Encountering Things

Encountering Things brings together leading design scholars to explore the relationship between thing theory and design, exploring production processes and offering an engaging, theoretical perspective about the social and cultural lives of objects.
Focusing on the themes of process and product, the contributors investigate the productive interplay between the activity of design and the objects that design uses and produces. Chapters span the design disciplines and essays examine the processes by which objects, things, and artifacts are made; the lives of design objects; and things in their cultural contexts. Theoretical discussion is encouraged by in-depth case studies of things themselves. Each chapter includes an informational sidebar per essay and a useful glossary of key terms.

Leslie Atzmon is Professor of Graphic Design and Design History at Eastern Michigan University, USA.
Prasad Boradkar is Associate Professor and Coordinator of the Industrial Design Programme at Arizona State University, USA.

Introduction
Leslie Atzmon and Prasad Boradkar
Chapter 1
Filled with Wonder: Enchanting Androids from Cams to Codes
Betti Marenko
Chapter 2
When Objects Fail: Unconcealing Things in Design Writing and Criticism
Peter Hall
Chapter 3
What design tells us about objects and things
G. De Michelis
Chapter 4
Visual Essay-The Boombox Project
Prasad Boradkar and Lyle Owerko
Chapter 5
Theorizing the Hari Kuyô
Christine Guth
Chapter 6
Making Things Things
Nina Rappaport
Chapter 7
Distributing Stresses: The Development and Use of the Eames Dining Chair Metal
Michael J. Golec
Chapter 8
The Practically Living Weight of Convenient Things
Cameron Tonkinwise
Chapter 9
The Modern American Telephone as a Contested Technological Thing, 1920-1939
Jan Hadlaw
Chapter 10
Visual Essay-Montreal Signage Project
Matt Soar
Chapter 11
Connecting Things: Broadening Design To Include Systems,
Platforms, And Product-Service Ecologies
Hugh Dubberly
Chapter 12
Things as "Poor" Substitutes
Carl Knappett
Chapter 13
The Graphic Thing: Ambiguity, Dysfunction, and Excess in Designed Objects
Phil Jones
Chapter 14
Nothingness in April Greiman's "Does It Make Sense?"
Elizabeth Guffey
Chapter 15
Visual Essay-Indian Copper Objects
Prasad Boradkar
Afterword
Bill Brown
Bibliography
Index