Customer Reviews

Creating Value by Design: Thoughts and Facts

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This is a compendium of brief essays by the Director of Design at Philips. It is extremely interesting as a showcase for his thoughtfulness and what goes into the design process at Philips, from electronic minaturization and city lighting to ethical concerns about the environment and even the concerns of developing countries and their (unprofitable) needs. I was truly rivetted by much of it, and saw certain areas of design I knew in new ways while learning about others. The Second volume, FACTS, consists largely of beautiful photos of his group's products. At the very least, I will consider Philips products first now, as I know some of what is behind them.

I would recommend this book to any design student: Philips is not just about profit, but about much much more. Marzano really gets you to think about both how and why products are designed the way that they are and, by extension, we can imagine the type of society and culture that we want in the future. It is a tour de force. As thought, this is truly outstanding and stimulates the appetite for further inquiry - just what a student needs.

That being said, there are many things that the book is not, about which potential readers should know. Marzano does not go into how his design group fits into Philips - as I understand it, it is autonomous from the business units and must sell its ideas to them and I suspect that lots of his ideas get lost in the brutal translation to profit-seeking manufactures. Morover, Marzano evokes rather than systematially develops or analyses his concepts; this is not necessarily a criticism, but the reader will have to seek them elsewhere for more consistent treatment. Finally, Marzano also gets into the public policy arena - arguing that designers should try to communicate their progressive ideas to politicians - which I found a worthy thought but rather vague and even naive on his part.

Warmly recommended.

I find this book to be one of the best recounts of product design methodology written for designers in a designer's language. It goes further than just presenting design theory. In Volume I, the thoughts and theory is presented and in Volume 2 the results of applying the theory are shown. This is not just a book that presents you with a dry theory. It basically tells you the how and the outcome of the design process in two beautifully designed Volumes.