What is post-branding?

Design Fiction is a method to vividly render tangible futures by creating material artifacts that represent the implications of change. Design Fiction is as much a mindset as it is a methodology whereby foresight, research, expectations, strategic direction, and planning can be cohered into representational ‘artifacts from possible futures.’from possible futures. Design fiction opens up new conversations and considerations whilst augmenting existing, well-trodden research and foresight practices.

Over fifteen years in the making, this book explores the origins of design fiction, and details the practical approach to assessing the consequences of decision making by creating tangible artifacts from possible futures. Design fiction opens up new conversations and considerations whilst augmenting existing, well-trodden research and foresight practices. The writers of this book have used design fiction approaches with clients such as Apple, Warner Bros, IKEA, Edelman, Dubai Museum of the Future, Google and Facebook, and they aim to bring these techniques to a wider audience through the publication of this book.

Written by Julian Bleecker, Nick Foster, Fabien Girardin and Nicolas Nova in collaboration with Patrick Pittman and Chris Frey of No Media Co. Designed by Chris Lange

This book frequently uses the word ‘we’. We, as in the general public, engaged citizens, humans of planet Earth… And we, Mouna Andraos and Melissa Mongiat, together with our team at Daily tous les jours, as we seek new models for living together. Welcome to our journal. 

We crave living in environments that support us, nourish us and inspire us. We dream of places to go through our lives together, inclusively and tolerantly. Can we re-enchant the raw material of our collective daily experiences? We have been creating interactive art and narrative experiences in public spaces around the world for fifteen years. Using music, dance, art, and other mediums to emphasize the joyful, whimsical, and unexpected, we create moments of connection and care between strangers. 

Through this book, we share our experience in building an emergent practice combining technology, storytelling, performance, and design, while asking fundamental questions to create meaningful work in a world in crisis. Meet us outside the urban masterplan, where we experiment with infrastructure for the human spirit.

Moving beyond the usual genres of form in graphic design’s canonical history, ‘Designing History’ proposes a model centred on bureaucratic instruments of identity, ownership, value, and permission: money, passports, certificates, property deeds, etc. It considers the implications of a design history of the document, where the designer shifts from being a practitioner of conventional design histories to become subject and agency of bureaucratic authority. The book is a revised edition of ‘Immutable: Designing History’ (2022) and includes an extended essay that contextualizes the project as a remapping of graphic design’s historical, pedagogical, and practical assumptions.

Often dissident, sometimes adherent, Nothing About is, in essence, indefinable because it is adaptive and fluid. Speculative or hands-on, this discipline – if we can call it that – displays all the ambivalences of our contemporary lifestyles: superficial and profound, profane and divine, present everywhere and nowhere, and often regarded as futile, even though it could nonetheless destroy the most beautiful of insides. This book brings together a variety of intellectual tools and insights – polysemic and ambiguous, bespoke and improvised, ornamental and criminal, spanning media, technology, the arts and other, often undefined fields – that analyze the impact of the discipline on contemporary design. In the end, what makes Nothing About charming is that this inside – insofar as it is still defined as such – has only the humble ambition of accompanying beings, both animate and inanimate, within their environment, like a friend who is never far away. 

Introduction by Javier Fernández Contreras. Text contributions by Daniel Zamarbide, Line Fontana & David Fagart, Valentin Dubois & Bertrand Van Dorp, Camille Bagnoud & Ahmed Belkhodja, Javier F. Contreras & Roberto Zancan, Paule Perron, Philippe Rahm, Youri Kravtchenko, Leonid Slonimskiy, Simon Husslein, Vera Sacchetti, Jan Dominik Geipel, Valentina De Luigi, Jean-Pierre Greff.

In a world propelled by swift technological progress and perpetual obsolescence, women frequently find themselves adapting and altering their daily experiences in order to remain functional. In the 21st century, as technology purports to comprehensively assess and address women’s conditions and physical discomfort, Cycles, the Sacred and the Doomed delves deeply into the realm of female health technologies, revealing a space where science, holistic methods, and mythology converge. This book challenges the idea of combining ancient wisdom with modern innovation and takes readers on a multidisciplinary journey to explore the intricacies of female’s health.

There is no one-size-fits-all approach to design. It is as much a practice as it is a methodology or way of thinking, a multifaceted discipline that moves with society’s progression. Throughout the creative process behind every design, learnings happen. Designers learn to adapt, adjusting their positions relative to the context. This volume spotlights self-organised, spontaneous, sporadic, and informal educational initiatives within the realm of creative practices, both historical and contemporary. The initiatives presented here show that any attempt to control a narrative and limit it to a single understanding risks stifling potential innovations that might arise from unexpected origins.

