THE BOOKBUY THE BOOK
THE BLOGDesign Your Life: The Pleasures and Perils of Everyday Things
THE LINKSApartment Therapy
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ABOUT DESIGN YOUR LIFE
Cover designed by Chip Kidd; illustration by Ellen Lupton. 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.  ABOUT ELLEN AND JULIA LUPTON
Photo by Bob Moeller > download hi-res photo ELLEN AND JULIA LUPTON are educators, citizens, mothers and identical twins who write together and separately about matters concerning design and everyday life. ELLEN LUPTON is curator of contemporary design at Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum in New York City and director of the Graphic Design MFA program at Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore (MICA). Design is the subject of all her work. She has produced numerous books and exhibitions on obscure topics, including The Kitchen, the Bathroom, and the Aesthetics of Waste (1992), Mechanical Brides: Women and Machines from Home to Office (1993), and Skin: Surface, Substance + Design (2002). She has recently become obsessed with bringing design awareness to broader audiences. Thinking with Type (2004) is a basic guide to typography directed at everyone who works with words. D.I.Y.: Design It Yourself (2006), co-authored with her graduate students, shows general readers how to make books, business cards, wedding invitations, and other useful communications. A little Photoshop is a dangerous thing, and this handy guide makes it even more so. Ellen has contributed to various design magazines, including Print, Eye, I.D., and Metropolis. She is a 2007 recipient of the AIGA Gold Medal. A frequent lecturer around the U.S. and the world, Lupton will speak about design to anyone who will listen. JULIA LUPTON teaches English and writes books about Shakespeare at the University of California, Irvine. In 2007, she was named a Chancellor’s Fellow in recognition of her contributions to Shakespeare studies. She is currently Director of the Humanities Core Course and the co-founder of the UCI Design Alliance. At night, she blogs about design with her twin sister Ellen Lupton (www.design-your-life.org). Julia contributed several essays to Ellen’s book DIY: Design It Yourself. Ellen and Julia went on to co-author the sequel, DIY Kids, released in Fall, 2007 by Princeton Architectural Press. DIY Kids shows Generation Tween how to save the world one recycled cereal box and two graffiti bracelets at a time. “It’s never too early,” the twins explain, “to talk to your child about design.” According to a review on Etsy.com, D.I.Y. Kids “breaks down the complex ideas behind design and branding into easy, simple activities for kids to understand.” DIY Kids has been published in Portuguese by the Brazilian press Cosac Naify. > Interview with Ellen at Design Taxi (Scroll down when you get there!) |
