You are here

The Culture of Design
Share

The Culture of Design

Third Edition
  • Guy Julier - Aalto University, Finland, University of Brighton/Victoria & Albert Museum, UK


December 2013 | 296 pages | SAGE Publications Ltd

What is the social impact of design? How do culture and economics shape the objects and spaces we take for granted? How do design objects, designers, producers and consumers interrelate to create experience? How do new networks of communication and technology change the design process? Thoroughly revised, this new edition:

  • explores the iPhone
  • digs deep into the digital with a new chapter on networks and mobile technologies
  • provides a new chapter on studying design culture
  • explores the relationship of design to management and the creative industries
  • supports students with a revamped website and all new exercises
This is an essential companion for students of design, the creative industries, visual culture, material culture and sociology.

 
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

 

This is a thoughtful update on previous editions; Julier takes time to pick up on 'sticky' issues and explain them in detail without sounding pedantic or over-bearing. This new edition will be a welcome addition to contemporary design culture and of use to designers and students alike.

Dr Juliette MacDonald
Edinburgh College of Art

Just as the domains of design studies and practice are in a constant state of evolution, this Third Edition of The Culture of Design has evolved to present a comprehensive discussion of contemporary design as a socio-technical cultural phenomenon in theory and practice.

Professor Laurene Vaughan
RMIT University

Few books have had the success of producing a new scholarly field in the way of Guy Julier’s The Culture of Design. This book has proved to be the cornerstone in the curriculum of courses and new educations in Design Culture Studies.

Professor Anders V. Munch
University of Southern Denmark

The Culture of Design remains the only historically situated yet comprehensively contemporary account of how design as a creative industry materializes values into everyday lifestyles. Julier's capacity to extend his framework to cover the large and diverse changes design has undergone - in relation to digital economies and the rise of design thinking and social design - since the last edition, attest to his analyses' validity and power.

Cameron Tonkinwise
School of Design, Carnegie Mellon University

The third edition of The Culture of Design has again improved upon earlier versions. It has valuable new parts on economy that improve it and open new possibilities for research. Prof. Julier has also managed to keep the valuable features of his book. I believe there will be a global market for the book, and I find it still a valuable contribution to design education as well as research.

Ilpo Koskinen
Aalto University, Helsinki

We use the book as an illustration about what design might look like.

Dr Jules Verlaan
Faculty of Civil Engineering & Geosciences, Delft University of Technology
January 16, 2018

This is one of these design books that offer a very good overview of all aspects of design culture.

Mrs Ann Laenen
Communications , University of Malta
April 20, 2016

This book is excellent in connecting design to current scholarship in other disciplines. It inspires a myriad of possibilities to study design as related to culture. The case studies are recent and illuminating.

Dr Javier Gimeno Martinez
Humanities , Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
November 19, 2015

Excellent overview of design methodologies, practices and industry agendas

Mr Christian Lloyd
Department of Design, Huddersfield University
November 22, 2015

great book for completing research and to use for further reading

Mr Brendon Pettit
creative studies, Great Yarmouth College
January 13, 2015

For instructors

Purchasing options

Please select a format:

ISBN: 9781446273593
£39.99
ISBN: 9781446273586
£117.00