Uncover Glimmer: How Design Can Transform Your Life, And Maybe Even The World Translated By Warren Berger Available In Physical Edition

was my first book on the subject of Design, it was assigned to me for a senior capstone course on entrepreneurship and product design.
I thoroughly enjoyed thinking about design from the eyes of designers, I felt like it offered me more mental tools to approach design thinking than learning fundamentals of design in a college course.
It's an easy read and has some great anecdotes, pick it up at your local library if you'd like to learn about designing things as small as spatulas and as large as economies.
Changed the way I think about the word design, Great case studies on designing better processes and solutions, Changed the way I look at the world around me, I have always been able to identify inefficiencies and bad design, but this book tipped me over the edge towards designing better processes.


The term design is used very broadly and the designers mentioned are often made out to be gods/heroes but other than that an inspiring and well written book for me an outsider to the design industry.
I really hadn't read the reviews for this until I finished the book, and it was funny to find that some folks had the same thoughts that I did.
First, I think this is a great book! But, it took me quite a bit to get into it and get through it.
This worried me at first, but I made it through, The reason it takes so long is that there is a LOT of information in here, Good information. Great examples. Deep thoughts. I checked this out from the library, but now I'm going to buy a copy of this, A definite must in my creative toolkit, The other BIG PLUS is the set of resources at the end of the book, . . from a glossary, to people, to websites, etc, This is a gem! This book was passed out by our VP as a "mustread, " I assumed it was about graphic design, but it was about so much more, I loved the multiple case studies about how design whether in a product, a process, or an idea can really be transformative, far beyond what we usually consider.
This book is about opening your mind to a new way of thinking and a shift in worldview, Very much worth the read, Enlightening book that encourages us to think like designers, Wellwritten, engrossing, and tips are directly applicable to all aspects of business and life, This a book by designers who apply the term design too broadly to encompass almost everything that is invented, created, painted, machined, or constructed.
The main thing I enjoyed about this book was some of the creative examples of design used to solve hard problems, but it was a bit snooty from the design perspective and it referred to the great designer so and so and the amazing work of so and so else so much that it became annoying.
Still a worthwhile read. Although at times I felt that this book is just an updated version of Wikinomics I sometimes doubt the updated part aimed at designers, complete with some obligatory designspeak, it managed to keep me interested to the end.
Although at times it just seemed to go all over the place with the examples, some practical, others technical, others personal or more artistic in nature, it kept coming back to the idea of design as the expression of human will and desire and Macs, he always had to return to the Mac or iPod basically deifying Jobs.

Even though it has its flaws from my point of view, it's actually a great book the book sometimes sounds like a basic selfhelp book, with the short and definite sentences, like the author expects you to put down the book and start applying the thing he was talking about.
It has a wealth

of examples and references although not all of them new, especially when you realise you know most of them and is a fine read.

There's nothing wrong with a little selfhelp advice for designers or wannabedesigners, Totally loved it. Some really great insights into design, and how design is becoming far more important to companies that want to survive and thrive in todays world.
Many companies think design is merely the packaging, the glossy veneer so to speak, But smart companies realize that design needs to extend not just to how the product looks, but everything, They need to design the whole experience, from how the product looks, but more importantly how it works, and the detailed research that goes into functionality, to how the company interacts with their existing and potential customers, via a website, phone interaction, etc.


It uses Bruce Maus terrific essay sitelinkAn Incomplete Manifesto For Growth
as a starting point,

Several sections were very profound, and one I thought was especially good,

Brian Collins of the firm COLLINS states that the experience design movement is reinventing the marketing model that has been dominated by advertising for the last half century.
That old model made it feasible that a large company could offer a lackluster customer experience, yet still coax people to purchase its bland offerings, thanks to the sheer power of message bombardment.
But over the past decade, a flipflop began to take place, Ads started to lose their power because of changes in media including more fragmentation and greater audience control and participation, Meanwhile, those same changes in the media heightened the importance of providing quality customer experiences because customers now had more ways to talk to each other.
Today, increasingly, the experience is the advertising,

The companies that are unable to figure out how to design and deliver that experience have little else to do but make pleas for our attention that are mostly ignoredin other words, they advertise.
Collins believes we may now be reaching the point at which advertising becomes the penalty paid by companies that cannot design well, “In this new environment,” he says, “you could think of traditional advertising as a tax on laggards, ”
Glimmer p.

It also delved into the curse of a lot of designers that theyre interested in everything that they want to learn and try everything.
I can identify. Buckminster Fuller would call it being a comprehensivist,

“When Im totally unqualified for a job, thats when I do my best work, If youre trying to find a new way to think about something to make it better, it can actually hurt you to have too much experience in that particular milieubecause you understand the expectations too well.
And that can cause you to limit and edit your possibilities, based on what you already know doesnt work, ” Paula Scher

Another section touched on why being creative is such a charge,

People tend to think of happiness as a goal, but its more of a process, according to Martin Seligman, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania and the former president of the American Psychological Association.
Seligman maintains that there are two activities that lead to happiness, One is what he calls “engaging” activitythe challenging and often creative activity that tends to lead to a “flow experience, ”

When youre engaged in these types of creative activities, it activates an area of the brain called the nucleus accumbens that controls how we feel about life, according to Dr.
S. Ausim Azizi, chairman of the department of neurology at Temple Universitys School of Medicine, He noted that creative activities that you enjoy also stimulate the brains septal zonethe “feel good” areaand that makes you feel happy,

But the other part of the puzzle has to do with the second type of activity that can make you happy.
Seligman has observed that in addition to those “engaging” or creatively stimulating activities, there are also “meaningful” activities that tend to make people happy.
These, he says, involve “using what youre best at to serve others or participate in a cause bigger than yourself, ”

If youre doing a certain kind of design“problem solving design”you are combining both types of activities, You are creating and contributing to a larger cause, simultaneously,

Through constant acts of creative design, you recreate yourself, You help propel your own growth spiral, feeding off the energy of creation, Thats not just a feeling, its a fact: being in that state of “design flow” raises the levels of neurotransmitters in your brain, such as endorphins and dopamine, and that keeps you focussed and energized, according to Dr.
Gabriella Corá of the Florida Neuroscience Center, Glimmer p