Designerly Ways of Knowing: A Working Inventory of Things a Designer Should Know takes Michael Sorkin's celebrated list format and rebuilds it for design practice — politicising the discipline through prompts on colonialism, visual pollution, scent, and the ethics of simplicity.
About This Book
Inspired by Michael Sorkin's essay-list 'Two Hundred and Fifty Things an Architect Should Know,' Danah Abdulla compiled a parallel inventory for designers rooted in critical inquiry and political conscience. The result is neither a curriculum nor a manifesto, but something more usefully unstable: a sequence of prompts that move between the sensory and the structural, the personal and the systemic. Abdulla's list asks designers to reckon with what critical theory fails to address — including the colonial experience — while also attending to how symbols and emblems shape feeling, and why the drive toward simplicity carries its own dangers. For students and practitioners interrogating the social responsibilities of design, this compact volume is a genuinely generative starting point.
Key Features
- 64 pages of poetic, prompt-based inventory drawing on critical theory, decolonial thought, and design ethics
- Authored by Danah Abdulla, Program Director of Graphic Design at Camberwell, Chelsea and Wimbledon Colleges of Arts
- Published by Onomatopee, 2018
What You'll Discover
- How the list form — as pioneered by Sorkin for architecture — can be redeployed as a tool for critical design reflection rather than technical instruction
- The ways dominant strands of critical theory have failed to account for the colonial experience, and what that means for design practice
- Why the pursuit of simplicity in design is not neutral, and the conditions under which it becomes a form of erasure
- How non-visual registers — scent, symbol, emblem — shape the experience of designed environments and communication
About the Author
Danah Abdulla (born 1986) is a Palestinian Canadian designer, educator, and researcher. She serves as Program Director of Graphic Design at Camberwell, Chelsea and Wimbledon Colleges of Arts, and is a founding member of the Decolonising Design platform.
Specifications
- Format: Softcover
- Pages: 64
- Dimensions: 110 x 175 mm
- Language: English
- ISBN: 9789083449883
- Publisher: Onomatopee
- Publication Date: 2018
Perfect For: Graphic design students and educators, practitioners engaged with decolonial and critical design discourse, and anyone rethinking the ethical foundations of design knowledge.