Quarterly Disegno is devoted to exploring the many facets of design and its impact on the world today.

Issue 38 includes Yui Tezuka climbing onto the roof of her childhood home; the digital legacy of Bandai-Namco’s Tamagotchis; building an educational space in nature with ANO Ghana; a seaside trip to Hat Projects’ new business centre; ÉCAL students’ thirsty furniture; a visit to Erich Mendelsohn’s first ever building and a journey through desecrated graves; Yuri Suzuki’s AI-generated sonic architecture; cave_bureau’s bid to save Mt Suswa from water scarcity; Nigel Shafran’s beautifully everyday workbooks; Stephen Burks Man Made’s work to sculpt objects honouring ancestors; experiments led by Folkform at the last Masonite factory in Sweden; celebrating the natural composition of linoleum with Christein Meindertsma; and making energy output physical with Industrial Facility.

Inga Sempé’s design fictions surrounding the home; a take on the Filipino bangkito, designed by Unosinotra; a call for typefaces that can handle the diacritical demands of Vietnamese script; Jenny Nordberg’s furniture experiments with glitch aesthetics; Jörg Boner and Lütjens Padmanabhan Architektinnen’s garden pavilion embassy in Algiers; a visit to the Ouagadougou atelier of Hamed Ouattara; a fringe-based challenge to wasteful cutting patterns from Sarah Brunnhuber; shipping containers and dazzle camouflage compared by Tetsuo Mukai; a study of designing for pets, with Layer, Hay, Papuk and LucyBalu; an oral account of contemporary Swiss design, as told by Sarah Kueng, Ini Archibong, Big-Game and more; Sony’s Cube, seen in a music video from Glass Animals; the pleasures of portable lighting, in Omer Arbel’s glowing orb; a journey through llamas and living legacies at the Eames Insitute for Infinite Curiosity; a roundtable about the challenges and opportunities facing bio-tech, steered by Natsai Audrey Chieza and Normal Phenomenon of Life; a dive into the realm of tin and terracotta with a barbecue from Jasper Morrison Studio; the world’s first 100 per cent recycled aluminium alloy, explored by Lars Beller Fjetland; 3D art translated into 2D textiles, courtesy of Jacob Hashimoto; the need for DIY design, as argued for by Nitzan Cohen; a meeting between typefaces and furniture, orchestrated by BNAG and ABC Dinamo;a trough-like yellow tray, designed by Mitre and Mondays; and Oscar Lhermitte’s design assessment of the London plane tree.

‘Most arrangements are little noticed, yet some stop you in your tracks’. Originally published in 2003, Leonard Koren’s highly sought-after Arranging Things: A Rhetoric of Object Placement utilises the language of rhetoric to portray visual arrangement as a ‘communicational act: its own language-like form of aesthetic expression’.

Koren’s insightful meditation is further distilled into eight rhetorical principles presented alognside 23 idiosyncratic paintings by artist Nathalie Du Pasquier which illustrate the volume. With a welcoming tone, Arranging Things offers an accessible strategy which can be used to analyse any arrangement.

Back by popular demand, this new edition of Arranging Things presents Du Pasquier’s artistic works in a generous format in celebration of Koren’s visual journey through the heart of design philosophy. Arranging Things is not merely a popular book on design; it is a landmark text, a practical manifesto of aesthetic beauty, one for brightening and broadening the way we understand and arrange our worlds.

À travers un état des lieux historique, des reportages en usine, des décryptages de savoir-faire, et des pièces iconiques, Tools livre une enquête sur le tissage d’hier et d’aujourd’hui, en accordant une grande attention à celles et ceux qui fabriquent les objets cultes de notre quotidien et qui véhiculent les histoires qui sont à l’origine de notre imaginaire commun.

It seems like magic when some new gadget seems to know what we want before we know ourselves. But why does some design feel intrinsically good, and why do some designs last forever, while others disappear? "User Friendly" guides readers through the hidden rules governing how design shapes our behaviour, told through fascinating stories such as what the nuclear accident at Three Mile Island reveals about the logic of the smartphone; how the pressures of the Great Depression and World War II created our faith in social progress through better product design; and how a failed vision for Disney World yielded a new paradigm for designed experience.

Just what is it that catches the eye, and why? What’s the significance of a broken flowerpot, a pair of identical tables side by side, a garden hose wrapped around an old car wheel? In this collection of photo essays, the famous designer Jasper Morrison examines and imagines the life behind a series of seemingly ordinary situations.

By what means did so much beauty and ingenuity appear in articles of everyday rural life in Portugal? How did the shape of these objects balance necessity and formal perfection so skillfully? The Hard Life by Jasper Morrison is a book of photographs taken by Morrison of objects in the collection of the National Museum of Ethnology in Lisbon, Portugal.

This book explores the effect that generations of trial and error, individual craftsmanship and an instinct to carve out the essential with the slenderest of means brought to objects that made life both livable and meaningful to a pre-industrial society. The objects photographed and described by designer Jasper Morrison may be appreciated both for their beauty and for the example they set of design at its purest.

The Hard Life is a continuation of Morrison’s celebration of the ordinary and offers a new perspective on his design philosophy. It’s an homage to the beauty of ancient commodities.

A meeting with Hannah Beachler, Jomo Tariku, Ini Archibong and others, as they discuss their work on the Met’s Afrofuturist period room; reflections on the Nakagin Capsule Tower and its physical and ideological deterioration; an unravelling of Stefan Diez’s conductive textile lighting for Vibia; a conversation between David Chalmers and Space Popular about designing digital realities; multiple journeys to East Quay by the Onion Collective, a community space to revitalise postindustrial Watchet; archived memories from Matrix, a pioneering feminist architecture collective; photographs from Emeco House and its restoration of a sewing workshop; and a study of Mumbai’s historic chawls on the cusp of redevelopment.