BiblioVault - Books about Design

Venice Variations

Tracing the Architectural Imagination

Sophia Psarra

University College London, 2018

From the myth of Arcadia through to the twenty-first century, ideas about sustainability—how we imagine better urban environments—remain persistently relevant and raise recurring questions. How do cities evolve as complex spaces nurturing both urban creativity and the fortuitous art of discovery, and by which mechanisms do they foster imagination and innovation? While past utopias were conceived in terms of an ideal geometry, contemporary exemplary models of urban design seek technological solutions of optimal organization. The Venice Variations explores Venice as a prototypical city that may hold unique answers to the ancient narrative of utopia. Venice was not the result of a preconceived ideal but the pragmatic outcome of social and economic networks of communication. Its urban creativity, though, came to represent the quintessential combination of place and institutions of its time.

Through a discussion of Venice and two other works owing their inspiration to this city—Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities and Le Corbusier’s Venice Hospital—Sophia Psarra describes Venice as a system that starts to resemble a highly probabilistic "algorithm." The rapidly escalating processes of urban development around our big cities share many of the motivations for survival, shelter, and trade that brought Venice into existence. Rather than seeing these places as problems to be solved, we need to understand how urban complexity can evolve, as happened from its unprepossessing origins in the marshes of the Venetian lagoon to the "model city" enduring a thousand years. This book frees Venice from stereotypical representations, revealing its generative capacity to inform potential other "Venices" for the future.

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The Visual Elements—Abstraction

A Handbook for Communicating Science and Engineering

Felice C. Frankel

University of Chicago Press, 2026

For anyone interested in visual communication, a training guide for evaluating and developing visual representations for the big ideas in science and technology, essential skills for journal submissions, grant applications, and public understanding.

As a scientist, engineer, or other researcher, you may have written an abstract. In a paragraph, you explain the purpose of your research, your approach, the questions you have asked and answered, and your work’s impact. The abstract is a summary and an invitation—to read the paper, attend your talk, and join you in your thinking. You may even have been asked to create a visual abstract—a single image—to achieve the same goals. As a designer or public information officer, you may have had a similar brief—to explain a compelling subject with a visual for a journal cover or press release. And yet, this important skill—devising visual metaphors—isn’t typically taught. With her decades of experience creating compelling images and instructing MIT researchers, award-winning photographer and science communicator Felice C. Frankel helps readers evaluate and create their own visual abstractions.

Like in her other books in the Visual Elements series, on photography and design, Frankel asks readers to evaluate different choices—for example, in conveying the uncertainty of a hurricane’s path or the organization of the Standard Model for elementary particles. But in Abstraction, she offers more. With examples from science, engineering, and beyond, the book helps readers consider and evaluate the visuals around them and determine how they work and when they fail: Is this representation the best for communication? Will these abstractions encourage others to engage with my work? Will they mislead? Will they help my ideas evolve? Frankel invites researchers to think about the many meanings behind their images—and, in turn, to think more deeply about their research.

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The Visual Elements—Design

A Handbook for Communicating Science and Engineering

Felice C. Frankel

University of Chicago Press, 2024

With insights and examples from designers at publications from Nature to the New York Times, an essential guide to creating figures and presentations.

In this short handbook, award-winning science communicator Felice C. Frankel offers a quick guide for scientists and engineers who want to share—and better understand—their research by designing compelling graphics for journal submissions, grant applications, presentations, and posters. Like all the books in the Visual Elements series, this handbook is also a training tool for researchers. Distilling her celebrated books and courses to the essentials, Frankel shows scientists and engineers, from students to primary investigators, the importance of thinking visually. This crucial volume in the Visual Elements series offers a wealth of engaging design examples. Case studies and advice from designers at prestigious publications and researchers’ own before-and-after examples show how even the smallest changes—to color, type, composition, and layering—can greatly improve communication. Ideal for researchers who want a foothold for presenting and preparing their work for everything from conferences to publications, the book explains the steps for creating a concise and communicative graphic to highlight the most important aspects of research—and to clarify researchers’ own thinking. The resulting book is an essential element of any scientist’s, engineer’s, or designer’s library.

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VLSI and Post-CMOS Electronics

Design, modelling and simulation, Volume 1

Rohit Dhiman

The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2019

VLSI, or Very-Large-Scale-Integration, is the practice of combining billions of transistors to create an integrated circuit. At present, VLSI circuits are realised using CMOS technology. However, the demand for ever smaller, more efficient circuits is now pushing the limits of CMOS. Post-CMOS refers to the possible future digital logic technologies beyond the CMOS scaling limits. This 2-volume set addresses the current state of the art in VLSI technologies and presents potential options for post-CMOS processes.

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