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The Bauhaus school in Germany has been understood through the writings of its founding director Walter Gropius and several artists who taught there: Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, and László Moholy-Nagy. Far less recognized are texts written by women in the school’s weaving workshop. The weavers’ innovativeness can be attributed to their notable textiles products: from colorful, expressionist tapestries to the invention of sound-proofing and light-reflective fabric. But it was also here that, for the first time, a modernist theory of weaving emerged—an investigation of its material elements, loom practice, and functional applications. What Bauhäusler like Anni Albers, Gunta Stölzl, and Otti Berger accomplished through writing, as they harnessed the vocabulary of other disciplines (painting, architecture, or photography), was a profound step in the recognition of weaving as a medium-specific craft—one that could be compared to and differentiated from others. Writing On Weaving finds new value and significance in the work the Bauhaus weavers did as writers. Employing a method that bridges art history, design history, craft theory, and media and cultural studies, it raises and seeks to answer several, interdisciplinary questions: Are the concepts of “craft” and “medium” isomorphic, or structurally distinct? How might the principles and methods of weaving challenge modernist assumptions about distinct media? To what degree are crafts and media reliant on theoretical, textual armatures to be specific? How does a medium accrue a gendered value, as “feminine?”

Design involves envisioning what we need that doesn’t yet exist, and realizing possible futures better than what we have. This book applies that way of thinking about design to a range of poorly functioning systems – our schools, highways, and cities – and services – be they public, private, and non-profit – that either no longer meet our needs or that have underperformed for too long. We rarely think of systems and services as designed and, as a result, we tend to accept their failures the way we do the weather. But we should not give into such acquiescence. Designed every bit as much as the products we buy and the environments we inhabit, our systems and services deserve as much critical scrutiny and creative re-imagining as we would give any other design. This book, drawing from previously published essays by the author, makes the case for applying design thinking to the “invisible” systems we depend on for our daily lives and then shows what that might mean for our educational and belief systems, our infrastructure and public realm, and our political and economic systems. In the process, the author challenges the design assumptions that have led to so much poor performance: that our schools cannot teach creativity, that our governments cannot predict the disasters that befall us, that our health system will protect us from pandemics, that our politics will remain polarized, that our economy cannot avoid inequality, and that our industry cannot help but pollute the environment.

This book explores how a perception of children as imaginative and “naturally” creative was constructed, disseminated, and consumed in the United States after World War II. I argue that educational toys, playgrounds, the smaller middle-class house, thousands of postwar schools, and children’s museums, were designed to cultivate an ideal of imagination in a growing cohort of Baby Boom children. Psychologists avidly studied creativity after 1950, and their research was embraced by the educational toy industry, invoked in parenting guides, taught in school arts classes, and erected in new school buildings and museums. Enthusiasm for encouraging creativity in children met and countered Cold War fears of failing competitiveness and the postwar critique of social conformity, becoming an emblem of national revitalization. I describe how a belief in children’s capacity for imagination and independent thinking was transformed from an elite concern of the interwar years to a fully consumable and aspirational ideal that has not yet abated. I emphasize the ways that material goods and spaces embodied this abstract social and educational discourse. However, I also argue that things and spaces were not passive receptacles, but material actors that actively transformed a popular understanding of creativity during a crucial period of educational reform, economic expansion, and Cold War anxiety. Historicizing, rather than essentializing, the idea of childhood creativity, reveals how this notion continues to haunt everyday things, the built environment, and American culture.

This book is the first biography of artist and industrial designer John Vassos. The book positions him as a significant figure in the development of a self-conscious industrial design profession during the late 1920s and 1930s into the postwar period. The big four founders of the profession have received ample attention, but Vassos, who was a key pioneering figure, has primarily been forgotten. Vassos deserves scholarly attention as he was the only prewar industrial designer to specialize in designing for the then emergent mass media of radio and television. The book creates a complex portrait of an artist and designer whose early illustration work criticized the commercialization of modern life but whose later design work took for granted those same qualities and attempted to accommodate people to them. The book relies on unpublished records and correspondence to trace in detail the evolution of his ideas about modernity and the design process. Vassos was the Radio Corporation of America’s key consultant designer through the rise of radio and television and even computing, including the design of the "first" tv set, as such his work reveals how designers created shapes for media tools which have no prior form.