|
 
Cover designed by Chip Kidd; illustration by Ellen Lupton.
> download hi-res cover art
Design Your Life: The Pleasures and Perils of Everyday Things is a new book by Ellen and Julia Lupton (St. Martin’s Press, May 2009). It’s also the name of our blog, Design-Your-Life.org, which we started in the summer of 2005. The blog generated over 1,200 separate articles and countless comments by dozens of contributors.
This simpler iteration of our site, launched in October 2008, was created to celebrate the publication of our book. For technical reasons, entries posted before August 2008 are no longer available.
Design, we argue, is more than the stuff you buy at high-end stores or the modern look that moves products at Target and IKEA. Design is critical thinking. It is a way of looking at the world and wondering why things work, and why they don’t. Use design to recognize the forms of pleasure and productivity hiding in the messes of daily life, be it a room, a laundry bin, a pile of papers, or a busy schedule. Design is creative thinking. Use it to stage memorable parties without burning out, to squeeze meaning and joy out of commercial holidays, and to enact your own vision of what’s hip, cool, beautiful, or just.
Design Your Life is about objects and how we interact with them. Illustrated throughout with paintings of things both ordinary and odd, this book casts a sharp eye on parenthood, housekeeping, entertaining, time management, crafting, and more. We take an irreverent and realistic look at everything from the objects on our counters and the rooms we live in to the attitudes that promise us happiness in an increasingly fragile world. Speaking to readers who are both design-conscious and consumer-wary, Design Your Life taps into the popular interest in design as well as people’s desire to make their own way through a mass-produced world.
> Buy the book on Amazon
|
THE BOOK