Christoph Thun-Hohenstein

Erwin Wurm's sculptures - with their protruding fingers, hands, lips, mouths, breasts, bellies, noses, and ears - force their way out of a clay mass. Text in English and German.

Otto Prutscher (1880-1949) was an architect and a designer in all applied arts media, as well as an exhibition designer, teacher and member of all the important arts and crafts movements, from the Secession to the Wiener Werkstätte and the Werkbund. The MAK - Museum of Applied Arts in Vienna - possesses a comprehensive graphic bequest and many significant objects from Prutscher's design oeuvre. Selected examples of Prutscher's creative work document his long-lasting influential role as a designer and artistic adviser for decorative art companies from Johann Loetz to Thonet. The publication conducts an audit of Prutscher's work as a pacemaker of Viennese modernism - over twenty years since the last show in Vienna and seventy years on from his death. Text in English and German.

Hello, Robot. Design Between Human and Machine investigates how robotics is becoming part of our everyday lives. The exhibitions shows that design in its traditional function as a mediator is indispensable if robots are to become a visible reality and not just remain hidden in washing machines, cars and cash machines. The volume clarifies where we already encounter these intelligent machines and where we may come across them in the near future: in industry, in the military and in everyday settings; at nurseries and retirement homes; in our bodies and in the cloud; when shopping and having sex; in video games and, of course, in film and literature. In a series of in-depth essays and interviews, experts such as the science fiction author Bruce Sterling and the design duo Dunne & Raby explore the question of how we deal with our environment becoming increasingly digital, smarter and more autonomous. They highlight our often ambivalent relationship to new technologies and discuss the opportunities and challenges that are posed to us as individuals and as a society in this context. In this regard, Hello, Robot. broadens the scope of the discussion to the ethical and political questions with which we are faced today in the light of technological advances in robotics, whilst confronting us with the contradictions that are often found in the answers to these questions.

The book Design Unplugged illustrates very lucidly that, in the digital age, analogue hand sketches still fulfil an important role as a form of illustration, having taken on a new quality. Thomas Feichtner, an internationally established designer based in Vienna, has rediscovered hand sketching as a key element of his design process. Sketches in the form of mental notes – vague, unadulterated and unfiltered. Over years he has created designs that share pencil sketches as a common ground and visual link. His book does not contain any illustrations of completed work in the field of furniture product design, but only shows pencil sketches – some of which previously unpublished – that have preceded the products. They provide an authentic insight into the daily work of the successful product designer. Design reduced to pencil and paper – unplugged – rather than the full orchestration of all digital possibilities. Design Unplugged illustrates a personal approach to design, which the products alone would not reveal.

In Ovid's Metamorphoses, Eoos is one of the chariot draft horses of the sun god Helios; the design studio EOOS founded in Vienna 20 years ago is also a driving force, in the today's globalized world of design. This is verified by more than 130 design awards and an impressive number of patents. EOOS pursues a consistent reduced design language, alternating between archaic and high-tech and entirely free from stylistic affectations. This first and long overdue monograph on EOOS is divided into three parts, and is a source of inspiration, analysis, and documentation. Part one is based on a series of images, which gives insight into the “making of” - into the way in which EOOS approaches the design process. It shows references, links, drawings, research material, and finished products. In part two, EOOS assumes the form of first-person narrator to report on selected designs, backgrounds, and details of their histories. Part three documents in chronological order all the EOOS products that have gone into production, as well as projects and design experiments conceived purely by and for EOOS.