In the Bubble

I'm currently reading In the Bubble by John Thackara and I was considering writing a review of it, but Andrew Otwell has just posted a great review and it's much more of a considered piece than one I would have written.

It might sound like “asking the right questions” is a trivial, simple or even irrelevant job. It is not. Thackara’s point in “In the Bubble” is that the context has become so complex, fast-moving, global, and even invisible, that design has become a wholly different field than it has been in the past. In a readable mix of statistics, anecdotes, and analysis, Thackara details problems of sustainability, environment, population, and sprawl as problems of design. Problems which cannot be solved by simply making more pretty stuff.