The Disobedience of Design: Gui Bonsiepe

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This volume presents for the first time in English a curated selection of writings by the design thinker Gui Bonsiepe from the 1960s to the present day. Addressing as it does questions of non-Western design and a design practice that is both radical and democratic, Bonsiepe's work has assumed new importance for current debates inspired by global political and environmental crises. Structured into three sections, the anthology first addresses Bonsiepe's work on design theory and practice, particularly in relation to the history and contemporary relevance of the Ulm design school, where Bonsiepe was a professor in the 1960s. A second section then represents Bonsiepe's writings after his move to South America in the 1960s and '70s, where he worked as a design consultant for the Allende government in Chile before the military takeover. In writings from the period, Bonsiepe explores the concept of design 'at the periphery' and the relationship of national design traditions and practices in Latin American countries to those of 'the core' - Western European and American design. The final section comprises selections of Bonsiepe's writings on design in relation to literacy and language, visuality and cognition. This indispensable volume includes new interviews with Bonsiepe as well as his original, previously unpublished texts.

Reviews

Wielding a powerful dissenting design imagination, Gui Bonsiepe is one of the most complex and accomplished design thinkers of our time. As this judiciously organized collection of his writings and projects demonstrates, beginning with his work in Ulm in the 1960s and then in Latin America after 1970, and continuing through to his pioneering development of ontological interface design in the 1990s through to his more recent critiques of "design thinking", The Disobedience of Design offers perspectives that challenge, radically, the limitations of contemporary European and American design practice and theory. -- Arturo Escobar, Emeritus Professor of Anthropology, University of North Carolina, USA

Author Bio

Gui Bonsiepe studied information design at the hfg ulm (Hochschule fr Gestaltung Ulm), Germany from 1955-1959, where he taught as Assistant Professor from 1960-1968. Since 1968 he has been a designer and consultant for industrialization policy in Chile, Argentina, and Brazil. From 1993-2003 he was Professor of Interface Design at the University of Applied Sciences, Cologne, Germany. He lives and works in Brazil and Argentina. Lara Penin is Associate Professor of Transdisciplinary Design at Parsons School of Design, USA. Author of An Introduction to Service Design: Designing the Invisible (Bloomsbury, 2018), her work is at the intersection of service and strategic design, participatory design and social justice. She is a graduate in Architecture and Urbanism from the University of So Paulo, Brazil, and has a PhD in Design from Milan Polytechnic University, Italy.