Andrea Lipps

An exploration of the ways in which designers are striving to transform our relationship with the natural world. Designers today are striving to transform our relationship with the natural world. While the modern industrial age gave way to designs that vastly improved human enterprise through technology, there were unintended and destructive consequences for the environment. Humans are intrinsically linked to nature yet our actions have frayed this relationship, forcing designers to think more intentionally and to consider the impact of every design decision, from an artifact’s manufacture and use to its obsolescence. Designers are aligning with biologists, engineers, agriculturists, environmentalists and many other disciplines to design a more harmonious and regenerative future. Based on these new partnerships, designers are asking different questions and anticipating future challenges, which not only change the design process, but also what design means. Nature: Collaborations in Design includes over sixty-five international projects from the fields of architecture, product design, landscape design, fashion, interactive and communication design, and material research. More than 300 compelling and exquisite photographs, illustrations and content from data visualizations illustrate seven essays, which explain and explore designers’ strategies around understanding, simulating, salvaging, facilitating, augmenting, remediating and nurturing nature. Four conversations between scientists and designers delve into topics related to synthetic biology, scientific versus design lexicon, and recent shifts in the meaning of nature with a glossary illuminating scientific, technological and theoretical concepts and processes invoked by the designers.

Beauty celebrates design objects and practices that are exuberant, ethereal, atmospheric, experiential, exceptional or sublime. Objects of beauty provoke immediate reactions and demand judgment – asking us to redefine what is lovely or grotesque, formed or malformed, virtuous or subversive. They exalt experience as a living, unfolding exchange between people and things. Beauty honours the voices of designers from 26 countries around the world by conducting original interviews about their works and processes – showing that aesthetic innovation can drive change, whether materially, structurally or ethically. Beauty is an object to be touched, smelled and savoured. Each of the book’s seven sections is printed on a luxurious Japanese matte paper with its own fifth accent colour. A smaller signature of pages – printed on its own creamy pink paper at the centre of the book – is called the heart. It contains front and back matter and the responses from designers to the questions: What comes to mind when you hear the word beauty? What is the most beautiful time of day? What is the most beautiful place you’ve visited? The authors/edited selected the designers for the book and exhibition with a group of international curatorial advisors: Adélia Borges (Brazil), Claire Catterall (England), Kenya Hara (Japan), Mugendi M’Rithaa (South Africa), Sarah Scaturro (United States), Annemartine van Kesteren (Netherlands) and Suvi Saloniemi (Finland).