Not at Your Service: Manifestos for Design brings together the broad spectrum of beliefs, subjects and practices of designers at Zurich University of the Arts. It offers different approaches and insights on the present-day role and impact of design. It is not conceived as a finished project, but as a fluid document of its time. Collaborative design, interaction within complex systems, attention economics, the ecological shift, visual literacy, gender-neutral design, “quick and dirty” design ethnography, social responsibility, the value of ugliness, death futures, immersive technologies, identity and crises, design as a transformative discipline – all of these topics are presented for debate with passion, conviction and professional expertise.
526 pages (PDF), Birkhäuser, 2021
ISBN 978-3-0356-2275-1
The project Not at Your Service: Manifestos for Design brings together a wide range of voices in order to illustrate the ways in which design mutates, infects unfamiliar territories and sometimes turns into an empty word devoid of meaning, but also to show how it can open up innovative, socially relevant and cross-disciplinary fields for sustainability, technological innovation and aesthetic practices, and have a positive effect on society.
Not at Your Service: Manifestos for Design brings together the broad spectrum of beliefs, subjects and practices of designers at Zurich University of the Arts. It offers different approaches and insights on the present-day role and impact of design. It is not conceived as a finished project, but as a fluid document of its time. Collaborative design, interaction within complex systems, attention economics, the ecological shift, visual literacy, gender-neutral design, “quick and dirty” design ethnography, social responsibility, the value of ugliness, death futures, immersive technologies, identity and crises, design as a transformative discipline – all of these topics are presented for debate with passion, conviction and professional expertise.
526 pages, Birkhäuser, 2021
ISBN 978-3-0356-2272-0
What consequences does the design of the virtual yield for architecture and to what extent can the nature of architecture be used productively to turn game-worlds into sustainable places – over here, in “reality”?
This pioneering collection gives an overview of contemporary developments in designing video games and of the relationships such practices have established with the design of architecture. Due to their often simulatory nature, games reveal constructions of reality while positively impacting spatial ability and allowing for alternative avenues to complex topics and processes of negotiation. Granting insight into the merging of the design of real and virtual environments, this volume offers an invaluable platform for further debate.
343 pages, transcript, 2019
ISBN 978-3-8394-4802-1
Swiss Graphic Design Histories offers an entirely new redefinition of Switzerland’s graphic design landscape. Based on extensive research by scholars of design history and with a multiple and inclusive approach, it reaches beyond the usual canon and the well-known epicenters Basel and Zurich with the Germanophone fathers of what has become famous as the Swiss Style in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s.
Edited by Davide Fornari, Robert Lzicar, Sarah Owens, Michael Renner, Arne Scheuermann and Peter J. Schneemann.
Named one of the Most Beautiful Swiss Books 2021.
814 pages in 4 volumes, Scheidegger & Spiess, 2021
ISBN: 978-3-85881-868-3
Design Struggles critically assesses the ways in which the design field is involved in creating, perpetuating, promoting and reinforcing injustice and inequality in social, political, economic, cultural and ecological systems. This book shows how this entanglement arose from Eurocentric and neoliberal thinking. The voices and practices represented here propose to question and disrupt the discipline of design from within, by problematizing the very notions of design. They aim to do so by generating new, anti-racist, post-capitalist, queer-feminist, environmentally conscious and community-based ideas on how to transform design. In this way, Design Struggles strives to forge sustainable, new practices within the design field that challenge the status quo and amplify underrepresented voices, both in the world of design, as well as beyond.
448 pages, valiz, 2021
ISBN: 978-94-92095-88-6
