Nuestro móvil, nuestro ordenador, la alfombra del salón o el flexo bajo el que trabajamos cuentan una historia sobre nosotros. Deyan Dudjic, director del Design Museum de Londres, reflexiona en este libro sobre el papel que desempeñan los objetos en nuestra vida: por qué el diseño nos sirve de consuelo y de demostración de poder, y a dónde se nos está llevando el afán de poseer cada vez más. Una invitación a reflexionar sobre conceptos como el lujo, la moda o el arte en términos de cómo los vivimos... y de cuánto nos cuestan.

shelved at: 91 : Architecture / price : £20.00

shelved at: 91 : Architecture / price : £20.00

It was an interesting book, until the last couple of chapters. I am finding that experts who write these sort of books can't help but put the spotlight on either a favorite artist or genre, whether or not if fits the book and this one was no different.

I enjoyed the look at the development and rise of design and it's place in our society. Where he started to loose me was when he tried to point out how undervalued design was compared to "high" art. I'm not sure how you can compare the monetary value of something that is mass produced vs. a one of a kind creation but he tried real, real hard to do so.

Some of my problems also come from when he started to go on and on about the modern art movement. This is a personal bias as I don't care much for modern art and think people who try to give it to much meaning and value are simply trying to hard to force something that doesn't exist. But also this is where he started to put his own interest in an art form over the theme of the book. Instead of just discussing the effect of modern art, he started listing artists and their work, without giving any images to back them up. That gets boring fast.

I enjoyed the first half of the book immensely, but feels he lost his way at the end, which is a shame as I now feel I don't know what his main point was through it all. ( )

Sudjic is director of the Design Museum in London, so you might expect him to have plenty to say about design. And yet this book reads more like a series of lectures than a coherent manifesto. Perhaps that's due to the difficulty of pinning down what design actually is (and what it isn't) - and the fact that Sudjic is torn between liking nice things and being uncomfortable with the volume of modern consumption (he says he's 'disgusted' with it, but I think the niceness of things wins out).

Sudjic is writing for an audience au fait with design, but he is still accessible. My favourite part of the book was the chapter on design archetypes, which (after discussing the Anglepoise lamp) moved on to banknotes.

"With nothing more than an image and a choice of font ... a banknote has to convince us that it is worth more than the paper on which it is printed ... steel engravings still seem to denote a valuable piece of paper with more conviction than, say, a watercolour sketch. ... Look at the way that the states of the former Yugoslavia rushed to design themselves banknotes even before they had internationally recognized governments. Out went the heroic steelworkers and apple-cheeked peasant women bringing in the harvest ... you could tell that Macedonia was going to run into problems imply by looking at a national currency decorated with images of white-coated technicians sitting at computer screens, which projected - and had - the financial probity of a tram ticket."

Unfortunately, a lot of what Sudjic says in this book is either preposterous or banal. But it was worth reading for the occasional spot-on and acerbic comment - such as carbon offsetting being the modern equivalent of buying papal indulgences. ( )