TABLE OF CONTENTS 1. The mainstream view of industrial design serving the narrow commercial interests of industry as opposed to a more general social role for design: developing tools for living.
2. The adventurous spirit and humanist vision of Italian design research from the 1960s, 1970s, and early 1980s has been an inspiration throughout this project. The design approach developed for electronic objects in this book is indebted to their research.
3. I feel myself that the writer s role, his authority and licence to act, have changed radically. I feel that, in a sense the writer knows nothing any longer. He has no moral stance. He offers the reader the contents of his own head, he offers a set of options and imaginative alternatives. His role is that of the scientist, whether on safari or in his laboratory, faced with a completely unknown terrain or subject. All he can do is to devise various hypotheses and test them against the facts. J. G. Ballard, Crash, 9.
4. In his introduction to Einstein s Monsters, Martin Amis (1987) writes that the purpose of the stories is no purpose at all except, I suppose, to give pleasure, various kinds of complicated pleasure (ix).
1. The idea of a post-optimal object arose from a general observation made by Marco Susani during a workshop at the Netherlands Design Institute in 1996. His suggestion, that products in general had reached an optimal level, and that designers should turn their attention toward...
