By Maria Popova
More than two years ago, Nate Burgos of Design Feast brought us the first installment of Rare Book Feast — an ongoing video series celebrating the timeless joy of books in the era of digital ephemera and spotlighting yesteryear’s out-of-print gems. Now, he’s back with the second installment: Design Methods: Seeds of Human Futures (public library) by John Christopher Jones, the very first professor of design at Open University, originally published in 1970 — a seminal treatise exploring the process of design and its impact on countless facets of society.
From practical strategies for generating ideas, complete with worksheets, to a bigger-picture vision for areas as wide-ranging as urbanism and the relationship between people and objects, the methods Jones examines were devised or borrowed from different disciplines in response to “a world-wide dissatisfaction with traditional procedures,” seeking to offer novel insight for all those “concerned with creative behavior and with technological change” and framing design as a powerful tool for public decision-making.
Three decades later, Jones followed up with The Internet and Everyone (public library) — an even rarer gem, featuring a remarkable series of letters from the dawn of electronic communication, in which Jones evolves his thinking on human-dependent technology as he explores the strange new immediacy of information networks.
Design Methods was reprinted in 1992 and is thus still available, but at $93 for a paperback and a whopping $85 for an ebook version, which instantly renders it the most expensive Kindle book I’ve ever encountered, one has to wonder whether we need a separate category for books that aren’t quite out-of-print, but rather out-of-reach such baffling reasons as publishers pricing the unlimited resource of bits the same way that limited atoms are priced.
