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
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
Eine vergleichende ethnosemantische Lebenswelt-Analyse
Francis Müller untersucht mit einem ethnosemantischen Ansatz eine schweizerische und eine ghanaische charismatisch evangelikale Gemeinschaft im Großraum Zürich. Als zentrales Element kristallisiert sich in den zwei Gemeinschaften die Konversion und die damit verbundene Selbsttransformation heraus, welche in den zwei Gemeinschaften mit unterschiedlichen kulturellen Themen in Verbindung gebracht wird. Die erstrebte radikale Selbsttransformation ist riskant, weil sie den Bruch mit Gewohnheiten und dem bisherigen Leben impliziert. Es werden in den zwei Gemeinschaften unterschiedliche Techniken und normative Identitäten vermittelt, die zeigen, wie mit dieser Diskontinuität umzugehen und wie überhaupt in einer modernen, säkularen Welt zu leben ist. Der Autor leistet so einen Beitrag zur soziologischen Konversionsforschung.
244 Seiten (PDF), Springer, 2015
ISBN 978-3-658-09251-1
What do stories in games have in common with political narratives?
This book identifies narrative strategies as mechanisms for meaning and manipulation in games and real life. It shows that the narrative mechanics so clearly identifiable in games are increasingly used (and abused) in politics and social life. They have »many faces«, displays and interfaces. They occur as texts, recipes, stories, dramas in three acts, movies, videos, tweets, journeys of heroes, but also as rewarding stories in games and as narratives in society – such as a career from rags to riches, the concept of modernity or market economy. Below their surface, however, narrative mechanics are a particular type of motivational design – of game mechanics.
362 Seiten, transcript, 2021
ISBN: 978-3-8376-5345-8
