EOOS: Designing Impact, edited by Lars Müller, traces thirty years of the Vienna-based design studio EOOS — from internationally celebrated furniture practice to an organisation that made the global sanitation crisis its primary design problem, and in doing so redefined what design in the Global North might take responsibility for.
About This Book
EOOS was founded in Vienna in 1995 by Martin Bergmann, Gernot Bohmann, and Harald Gründl with a focus on furniture design, building long-standing partnerships with Walter Knoll, Keilhauer, Carl Hansen & Søn, Alessi, and others. In the early 2010s, the studio made a decisive shift: closing a successful chapter of retail design for clients including Adidas and Armani to focus on the three billion people worldwide without access to safe sanitation. The studio’s two seemingly contradictory fields — internationally successful author furniture design and social design aimed at systemic impact — are, on closer inspection, held together by a common attitude, an equal demand for quality, and a shared conviction that design thinking can bridge use, aesthetics, and social consequence. The story of EOOS, fifty years after Victor Papanek demanded that designers devote at least ten percent of their work to the real problems of all people, is an example of how this can actually be achieved.
Key Features
- Thirty years of EOOS documented through projects, essays, and conversations
- Partnerships with Walter Knoll, Carl Hansen & Søn, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Red Cross, and Caritas
- Contributions by Sarah Dorkenwald, Thomas Geisler, and Viktoria Heinrich
What You'll Discover
- How EOOS reconciles the aesthetics of high-end furniture design with the demands of social impact design
- The studio’s work on global sanitation — designing for the three billion people without access to safe facilities
- What it means, practically and philosophically, for a design studio to make social impact central to its practice
- The common attitude that holds seemingly contradictory fields of work together
About the Author
EOOS is an international design studio from Vienna, founded in 1995 by Martin Bergmann, Gernot Bohmann, and Harald Gründl. Lars Müller is a Norwegian-Swiss graphic designer and publisher who founded Lars Müller Publishers in Baden in 1983. The publishing house has produced some 800 publications on architecture, design, photography, art, and society.
Specifications
- Format: Paperback
- Pages: 460
- Dimensions: 16.5 x 24 cm
- Language: English
- ISBN: 9783037787816
- Publisher: Lars Müller Publishers
- Publication Date: 2025
Perfect For: Designers, design educators, social entrepreneurs, and anyone interested in the relationship between aesthetic excellence and social responsibility in contemporary practice