I got a good deal on a hardcover copy of Walter Isaacson's Steve Jobs biography, so I decided to atone for this techbro cliché by also purchasing this sleek, overpriced paperback of Bruno Munari's Design As Art (1966). Flipping through the pages, I saw a lot of interesting images and studies, and I thought I'd probably learn a thing or two from this book.Bruno Munari is an artist and designer, and I'm being somewhat reductionist here. He's clearly had his fingers in a lot of fields. He came up as an artist in fascist Italy, and initially associated himself with the futurist art movement. But over time, especially after the war he distanced himself from all that and became more of an industrial designer type of guy with a relatively progressive outlook.This book has no cohesion and the title is totally inaccurate. Turns out this is an English translation, and the original title of Arte come mestiere is better translated as something like "Art as trade" which maybe is better, but still inaccurate. Maybe a good title for this today might just be "Bruno Munari's Design Blog."If Munari were alive today, he would have been a blogging God. While this book is not high on insights, it's extremely sharp-witted, fast-flowing, and entertaining. Just look at this excerpt from "Fancy Goods":‘You’re always so full of ideas. Give me an idea for a Christmas present, not one of the ordinary things you find in the usual shops.’How was I to set about it? Well, first of all I had to get an idea of what my lady friend meant by ordinary things. I did a tour of the gift shops that sell fancy goods, just to see what they had in stock.In one shop I see a brass boot, size 25 (approx.). ‘I’ll have a pair of those,’ I say. ‘We have only one, sir.’ ‘What can I do with one boot?’ ‘It is not a boot to wear on the foot, sir. It is a boot to keep umbrellas in,’ the assistant explains, smiling patiently as one would at a madman. I am greatly embarrassed by this gaffe, and leave the shop at once, nearly tripping over a marble cat decorated with floral reliefs and serving as a doorstop. I am beginning to learn.As I stand indecisively outside the shop my glance happens to light on a copper frying-pan hanging on the wall. It is not meant to be used as a frying-pan, of course, because it has clock-hands attached and numbers from one to twelve. Ah… then it is a clock. It is in the shape of a frying-pan because it is for the kitchen. And a clock for the lavatory? [...]He goes on listing examples like this for a couple more pages, really rubbing in the ridiculousness of it all.[...] A photo-frame like a pocket watch, scissors like a flamingo, a salt-cellar like a wheelbarrow with a spoon like a shovel. A dish for fish shaped like a fish, a dish for pig’s foot shaped like a pig’s foot, a tureen for tomato soup shaped like soup. A hammer like a fish, a fish like a hammer, a cheese-dish in the form of a sitting hen, a thermos flask for ice, shaped like a football.A dish for fruit in the shape of a leaf, an old wooden cradle for use as a magazine rack…These are certainly not objects produced by designers, for designers do not have such raging imaginations. They confine themselves to making candlesticks that look like candlesticks. But look, what have we here? An antique gun hung on the wall as a hatstand, with a row of hooks soldered along the barrel. Or an enormous key with smaller hooks, for hanging real keys on. A cigarette lighter in the shape of a revolver, a revolver in the shape of a cigarette lighter. [... this goes on for a while longer]By this time my head is spinning and I don’t know for sure whether what I am seeing is really there. I don’t know whether to put my cigarette ash into someone’s hand or to screw the light-bulb into the soup-tureen. What on earth can I say to my lady friend? If we have gone this far at Christmas, where will we be at carnival time?However, I do say something. I say, let’s buy a pipe that is really a pipe, let’s fill it with real tobacco, light a match that looks like a match and works like a match, and apply it to the pipe-pipe. Let us have a cup of coffee in a cuplike cup on a table-table near our chairlike chair, and read a good book-book. And my friend gets all upset. She climbs into her Mini tarted up to look like a Cadillac and roars off into the mist, sounding like a Ferrari.Every chapter reads roughly like a blog post, and there's not a clear thing connecting each chapter, nor is there much of a broader point to be made. My takeaways from this book are:Art has lost its connection with the public. Designers are planners with aesthetic sense, and they must reconnect with people through everyday objects (this is pretty much the only thing that's relevant to the book title, and is the focus of the earlier chapters).Munari strongly believes that function must dictate form. He divides the world into designers and stylists, and the latter care about aesthetic flourishes only in isolation (to match the fashions of the time).Good design should take inspiration from nature, but not through mere imitation. The designer must observe and understand the mechanisms for why things in nature work, and smartly incorporate those mechanisms and affordances in designs.The book divides itself into four categories: Design As Art, Visual Design, Graphic Design, Industrial Design, and Research Design. The chapters in Industrial Design is where Munari is at his best.In the spirit of treating this book like a blog, let me recommend some of my favourite Munari posts:Children's Books. Munari talks through his thought process for writing books for children, and criticises how books are often designed to make parents feel good, rather than actually engage with children.