15 Books about Design and the Future

From the Publisher. The contemporary art world is increasingly global, with a larger population, wider territory, and greater number of nationalities than ever before. Its prevailing conversation, however, has yet to catch up. Art Cities of the Future: 21st Century Avant-Gardes uncovers twelve distinct avant-gardes that have surfaced in recent decades, exploring their artistic heritage, cultural climate, and contemporary milieu.

The book's format is simple: for each of the twelve cities - Beirut, Bogotá, Cluj, Delhi, Istanbul, Johannesburg, Lagos, San Juan, São Paulo, Seoul, Singapore and Vancouver - a curator selected eight artists to represent the contemporary avant-garde. Though the artists work in a variety of media, including photography, painting, sculpture, installation, video, and performance art, all share two distinct qualities: a commitment to experimental art and a dedication to their local landscape.

Lively, thought-provoking, comprehensive, and packed with more than 500 images, Art Cities of the Future is sure to widen the historical narrative, allowing us to imagine a future of diverse aesthetics and shared concerns in the common language of contemporary art.

From the Publisher. Architects have always dreamed of shaping the future, of building utopian worlds filled with seemingly impossible structures that break with the past to propel mankind far into the 21st century and beyond. This book reviews forty such visionary projects, encompassing the whole spectrum of the built environment, from bus stations and concert halls to boat lifts and aquariums. This stimulating survey, illustrated with the very best architectural photography, will transport readers into yet unknown worlds.

From the Publisher. Until recently, analysis of the future was left to forecasters and trend experts. Today, however, designers and architects are playing an increasingly important role, creating products and environments that will change the way we live. Design Futures is a thought-provoking exploration of the radical directions that the creative industries are taking. Design expert Bradley Quinn reveals how a new generation of products, materials and surfaces will align design with such areas as artificial intelligence, genetic engineering and nanotechnology, reinventing the spaces in which we live and work, and how we experience the human body. Featuring interviews with renowned designers, architects and trend forecasters – among them Karim Rashid, Toyo Ito and Li Edelkoort – and over 250 illustrations of futuristic products and concepts, this is a unique guide to some of the twenty-first century’s most compelling ideas.

From the Publisher. Suburbs deserve a better, more resilient future. June Williamson shows that suburbs aren't destined to remain filled with strip malls and excess parking lots; they can be reinvigorated through inventive design. Drawing on award-winning design ideas for revitalizing Long Island, she offers valuable models not only for U.S. suburbs, but also those emerging elsewhere with global urbanization.

Williamson argues that suburbia has historically been a site of great experimentation and is currently primed for exciting changes. Today, dead malls, aging office parks, and blighted apartment complexes are being retrofitted into walkable, sustainable communities. Williamson shows how to expand this trend, highlighting promising design strategies and tactics.

She provides a broad vision of suburban reform based on the best schemes submitted in Long Island's highly successful "Build a Better Burb" competition. Many of the design ideas and plans operate at a regional scale, tackling systems such as transit, aquifer protection, and power generation. While some seek to fundamentally transform development patterns, others work with existing infrastructure to create mixed-use, shared networks.

Designing Suburban Futures offers concrete but visionary strategies to take the sprawl out of suburbia, creating a vibrant, new suburban form. It will be especially useful for urban designers, architects, landscape architects, land use planners, local policymakers and NGOs, citizen activists, students of urban design, planning, architecture, and landscape architecture.

From the Publisher. Echoes of the Future is a stunning compilation of recent graphic design and illustration that is inspired by our collective visual memory. Today’s young designers are not copying elements from classic modernism, letterpress printing, and other design styles of the past, but rather, they are synthesizing them to create a new aesthetic that emanates quality, timelessness, and sustainability.

This book showcases an up-to-the-minute style trend that promotes the impression of visual longevity in these times of economic uncertainty and contrasts sharply with the rapidly shifting styles of previous years that seemed out-of-date almost immediately. While the work featured in Echoes of the Future deliberately seems older, one realizes how clearly different and contemporary it is when confronted with genuine examples from the past.

From the Publisher. Today fashion is moving forward at a faster pace than ever before, with advancing technologies and new materials reinventing clothing as we know it. Futuristic garment designs are often inspired by surprising sources: biological science, climate change, space suits, artificial intelligence, genetic engineering and nanotechnology. This book offers a fascinating survey of these new directions, charting the transformational products, design processes, maverick materials and groundbreaking practitioners that are revolutionizing fashion. Design expert Bradley Quinn also explores radical retail operations, fashion forecasting and the relationship between fashion and other disciplines. Featuring inspirational interviews with international trend forecasters and designers, and packed with illustrations of extreme designs and prototypes, Fashion Futures is a thought-provoking overview of how fashion will look, perform, and be manufactured and purchased in the 21st century.

