Glimmer: How Design Can Transform Your Life, and Maybe Even the World

GLIMMER: HOW DESIGN CAN TRANSFORM YOUR LIFE, AND MAYBE EVEN THE WORLD offers insights into how great modern designers design new product lines from iPhones to social network systems, considering how the art of professional design can teach everyone how to achieve a breakthrough just by learning how designers think. It focuses on insights of designer Bruce Mau, a powerful modern designers, and considers the works of ten top designers, interviewing over 200 leading design experts to provide an analysis and synthesis of 'glimmer' thinking. Arts and design collections need this.

I found myself stopping on almost every page to reflect and consider how the ideas in this book could apply to my work and personal life.

This will hopefully be the start of a much larger discussion - opening up a discourse about how we use aspects of our experience and perceptions as well as space and time to create and design lives and interactions. He is offering us a platform for ongoing conversations about intentionality in the way we structure our awareness while he increases it!

This book is a nice surprise. It takes this big question -- what is design? -- and answers it in a sweeping book written in a thoroughly entertaining and readable style. Berger pulls the reader into the subject with plenty of fascinating and compelling anecdotes and interviews with a wide-ranging group of design stars. Think Malcolm Gladwell writing about design and its many facets. Glimmer explains designers' innovative approaches to taking on -- and solving -- such disparate problems as making a readable and useable prescription pill bottle, to getting a million teenagers to stop smoking, to accessing clean water to supply a small African village. Berger uses the design philosophy of Bruce Mau (to whom everything, including one's life, is a design project) to put in context the endless possibilities of what design can achieve, and on the way, improve our lives. This book presents a fascinating and hopeful look at design, and shows us how a "glimmer" could just maybe change the world. (OH -- and the illustrations and graphics add a very nice touch.)

And I thought "design" meant home furnishings or a snappy cereal box. It turns out that design is--or should be- a fundamental approach to human endeavor. Berger asks us to take step back from our assumptions of how things are and how things can be. This is not a hyper-philosophical treatise; rather, it takes real world examples and analyzes how design can improve the lot of one life or many lives. The provocative examples range from the simplest water portage "systems" in the developing world to high-tech innovation. This fascinating examination encourages one to think of the interconnectedness of design in individual terms as well as the implications for society as a whole.