Wearable exoskeletons are electro-mechanical systems designed to assist, augment, or enhance motion and mobility in a variety of human motion applications and scenarios. The applications, ranging from providing power supplementation to assist the wearers to situations where human motion is resisted for exercising applications, cover a wide range of domains such as medical devices for patient rehabilitation training recovering from trauma, movement aids for disabled persons, personal care robots for providing daily living assistance, and reduction of physical burden in industrial and military applications. The development of effective and affordable wearable exoskeletons poses several design, control and modelling challenges to researchers and manufacturers. Novel technologies are therefore being developed in adaptive motion controllers, human-robot interaction control, biological sensors and actuators, materials and structures, etc.

Sculptor and furniture designer Wendell Castle (1932–2018) carved a distinct path in furniture making over nearly six decades of a distinguished career, and this long-awaited recording of his oeuvre, Wendell Castle: A Catalogue Raisonné, 1958–2012, beautifully presents the extraordinary scope of his artistry and craftsmanship. The voluminous accounting of his works, beginning with Castle’s earliest, mid-century works through to his unabashed experiments with unconventional materials (gel-coated fiberglass and metallic automobile paint) and his latest signature wood laminations, is comprehensive and detailed. Three essays of varying perspectives introduce the catalogue raisonné followed by an extensive accounting of his enormous oeuvre, his exhibitions, numerous awards, and the collections of his works, as well as a substantive bibliography. With his organic and whimsical approach to his various mediums, he seamlessly merged sculpture and design into one discipline, obscuring the distinction between the two. He invented the technique of carving stacked laminations of wood, and his later explorations into the qualities of fiberglass as a sculptural medium are unparalleled. Castle is widely collected and his works are in the permanent collections of more than 40 museums and cultural institutions around the world, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York); Museum of Modern Art (New York); Smithsonian American Art Museum (Washington, DC); Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal (Quebec, Canada); and the Victoria and Albert Museum (London).Castle has also been the recipient of many honors and awards, including four National Endowment for the Arts grants, three honorary degrees, the American Craft Council Gold Medal, and a Life-time Achievement Award from the Brooklyn Museum of Art.

This is volume 28 issue 1 of West 86th: A Journal of Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture. Focusing on the decorative arts, design history, and material culture, West 86th provides a forum for new research into all aspects of the content, meaning, and significance of material objects in history. West 86th publishes scholarly articles; review articles; primary source translations; critical book, catalogue, and exhibition reviews; research inquiries; letters to the editor; and supplementary digital material integral to articles.

This is volume 28 issue 2 of West 86th: A Journal of Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture. Focusing on the decorative arts, design history, and material culture, West 86th provides a forum for new research into all aspects of the content, meaning, and significance of material objects in history. West 86th publishes scholarly articles; review articles; primary source translations; critical book, catalogue, and exhibition reviews; research inquiries; letters to the editor; and supplementary digital material integral to articles.

This is volume 29 issue 1 of West 86th: A Journal of Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture. Focusing on the decorative arts, design history, and material culture, West 86th provides a forum for new research into all aspects of the content, meaning, and significance of material objects in history. West 86th publishes scholarly articles; review articles; primary source translations; critical book, catalogue, and exhibition reviews; research inquiries; letters to the editor; and supplementary digital material integral to articles.

This is volume 29 issue 2 of West 86th: A Journal of Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture. Focusing on the decorative arts, design history, and material culture, West 86th provides a forum for new research into all aspects of the content, meaning, and significance of material objects in history. West 86th publishes scholarly articles; review articles; primary source translations; critical book, catalogue, and exhibition reviews; research inquiries; letters to the editor; and supplementary digital material integral to articles.

This is volume 30 issue 1 of West 86th: A Journal of Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture. Focusing on the decorative arts, design history, and material culture, West 86th provides a forum for new research into all aspects of the content, meaning, and significance of material objects in history. West 86th publishes scholarly articles; review articles; primary source translations; critical book, catalogue, and exhibition reviews; research inquiries; letters to the editor; and supplementary digital material integral to articles.

