Book Notes: The Shape of Design by Frank Chimero
February 1, 2016 · 1 min read
Ryan Arnaudin
Product Design Lead
Austin // TX
Nearly five years after it first launched on Kickstarter, I read Frank Chimero’s excellent design handbook, The Shape of Design. The Kickstarter hardcover edition looks to be beautifully crafted, so if you can get your hands on that it would be the recommended way to go. If not, do as I did and grab the free ebook from Frank’s site.
I’d recommend The Shape of Design to any designer, and to anyone curious about design. Don’t expect a practical how-to. It’s a short, philosophical book about why we make things, written as a series of witty, metaphorical meditations. A few sections come off as self-indulgent, but it’s a quick read, and it will make you think harder about design, which (if you’ve found yourself here) is never a bad thing.
A few of my Kindle highlights:
To be human is to tinker, to envision a better condition, and decide to work toward it by shaping the world around us.
The Shakers have a proverb that says, “Do not make something unless it is both necessary and useful; but if it is both, do not hesitate to make it beautiful.”
We should be iterating on how we answer our needs, and not necessarily on the way our old solutions have taken shape.
All of this implies that design is a field of outcomes and consequences more than one of artifacts.
Design gains the ability to nourish when it acts as a gift rather than as something to create yearning. We get to close loops of desire rather than open new ones.
The world shapes us, and we get to shape the world.
Get it free at The Shape of Design.