BE OPEN Picks

In Broken, craft and design writer Katie Treggiden asks whose judgement determines whether something is worth saving. Through profiles and essays, she examines repair as a practice that preserves function, carries stories and creates opportunities for social change. The question extends beyond the object’s condition to the values that make replacement seem obvious and continued care seem exceptional.

The differences between the practices give the book its interest. Celia Pym’s attention to damage opens a way of reading the life already lived through a garment. Wear supplies information about a person’s movements and attachments, so a repair responds to a particular history. The object’s value cannot be understood solely through how closely it resembles its original, undamaged state.

Bridget Harvey’s repaired jumper, carried as a placard at the 2015 Global Climate March, makes a different argument. Its stitched message encourages people to mend and consume less, while the reused garment enacts that position. The material supports the statement. Seen alongside quieter forms of repair, it shows how the same act can restore usefulness, preserve memory or become a public intervention, depending on its context.

Treggiden’s introduction draws on the idea of broken world thinking, which places maintenance and repair at the centre of how societies continue to function. Her discussion moves from the repair of possessions towards the repair of relationships and damaged systems. This enlarges the scope of creative responsibility: work begins with attending to an existing situation and deciding what should be preserved, altered or allowed to end.

The book is most persuasive as an argument about value and attention. Readers should keep questions of labour, affordability and access beside its examples: the appeal of a skilled repair does not make that repair equally available to everyone. For emerging designers, its practical contribution is to change the starting point of a brief. An existing thing brings constraints, knowledge and attachments that a new object has yet to acquire. Working with those conditions can make repair a demanding form of authorship.

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Streetfight: Handbook for an Urban Revolution by Janette Sadik-Khan and Seth Solomonow is a practical account of how streets can be redesigned around people rather than treated almost exclusively as corridors for cars. Drawing on Sadik-Khan’s years as New York City transportation commissioner, the book follows the creation of pedestrian plazas, protected cycle lanes, faster bus routes and safer crossings.

Its most useful lesson is that meaningful urban change does not always begin with a vast construction project. Paint, temporary materials, adjusted signals, new seating and a different allocation of road space can test an idea quickly and make its effects visible. Photographs, diagrams and project examples help readers understand both the design decisions and the political work required to put them into practice.

For students and emerging designers, Streetfight demonstrates how observation and evidence can turn an ordinary street into a design brief. Pedestrian movement, traffic speed, business activity, safety and public response all become forms of feedback. The book also shows why communication is part of design: even a successful proposal must be explained, tested and adapted if it is to win public confidence.

This BE OPEN Pick takes the October theme from urban principles to visible action. It presents the street as a shared civic space and reminds young designers that limited budgets or complex institutions do not eliminate the possibility of change. Carefully chosen interventions can demonstrate an alternative, generate evidence and open the way to longer-term transformation.

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Disorder is the first book devoted to the work of graphic designer Chris Ashworth, tracing the ‘Swiss Grit’ approach that has shaped his practice from Ray Gun magazine in the late 1990s to contemporary typography, branding and music-related projects.

Across 488 pages, the book brings together published and unpublished work from 1997 to 2024, including marked-up chromalins, diary entries, discarded layouts, found-type photography and hands-on typographic experiments. Ashworth combines modernist principles with a rougher street sensibility, treating imperfection, revision and serendipity as part of the creative process rather than noise to be removed.

For students of graphic design and visual communication, Disorder offers a valuable counterpoint to a screen-dependent workflow. The book deliberately positions itself as an AI-free zone and argues for the creative value of working away from the computer. Its pages show how physical materials, manual interventions and unexpected mistakes can generate ideas that might never emerge from a perfectly controlled digital process.

This BE OPEN Pick follows August’s focus on AI and digital art with a different question: what remains uniquely valuable about making by hand? Disorder does not reject technology so much as defend the role of friction, accident and personal judgement in creative work. It encourages young designers to see process itself as a visual language – one in which corrections, scraps, tests and imperfections can become part of authorship.

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Glitches & Glory: The Digitally Rewired Art of David Szauder is a visually striking exploration of how digital errors, fragmented data and machine processes can become a distinctive artistic language.

