Explore the vast range of titles available.

Today designers often focus on making technology easy to use, sexy, and consumable. InSpeculative Everything, Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby propose a kind of design that is used as a tool to create not only things but ideas. For them, design is a means of speculating about how things could be -- to imagine possible futures. This is not the usual sort of predicting or forecasting, spotting trends and extrapolating; these kinds of predictions have been proven wrong, again and again. Instead, Dunne and Raby pose \"what if\" questions that are intended to open debate and discussion about the kind of future people want (and do not want).Speculative Everythingoffers a tour through an emerging cultural landscape of design ideas, ideals, and approaches. Dunne and Raby cite examples from their own design and teaching and from other projects from fine art, design, architecture, cinema, and photography. They also draw on futurology, political theory, the philosophy of technology, and literary fiction. They show us, for example, ideas for a solar kitchen restaurant; a flypaper robotic clock; a menstruation machine; a cloud-seeding truck; a phantom-limb sensation recorder; and devices for food foraging that use the tools of synthetic biology. Dunne and Raby contend that if we speculate more -- about everything -- reality will become more malleable. The ideas freed by speculative design increase the odds of achieving desirable futures.

In a changing world everyone designs: each individual person and each collective subject, from enterprises to institutions, from communities to cities and regions, must define and enhance alife project. Sometimes these projects generate unprecedented solutions; sometimes they converge on common goals and realize larger transformations. As Ezio Manzini describes in this book, we are witnessing a wave of social innovations as these changes unfold -- an expansive open co-design process in which new solutions are suggested and new meanings are created. Manzini distinguishes betweendiffuse design(performed by everybody) andexpert design(performed by those who have been trained as designers) and describes how they interact. He maps what design experts can do to trigger and support meaningful social changes, focusing on emerging forms of collaboration. These range from community-supported agriculture in China to digital platforms for medical care in Canada; from interactive storytelling in India to collaborative housing in Milan. These cases illustrate how expert designers can support these collaborations -- making their existence more probable, their practice easier, their diffusion and their convergence in larger projects more effective. Manzini draws the first comprehensive picture of design for social innovation: the most dynamic field of action for both expert and nonexpert designers in the coming decades.

Folk art is now widely recognized as an integral part of the modern Chinese cultural heritage, but in the early twentieth century, awareness of folk art as a distinct category in the visual arts was new.

Conceptualised in 1920s Japan by Yanagi Sôetsu, the Mingei movement has spread world wide since the 1950s, creating phenomena as diverse as Mingei museums, Mingei connoisseurs and collectors, Mingei shops and Mingei restaurants. The theory, at its core and its adaptation by Bernard Leach, has long been an influential 'Oriental' aesthetic for studio craft artists in the West. But why did Mingei become so particularly influential to a western audience? And could the 'Orientalness' perceived in Mingei theory be nothing more than a myth? This richly illustrated work offers controversial new evidence through its cross-cultural examination of a wide range of materials in Japanese, English, Korean and Chinese, bringing about startling new conclusions concerning Japanese modernization and cultural authenticity. This new interpretation of the Mingei movement will appeal to scholars of Japanese art history as well as those with interests in cultural identity in non-Western cultures.

When organizations apply old methods of problem-solving to new kinds of problems, they may accomplish only temporary fixes or some ineffectual tinkering around the edges. Today's problems are a new breed -- open, complex, dynamic, and networked -- and require a radically different response. In this book, Kees Dorst describes a new, innovation-centered approach to problem-solving in organizations: frame creation. It applies \"design thinking,\" but it goes beyond the borrowed tricks and techniques that usually characterize that term. Frame creation focuses not on the generation of solutions but on the ability to create new approaches to the problem situation itself.The strategies Dorst presents are drawn from the unique, sophisticated, multilayered practices of top designers, and from insights that have emerged from fifty years of design research. Dorst describes the nine steps of the frame creation process and illustrates their application to real-world problems with a series of varied case studies. He maps innovative solutions that include rethinking a store layout so retail spaces encourage purchasing rather than stealing, applying the frame of a music festival to understand late-night problems of crime and congestion in a club district, and creative ways to attract young employees to a temporary staffing agency. Dorst provides tools and methods for implementing frame creation, offering not so much a how-to manual as a do-it-yourself handbook -- a guide that will help practitioners develop their own approaches to problem-solving and creating innovation.

