Assembling Tomorrow: A Guide to Designing a Thriving Future from the Stanford D.School

Scott Doorley, Carissa Carter, Stanford D School

Book cover for Assembling Tomorrow: A Guide to Designing a Thriving Future from the Stanford D.School
Book cover for Assembling Tomorrow: A Guide to Designing a Thriving Future from the Stanford D.School

Assembling Tomorrow: A Guide to Designing a Thriving Future from the Stanford D.School

Assembling Tomorrow: A Guide to Designing a Thriving Future from the Stanford D.School

Scott Doorley, Carissa Carter, Stanford D School

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Description

A powerful, fully illustrated guide to using the tools of design thinking to create a more positive and cooperative future, from Stanford University's Hasso Plattner Institute of Design.

We live in an era of runaway design, where innovations tangle with our lives in unpredictable ways, from the positive and negative consequences of AI and social media to how development has driven climate change. Despite good intentions, the impacts of our actions can be tricky to notice, predict, and repair.

Featuring stunning art, Assembling Tomorrow explains how we can anticipate the implications of what we make before we release those ideas into the world--and how to use the tools of design to both mend the mistakes of our past and shape our future for the better.

This forward-looking guide helps you reframe your mindset to notice and question what you might otherwise have missed. Assembling Tomorrow imagines the future as if it had already happened and considers the past with a critical eye so that each one of us--as designers of our personal and shared futures--can work toward healing and create a better world for generations to come.

About the Author

Scott Doorley is a writer, designer, and creative director at the Stanford d.school. He co-wrote the book Make Space: How to Set the Stage for Creative Collaboration and teaches classed in design and communication. His work has been featured in museums from San Jose to Helsinki and in publications from Architecture + Urbanism to the New York Times.

Carissa Carter is a designer, geoscientist, and the academic director at the Stanford d.school. She's the author of The Secret Language of Maps: How to Tell Visual Stories with Data, and teaches design courses on emerging technologies, climate change, and data visualization. Her work on designing with machine learning and blockchain has earned multiple design awards, including Fast Company Innovation and Core 77 awards.

The Hasso Plattner Institute of Design, known as the d.school, was founded at Stanford University in 2005. Each year, more than a thousand students from all disciplines attend classes, workshops, and programs to learn how the thinking behind design can enrich their own work and unlock their creative potential.

Armando Veve is an award-winning illustrator whose drawings have appeared in publications including The New Yorker, National Geographic, Scientific American, MIT Technology Review, and Wired, among others. He studied illustration at the Rhode Island School of Design and currently resides in Philadelphia.

Critical Reviews

"This brilliant book offers a new approach to all creative work that will expand your understanding of what it means to make and open up possibilities you didn't know existed--it did for me."--Adam Johnson, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Orphan Master's Son

"Assembling Tomorrow is a dazzling, disturbing, optimistic, and relentlessly useful gem to help you shape the future by understanding the past. I am especially smitten with how Carter and Doorley weave in 'Histories of the Future'--thought-provoking flights of fancy that explore how everything from sibling rivalry to sexuality to the Amazon rainforest just might have evolved seventy years from now."--Robert I. Sutton, organizational psychologist and New York Times bestselling author

"An elegantly conceived and executed book, Assembling Tomorrow addresses the problems and potential of runaway design with science, art, scrutiny, and speculation. The result is a guidebook, instruction manual, and secret recipe for creating a future we all can live with and in. It is the design manual that everyone needs, whether you consider yourself a designer or not."--Thomas Hayden, science writer and author of On Call in Hell and Sex and War

"A beautifully crafted and timely call for design and technology to embrace the very thing they've often sought to transcend-constraints, nature, and our own humanity."--Liz Carlisle, agroecologist and author of Healing Grounds and Lentil Underground

"Prepare for a wild ride! Through a brilliant intermingling of non-fiction and speculative fiction, Assembling Tomorrow will challenge your current mindset and empower you to create a brighter future."--Dr. Jennifer Aaker, behavioral scientist and author of Humor Seriously

"A crucial part of your creative toolset that will expand your imagination. [1] Telling stories about tomorrow enables us to expand our imagination and establish a bond with the futures that await us."--Liza Chong, founder of the Design Impact Fund and former CEO of The Index Project

"Assembling Tomorrow brilliantly navigates the complexities of our modern world, blending insightful analysis with imaginative storytelling. It is a must-read for those looking to find harmony in today's dynamic landscape."--Jason Mayden, chief design officer of the Nike Jordan brand

"Assembling Tomorrow is a brilliant and important book. Carissa Carter and Scott Doorley have created a powerful guide to design--its history, processes, and extraordinary potential. They weave together riveting illustrative stories and perceptive insights to create a book that has tremendous value and meaning for everyone."--Bill Guttentag, Oscar-winning writer-director

"In this era of runaway design--where complexity rules and the stakes for humanity and life on earth are so high--Assembling Tomorrow is both a meditation and a guide, a poetic road map to flourishing."--David Sun Kong, PhD, director of the Community Biotechnology Initiative, MIT Media Lab

Publishing Information

Publisher: Ten Speed Press
Pub date: 2024-06-18
Length: 320 pages

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