The Culture of Design
Julier provides an important contemporary account of how design disciplines act and interact in the world…. an important resource for the student of design… perfection as a cultural studies text.
European Journal of Cultural Studies
A book which states on its back cover that it ‘establishes “design culture” as a distinct discipline’, has a lot to live up to. Fortunately, The Culture of Design delivers a great deal…
It sets out useful areas of explanation which provide superb reference material for teaching, and those areas explaining the production/consumption process will help students of design to understand objects in ‘action’, while those describing the present state of the design industry will allow newer students to understand their place in the circuit of culture.
I suspect that Julier can feel safe in the knowledge that along with his previous opus, the Encyclopaedia of 20th Century Design and Designers (Julier,1993), The Culture of Design is destined to become a fixture on the A-list of recommended reading for design courses for many years to come.
The Design Journal
Vol 4, Issue 3
Read the full review here.
Julier is more than a knowing consumer. He is a proven author in the field of design history with his concise, well-informed reference book—20th Century Design and Designers. He is also, and more significantly, a lecturer who teaches designers and therefore has a wholly justifiable bias in favour of the professional designer. And this is where the book scores best in the close attention devoted to the culture of design from inside the profession. It answers the need for a text that defends design practice from the types of postmodern critiques that attack the concept of authorship as superfluous.
It also gives designers a space from where to theorize their practice and the extent of their autonomy from within the realpolitik of a very volatile industry in a commercial world where consumption radier than production leads design.
Journal of Design History
Read the full review here.
This is a thoughtful update on previous editions; Julier takes time to pick up on ‘sticky’ issues and explain them in detail without sounding pedantic or over-bearing. This new edition will be a welcome addition to contemporary design culture and of use to designers and students alike.
Just as the domains of design studies and practice are in a constant state of evolution, this Third Edition of The Culture of Design has evolved to present a comprehensive discussion of contemporary design as a socio-technical cultural phenomenon in theory and practice.
RMIT University
Few books have had the success of producing a new scholarly field in the way of Guy Julier’s The Culture of Design. This book has proved to be the cornerstone in the curriculum of courses and new educations in Design Culture Studies.
The Culture of Design remains the only historically situated yet comprehensively contemporary account of how design as a creative industry materializes values into everyday lifestyles. Julier’s capacity to extend his framework to cover the large and diverse changes design has undergone – in relation to digital economies and the rise of design thinking and social design – since the last edition, attest to his analyses’ validity and power.