Customer Reviews

Designing the 21st Century (Specials)

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Overall, I like this book because you can't beat 300+ pages of full color pictures for 10 bucks. It includes the work or many designers, each designer getting about 4-6 pages. For each designer, there is a picture of the designer, a quote by the designer (in English, German, and French), and several examples of the designer's work. The one thing that really frustrates me is that there are no descriptions of the objects. There is only a title and a year, such as "Handmixer, 1999," but I am often left wondering how an item works or how it evolved in the designer's mind. I guess for that we have to rely on other books, but if all you're looking for is a breif overview of modern design with a lot of nice pictures, this is a good way to go.

This book profiles industrial designers and design firms (mostly situated in Europe, as stated by the last reviewer).

It's a great book if you're interested in where industrial and product design is going, rather than where it's been. The product photographs and computer-generated illustrations are plenty and colourful (common to Taschen publications).

I have yet to find any other comparable books on modern, ultra-contemporary and futuristic designs. A must for anyone studying ID or product design or anyone with an interest in design.

I like this book, like many of the books from TASCHEN it has great print quality and has a great design itself.
The examples inside are some that I have encountered already others I had never seen before.
Remember since this is not a ten volume work it is only a selection of designs rather than an exhaustive list.
Keeping this in mind, I like the choices the editors made. It has designers from all over the world, is in three languages like most of Taschen publications of this kind and the print quality as mentioned before is superior.

I have never had a book like this before with so much nice images of products and so easily accessable at the same time. A book written in three languages at the same time is a great idea.

I bought this book to get a survey of current ideas about product design, but it is almost exclusively European in scope. There are a few Asian designers, but I counted only one from all of Latin America and nobody from Africa. Maybe it's a function of the world economy that most products are being designed in Europe, but in a book that is soliciting ideas about the next century, in which Europe becomes less and less central, I feel the geographical scope was limited for no good reason, and the result is that you start hearing the same few simple ideas over and over. Also, many of these designers are not very articulate. An opportunity missed.