Glimmer: How Design Can Transform Your Life, and Maybe Even the World Hardcover - 2009

by Warren Berger

The first book to reveal how thinking like a designer can help solve thegreatest challenges we face in business, society, and our daily lives.

What can we learn from the ways greatdesigners think-and how can it improve our world? Inthis highly original book by journalist Warren Berger, incollaboration with celebrated designer Bruce Mau, ten groundbreakingprinciples of design are shown in action-addressingbusiness, social, and personal challenges and improving the waywe think, work, and live.

Glimmer takes readers on a journey through today'sfascinating world of design, where the formerly distinctdisciplines of graphic, product, and social design areundergoing "smart recombinations." In the cutting-edgestudios of Mau and other visionaries, everything is ripefor reinvention-including the ways businesses function,children learn, and communities thrive. Designers are solvingproblems at an unprecedented pace today by using improvedtechnology and the highly practical design principles describedin this book, such as "Ask stupid questions," "Make hopevisible," "Work the metaphor," "Embrace constraints," and"Begin anywhere." Glimmer inspires readers to apply these sameprinciples to their own life challenges.

While celebrated designers work on re-creatingthe world, Berger reveals the growing grassroots "glimmermovement" in which everyday people are emerging asdesigners and problem solvers. Readers will be fascinated by how"transformation design" is reinventing companies andaddressing thorny social problems. Berger shares stories of howburned fingers, wrenched backs, and mixed-up pills all led toingenious new product designs.

In a time of anxiety and retrenchment, thishopeful yet hardheaded book illuminates "the glimmer ofpossibility and potential-that first spark of an innovativeidea or a life-changing plan." According to Berger, "This faintlight is all around us and also within us, if we can learn torecognize and nurture it." The best designers already know howto transform that glimmer of possibility into the steady glow ofcreation and innovation-and with the inspiration of Glimmer,we're now all able to do the same.