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This is one of many design books available at David Krut Bookstores.

The most forward-thinking trends across the field of design are celebrated in Design Life Now, a publication from the National Design Triennial in conjunction with the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum’s exhibition series and luxury publisher Assouline.

The curators set out to listen to the pulse of the design world and the wider community looking for designers, firms and projects that answered the question “Why design now?” Across the varied and diverse fields of design the curators settled on eighty-seven designers and firms to exhibit. Designers confronted issues of sustainability, accessibility, universality, fair trade, conservation, health, education, creative capitalism, and the underserved audiences by creating systems, services, and social networks, alongside their physical products, all with the aim of communicating and informing their audience.

Design Life Now focuses on four principal ideas that characterise elements of the design world during the last three years: emulating life, community, hand-crafted and do-it-yourself design, and transformation. Presented in the book are designs that emulate the natural world – either through form or movement – in fields from game design to robotics, architecture to graphic design, products ranging from kayaks to sneakers.

Design Life Now demonstrates how design has responded to the growth and dissemination of information through the Internet, which in turn has led to the evolution of vast communities that interact across enormous distances via blogs, film and animation, graphic design, limited-edition toys, and music. In the era of “unstoppable self-education” that the Internet has helped foster, the designs showcased in Design Life Now reflect the larger electronic community through the presence and use of blogging and opensource software.

Rather than advertising glamourous interiors and luxurious things to buy, resources and guidelines are offered to ordinary people as a way of learning, understanding, and adapting the world around them. A major segment of Design Life Now features designers whose work reflects a renewed appreciation for craft and personalisation through the use of specialised techniques such as embroidery and beading. The exhibition also explores the transformation of form and materials through design, whether by bringing the outside into architectural interiors or by using light to dissolve and transform surfaces.

Keywords: Books, Design