Author: Frank Chimero
The Shape of Design is a short, accessible book about the creative process and the intersection of storytelling, craft and improvisation. The Shape of Design is a map of the road where we dance rather than a blueprint of it. It strives to investigate the opportunities of exploring the terrain, and it values stepping back from the everyday concerns of designing. … If you’ve read Frank Chimero’s essays or watched his talks online, you’ll recognise many of the ideas collected here. I’ve spent a year reading, re-reading, highlighting and annotating this book, and I’m sure I’ll keep coming back to it. If you work in design or a related field, and you think about what your work means and where it fits in the world, give this book a read.
The Shape of Design is a short, accessible book about the creative process and the intersection of storytelling, craft and improvisation. It strives to investigate the opportunities of exploring the terrain, and it values stepping back from the everyday concerns of designing. It attempts to impose a meaningful distance in order to patterns in the work and assess the practice as a whole. One can observe, from this distance, two very fundamental things about design that are easy to miss in the midst of all of this movement. First, design is imagining a future and working toward it with intelligence and cleverness. We use design to close the gap between the situation we have and the one we desire. Second, design is a practice built upon making things for other people. These two things dictate our relationship to the world and our bond to one another. They form the foundations of the design practice, so our work should revolve around these truths.