Customer Reviews

The Origins of Things: Sketches, Models, Prototypes

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Can a book be deeply flawed and still be worth having? The Origin of Things delights and disappoints with every page. The book consists of a collection of design objects across the years, along with the sketches and related items used to achieve their final design, and the images are fascinating. The lowly paperclip gets the same treatment as the Frank Lloyd Wright vase, giving it the warhol treatment and reveal its beauty. The text, however, fails. It's often hasty and incomplete, or obtuse, or dry. The result is a tease that makes you hunger for more, or mystifies leaving you alone to look at the drawings and results. Often one sense a thrilling story behind the design process-- such as with Wim Gilles scooterette project, in which he fought to do a personal project to build a lightweight folding scooter/moped that got to final prototype then was killed preproduction-- but the story doesn't shine through. Not bad, but unsatisfying.

However, I've really enjoyed the book, no matter how disappointed I've been with an incomplete story, because it *is* so neat to look at beautiful, well crafted objects and their creation artifacts: the prototype kettle made of two pans soldered together, the x-rays that informed a silverware set, the raw and elegant drawings that became Lloyd Wright's vases.

Decide for yourself.

This book does not assert itself as a literal translation of history. The purpose of the book is to demonstrate shifts in thinking at the point in time when the proposition was entirely new and profound. Imagine being confronted with the humble paperclip - it is far too obvious to be important but indeed at one time it was very important and by the same logic it gives rise to the competing paperclips.

There are many me-too books showing the same drafts, models and concepts year after year. This is a book about being unique and essential - a point of origin. There is no attempt made here to offer a plagarism source for design school students - it is a mindspring for deeply philosophical elements in the design process and one which is strongly associated with numerous essays in social shaping and the nett-gains of being independently constructive.

It attempts to strike at the heart of great moments in design. It is a notepad / journal / concise-dictionary. If you want to take things further on any given topic there is ample material in any research library to do so. If you expect a literal step-by-step explanation of how everything has become meaningful through design then this book will not write that essay for you.