Phil Patton’s Notable Books of 2013
The Afterlife of Emerson Tang, Overdrive, Hartmut Esslinger.
Nonfiction, Product/Industrial Design
- filter by:
- all genres (0)
Novels about design are rare, novels about car design rarer still. Of course, The Afterlife of Emerson Tang, Paula Champa’s story about great cars of the past and new ones of the future, is about much more. It is ultimately about time, memory, and change.
Built around a mysterious car, the book is also about an entrepreneur redesigning the technology of the automobile for a greener future. Champa has based her novel on reporting and observation of today’s automotive world, from high-tech garages to concours d’elegance where high net-worth collectors assemble.
Ultimately, however, the book is a story about hope and regret, grief and self-expression, wrapped around an old-fashioned mystery. “I mused on this,” Champa writes. “What is a vehicle but a private capsule? One in which the mundane errands and memorable adventures of a life are accomplished. By some alchemy, through this constant association, a mingling, a transmutation, can occur. In memories alone, a car is capable of encapsulating an entire life. Or more than one. . . . I wondered: Do you possess a car, or does it possess you?”
The process by which news turns into history is a strange one: nothing ages faster than new technology, for instance. But the personal computer is making its transition to the area of history—the laptop, the PDA, the mobile phone all will follow soon. One recent part of the process is a new book from Hartmut Esslinger, the founder of frogdesign (“Frog”), the firm that worked with Apple Design in the 1980s. Esslinger’s book is an illustration of this process in action. (In a token of 1960s, counterculture informality, Esslinger insisted on spelling the name frogdesign, with a lowercase initial, which was undone by the firm’s later acquisition by a larger corporation.)
Esslinger emphasizes the idea of “strategic design” as a key business discipline. His other clients included Lufthansa, A.T.&T, Louis Vuitton, Sony, and SAP. The book also includes work with his students at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna.
Praise for Apple design has tended to focus on Jonathan Ive and his staff and ignore the longstanding, but quite different contributions of Esslinger and Bob Brunner. In a reminder of the company’s earliest days, Esslinger includes photos of “concept” products mocked up for Apple. These early Apple products suggest a wide level of experimentation. They include upright workstations, amazingly contemporary laptops, small computers (“Baby Mac”) and the “MacPhone,” a slate with stylus and telephone handset—attached with a cord.
In retrospect, the question that is clear and is the nature of Apple’s success was figuring out which technologies were mature enough for which designs. The stylus-driven screens, say, or integrated telephones or some of the cooler concepts were not commercially ready in the late 1980s.
There is a consistency in appearance to the concepts. Frog’s achievement was to bring to Apple the idea of a consistent corporate design language, as practiced by Sony and IBM (or Kodak for that matter.) Esslinger named his “Snow White.”
The language stipulated the regular use of color, gridded ventilation areas, and consistently radiused corners for all Apple products. Its name referred initially to seven Apple product lines—“dwarves”—that were to be designed but also perhaps an echo of the fairy-tale Snow White. Esslinger had been inspired by the design consistency of Sony and of Braun. But he saw the limits of pure, cold geometric modernism. Snow White evoked “Snow White’s coffin”—the famous nickname given to an iconic Braun radio/record player hi-fi unit.
Steve Jobs left Apple in 1985 and Frog’s work for the company soon stopped. Frog went on to work on Job’s start-up, Next.
Apple was only one of the high-tech companies and projects Esslinger and frogdesign worked on. One interesting example, around the same time as Apple’s Newton handheld, was the 1993 A.T.&T. EO “personal communicator.”
It is amazing how fast high-tech projects and products can be forgotten—think of Palm Pilots and CD ROMs. But it is critical that designers record these early days of digital technology to avoid repeating mistakes. Many quirks of design turn out to have been the results of technological limits of the time that ended up embedded in our common standards. And many early ideas that were impractical at the time could now be successfully revived. One of the virtues of Esslinger’s book is to give us a longer-view technological perspective at a time when we narrowly focus on this month’s or even this week’s technological innovations. His lesson is about matching design and technology.
The world-weary Orson Welles intones this line in The Third Man, Carol Reed’s classic 1949 film based on Graham Greene’s novel: “In Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love—they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.” But R. James Breiding’s Swiss Made shows that Switzerland produced much more than that, and besides, the cuckoo clock is a pretty big deal.
Clocks speak of a culture of time and punctuality and of timepiece making, from wristwatch to Swatch, that says much about modern life as well as about Switzerland. Swiss Made, which is subtitled “The Untold Story Behind Switzerland’s Success,” is one of the rare titles to put design in the context of business case studies and cultural economics.
It is full of fascinating stories of familiar products seen from unfamiliar angles. Switzerland is a land not only of hardware but also of software, pharmaceuticals, and prosthetic inventions of all sorts. The stories show the unanticipated ways in which ideas develop. Innovation in elevator design, for instance, at Schindler, came from such unexpected areas as scheduling cars with the so called “hall call” algorithm.
