style, “Swiss graphic design,” or “Swiss typography” internationally is evident, but less is known about the process and effects of transnational exchange in design. This article follows the trajectories of objects and texts, revealing how they have established and disseminated the labels in Britain and abroad, thus contributing to

Why Swiss Graphic Design Again, Now? In reviewing the two publications—“Josef Müller-Brockmann” by Kerry William Purcell and “Swiss Graphic Design: The Origins and Growth of an International Style, 1920–1965” by Richard Hollis—Michael J. Golec noted that “when it comes to the graphic design of Josef Müller-Brockmann, we had to contend with what John Walker has referred to as ‘typological’ approaches-or

Previous historiography of graphic design education in the mid-twentieth century is shaped by published theories and educational principles of a limited circle of design teachers. As a counterbalance, this article stresses the relevance of a marginalized source: design student magazines. It juxtaposes K and output, published in the early 1960s at the Basel School of Design and the Ulm School of Design

This review essay is intended as a state of the field, outlining an emerging design for disability that is inflected by thinking from Critical Disability Studies. The article notes how this thinking draws from the tradition of Universal Design and presents five keywords that characterize the newer approach.

This 2000-word invited review discusses each chapter and the overall concept of Hendon and Massey's book, which brings out the use in many cases of a single object as a source of semiotic, social and political analysis. One of the things that emerges as most clearly “designed” in the volume under review is history itself. When Herbert Simon proposed in 1969 that “everyone designs who devises courses

In the literature, the history of Swiss graphic design is regularly told as a linear development from illustrative tendencies to Modernist abstraction. Recent research has shown that these narratives were constructed and disseminated by a group of Modernist graphic designers through journals and their own publications. By the mid-1950s, the Modernists themselves began dividing designers of the time

Throughout the process of reading The Graphic Design Reader, an expansive and carefully assembled anthology from Teal Triggs and Leslie Atzmon, I wondered whether my linear approach was appropriate for the task of reviewing it. Anthologies are, after all, typically consulted piecemeal, so a sustained journey through 1,000 pages of material left a different impression of the field. In any case, I expect

In a literal sense, the word ma (間) means “interval” or “gap.” With considerable enthusiasm, since the early 1960s, Japanese thinkers and design practitioners have developed ma into an abstract and spiritual concept. With the use of interpretive research and ethnographic methods, this article explores how ma, commonly understood as ambiguity, has been deeply appreciated in Japanese culture. To find

To resolve the problem of design marginalization in organizations, we introduce the concept of institution and an Aristotelian framework for human activity to identify an action-based approach for design in complex systems. When design is positioned solely as an activity of production—despite the success of human-centered products—it misses an opportunity to influence institutions, or the human-side

This article explores the nature of conceptual models for designing service participation. Conceptual models are both a representation and a hypothesis, dialectically creating conditions of participation. I first study the nature of a conceptual model and then explore the four arts with focus on the notion of form. Each art reveals a mode of thought regarding the form of the participatory whole: grammatical

A fundamental shift in the way society operates is approaching driven by advances in the field of artificial intelligence (AI). Yet, there is a comparative lack of discourse across the design discipline regarding this topic. While there are fragments of methodological readiness for designing (with/for) AI, the nuances of such need to be further explored. The aim of this article is to shed light on

HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access archive for the deposit and dissemination of scientific research documents, whether they are published or not. The documents may come from teaching and research institutions in France or abroad, or from public or private research centers. L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents scientifiques de niveau recherche

In a more-than-human world of design and designing, outcomes and experiences are the result of a sustained yet more uncertain interplay between people and networked computational things—as well as directly between these things in themselves. Developing new design methodologies and tools to unlock the potentials of technologies such as Big Data, the Internet of Things, Machine Learning, and Artificial

Based on a critical analysis of the two notions of “crisis” and “compassion,” this article outlines and problematizes the increasing engagement of design practices with refugees and vulnerable communities on the move. By contextualizing different historical and contemporary humanitarian design examples in an analysis of current European border politics, the article questions the ways in which designing