From the Publisher. Truly far-ranging, both conceptually and geographically, The Future of Architecture Since 1889 is a rich, compelling history that will shape future thinking about this period for years to come. Jean-Louis Cohen, one of today's most distinguished architectural historians and critics, gives an authoritative and compelling account of the twentieth century, tracing an arc from industrialization through computerization, and linking architecture to developments in art, technology, urbanism and critical theory. Encompassing both well-known masters and previously neglected but significant architects, this book also reflects Cohen's deep knowledge of architecture across the globe, and in places such Eastern Europe and colonial Africa and South America that have rarely been included in histories of this period. It is richly illustrated not only with buildings, projects and plans, but also with publications, portraits, paintings, diagrams, film stills, and exhibitions, showing the immense diversity of architectural thought and production throughout the twentieth century.

From the Publisher. Future Beauty is the first comprehensive survey of Japanese avant-garde fashion of the last 30 years. Such designers as Issey Miyake, Yohji Yamamoto and Rei Kawakubo made an enormous impact on the world fashion scene in the late twentieth century, challenging established notions of beauty and turning fashion into art. Today a new generation of radical designers, among them Tao Kurihara and Jun Takahashi, is fast gaining acclaim. This spectacular book, written by a team of experts led by the eminent fashion historian Akiko Fukai, explores the distinct sensibility of Japanese design – the uniqueness of its form, cut and fabric. Illustrated with over 250 photographs and sketches, Future Beauty is an authoritative and stylish guide to some of the world’s most expressive fashion.

A comprehensive examination, featuring more than 700 illustrations, of the Italian Futurist movement, its major exponents (Severini, Balla, Boccioni, Marinetti, Carra and Russolo), and its international off-shoots. The book covers painting, architecture, film, sculpture, still photography, music, poetry, and graphic and theatrical design and situates these achievements in the context of world events during this period (1909–30). Hultén also curated a contemporaneous exhibition on Futurism at Venice's Palazzo Grassi.

From the Publisher. What will the world look like in a hundred years from now? If global processes cannot be stopped, we at least have the chance to respond to them. Cities, shooting up like mushrooms, a shortage of resources, and climatic changes call for a new way of thinking. Time is pressing. Fortunately, there is no lack of visionaries and pioneers of sustainability. Futuristic presents about 50 of them: designers, architects, artists, scientists, cooperatives, and individualists, who are working for progress all around the globe. “We do not actually want to conquer space, but to expand the earth into the infinite. We do not need other worlds, but a mirror … Man needs fellow human beings.” [Stanislav Lem, Solaris, 1972]

Illustrated history of artists’ and writers’ visions of the year 2000 and life in the 21st century.

Innovation and design need not be about the search for a killer app. Innovation and design can start in people’s everyday activities. They can encompass local services, cultural production, arenas for public discourse, or technological platforms. The approach is participatory, collaborative, and engaging, with users and consumers acting as producers and creators. It is concerned less with making new things than with making a socially sustainable future. This book describes experiments in innovation, design, and democracy, undertaken largely by grassroots organizations, non-governmental organizations, and multi-ethnic working-class neighborhoods.

These stories challenge the dominant perception of what constitutes successful innovations. They recount efforts at social innovation, opening the production process, challenging the creative class, and expanding the public sphere. The wide range of cases considered include a collective of immigrant women who perform collaborative services, the development of an open-hardware movement, grassroots journalism, and hip-hop performances on city buses. They point to the possibility of democratized innovation that goes beyond solo entrepreneurship and crowdsourcing in the service of corporations to include multiple futures imagined and made locally by often-marginalized publics.

Cited by architect Norman Foster:

One of Fuller’s most popular works, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth is a brilliant synthesis of his world view. In this very accessible volume, Fuller investigates the great challenges facing humanity. How will humanity survive? How does automation influence individualization? How can we utilize our resources more effectively to realize our potential to end poverty in this generation? He questions the concept of specialization, calls for a design revolution of innovation, and offers advice on how to guide “spaceship earth” toward a sustainable future.

From the Publisher. Today designers often focus on making technology easy to use, sexy, and consumable. In Speculative Everything, Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby propose a kind of design that is used as a tool to create not only things but ideas. For them, design is a means of speculating about how things could be—to imagine possible futures. This is not the usual sort of predicting or forecasting, spotting trends and extrapolating; these kinds of predictions have been proven wrong, again and again. Instead, Dunne and Raby pose “what if” questions that are intended to open debate and discussion about the kind of future people want (and do not want).

Speculative Everything offers a tour through an emerging cultural landscape of design ideas, ideals, and approaches. Dunne and Raby cite examples from their own design and teaching and from other projects from fine art, design, architecture, cinema, and photography. They also draw on futurology, political theory, the philosophy of technology, and literary fiction. They show us, for example, ideas for a solar kitchen restaurant; a flypaper robotic clock; a menstruation machine; a cloud-seeding truck; a phantom-limb sensation recorder; and devices for food foraging that use the tools of synthetic biology. Dunne and Raby contend that if we speculate more—about everything—reality will become more malleable. The ideas freed by speculative design increase the odds of achieving desirable futures.

From the Publisher. Jaron Lanier is the bestselling author of You Are Not a Gadget, the father of virtual reality, and one of the most influential thinkers of our time. For decades, Lanier has drawn on his expertise and experience as a computer scientist, musician, and digital media pioneer to predict the revolutionary ways in which technology is transforming our culture.