Featuring contributions from Amanda Ariawan, Andriew Budiman, Carlos Romo-Melgar, Chabib Duto Hapsoro, Czar Kristoff J.P., Filippo Sciascia, Fiorent Fernisia, Gideon Kong, Jacob Lindgren, Jeremy Sharma, Keni K. Soeriaatmadja, Limestone Books, Livian Aurel V. Purwanto, Mac Andre Arboleda, Nishkra, Prananda L. Malasan, R.A. Dita Saraswati, Reza Afisina, Rouzel Waworuntu Saad, Savira Aristi, Trevor Embury, and Virliany Rizqia Putri.

Do you remember the last time you were looking forward to the future? We're not talking about flying cars or floating screens. We're talking about a credible vision of a better time to come. So when was the last time? How did it look? How did it feel?

Have a glance at page 223, about two-thirds in. This is a portrait of Frantz Fanon by Milton Glaser. One of the biggest names in commercial graphic design of the 20th century, painting the likeness of the giant of anti-colonial thought. Let’s leave aside the question of "who's the Milton Glaser of today?" for now, but if there was one, whose portrait would they be painting?

What we’re attempting, in these few hundred pages, is to track our favorite examples of the visual language of revolt and solidarity in the 1960s and 1970s, put them in dialogue with our most beloved works of graphic design of those decades, and celebrate the heroes who made them. 
Creative currents flowing from Paris to Tokyo, Cuba to Milano, Beirut to New York, Berkeley to London, with innovations and revolutions (both political and artistic) happening every year. Causes supported by incredible talent and inspiring design that activated people, uplifted liberation movements, advanced the struggles for social justice, and created bonds of global solidarity.

Sadly this cross-pollination between commercial art and the political ended around the late 1980s and those two worlds are now completely isolated from one another.
Why do movements not produce beautiful and memorable visuals anymore? Why do the biggest image makers of today not lend their talents to the good fights that need their help? We hope that these will intersect again, and the first step is to study their history.Friends, we are here to tell you that fighting for a better world is, in fact, not only extremely cool, but the coolest thing you can do — and we have the images to prove it!

Ramdane Touhami and Émile Shahidi have spent years researching and traveling to assemble a huge collection of books, rare periodicals and radical art that will soon be available for consultation in person and online, and of which this little book is just a taste.

What does ‘user-friendly’ website mean if, on it, online behaviors like stalking, teasing, and ghosting — once considered peripheral — are now central to survival, care, and belonging? How to thrive without becoming an “Interdisciplinary Unicorn”: the state’s most beloved user-citizen fluent in multiple registers of production, optimization, and self-branding? How in this beautiful world is one supposed to log off, when surveillance and privacy erosion have been normalized? And how, oh how, could users possibly think of building the alternatives, when cool and cringe online acts, all activate the platform’s reward system: the unleashing of emoji-filled praise? How to resist the platform’s toxic seduction? 

Haunted by screenshots of early cyberfeminist websites and in dialogue with digital sages, web scripts, and business interests, media artist, web developer, and author Maisa Imamović embarks on a philosophical and practice-based crusade through the internet’s surface and its shadows. To expose the various ways of thriving online without surrendering to optimization, the book explores imperfect uses of perfect software, preservation of precarious web infrastructures, tactical content strategies, and experiments with autonomous financial systems — all wrapped in educational efforts to sustain criticality amid automation. Through these traversals beneath the scroll, Maisa finds her Webland: speculative, broken, and oftentimes, poetic infrastructure where logic destabilizes, binaries dissolve, and meaning evades monetization. But can a non-extractive internet exist beyond metaphor? Can poetry rewire protocol? Or will her sanctuary be absorbed into the very architectures it resists?

"In Maisa in Webland, Maisa Imamovic evokes the multidimensional, spontaneous human elements of the early web, using interviews, case studies, critical theory and fiction as her organic materials. She peeks behind the screen and through time to trace the subtle erosion of the web’s early utopian ideals to its cold and extractive present. Imamovic bravely wades through the swampy digital muck that mediates our everyday reality, examining its invisible psychic scaffolding with academic rigor, and a big dose of humor and heart. Was it an inevitable entropy, or an aberration? How and when did we get so off-course? Can we return? Do we want to? In Maisa’s Webland, we might very well be doomed, and maybe that’s a good thing. When the center of this tangled web no longer holds, something new can take shape.” - Nada Alic, author of Bad Thoughts