After decades of delay, the U.S. legal profession is finally embracing digital technology in the delivery of civil justice. Much more rapidly, design methods are being embraced by legal institutions as a means reforming everything from commercial legal product lines to civil court forms. What explains the rapid embrace of legal design when digital legal technology took decades to break through? We

Introduction Human-centered design has been a dominant innovation methodology in service industries, from medicine to insurance to finance.1 It has now come to the legal system, together with movements related to legal technology, legal hacking, and access to justice reform, as a collective legal design movement.2 University labs, conferences, classes, and new job positions are oriented around “legal

In spring 2017, Binghamton University hosted “Milton Glaser: Modulated Patterns,” an exhibit of the design master’s then-recent work. The exhibit, curated and designed by university professor Blazo Kovacevic, featured wall-to-ceiling reproductions alongside original works, submersing the viewer in the visual environment. Two years later, the curators have followed with “Works of War: Seymour Chwast”—a

This article proposes a design space for designers and researchers working on the challenge of building people's capability to navigate complex systems, like the legal one. This capability is necessary for people whose rights, quality of life, and wellbeing necessitate them navigating bureaucratic systems. This design space aims to empower people to understand the system they are operating in, diagnose

Design is a key player in the future of data privacy and data protection. The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) established by the European Union aims to rebalance the information asymmetry between the organizations that process personal data and the individuals to which that data refers. Machine-readable, standardized icons that present a “meaningful overview of the intended processing” are

This article shares observations made during an experimental community-led design project undertaken to identify promising new solutions for civil justice services which low-income Escambia County residents could easily use. The Florida Bar Foundation-funded project generated three new initiatives that were prototyped, filed tested, and prepared for continuation. The Escambia Project ultimately engaged

Design theory and practice are increasingly prevalent in legal and justice systems, at times reframing the relationship between the law and the world it seeks to make just. This article presents my professional experiences introducing design theory, methods, and mindsets into legal and government contexts, highlighting challenges and tensions across various legal design projects. Challenges include

In design research critique has recently been voiced against the multiple ways the notion of participation is understood and practiced. Studies of performativity and performance art have been used to account for this methodological multiplicity. However, in this paper, we argue that participation still has much offer design research as a foundational concept, but that a more nuanced understanding is

This article aims to understand different service design concepts and investigate how multiple service design concepts may be better integrated and interconnected based on mutually benefitting relationships. It proposes a typology of three service design concepts and an integrative service design framework, which guides specific pathways for cross-fertilization between marketing/management-centric

Emergence in the African urban context provides unique opportunities to study novel ways of designing within a transdisciplinary set up, yet little has been written in this regard. In this paper, I reflect on how I have engaged in transdisciplinary research as a designer in Africa's urban contexts over the recent years. These reflections offer African perspectives that are enriched by ongoing global

Disparities in health and health care across a range of populations and conditions are well described. Yet, many physicians remain unaware of their existence. To address this lack of awareness, accrediting bodies have established requirements for medical schools and residencies to teach medical students and residents physicians about various aspects of disparities in health and health care. The Association

The Past Thirty years after hosting its first Olympic Games—the Seoul Summer Olympics in 1988—the Republic of Korea was given the honor of hosting a second—the 2018 Winter Olympics in PyeongChang, which took place February 9–25, 2018. I was working in Korea as a corporate identity designer at the time of the 1988 Olympics, and for the 2018 Olympics, I had the privilege of chairing the Design Advisory

In this article, I introduce the notion of remix as a form of metadesign—a methodological system—applicable to type design. Although the concept of metadesign has been entertained since at least the mid-1960s, it has gained new relevance as it has resurfaced in academic literature during the twenty-first century. This new relevance has been credited to the development of digital tools that allow for

This article addresses the concept of complexity and its effect on the logic of the design problem. It argues that the competing interpretations of complexity represent a logical antinomy (in the Kantian sense), and that this prevents the concept's further elaboration. It is necessary therefore to address the conditions that have produced this antinomy. Using the Hegelian category of the determination

Allanwood, Gavin and Peter Beare. User Experience Design: A Practical Introduction (2nd ed). London: Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2019. ISBN 978-1-3500-2170-9 (pbk). 176 pages. Color illustrations. This book outlines methods and principles of user experience design, with twelve activities providing hands-on experience with basic user research tools. The second edition calls attention to the standardization

