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Silvio Lorusso

What Design Can't Do: Essays on Design and Disillusion

Name: What Design Can't Do: Essays on Design and Disillusion
Brand: Ingram
SKU: WHAT-DESIGNERS-CANT-DO
Price: 25.00 USD
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Design is broken. Young and not-so-young designers are becoming increasingly aware of this. Many feel impotent: they were told they had the tools to make the world a better place, but instead the world takes its toll on them. Beyond a haze of hype and bold claims lies a barren land of self-doubt and impostor syndrome. Although these ‘feels’ might be the Millennial norm, design culture reinforces them. In conferences we learn that “with great power comes great responsibility” but, when it comes to real-life clients, all they ask is to “make the logo bigger.”

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What Design Can't Do: Essays on Design and Disillusion

This book probes the disillusionment that permeates design. It tackles the deskilling effects provoked by digital semi-automation, the instances of ornamental politics fashioned to please the museum-educational complex, the nebulous promises of design schools. While reviving historical expressions of disenchantment, Silvio Lorusso examines present-day memes and social media rants. To depict this disheartening crisis, he crafts a new critical vocabulary for readers to build upon. What this exposé reveals is both worrying and refreshing: rather than producing a meaningful order, design might be just about inhabiting chaos.

What was once a promising field rooted in problem-solving has become a problem in itself. The skill set of designers appears shaky and insubstantial – their expertise is received with indifference, their know-how is trivialised by online services, their work is compromised by a series of unruly external factors. If you see yourself as a designer without qualities; if you feel cheated, disappointed or betrayed by design, this book is for you.

Author

Silvio Lorusso

Publisher

Set Margins'

Format

Softcover

Pages

352

Size

7.87 x 5.11 Inches

ISBN

978-9083350134

About the author

Silvio Lorusso

Silvio Lorusso is an Italian writer, artist and designer based in Lisbon, Portugal. He publishedEntreprecariat(Onomatopee 2019, reprint at Set Margins’ publications 2026) andWhat Design Can’t Do(Set Margins’ publications) in 2023. Lorusso is an assistant professor at the Lusófona University in Lisbon and a tutor at the Information Design department of Design Academy Eindhoven. Lorusso’s work touches upon visual communication, memes, post-digital publishing, entrepreneurship and precarity, digital platforms, design culture and politics, creative coding, art and design education, videogames. He has been a member of Varia, the Center for Everyday Technology, as well as part of the editorial board of Italian graphic design magazine Progetto Grafico.

Silvio Lorusso

What Design Can't Do: Essays on Design and Disillusion

What Design Can't Do: Essays on Design and Disillusion

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