Design and Visual Communication arrives in English for the first time, translating over 50 lessons, class materials and letters by Bruno Munari into a sustained argument for how art, architecture and design must continually remake the tools through which we see the world.
About This Book
Written after Munari was invited to the Carpenter Center at Harvard, this book began as a body of teaching material and correspondence addressed to the city of Milan. Its ambition was never purely pedagogical: Munari conceived it as a living volume, one that actively resists the consolidation of past methods, however recent. The first English translation closes a long-standing gap for design educators, students and practitioners working outside Italian. Contextual annotations by Jeffrey Schnapp — Munari scholar and design historian — thread through a facsimile of the original, positioning this as both archival document and active proposition. For anyone serious about design education, visual communication and the future of the book as a form, this edition repays close attention.
Key Features
- 400 pages of facsimile reproduction paired with in-depth contextual annotations and micro-interventions by Jeffrey Schnapp
- Annotations by Jeffrey Schnapp, Munari scholar and design historian
- Published by Inventory Press, ISBN 9781941753712
What You'll Discover
- How Munari transformed Harvard teaching material and letters to Milan into a cohesive theory of design's future
- Schnapp's micro-interventions as a model for how scholarly annotation can itself evolve the form of the book
- Munari's insistence that designers develop new perceptual tools rather than refine inherited ones
- The relationship between design education, visual communication and everyday life as Munari understood it in 1968 — and why that relationship remains unresolved
About the Author
Bruno Munari (1907–98) was an Italian artist, designer and inventor whose practice spanned painting, sculpture, film, industrial design and graphic design across modernism, futurism and concrete art. His research extended into literature, poetry, games, didactic method, movement, and tactile and kinesthetic learning, making him one of the twentieth century's most wide-ranging thinkers on creativity.
Specifications
- Format: Paperback
- Pages: 400
- Dimensions: 210 x 140 mm
- Language: English
- ISBN: 9781941753712
- Publisher: Inventory Press
- Publication Date: [Details available upon request]
Perfect For: Design educators, architecture and graphic design students, historians of modernism and visual communication, and practitioners interested in the theory and pedagogy behind design thinking.