Being witty and being culturally appreciated are two independent things in visual communication design. More often than not, on one hand, the Japanese sense of ‘playfulness’ is manifested in enigmatic images, which express intriguing aspects of Japanese psyche. On the other hand, the Western sense of humor is often light hearted, as its major aim is to raise a smile instead of ambiguity. This ethnographic

Often qualified as “revolutionary,” electronic and reactive textiles are promising to bring wide-reaching changes to our existence: from the way we dress to the way we communicate, from the way we sense and are sensed to the way we build and use textiles as substrates for new applications. From a philosophical perspective, this article explores the revolutionary character of electronic and reactive

In design research, critique has recently been voiced against the multiple ways the notion of participation is understood and practiced. Studies of performativity and performance art have been used to account for this methodological multiplicity. However, in this article, we argue that participation still has much to offer design research as a foundational concept, but that a more nuanced understanding

This article reveals how citation networks can be used to understand and demonstrate the ways design serves to integrate other bodies of knowledge. Analysis focused on two corpuses of peer-reviewed journal articles, representing two bodies of knowledge. The first corpus consisted of 277 articles with the words “Design Thinking” in title. The second corpus contained 296 articles with the words “Network

Reflecting on arguments proposed in the article “Made in Patriarchy” (Design Issues 1986), this article proposes that by re-viewing and re-searching design through the lens of women's experiences, we can think again about what design means and who does it to understand the potential of design as a vital component of heterogeneous everyday lives.

We use two cases of design activism to examine designers' forms of positionality—or, the relations that enter into the formation of design interventions and the ways that a designer's situation affects the matter of those designs. We argue, by recognizing the stakes of their interventions and by mapping their contingencies, designers call into question the promise of their reforms—opening opportunities

In the past, housing and homeownership have been used as media for social reform. This article looks at the socio-political agenda behind the birth of company towns and the role of architecture and urban design in shaping the social life of the inhabitants. The study examines Cité Ouvrière, a nineteenth-century mass factory settlement in Mulhouse (France), which provided workers with access to property

This article initiates a discussion about the unequal geography of the labor that challenges institutions and processes of public scholarship in design. The comparison between the urban competitions in New York, London, and Rio de Janeiro demonstrates that it was only in the Global South that challenges to the technology of the competition were raised. These challenges were based on issues of power

The reproduction of inequalities is a necessary product of neoliberal economic systems. Meanwhile, attempts to ameliorate this within social design actually perpetuate this situation. This, we argue, is partly due to the institutional configuration of design whose precarious professional norms mitigate against long-term consolidation. Relatedly, this struggle for recognition produces a kind of performativity

This article discusses how a material divide that leaves vulnerable communities with homes made of poor quality material is perpetuated in the system of spatial design. It examines a vignette about the development of the community theater in London to illustrate the unequal access to and participation in the design process as “intentional problem-solving” by different stakeholders. The discussion outlines

This article introduces the special issue “Design Inequalities” and the articles contained within it. It provides a new conceptual framework by looking at design as a way of “making society” and exploring how design is entangled with social inequalities across a wide spectrum of domains. The ontological point of departure is to view “design” and “inequalities” as both superstructures and micro-practices

Using both interviews and participant observations, this article examines feminist design initiatives in hacker and maker cultures, unpacking their possible contribution to a world of more equitable digital technology development, use, and re(de)construction.

