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Design Your Life: The Pleasures and Perils of Everyday Things
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| List Price: | $23.95 |
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Product Description
Design Your Life is a series of irreverent and realistic snapshots about objects and how we interact with them. By leading design thinker Ellen Lupton and her twin sister Julia Lupton, it shows how design is about much more than what’s bought at high-end stores or the modern look at IKEA. Design is critical thinking: a way to look at the world and wonder why things work, and why they don’t.
Illustrated with original paintings of objects both ordinary and odd, Design Your Life casts a sharp eye on everything from roller bags, bras, toilet paper, and stuffed animals to parenting, piles, porches, and potted plants. Using humor and insight Ellen and Julia explore the practical side of everyday design, looking at how it impacts your life in unexpected ways and what you can do about it. Speaking to the popular interest in design as well as people’s desire to make their own way through a mass-produced world, this thoughtful book takes a fresh and humorous approach to make some serious points about the impact of design on our lives.
Find out what's wrong with the bras, pillows, potted plants, and the other hopeless stuff you use, buy, clean, water, or put away everyday. Discover how to secretly control the actions of those around you by choosing and placing objects carefully. Find out how roller bags are threatening civilization, and how the layout of your own house might be making you miserable. Use the tools of self-publishing to take the power of branding into your own hands.
Taking a fresh, funny look at parenthood, housekeeping, entertaining, time management, crafting, and more, Design Your Life shows you how to evaluate the things you use, and how to recognize forms of order that secretly inhabit the messes of daily life, be it a cluttered room or a busy schedule. Use this book to gain control over your environment and tap into the power of design to communicate with friends, family, and the world.
Product Details
- Amazon Sales Rank: #96902 in Books
- Published on: 2009-05-12
- Released on: 2009-05-12
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: .60" h x 6.75" w x 9.30" l, 1.14 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 192 pages
Features
- ISBN13: 9780312532734
- Condition: NEW
- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
- Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices
Editorial Reviews
Review
"Design your life is an utter pleasure, like a delicious tray of warm brownies that also happen to be nutritious. I've never encountered a book about design so smart and fun and unpretentious and easy to love." - Kurt Andersen, author of Heyday And Turn Of The Century."
About the Author
JULIA LUPTON teaches at the University of California, Irvine and is co-chair of the Design Alliance. She is the author of several books on Shakespeare and co-authored D.I.Y. Kids with her sister Ellen.
Customer Reviews
A real delight to have and to share
What a delight to share in the experience of having this brilliant, savvy, funny, practical, beautiful book in hand: an invitation to play,
construct, imagine, chat, reconfigure, connect. Both voices in this book
encourage us to open a conversation with them -- visually, verbally -- and with our multiple selves, with the people in our lives, with designers who
offer us opportunities to re-think the way we live now. A treat for
ourselves and for anybody we might want in our lives.
"Design Your Life" is a wonderful book.
"Design Your Life" is an excellent, entertaining read. It is funny, very clever, interesting, and useful. The wit is woven into humorous and critical examinations of the items and structure that is the context of our daily lives.
If you read this book, you will have a series of great "Aha!" moments as you gain a deeper understanding of how the design of your environment and the items you use influence and effect your behavior.
There is also a confortable amount of how-to and d.i.y. info to balance the humorous and historical.
As you read it you will feel your own ideas begin to spring forward. You will also think of people for whom it would be a perfect gift. Give it a try.
disappointing
I found nothing useful in this book. It seemed like a puff piece for the authors, and I'm surprised it received positive reviews. Maybe it was creative - that is, a creative way to get me to part with my money. But there was little substance, and I wasn't impressed with the few ideas presented.
