Design and Visual Communication

A long-overdue English translation of Munari’s seminal tract on the everyday value of architecture and design education

The first ever English translation of Bruno Munari’s Design and Visual Communication (1968) fills a gap in Munari’s output for the English-speaking world and provides a highly relevant guide to bridging architecture and design education and everyday life.
Published in 1968 after Munari was invited to the Carpenter Center at Harvard as a successor to György Kepes, the book transforms over 50 lessons, class materials and letters addressed to the city of Milan, into a book on the future of art, architecture and design. Conceived as a living volume, the book is written to inspire current and future designers to push beyond past events, however recent, and develop new tools to see and understand tomorrow’s world.
Accompanying the facsimile reproduction of the original volume are in-depth contextual annotations by Jeffrey Schnapp. As a Munari scholar and design historian, Schnapp has spent years unearthing the radical potential of critical historical material. His annotations and micro-interventions throughout the facsimile reprint seek to fulfill Munari’s call for an evolution of the book in form and content and highlight how this work is as relevant today as when originally published.
Bruno Munari (1907-98) was an Italian artist, designer and inventor who contributed fundamentals to many fields of visual arts (painting, sculpture, film, industrial design, graphic design) in modernism, futurism, and concrete art and in nonvisual arts (literature, poetry) with his research on games, didactic method, movement, tactile learning, kinesthetic learning and creativity.