Design with a conscience: that's the take-home message of this important, provocative book. John Thackara, long a major force in design, now takes on an even more important challenge: making the world safe for future inhabitants. We need, he says, to design from the edge, to learn from the world, and to stop designing for, but instead design with. If everyone heeded his prescriptions, the world would indeed be a better place. Required reading—required behavior.
Don Norman, Nielsen Norman Group, author of Emotional Design
The future is created at the intersection of business, technology, design, and culture. In the Bubble is an insightful and delightful explanation of this nexus and of how each force affects the others. Designers often miss a great deal in their educations about the real people who will use and inhabit their work. Thackara astutely illuminates a lot of what designers don't know they're missing.
Nathan Shedroff, author of Experience Design
In the Bubble is often delightful, stimulating, and surprising. Thackara may well emerge as a visionary voice for the wired era. For planners, designers, and anyone with an interest in the future, this book is a rich resource of inspiration, ideas, and guiding principles as well as sharply observed cautionary tales. It suggests that what the tech revolution most needs, and may already be moving toward, is a sense of purpose.
Bill S. Kowinski
San Francisco Chronicle
Thackara has built an intricate and compelling case for the continuing impact of local action in a networked world...I hope he's right.
I.D. Magazine
One of Thackara's powerful concepts is that of the macroscope: instead of a microscope, which allows us to see tiny things, we need instruments to see distributed, long-term phenomena that pass unnoticed amidst the nonstop distractions of a modern go-go culture. In the Bubble is just such a macroscope, a deeply reflective meditation on the underlying changes in the structure of globalized society, and a revelation about what designers can do to make that shifting structure more robust and sustainable.
J. C. Herz, author of Joystick Nation
If there is one pervasive criticism of global capitalism that cuts across all ideologies, it is this: goods have become more important and are treated better than people. We are producing higher quality computers than children. John Thackara's brilliant book about quotidian design describes design innovation driven by social fiction instead of science fiction. This is design focused on what Fernand Braudel called 'everyday life': the demands and pleasures of caring for others, raising children, meaningful work, and journeying. These inspired and innovative technologies return people to the heart of the world and help them create a fulfilling life.
Paul Hawken, Natural Capital Institute, author of The Ecology of Commerce
Thackara's deeply informed book presents a breathtaking new map of the design landscape. With not a whisper of evangelistic zeal, In the Bubble offers an engaging narrative as well as design principles that speak to sustainability, joy, and quality of life in increasingly complex times.
Brenda Laurel, author of Utopian Entrepreneur, chair of the Graduate Media Design Program at Art Center College of Design
Whatever you are designing, you will want to keep this book next to you. When you are wondering what to design, you will want to pick it up and browse through it again, to remind you of all the new possibilities for design. When you worry if your design is good enough, you will want to check through the passages that you have marked, to be sure that you have provided for all the complexities that count. When you have an 'Aha!' and are confident that your design is great, you will want to check that you have matched the attributes of 'Flow.' When you have an idle moment, you will want to read through the notes, which are a good book about design in themselves.
Bill Moggridge, Cofounder, IDEO
We all envy John Thackara's digestive system. He is able to take in the most disparate events, locations, trends, and apparent minutiae and deliver back a synthesis of the way the world moves for the use of designers and of those who use design as a powerful life-forming tool. And to help us swallow what might otherwise be too abstract a meal, he seves it to us with parables that make the book not only an enriching, but also a fun read.
Paola Antonelli, Curator of Architecture and Design, The Museum of Modern Art
An excellent new book...so push aside that colorful pile of photo-packed publications and pick up In the Bubble: Designing in a Complex World, in whose pages 'design' is understood to be more about process than product, more about systems and services than about surfaces and packages, more about work to do than things to buy.
ArtsJournal.com
Thackara leaps nimbly from statistics to observations to anecdotes, from past to present to future, from energy to the environment, from the Burning Man Festival in Arizona to the Bombay Lunch Delivery program.
Architectural Record
I eagerly devoured every last page of John Thackara's lofty, captivating book, up to and including his wry footnotes and that superb bibliography.
Bruce Sterling, author of Shaping Things
If you've ever found yourself saying, 'bad TiVO,' design critic John Thackara is talking to you.
Fast Company
'To do things differently, we need to perceive things differently,' John Thackara writes. I agree! In the Bubble is the first strong, thoroughly documented statement on the importance of the local and the embedded in our fluid, hyper-connected world. A fundamental contribution to a new design culture.
Ezio Manzini, Milan Polytechnic, author of The Material of Invention and Sustainable Everyday