[The publisher] thinks that it is not children who buy books. They are bought by grown-ups who give them as presents not so much to amuse the child as to cut a (sometimes coldly calculated) dash with the parents. A book must therefore be expensive, the illustrations must use every colour in the rainbow, but apart from that it doesn’t matter even if they are ugly. A child won’t know the difference because he’s just a little nincompoop. The great thing is to make a good impression.Wear and Tear. A meditation on when and how wear and tear must inform the design of things.What could be more utterly wrongheaded than the heel of a shoe? Upon this we put the whole weight of our bodies while standing or walking. As soon as we actually use these heels we destroy them, yet we obstinately persist in putting identical heels back on again. These are heels made to be admired in shop windows, while the shoes are as useless and as stationary as pieces of sculpture. Certain children’s shoes are now made with rounded heels, and start out in the shape that wear will reduce them to anyway. But this is impossible for grown-ups. Such shoes wouldn’t sell. They’re not dignified.Orange, Peas and Rose. A bizarre joke chapter, where Munari describes objects of nature as though they were a product designed by someone. It really puts across Munari's careful and attentive observations on the nature of things.OrangeThis object is made up of a series of modular containers shaped very much like the segments of an orange and arranged in a circle around a vertical axis. Each container or section has its straight side flush with the axis and its curved side turned outwards. In this way the sum of their curved sides forms a globe, a rough sphere.All these sections are packed together in a container that is quite distinctive both as to its material and its colour. Its outside surface is fairly hard, but it has a soft internal lining that serves as padding between the outer surface and the sections packed inside. The material is in origin all of the same type, but it is suitably differentiated according to its function.Each section or container consists of an envelope of plastic-like material large enough to contain the juice but easy to handle during the dismemberment of the global form. The sections are attached to one another by a very weak, though adequate, adhesive. The outer or packing container, following the growing tendency of today, is not returnable and may be thrown away.A Piece of Travelling Sculpture. This is a commentary on the design of cars of that time. It has aged finely.Either we ought to apply aesthetic criteria to everything, or forget them completely. Why do we criticize the ‘line’ of a mudguard but never think of questioning the tread of a tyre? Did you ever hear of anyone refusing to buy a tyre because its design didn’t go with his waistcoat? No, because a car is part machine and part drawing-room. Have you heard how these styling experts talk? Just listen to them: ‘giving the interior a more intimate character… an inspired model… a delicious harmony of colours… a new, more slender line… an utterly personal interpretation… a real jewel’, etc. Isn’t this the kind of talk you expect to hear in a couturier’s salon? And of course the word salon is actually used for exhibitions of new cars. And what do you think these gentlemen ought to be talking about? They should be discussing the real problems, aside from matters of aesthetics and personal taste and the art of sculpturing forms. Their designs should be based on statistics and lab tests, on the ceaseless study of form, function and cost.And That's Not All... This is a commentary on a designer's never-ending obsession with chairs. He presents the futility of perfecting the chair effectively: with few words, and lots of delightful illustrations of chairs. There's seven pages of chair images.An Arrow Can Lose Its Feathers but Not Its Point. He is quite literal about it. He shows how the humble arrow sign started out as an actual image of an arrow, and over time became abstract, until what remained is only the bare essence of what it is trying to convey.There's a short appendix called "The Machines of My Childhood (1924)" where he describes an old floating watermill he poked at as a child. He goes back to look for that machine, and sees that it is gone.With that, the book ends abruptly, and as will this note.