Design culture foregrounds the relationships between the domains of design practice, design production and everyday life. Its focus is on contemporary designed objects and the networks between the multiple actors engaged in their shaping, functioning and reproduction. It acknowledges the rise of design and the role of the designer as key components and key challenges of the modern world.
Featuring an impressive range of international case studies, ranging from examples of everyday design such as IKEA furniture and amateur graphic design, to the role of the design professional and the functioning of design within organisations, Design Culture interrogates what this emergent discipline is, its methodologies, its scope and its relationships with other fields of study. The volume's interdisciplinary approach brings fresh thinking to this fast-evolving field of study.
Designers often claim they seek to "improve or maintain the habitability of the world of their fellow citizen". Design Culture may well be the appropriate theoretical framework I am longing for to better understand and explain what "habitability" is about.