Author: Jessica Helfand File Type: pdf A compelling defense for the importance of design and how it shapes our behavior, our emotions, and our lives Design has always prided itself on being relevant to the world it serves, but interest in design was once limited to a small community of design professionals. Today, books on design thinking are best sellers, and computer and Web-based tools have expanded the definition of who practices design. Looking at objects, letterforms, experiences, and even theatrical performances, award-winning author Jessica Helfand asserts that understanding designs purpose is more crucial than ever. Design is meaningful not because it is pretty but because it is an intrinsically humanist discipline, tethered to the very core of why we exist. For example, as designers collaborate with developing nations on everything from more affordable lawn mowers to cleaner drinking water, they must take into consideration the full range of a given communitys complex social needs. Advancing a conversation that is unfolding around the globe, Helfand offers an eye-opening look at how designed things make us feel as well as howand whythey motivate our behavior. **Review Jessica Helfand makes the case for design not as a skill or an industry but as an exploration of our humanity. She designs in order to see, and this smart and beautiful book looks inward as well as out.JAMES GLEICK (James Gleick) In an age marked by speed, impatience, and the giddy pursuit of objects, both actual and virtual, Jessica Helfands Invention of Desire demands our attention. In her text she deftly explores the essences rather than surfaces of design, in particular the ethical responsibilities that attend every created thing. Punctuated by beautiful images made from histological samples of tissues, organs, bones, and nerves, this book insists on what is often forgotten the shared human experience and its meaning for the world of design.SIRI HUSTVEDT (Siri Hustvedt) Jessica Helfand looks at design as a deeply emotional experience, as a live wire on sensations, as an expression of what it means to be alive. This is truly intelligent writing.STEFAN SAGMEISTER (Stefan Sagmeister) In her extraordinary new paintings, Jessica Helfand finds the sweet spot between scientific certainty and formal abstraction. She invites us to consider the body, the self, and themesmerizingbiological wonders that unite us as a species. This is a remarkable body of work.LAURIE SIMMONS (Laurie Simmons) Compassion. Solitude. Memory. These are just a few of the topics explored in Jessica Helfands glorious book. Deeply philosophical and humanistic, it is a beautifully articulated meditation of what it means to design and what it means to be alive.MAIRA KALMAN (Maira Kalman) This beautifully written and fascinating book doesnt dwell on the neatness of design but brilliantly explores its power and implications. Jessica Helfand marvels at, then analyzes the authority of visual and material culture and what happens when we try to shape both. In essays as emotionally centered as they are rigorously argued, she reminds us of what design can and cannot do and what is exhilarating and, inevitably, humbling about that.MARVIN HEIFERMAN (Marvin Heiferman) A magical book.RICKY JAY (Ricky Jay) A thoughtful and necessary new book.Allison Arieff, New York Times (Allison Arieff New York Times) From the Inside Flap Design is an intrinsically humanist discipline, tethered to the very core of why we exist. It frames our conception of power, informs our belief about personal dignity, piques our curiosity about fiction and fantasy highlights our yearning for romance and beauty and engages our eternal appetite for narrative. Design matters because of the why, not the what the sentiment, not the acquisition. Design matters because people matter, and the purpose of this book is to examine precisely this proposition to consider the conscience-driven rules of human engagement within which design must operate. This is a book about design as it relates to human beings. Because that is what matters most of all.

Author: Rajyashree Pandey File Type: pdf Perfumed Sleeves and Tangled Hair explores the possibilities and limits of terms such as body, woman, gender, and agencycategories that emerged within the context of western philosophical, religious, and feminist debatesto analyze texts that come out of altogether different temporal and cultural contexts. Through close textual readings of a wide range of classical and medieval narratives, from well-known works such as the Tale of Genji to popular Buddhist tales, Rajyashree Pandey offers new ways of understanding such terms within the context of medieval Buddhist knowledge. Pandey suggests that woman in medieval Japanese narratives does not constitute a self-evident and distinct category, and that there is little in these works to indicate that the sexed body was the single most important and overarching site of difference between men and women. She argues that the body in classical and medieval texts is not understood as something constituted through flesh, blood, and bones, or as divorced from the mind, and that in the Tale of Genji it becomes intelligible not as an anatomical entity but rather as something apprehended through robes and hair. Pandey provocatively claims that woman is a fluid and malleable category, one that often functions as a topos or figural site for staging debates not about real life women, but rather about delusion, attachment, and enlightenment, issues of the utmost importance to the Buddhist medieval world. Pandeys book challenges many of the assumptions that have become commonplace in academic writings on women and Buddhism in medieval Japan. She questions the validity of speaking of Buddhisms misogyny, womens oppression, passivity, or proto-feminism, and points to the anachronistic readings that result when fundamentally modern questions and concerns are transposed unreflexively onto medieval Japanese texts. Taking a broad, interdisciplinary approach, and engaging widely with literature, religious studies, and feminism, while paying close attention to medieval texts and genres, Pandey boldly throws down the gauntlet, challenging some of the sacred cows of contemporary scholarship on medieval Japanese women and Buddhism. **