World Design

In a series of fascinating tales, Gene Kohn explains how he helped build one of the most successful architecture firms in the world, offering inspiring lessons on business leadership and design innovation that can be applied to many fields.

Forthright and engaging, Kohn examines both award-winning achievements and missteps in his 50-year career in architecture. In the process, he shows how his firm, KPF, has helped change the buildings and cities where we live, work, learn, and play.

In Designs for the Pluriverse Arturo Escobar presents a new vision of design theory and practice aimed at channeling design's world-making capacity toward ways of being and doing t….

Magnolia "Mack" Bishop is staring down the barrel at single motherhood--thanks to an unsolicited personal picture her husband texted another woman that quickly went viral among every mom group in town. But she's determined to not let it distract her from the professional victory she's inches away from: securing Charleston's prestigious Historic Preservation Design Fellowship, the apple of every local designer's eye.

99% Invisible is a big-ideas podcast about small-seeming things, revealing stories baked into the buildings we inhabit, the streets we drive, and the sidewalks we traverse. The show celebrates design and architecture in all of its functional glory and accidental absurdity, with intriguing tales of both designers and the people impacted by their designs.

Bill Bryson and his family live in a Victorian parsonage in a part of England where nothing of any great significance has happened since the Romans decamped. Yet one day, he began to consider how very little he knew about the ordinary things of life as he found it in that comfortable home. To remedy this, he formed the idea of journeying about his house from room to room to “write a history of the world without leaving home.”

Throughout history, across cultures and countries, silk has reigned as the undeniable queen of fabrics, yet its origins and evolution remain a mystery. In a gorgeous and sweeping narrative, Silk weaves together its intricate story and the indelible mark it has left on humanity.

The world is working exactly as designed. And it’s not working very well. Which means, we need to do a better job of designing it. Design is a craft with an amazing amount of power. The power to choose. The power to influence. As designers, we need to see ourselves as gatekeepers of what we are bringing into the world and what we choose not to bring into the world.

In How Design Makes the World, best-selling author and designer Scott Berkun reveals how designers, from software engineers to city planners, have succeeded and failed us. From the airplane armrest to the Facebook “like” button, and everything in between, Berkun shows how design helps or hinders everyone, and offers a new way to think about the world around you.

The incredible untold story of how Ann Lowe, a Black woman and granddaughter of slaves, rose above personal struggles and racial prejudice to design and create one of America's most famous wedding dresses of all time for Jackie Kennedy.

A follow-up to her popular Encyclopedia of the Exquisite, Jenkins' new book offers a string of historical anecdotes structured around the hours of the day, celebrating the unusual, fantastic, and beautiful ways people have spent time throughout the ages.

Take your games to the next level with advice from more than 60 of the best board game designers in the world. Game design is hard. We all need sound advice to guide our work and help us become better at the craft. In this book you'll find incredible wisdom and insight from the top designers in the industry today.

Coco Chanel created the look of the modern woman and was the high priestess of couture. She believed in simplicity, and elegance, and freed women from the tyranny of fashion. She inspired women to take off their bone corsets and cut their hair. She used ordinary jersey as couture fabric, elevated the waistline, and created bell-bottom trousers, trench coats, and turtleneck sweaters. In the 1920s, when Chanel employed more than 2,000 people in her workrooms, she had amassed a personal fortune of $15 million and went on to create an empire.

In this ambitious global project, 200 women share their inspiring stories of success and courage, love and pain, redemption and generosity. This updated, abridged edition includes powerful new interviews and stirring quotes alongside selections from the original book, all answering the same five questions. This new edition is an illuminating audiobook for the modern woman and a lovely gift for mothers, sisters, daughters, and friends.

In this compelling audiobook, Scot McKnight shares his personal experience in the Church as well as his study of the Apostle Paul to answer this significant question: What is the Church supposed to be?

Written and read by the man whose resumé boasts "Inventor of the World Wide Web," Weaving the Web is the not-to-be-missed story of how the Internet came to be and where its creator thinks it's going.

With more than 50,000 copies sold in Denmark, this book has been on the bestseller list since its publication in 2017. Barack Obama used a secret competitive advantage to win two elections. Companies such as Google, Amazon and Novo Nordisk use the same insight to stir up innovation, increase compliance, improve the work environment and sell more products. And successful management groups in the C20 index have started using it as their preferred strategy. But what kind of insight are we talking about here? The answer is - behavioural design.

As a workplace strategist and business coach, Erica Keswin has spent over 20 years working with top business leaders and executives to build successful organizations that honor relationships. Featuring case studies from top brands such as, Lyft, Starbucks, Mogul, and SoulCycle, to name a few, Bring Your Human to Work distills the key practices of the most human companies into applicable advice that any business leader can use to build a “human workplace”.

Dorothy Draper has one last chance to prove she chose the right course for her life. With the restoration of The Greenbrier resort at her fingertips, Dorothy aspires to give new life to a place that’s sentimental to her, and to bring a new spark to interior design.

Sara Hendren invites us to rethink the things and settings we live with. What might assistance based on the body’s stunning capacity for adaptation—rather than a rigid insistence on “normalcy”—look like? Can we foster interdependent, not just independent, living? How do we creatively engineer public spaces that allow us all to navigate our common terrain? By rendering familiar objects and environments newly strange and wondrous, What Can a Body Do? helps us imagine a future that will better meet the extraordinary range of our collective needs and desires.

Gabrielle and Ben Blair have been raising kids for over two decades. Through the years, they’ve charted their own unconventional path: working from home before remote work was a thing; uprooting their kids four, five, six times–including a move to France where they enrolled in local schools without knowing the language. It’s been a unique parenting journey characterized by experimentation, trial and error, decisions prompted by financial or psychological necessity, varying levels of anxiety and tension, despair, and hope.