The Culture of Design

Chapter 1: Design Culture Design culture as an object of study Beyond Visual Culture: Design Culture as an academic discipline Models for studying Design Culture Design Culture beyond discipline? Chapter 2: Design and Production The rise of design Freelance, in-house and consultancy design The establishment of design consultancy The 1980s design consultancy boom Neo-fordist design Post-fordist design Towards a brand ethos Speeding up design and production Design within disorganized capitalism The new economy Chapter 3: Designers and Design Discourse Definitions of design The word 'design' in history The professional status of design Designers as 'Cultural Intermediaries' Historicity and modernism in design discourse Second modernity versus design management Service design Design Thinking Chapter 4: The Consumption of Design The culture of consumption Design and consumer culture Passive or sovereign consumers? De-alienation and designing Commodities and the aesthetic illusion Systems of provision Circuits of culture Designers and the circuit of culture Writing about things Consumption and practice Anomalous objects Chapter 5: High Design Design classics Mediating production Consuming postmodern high design: Veblen and Bourdieu Historicity Modern designers/modern consumers Designers, risk and reflexivity Critical design Design art Chapter 6: Consumer Goods Images Surfaces Doing the Dyson Product semantics Mood boards Lifestyles and design ethnography Back to the workshop Product semantics and flexible manufacture Designing global products Product designers and their clients Products and brand image Product use The iPod: consumption, practice and contingency Chapter 7: Branded Places Evaluating place: beyond architectural criticism The Barcelona paradigm Cultural economies, regeneration and gentrification Museums and postindustrial place-making Beyond nation-states: cities and regions The branding of city-regions and nations Problematizing the branding of place Chapter 8: Branded Leisure From Fordist to disorganized leisure Time-squeeze and packaged leisure The Disney paradigm Post-tourists Naked and nowhere at Center Parcs Televisuality and designing leisure experiences Dedifferentiation/distinction Chapter 9: On-screen Interactivity Computers and graphic design Technological development and consumer growth Professional practices Critical reflection Authorship Readership Consuming interactivity Cybernetic loss Liberation and regulation: the bigger picture Bytes and brands Chapter 10: Communications, Management and Participation Internal brand building The end of advertising Brand and communications consultancy Employees as consumers Aesthetic labour Designing for creativity Social participation and design activism Chapter 11: Networks and Mobile Technologies iPhones and smartphones Cyborgs Closed and open networks Cultural relativism and technological change The competition of monopolies Scipts and metadata Agencement Assemblage Articulation Boundary objects and spaces Chapter 12: Studying Design Culture A design culture turn Writing design culture Scope Closed and open conceptions of design Reflexivity and historicity Mediation Density Dynamics Materiality Concluding remarks