David Szauder combines visual programming, generative techniques and image-making to create works that move between memory, identity and technological disruption. In his practice, the glitch is not simply a failure to be corrected. It becomes a creative event: an unexpected break in an image that reveals new structures, textures and ways of seeing.

For students interested in digital art, photography, graphic design, animation and generative media, the book offers both visual inspiration and a useful creative principle. New tools do not have to produce smooth, perfect or predictable results. Distortion, repetition, instability and technical accidents can be treated as material, allowing the artist to explore the relationship between human intention and computational behaviour.

This BE OPEN Pick brings an experimental digital perspective to the Bookshelf. It encourages young creatives to look closely at what happens when technology does something unexpected and to consider whether error can become authorship, whether damaged images can carry memory, and how the imperfections of machines may open space for a more personal visual voice.

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Jeong: The Spirit of Korean Craft and Design by Hyo Jung Lee is a visually rich introduction to Korean craft and design, bringing together traditional objects and contemporary creations through the cultural idea of jeong — a sense of attachment, care and emotional connection that grows over time.

The book presents Korean design not as a single aesthetic, but as a living dialogue between heritage and innovation. Ceramics, textiles, furniture, embroidery, lacquerware and everyday objects appear alongside contemporary works, showing how material knowledge can travel across generations and adapt to new contexts.

For young artists and designers, Jeong is valuable because it links form, material and feeling. It asks readers to notice how objects carry relationships: between maker and material, user and object, memory and function, tradition and experiment. This is especially relevant for students interested in craft, interiors, product design, sculpture, visual culture and sustainable approaches to making.

This BE OPEN Pick adds a broader cultural perspective to the Bookshelf. It reminds emerging creatives that innovation does not always mean breaking with the past; sometimes it begins with looking again at inherited techniques, tactile intelligence and the emotional life of objects.

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Frank Chimero’s The Shape of Design is a short and thoughtful book about the creative process, storytelling, craft and the human purpose behind making things.

Rather than focusing on technical rules, software skills or visual trends, the book asks broader questions about what design is for. How do ideas take shape? How do designers make decisions? Why do stories matter? What makes creative work meaningful to other people?

Accessible, reflective and beautifully written, The Shape of Design is especially useful for students and young creatives who are still developing their own professional language. It encourages readers to think about design as a way of creating relationships between people, objects, ideas and experiences.

This BE OPEN Pick is a valuable companion for anyone beginning a creative path. It reminds us that design is not only about solving problems or producing attractive outcomes. It is also about attention, generosity, curiosity and the ability to give form to meaning.

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“A History of Art for Beginners and Students: Painting, Sculpture, Architecture,” published in the late 19th century, offers a foundational exploration of art history. This introductory text covers painting, sculpture, and architecture from ancient to medieval times, aiming to educate beginners and students on the development and significance of art across cultures. The book begins by distinguishing between fine arts and mechanical arts, stressing the cultural and educational importance of artistic pursuits. Painting is introduced as a vital element of the fine arts, emphasizing its role in education and imagination.

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Broken into sections covering the fundamental elements of design, key works by acclaimed designers serve to illustrate technical points and encourage readers to try out new ideas. Themes covered include form, narrative, color, type and image, ornament, simplicity, and wit and humour.

The result is an instantly accessible and easy to understand guide to graphic design using professional techniques.

From the momentous invention of the needle some 40,000 years ago to the development of blue denim, this classic guide covers the landmarks of costume history, the forms and materials used through the ages, as well as the ways in which clothes have been used to protect, to express identity, and to attract or influence others.

For the fifth edition, Amy de la Haye, former Curator of Twentieth-Century Dress at the Victoria and Albert Museum, has revised the final chapter and included a new section addressing the fashion industry in the twenty-first century. She discusses the expansion of the Asian luxury market; the rise of “fast fashion,” stylists, and celebrity endorsements; and the influence of the Internet.

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Written by celebrated landscape artist, instructor, and author Mitchell Albala, this richly informative and beautifully illustrated volume leads you step by step through his approach to the genre, from establishing a composition using basic shapes to applying time-tested color strategies, with all-new lessons, practical exercises, and special topics,

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