The tale of how the Nespresso coffee system, at first feared by executives as a potential cannibalizing rival to Nescafé instant coffee, took years to grow up at the edges of Nestlé’s empire. Developed at Nestlé’s branch in Japan, and promoted through clubs and shops there, it ended up a very different product before becoming a global success. Breiding explains that “Nespresso took more than a decade to make a dent in the market and Nestlé’s Chairman refused to put a machine in the board room because he was skeptical of its success. Now it is the most profitable among Nestlé’s 4,000 products.”
The source of innovation, Breiding argues, is the Swiss economic model. It has produced high average income without a disproportionate concentration of wealth at the top. Nestlé and Novartis may be familiar Swiss firms, but the book is also full of surprising examples of Swiss companies built on design, such as Logitech, the pioneer of the computer mouse and accessory design, established in 1982. (And of all the Swiss innovations, the cuckoo clock is not one: Breiding says it was developed in Germany.)
Announcements
Now is Better by Stefan Sagmeister
Now is Better
By Stefan Sagmeister
Publisher: Phaidon Press
Published: October 2023
Combining art, design, history, and quantitative analysis, transforms data sets into stunning artworks that underscore his positive view of human progress, inspiring us to think about the future with much-needed hope.
Design Emergency: Building a Better Future by Alice Rawsthorn and Paola Antonelli
Design Emergency: Building a Better Future
By Alice Rawsthorn and Paola Antonelli
Publisher: Phaidon Press
Published: May 2022
Rawsthorn and Antonelli tell the stories of the remarkable designers, architects, engineers, artists, scientists, and activists who are at the forefront of positive change worldwide. Focusing on four themes—Technology, Society, Communication, and Ecology—the authors present a unique portrait of how our great creative minds are developing new design solutions to the major challenges of our time, while helping us to benefit from advances in science and technology.
.png)
Why Design Matters: Conversations with the World’s Most Creative People by Debbie Millman
Why Design Matters: Conversations with the World's Most Creative People
By Debbie Millman
Publisher: Harper Design
Published: February 22, 2022
Debbie Millman—author, educator, brand consultant, and host of the widely successful and award-winning podcast “Design Matters”—showcases dozens of her most exciting interviews, bringing together insights and reflections from today’s leading creative minds from across diverse fields.
Milton Glaser: POP by Steven Heller, Mirko Ilić, and Beth Kleber
Milton Glaser: POP
By Steven Heller, Mirko Ilić, and Beth Kleber
Publisher: The Monacelli Press
Published: March 2023
This collection of work from graphci design legend Milton Glaser’s Pop period features hundreds of examples of the designer’s work that have not been seen since their original publication, demonstrating the graphic revolution that transformed design and popular culture.
.png)
Meet Me by the Fountain: An Inside History of the Mall by Alexandra Lange
Meet Me by the Fountain: An Inside History of the Mall
By Alexandra Lange
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Published: June 2022
Chronicles postwar architects’ and merchants’ invention of the shopping mall, revealing how the design of these marketplaces played an integral role in their cultural ascent. Publishers Weekly writes, “Contending that malls answer ‘the basic human need’ of bringing people together, influential design critic Lange advocates for retrofitting abandoned shopping centers into college campuses, senior housing, and ‘ethnocentric marketplaces’ catering to immigrant communities. Lucid and well researched, this is an insightful study of an overlooked and undervalued architectural form.”
Die Fläche: Design and Lettering of the Vienna Secession, 1902–1911 (Facsimile Edition) by Diane V. Silverthorne, Dan Reynolds, and Megan Brandow-Faller
Die Fläche: Design and Lettering of the Vienna Secession, 1902–1911 (Facsimile Edition)
By Diane V. Silverthorne, Dan Reynolds, and Megan Brandow-Faller
Publisher: Letterform Archives Books
Published: October 2023
This facsimile edition of Die Fläche, recreates every page of the formative design periodical in full color and at original size, accompanied by essays that contextualize the work, highlighting contributions by pathbreaking women, innovative lettering artists, and key practitioners of the new “surface art,” including Rudolf von Larisch, Alfred Roller, and Wiener Werkstätte founders Koloman Moser and Josef Hoffmann.
Popular NowWeekMonth
- The Book We Need Now: New from Stefan Sagmeister
- Quote of the Day: Witold Rybczynski & Paradise Planned
- Summer Reading for Design Lovers: The Story of Architecture
- One Book and Why: Design School Dean Frederick Steiner Recommends . . .
- One Book and Why: Graphic Designer Stefan Sagmeister Recommends . . .
- Book List of the Week: Milton Glaser
- Imagining Information: Symbols, Isotype, and Book Design
- “The Notebooks and Drawings of Louis I. Kahn” To Be Reissued in a New Facsimile Edition
- Do We Need a Completely New Approach to Marketing Books?
- Question Everything: A Conversation with OK-RM’s Rory McGrath
Recent Articles