This article concerns the history of the curb cut metaphor as applied to personal computer technology in the 1980s. Disability advocates used the metaphor to argue the necessity for accessibility features on computers to enable greater access. To accomplish this goal, these advocates utilized a complex comparison between personal computers and sidewalk ramps to combat assumptions about who the intended

This article focusses on the work of street-food market organizers in London as a design practice. The argument is based on ethnographic research about the curation of the street-food scene, which aimed at understanding how market organizers created markets as economic entities and design marketplaces as urban forms. Space, objects, people, aesthetics, and atmospheres were designed into a marketplace

This article provides a bookend to the collection and situates this Design Issues special issue “Design Inequalities” within the wider context of the studies of inequalities and design. Drawing on the theory of reflexivity as its guide, the article provides a narrative to processes of collating and editing a journal collection that draws into conversation two fields of research which rarely converge

Grounded in interaction criticism, this article uses visual analysis to explore the performance techniques offered by the female-focused sex education platform OMGYes. Motivated to close a gendered orgasm gap, the site employs a range of methods designed to provide its users with techniques to achieve orgasm. Contextualizing the site within broader cultures of self-improvement, the article addresses

Our article “Basel to Boston: An Itinerary for Modernist Typography in America” (volume 34, number 3, Summer 2018) addresses how and why the so-called “Swiss style” of graphic design came to be adopted so early and so enthusiastically by designers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and what it has meant for the history of design in America. Our stated focus was not on the origins and

In 1947, Czech designer Ladislav Sutnar and Danish architect Knud Lönberg-Holm published three articles in Interiors magazine introducing their theories of modern visual communication to the professional design community in the United States. These articles, subsequently released together as Designing Information, were informed by the authors’ work at Sweet's Catalog Service, a dominant publisher of

Many design practices in Indonesia combine a sense of urgency around environmental crises with very local forms of community organizing and alternative economies. Located in the village of Kandangan in an agricultural area of Central Java are two organizations called Magno and Spedagi, as well as a cluster of other design activist projects. This paper aims to bring some of these practices and projects

In recent years, focus on the designer's ability to frame wicked problems has underlined the important positioning of the designer as a key player in the early phases of innovation. However, further clarification and development of the theory and terminology of framing are needed in order to understand and support the rather complex framing process that the design team engages in during the early phases

Design is increasingly recognized as offering strategic value to business in driving innovation, and has assisted organizations in balancing the needs of several stakeholders while maintaining competitiveness. However, for organizations which are not design-oriented, realizing outcomes through design can present a complex challenge. This paper presents the findings of a two-year action research project

An edited presentation of an extended interview with the design historian John Heskett undertaken a few months after the publication of Heskett's Industrial Design (Thames and Hudson, 1980). Part One explores the genesis and structure of Industrial Design, as well as wider problems in the writing of histories of design. Part Two examines circumstances and tensions in regard to understanding the roles

Since the mid-1950s, Tomás Maldonado has been a pioneer in the development of a new way of understanding the purpose, the contexts, the methods, the interdisciplinary supports, and the means of design. With his passing on Monday, November 26, 2018, the design community lost not only a friend and an articulate and erudite advocate, but also a symbol of a way of life, dedicated to satisfying an endless

Editors’ Introduction Ten years ago, Fred Collopy published this short provocative essay at Fast Company (June 7, 2009). Based on his experience working with systems thinking Collopy offered the proponents of design thinking a cautionary tale regarding the promise of thinking holistically about complex phenomena. He also offered his suggestions for a research agenda intended to harvest the insights

This article draws an alignment between John Dewey's Pragmatism and design inquiry or, particularly, research which incorporates design practice. Three core components of Dewey's philosophy are described—namely, his theory of inquiry, his theory of communication, and his metaphysics—all of which are seen to interlink to form a unique approach to knowledge. From this, a number of key features of the

The article examines curatorial practices in regard to graphic design and posters—a subject only sparsely covered by poster research. It investigates how urban, environmental structures can work as guidelines for curating posters and ephemerals in museums. By applying an ecological view to design, it stresses the reciprocal relationship of humans with their built and product-designed environments and

This article is a textual analysis initiating the examination of twelve album covers in relation to Lebanon. The covers are examined through the trans-contextualization of diverse and eclectic fusions. Such covers create complex narratives echoing band identities while, parody enabled continuum, yet critique detachment. Though the album covers form a commentary related to histories, they do not merely

The article explores the concept of “openness” in the design field. In particular, it suggests a broad interpretation of the relationship between “openness” and design by analyzing the use of the expression “open design” between 2000 and 2017. This expression is related to words such as, co-design, crowdsourcing, open innovation, making and open manufacturing, which can be synthesized by the concepts