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The Gendered Object
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 244

The Gendered Object

EU security governance assesses the effectiveness of the EU as a security actor. The book has two distinct features. Firstly, it is the first systematic study of the different economic, political and military instruments employed by the EU in the performance of four different security functions. The book demonstrates that the EU has emerged as an important security actor, not only in the non-traditional areas of security, but increasingly as an entity with force projection capabilities. Secondly, the book represents an important step towards redressing conceptual gaps in the study of security governance, particularly as it pertains to the European Union. The book links the challenges of governing Europe's security to the changing nature of the state, the evolutionary expansion of the security agenda, and the growing obsolescence of the traditional forms and concepts of security cooperation.

Wild Things
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 264

Wild Things

What do things mean? What does the life of everyday objects reveal about people and their material worlds? Has the quest for 'the real thing' become so important because the high-tech world of total virtuality threatens to engulf us? This pioneering book bridges design theory and anthropology to offer a new and challenging way of understanding the changing meanings of contemporary human-object relations. The act of consumption is only the starting point of object's “lives”. Thereafter they are transformed and invested with new meanings and associations that reflect and assert who we are. Defining designed things as “things with attitude” differentiates the highly visible fashionable object from ordinary aretefacts that are too easily taken for granted. Through case studies ranging from reproduction furniture to fashion and textiles to 'clutter', the author traces the connection between objects and authenticity, ephemerality and self-identity. Beyond this, she shows the materiality of the everyday in terms of space, time and the body and suggests a transition with the passing of time from embodiment to disembodiment.

A View from the Interior
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 246

A View from the Interior

This book looks at women's contributions to modern design. It also explores how women as consumers have shaped contemporary design and the assumptions made by male designers about women's tastes and lives. The role of design education is also covered.

Bringing Modernity Home
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 242

Bringing Modernity Home

  • Categories: Art

Bringing Modernity Home offers a retrospective view of the development of popular taste and the beginnings of a new phase in the rise of the consumer society in the post Second World War period. It traces the change to consumer-led design after a time of grim austerity and recovery from the war while the state and production considerations held sway when consumers "couldn't afford taste". The case studies of so-called frivolous items like the cocktail cabinet, the coffee table and the rise of DIY in the working-class homes of the "new towns" gives a flavor of the excitement and thrill they afforded designers, makers and consumers after the harsh deprivations of the war.

Utility Reassessed
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 288

Utility Reassessed

  • Categories: Art

This collection of essays both defines and reassesses the concept of utility. In considering the place of ethics in the recent history of art and design, the text offers a way into the issues which concern design decision-makers today.The text presents topics such as the investigation in to hitherto undiscovered designs for a utility vehicle, it gives a perspective on the philosophy behind the concept of utility as a design theory and offers a critique of the dangers of good design. The text approaches the subject as a continuing history that has attempted to improve the human condition, through a process of rational thought in the construction of the material world. Using the history of Utility as a design theory, the text suggests ways in which the past can teach us something of the present, and reveals why, on the cusp of the new millennium, Utility is important.

Bringing Modernity Home
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 232

Bringing Modernity Home

  • Type: Book
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  • Published: 2007-03
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  • Publisher: Unknown

Bringing Modernity Home offers a retrospective view of the development of popular taste and the beginnings of a new phase in the rise of the consumer society in the post Second World War period. It traces the change to consumer-led design after a time of grim austerity and recovery from the war while the state and production considerations held sway when consumers "couldn't afford taste". The case studies of so-called frivolous items like the cocktail cabinet, the coffee table and the rise of DIY in the working-class homes of the "new towns" gives a flavor of the excitement and thrill they afforded designers, makers and consumers after the harsh deprivations of the war.

Design History and the History of Design
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 272

Design History and the History of Design

An essential overview as well as a theoretical critique for all students of design history. Walker studies the intellectual discipline of Design History and the issues that confront scholars writing histories of design. Taking his approach from a range of related fields, he discusses the problems of defining design and writing history. He considers the different methods that leading scholars have used in the absence of a theoretical framework, and looks critically at a number of histories of design and architecture.

Design and Feminism
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 222

Design and Feminism

The distinction between the spaces considered public and private or work and home is becoming more blurred. Our streets, parks, dwellings and tools are designed to a "one-size-fits-all" standard, and the responses of the design community to meet diverse needs have been mixed at best. Design and Feminism offers feminist critiques of these inadequate design standards, and suggest ideas, projects, and programs for change.

Consumption: Disciplinary approaches to consumption
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 602

Consumption: Disciplinary approaches to consumption

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The Politics of the Artificial
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 286

The Politics of the Artificial

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 p...