By what means did so much beauty and ingenuity appears in articles of everyday rural life in Portugal? How did the shape of these objects balance necessity and formal perfection so skillfully? 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.

A multiauthored portrait of the Swiss open-air museum documenting centuries of historic homes and the enchanting details of vernacular architecture Founded in 1978, Ballenberg is a legendary Swiss open-air architectural museum that gathers more than 100 residential and agricultural buildings from the 14th to the 19th centuries, from almost all of the cantons of Switzerland, which have been transported to the museum from their original sites. Together these buildings show how architecture, furnishings and tools expressed the needs of everyday life in their design and execution. Traditional handicrafts such as basket-weaving, forging, braiding, spinning, weaving and carving are also kept alive in Ballenberg's on-site workshops. Edited by Rolf Fehlbaum, entrepreneur and long-time driving force behind Vitra, this beautiful publication is an invitation to discover and explore the world of things with fresh eyes. A Way of Life compiles photographs, observations and discoveries made at Ballenberg by the acclaimed designers Jasper Morrison and David Saik and the architect Tsuyoshi Tane, who all share a fascination with the simple, the practical and the functionally beautiful. In concise, elegant writing, Morrison, Saik and Tane comment on the design ingenuities in various features of the buildings. The book's superb photography celebrates the traces of wear and tear on door handles, benches, columns, brick tile floors and other architectural details that testify to a bygone ethos of enduring utility and economic common sense. A Way of Life serves as an encouragement to designers and consumers alike to resist trends and fads, and to critically evaluate the objects of everyday use in terms of utility and aesthetics.

A window into the world of functional everyday design The designers Jasper Morrison and Naoto Fukasawa have compiled 204 everyday objects in search of "super normal design" alongside examples of anonymous design like the Swiss Rex vegetable peeler or a simple plastic bag, there are design classics like Marcel Breuer's tubular steel side table, Dieter Ram's 606 shelving system, or Joe Colombo's Optic alarm clock of 1970. With products by Newson, Grcic, the Azumis, and the Bouroullec brothers, it also represents the generation to which Morrison and Fukasawa belong. The phenomenon of the super normal is located, as it were, beyond space and time; the past and present of product design both point to a future that has long since begun. The super normal is already lying exposed before us; it exists in the here and now; it is real and available: we need only open our eyes; Fukasawa and Morrison make it visible for us.

What feeds the inspiration of the designer? Observation. In Jasper Morrison's collection

of pictures, the icons of design history meet up with the unassuming objects of

everyday life, and curious findings with the archetypes of modernism. Every picture

tells a story and creates a new one in juxtaposition with its neighbor without words,

in the language of form.

Morrison responds to the arbitrariness of form with simplicity and complexity, poetry

and humor in a repertoire of compelling designs. "a world without words" is a school

of seeing that addresses designers and consumers alike, who wish to explore the

universe

of goods.