Design Your Life

Design Your Life: The Pleasures and Perils of Everyday Things

By Ellen Lupton and Julia Lupton 

This playful book shows how design is about much more than what’s bought at high-end stores or the modern look at IKEA. Design is critical thinking: a way to look at the world and wonder why things work, and why they don’t. Illustrated with original paintings of objects both ordinary and odd, Design Your Life casts a sharp eye on everything from roller bags, bras, toilet paper, and stuffed animals to parenting, piles, porches, and potted plants.  

Using humor and insight Ellen and Julia explore the practical side of everyday design, looking at how it impacts your life in unexpected ways and what you can do about it. Speaking to the popular interest in design as well as people’s desire to make their own way through a mass-produced world, this thoughtful book takes a fresh and humorous approach to make some serious points about the impact of design on our lives. 

St. Martins Griffin, 2009, softcover, 6.77 x 9.08 inches, 299 pages
 
Ellen Lupton is a curator of contemporary design at the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum and the director of the graphic design MFA program at the Maryland Institute College of Art. She is the author of numerous books, including D.I.Y. Design It Yourself and Thinking with Type. She received a Gold Medal for Lifetime Achievement from the AIGA in 2007. 

Julia Lupton, Ellen Lupton's identical twin sister, is a professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Irvine (UCI). She is also the co-director of the UCI Shakespeare Center at UCI. Additionally, she previously served as the Interim Director of the UC Humanities Research Institute and the founding director of Illuminations: The Chancellor's Arts and Culture Initiative at UCI.