Thinking Design Through Literature Routledge Research in Design Studies Series

This book deploys literature to explore the social lives of objects and places. The first book of its kind, it embraces things as diverse as escalators, coins, skyscrapers, pottery, radios, and robots, and encompasses places as various as home, country, cities, streets, and parks. Here, fiction, poetry, and literary non-fiction are mined for stories of design, which are paired with images of contemporary architecture and design. Through the work of authors such as César Aires, Nicholson Baker, Lydia Davis, Orhan Pamuk, and Virginia Woolf, this book shows the enormous influence that places and things exert in the world.

Chapter One - Culture: Identity, Displacement, Exile; Chapter Two - Politics: Prosecution, Obfuscation, Possibility; Chapter Three - Beings: Unruly Things, Golems, Cyborgs; Chapter Four - Technology: Connections, Disruptions, Amplifications; Chapter Five - Domesticity: Cleaning, Mending, Caring; Chapter Six - Consuming: Shopping, Collecting, Hoarding; Chapter Seven - Sensing: Perceptions, Vibrations, Visions; Chapter Eight - Mortality: Death, Burial, Resurrection

Susan Yelavich is Professor Emerita, Design Studies, Parsons School of Design, The New School. NYC.