Cracking the Whip: Essays on Design and Its Side Effects

by Ralph Caplan

Cracking the Whip is a collection of 69 essays that looks at just about everything in clothes, hardware, posters, cars, airports, chairs, lighting, vending machines, cities and bathrooms. They are about how we use design, language and instinct to navigate our everyday world from eating, relating to others, maintaining traditions and advancing our causes. Previously published in distinguished forums ranging from Id Magazine, Print, and Interior Design to The New Yorker, The New York Times, and The Nation, Caplan brings to these essays an erudition tempered by clarity, charm and humour. Cracking the Whip is made up of disparate parts that add up to the perfect foundation for the student designer.

Genres: Design

320 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2005

About the author

Ralph Caplan is a contributing editor at Print magazine, a regular contributor to VOICE: The AIGA Online Journal of Graphic Design and has written articles for Design Quarterly, Interior Design, The New York Times, and House and Garden. He began his long and distinguished career in design journalism in the late 1950's as editor-in-chief at I.D. Magazine. His books include By Design: Why There Are No Locks on the Bathroom Doors in the Hotel Louis XIV and Other Object Lessons (Fairchild, 2005) and Cracking the Whip: Essays On Design And Its Side Effects (Fairchild, 2005). Ralph has also written extensively for and about the furniture manufacturer Herman Miller. He is a director emeritus of the International Design Conference in Aspen, Colorado, an honorary member of IDSA, and, in 2005, was a writer-in-residence at Haystack Mountain School of Arts and Crafts.

Reviews

[Brian Kovesci · Rating 2 out of 5]

I don’t know.

It seems like designers who write come across as amateur philosophers. Arguments aren’t appropriately flushed out, but it then it almost doesn’t matter because that argument happened in the past and they have already moved on to a newer, more exciting (read: half-baked, unstudied and I’ll-informed) thought experiment.

What happened? Why can’t designers have something of substance to say?