Folk art is defined as creation that does not belong to the classical or modern arts but is generally included in traditional or domestic handcraft production. Works of folk art are generally of anonymous origin; their producers have not graduated from aesthetic or artistic studies in the narrowest sense. The discovery of the phenomenon of folk art as a valuable part of culture is due to the development of the science of art history at the end of the 19th century. From the aesthetic and historical point of view, it occurred in parallel with the gradual disappearance of this phenomenon in the European societies that were in the process of industrialization. At the end of the 19th century, with the gradual disappearance of handicraft traditions in Central and Western Europe and later in Eastern Europe, folk art lost its original foundation. Due to theories of primitivism, popular art was given special attention during this period by - and thanks to -artists of the modernist trend. During this period, folk clothes and clothing motifs were seen frequently. In particular, various pictures, colors, symbols, lines and images representing flowers were used quite often. What the grounds for all these people are, their importance, their depth, why they are repeated and how they are repetitive patterns are hidden in these clothes and works. Preservation of the national culture and the local folklore is very important and we think, first and foremost, that we should understand the significance of these symbols and colors that represent our heritage. The aim of this study is to analyze colors and symbols in Romanian and Turkish Folk Art with an analogical approach. In this study, examples of colors and symbols in Romanian and Turkish Folk Art were examined from areas such as clothing, weaving and ceramics and the use of symbols, the meanings of colors were conveyed and supported by patterns and it was concluded that there were similarities as well as regional differences between the two countries.

Folk art education is an important way to inherit and develop traditional culture. In this paper, the cascade propagation of typical decentralized Internet-social networks is modeled as a propagation dynamic graph model, and an enhanced graph-aware neural network is proposed through the analysis of the learning process of neural graph networks. A further recurrent graph-aware neural network is proposed for the characteristics of information dissemination in the decentralized Internet, and the transmission and development of traditional culture in folk art education are analyzed based on this network model. In folk art education, the most common type of traditional culture dissemination is ink painting, accounting for 20.32%, which is 6.91%, 12.35%, and 14.86% higher than other types, respectively. From 2014 to 2021, the percentage of Internet-based communication media increased from 12.47% to 24.78%, an increase of 12.31 percentage points. The analysis based on the decentralized Internet can accurately extract the characteristics of traditional culture integrated into folk art education, which helps to inherit further and promote the excellent traditional culture.

In A Saving Science, Eric Ramírez-Weaver explores the significance of early medieval astronomy in the Frankish empire, using as his lens an astronomical masterpiece, the deluxe manuscript of the Handbook of 809, painted in roughly 830 for Bishop Drogo of Metz, one of Charlemagne's sons. Created in an age in which careful study of the heavens served a liturgical purpose—to reckon Christian feast days and seasons accurately and thus reflect a \"heavenly\" order—the diagrams of celestial bodies in the Handbook of 809 are extraordinary signifiers of the intersection of Christian art and classical astronomy. Ramírez-Weaver shows how, by studying this lavishly painted and carefully executed manuscript, we gain a unique understanding of early medieval astronomy and its cultural significance. In a time when the Frankish church sought to renew society through education, the Handbook of 809 presented a model in which study aided the spiritual reform of the cleric's soul, and, by extension, enabled the spiritual care of his community. An exciting new interpretation of Frankish painting, A Saving Science shows that constellations in books such as Drogo's were not simple copies for posterity's sake, but functional tools in the service of the rejuvenation of a creative Carolingian culture.