Encountering Things brings together leading design scholars to explore the relationship between thing theory and design, exploring production processes and offering an engaging, theoretical perspective about the social and cultural lives of objects.

Focusing on the themes of process and product, the contributors investigate the productive interplay between the activity of design and the objects that design uses and produces. Chapters span the design disciplines and essays examine the processes by which objects, things, and artifacts are made; the lives of design objects; and things in their cultural contexts. Theoretical discussion is encouraged by in-depth case studies of things themselves. Each chapter includes an informational sidebar per essay and a useful glossary of key terms.

Leslie Atzmon is Professor of graphic design and design history at Eastern Michigan University, USA.

Prasad Boradkar is Associate Professor and Coordinator of the industrial design program at Arizona State University, USA.

Introduction, Leslie Atzmon, Eastern Michigan University, USA and Prasad Boradkar, Arizona State University, USA
1. Configuring Things, Prasad Boradkar, Arizona State University, USA
2. The Graphic Thing: Ambiguity, Dysfunction, and Excess in Designed Objects, Phil Jones, Arts Institute, Bournemouth, UK
3. Neo-animism and Design: A New Paradigm in Object Theory, Betti Marenko, Central St Martin's, University of the Arts, London UK
4. Destabilizing Things: The Design Prototype, Arno Verhoeven, Edinburgh College of Arts, University of Edinburgh, UK
5. Theorizing the Hari Kuyô, Christine Guth, Royal College of Art, London, UK
6. Uses of Failure, Peter Hall, Queensland College of Art, Griffith, University, Brisbane, Australia
7. April Greiman Making Sense of the Thing "Made in Space", Elizabeth Guffey, SUNY, Purchase, NY, USA
8. The Design Competition: The Contested Meaning of the Modern Telephone in America, 1920-1939
Jan Hadlaw, York University, Toronto, Canada
9. What design tells us about objects and things, G. De Michelis, University of Milano-Bicocca, Italy
10. Black and White: Sofrut and the Awesome Thingness of Torah Letterforms, Leslie Atzmon, Eastern Michigan University, USA
11. Distributing Stresses: A Consideration of the Lives, of Human and Nonhuman Things in the Eames, DCM Chair, Michael J. Golec, School of the Art Institute, Chicago, USA
12. Making Things Things, Nina Rappaport, Yale School of Architecture, USA
13. The Thing-ness of Making: Attending to Production and the Appropriation of the Handmade in
Contemporary Design Practice, Catharine Rossi, Edinburgh College of Art, UK
Bibliography
Index