What is beyond user-centered design, beyond actual objects, products, environments, marketing plans? Nonobject shifts the paradigm of current product design approaches to create the next direction of design: a thoughtful examination of the intangible, a conscious reinterpretation of how users relate to products.
In Nonobject, award-winning designer Branko Lukic takes us on a tour of the charged spaces between people and the objects they use. View a series of visionary explorations of objects from the future, derived from as-yet-undiscovered materials, imagined manufacturing processes, and invented rules. These “nonobjects”--including a “superpractical” cell phone with keypad, speaker, and microphone on every surface; a digital camera that captures the scene and what’s behind the scene; and a faceless watch that keeps us in touch with our inner clock--shimmer, spin, and star on the iPad screen. Tap an icon and a man’s dress shoe expands and contracts according to price (how much is a product experience worth?). Tap another icon and see the “square against air” zero emission nUCLEUS motorcycle get ready for action; tap another and change its materials and character scheme. Watch the iEat diet spoon collapse before a dieter can overeat. See a table (dinner or conference) configured for dictatorship, compromise, or democracy. Text by design theorist Barry Katz guides us through the mysteries of this immaterial reality.
In the Nonobject journey, product design meets philosophy, poetry, and the theater of the imagination. The nonobject fills us with surprise and delight. From a business perspective, it introduces a powerful mental aperture tool for radical innovation, a tool much needed as we enter the emotion economy.
Praise for Branko Lukic and Nonobject
Leading Title of MIT’s Influential 2010 Fall Catalog
“The ideas in this book made me fall in love with design all over again.”
--Helen Walters, Core77, Best Innovation and Design Books of 2010
“Mr. Lukic’s objective of humanizing mass-manufactured objects is among the most important challenges for design.”
--The New York Times
“Branko Lukic is the best design-fiction designer in the world.”
--Bruce Sterling, WIRED
“NONOBJECT of our Affection… (has) vision that wins awards and gains vital market share for clients.”
--Surface