Search results for ""Author Victor Margolin""

Emerging from the world of commercial art and product styling, design has now become completely integrated into human life. Its marks are all around us, from the chairs we sit on to the Web sites on our computer screens. One of the pioneers of design studies and still one of its most distinguished practitioners, Victor Margolin here offers a timely meditation on design and its study at the turn of the millennium and charts new directions for the future development of both fields. Divided into sections on the practice and study of design, the essays in "The Politics of the Artificial" cover such topics as design history, design research, design as a political tool, sustainable design, and the problems of design's relation to advanced technologies. Margolin also examines the work of key practitioners such as the matrix designer Ken Isaacs. Throughout the book Margolin demonstrates the underlying connections between the many ways of reflecting on and practising design. He argues for the creation of an international, interdisciplinary field of design research and proposes a new ethical agenda for designers and researchers that encompasses the responsibility to users, the problems of sustainability and the complicated questions of how to set boundaries for applying advanced technology to solve the problems of human life. Opinionated and erudite, Victor Margolin's "The Politics of the Artificial" breaks fresh ground in its call for a new approach to design research and practice. Designers, engineers, architects, anthropologists, sociologists and historians should all benefit from its insights.

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This is the first volume of the World History of Design, the definitive historical account of global design by pre-eminent design scholar Victor Margolin. The first volume explores the earliest cave art and human tools, including the key examples of the visual and material culture that were produced in all parts of the world from the first stages of human civilization, the Industrial Revolution and its aftermath, and finally World War I. This richly illustrated volume contains over 380 images, with 72 in full colour.

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This is the second volume of the World History of Design, the definitive historical account of global design by pre-eminent design scholar Victor Margolin. The second volume covers the period between World War I and II, when mass production and mass communication spread to most parts of the world. There are also focused accounts of design in particular places and in particular periods during this period, among these topics are the relations between art and industry in Germany between 1890 and 1914; the avant-gardes in Eastern Europe, 1917-1930; design in the Weimar Republic, 1918-1933; and the consultant designers in the United States, 1929-1939. This richly illustrated volume contains over 490 images, with over 80 in full colour.

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Following 1917, a new artistic-social avant-garde emerged aiming to engage the artist in the building of social life. Through close readings of the works of Alexander Rodchenko, El Lissitzky and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, this book examines the way in which these three artists negotiated the changing relations between their social ideals and political realities they confronted.

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This text reflects the growing recognition that the design of the everyday world deserves attention not only as a professional practice but as a subject of social, cultural and philosophic investigation. Victor Margolin, co-founder and an editor of "Design Issues", and Richard Buchanan, also an editor of the same journal, bring together 11 essays by scholars in fields ranging from psychology, sociology and political theory to technology studies, rhetoric and philosophy. The essayists share the editors' concern, first made clear in Margolin's "Design Discourse: History, Theory, Criticism", with the development of design studies as a field of interdisciplinary research. The contributors (Gianfranco Zaccai, Albert Borgmann, Richard Buchanan, Augusto Morello, Tufan Orel, Nigel Cross, Victor Margolin, Langdon Winner, Carl Mitcham, Tony Fry, and Ezio Manzini) focus on three broad themes that form a sequence of fundamental issues: how to shape design as a subject matter; how to distinguish the activity of designing in the complex world of action; and how to address the basic questions of value and responsibility that persistently arise in the discussion and practice of design. The essays discuss such topics as the relation of aesthetics to technology, the place of design in social action, the role of the consumer in design decisions, and the need for ethical practice in contemporary design. Manzini's concluding essay shows how the issue of ethics should connect responsible behaviour to decisions made every day in the manufacture of objects.

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Victor Margolin is Professor Emeritus of Design History at the University of Illinois, Chicago. He is a founding editor and now co-editor of the academic design journal Design Issues. His many books include: The Designed World: images, objects, environments; The Politics of the Artificial: Essays on Design; Design Discourse: history, theory, criticism; Discovering Design: explorations in design studies

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Although design infuses every object in the material world and gives form to immaterial processes as well, it is only recently that design itself has become the focus of intellectual debate. In Design Discourse, Victor Margolin gathers together a body of new writing in the emerging field of design studies. The contributors argue in different ways for a rethinking of design in light of its cultural significance and its powerful position in today's society.

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