Glimmer: How Design Can Transform Your Life, and Maybe Even the World

Read Warren Berger's posts on the Penguin Blog.

The first book to reveal how thinking like a designer can help solve the greatest challenges we face in business, society, and our daily lives.

What can we learn from the ways great designers think—and how can it improve our world? In this highly original book by journalist Warren Berger, in collaboration with celebrated designer Bruce Mau, ten groundbreaking principles of design are shown in action—addressing business, social, and personal challenges and improving the way we think, work, and live.

Glimmer takes readers on a journey through today’s fascinating world of design, where the formerly distinct disciplines of graphic, product, and social design are undergoing “smart recombinations.” In the cutting-edge studios of Mau and other visionaries, everything is ripe for reinvention—including the ways businesses function, children learn, and communities thrive. Designers are solving problems at an unprecedented pace today by using improved technology and the highly practical design principles described in this book, such as “Ask stupid questions,” “Make hope visible,” “Work the metaphor,” “Embrace constraints,” and “Begin anywhere.” Glimmer inspires readers to apply these same principles to their own life challenges.

While celebrated designers work on re-creating the world, Berger reveals the growing grassroots “glimmer movement” in which everyday people are emerging as designers and problem solvers. Readers will be fascinated by how “transformation design” is reinventing companies and addressing thorny social problems. Berger shares stories of how burned fingers, wrenched backs, and mixed-up pills all led to ingenious new product designs.

In a time of anxiety and retrenchment, this hopeful yet hardheaded book illuminates “the glimmer of possibility and potential—that first spark of an innovative idea or a life-changing plan.” According to Berger, “This faint light is all around us and also within us, if we can learn to recognize and nurture it.” The best designers already know how to transform that glimmer of possibility into the steady glow of creation and innovation —and with the inspiration of Glimmer, we’re now all able to do the same.