The Design of Material, Organism, and Minds

Design is eminent throughout different disciplines of science, engineering, humanities, and art. However, within these disciplines, the way in which the term design is understood and applied differs significantly. There still is a profound lack of interdisciplinary research on this issue. The same term is not even guaranteed to carry the same meaning as soon as one crosses over to other disciplines. Therefore, related synergies between disciplines remain largely unexplored and unexploited.This book will address design in the hope of promoting a deeper understanding of it across various disciplines, and to support Design Science as a discipline, which attempts to cover the vast number of currently isolated knowledge sources.

• Design
• Design Research
• Design Science
• Design of Minds
• Designer
• Designer Drugs
• Dialogical Design
• Modeling
• Sound-Color-Space Project
• Verification
• applied virtuality
• computer games
• design of music visualization

From the reviews:

“This book is a collection of essays on design … . The introduction … clearly outlines the objective of the book and summarizes the main points of each of the eleven chapters that follow. People with a general interest in design … want to look it up as an account of practitioners about their fields of expertise. … it might be found interesting by those who … seek an introduction to some of the diverse ways in which design manifests itself throughout our contemporary culture.” (Jorge Frascara, Information Design Journal, Vol. 18 (3), 2010)

“This set of papers attempts to create that concept through an eclectic set of examples: the design of the MINI automobile, computer games design, intelligent materials, drug design, architecture, and so on. … The chapters are written by different authors who clearly come from different backgrounds. This is good in terms of giving the book an interdisciplinary feel … . The individual chapters are interesting, and most have several brief case studies from the field at hand … .” (Joan Horvath, ACM Computing Reviews, January, 2011)

• ETH Zürich, Zurich, Switzerland

  Silke Konsorski-Lang

• Abt. Philosophie, ETH Zürich, Zürich, Switzerland

  Michael Hampe

Since March 1^st, 2008, Silke Konsorski-Lang has been Institute and Research Coordinator at the Institute for Visual Computing in the Department of Computer Science at the ETH Zurich. Prior to this, she was Managing Director of the Competence Center for Digital Design & Modeling. She earned her PhD degree (Dr.sc.techn.) at the ETH Zurich for her work on the investigation of video systems, especially 3D videos, in the field of architecture.

Since October 1^st, 2003, Michael Hampe has been full Professor of Philosophy in the Department of Humanities, Social and Political Sciences at the ETH Zürich. He studied Philosophy, Psychology and German Literature in Heidelberg and Cambridge and got his M.A. in Heidelberg in 1984. From 1984 to 1989 he studied Biology, specializing in Neurobiology and Genetics, and was employed as assistant in Philosophy, both at Heidelberg University.

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