In 2016, social media users in Thailand called out the Paris-based luxury fashion house Balenciaga for copying the popular Thai “rainbow bag,” using Balenciaga’s hashtags to circulate memes revealing the source of the bags’ design. In Why We Can’t Have Nice Things Minh-Ha T. Pham examines the way social media users monitor the fashion market for the appearance of knockoff fashion, design theft, and plagiarism. Tracing the history of fashion antipiracy efforts back to the 1930s, she foregrounds the work of policing that has been tacitly outsourced to social media. Despite the social media concern for ethical fashion and consumption and the good intentions behind design policing, Pham shows that it has ironically deepened forms of social and market inequality, as it relies on and reinforces racist and colonial norms and ideas about what constitutes copying and what counts as creativity. These struggles over ethical fashion and intellectual property, Pham demonstrates, constitute deeper struggles over the colonial legacies of cultural property in digital and global economies.

Whether in a court room or a dressing room, wigs come in many forms and represent many things: from power, to sexuality, to parody, to health, to self-identity, to disguise. Wigs are present at parties and in chemotherapy rooms, in pop music and contemporary art. In this witty and eloquent book, Luigi Amara reflects on the curious history of the wig and along the way takes a sideways look at Western civilization. Amara illuminates how the wig has starred throughout history, from ancient Egypt to the court of Louis XIV, and from British courtrooms to drag shows today. Containing many striking and unusual images, The Wig will appeal to all those interested in the history of fashion—as well as philosophy, art, culture, and aesthetics.

Written and illustrated by master wood engraver Barry Moser, this primer on the art of wood engraving is filled with valuable knowledge including how to prepare a printing block; how to think in the medium’s properties of line, shape, and ink; and how to transfer a drawing onto a block. It also offers practical advice on which tools to use for a project and which ink works best. A highly illustrated guide to this art form, Wood Engraving will be useful to experienced and beginner engravers alike. This book features stunning examples of Moser’s art and skill to admire and inspire.

In the first half of the sixteenth century, the Low Countries saw the rise of a lively market for practical and instructive books that targeted non-specialist readers. This study shows how woodcuts in vernacular books on medicine and astrology fulfilled important rhetorical functions in knowledge communication. These images guided readers’ perceptions of the organisation, visualisation, and reliability of knowledge. Andrea van Leerdam uncovers the assumptions and intentions of book producers to which images testify, and shows how actual readers engaged with these illustrated books. Drawing on insights from the field of information design studies, she scrutinises the books’ material characteristics, including their lay-outs and traces of use, to shed light on the habits and interests of early modern readers. She situates these works in a culture where medicine and astrology were closely interwoven in daily life and where both book producers and readers were exploring the potential of images.

Dilemmas from climate change to financial meltdowns make it clear that global interconnectedness is the norm in the twenty-first century. As a result, global governance organizations (GGOs)—from the World Trade Organization to the Forest Stewardship Council—have taken on prominent roles in the management of international affairs. These GGOs create and promulgate rules to address a host of pressing problems. But as World Rule reveals, they struggle to meet two challenges: building authority despite limited ability to impose sanctions and maintaining legitimacy while satisfying the demands of key constituencies whose support is essential to a global rulemaking regime.

Through a novel empirical study of twenty-five GGOs, Jonathan GS Koppell provides a clearer picture of the compromises within and the competition among these influential institutions by focusing attention on their organizational design. Analyzing four aspects of GGO organization in depth—representation and administration, the rulemaking process, adherence and enforcement, and interest group participation—Koppell describes variation systemically, identifies patterns, and offers explanations that link GGO design to the fundamental challenge of accountability in global governance.

Richly illustrated volume exploring the inseparable histories of modernist abstraction and twentieth-century textiles.
 
Published on the occasion of an exhibition curated by Lynne Cooke, Woven Histories offers a fresh and authoritative look at textiles—particularly weaving—as a major force in the evolution of abstraction. This richly illustrated volume features more than fifty creators whose work crosses divisions and hierarchies formerly segregating the fine arts from the applied arts and handicrafts.
 
Woven Histories begins in the early twentieth century, rooting the abstract art of Sophie Taeuber-Arp in the applied arts and handicrafts, then features the interdisciplinary practices of Anni Albers, Sonia Delaunay, Liubov Popova, Varvara Stepanova, and others who sought to effect social change through fabrics for furnishings and apparel. Over the century, the intersection of textiles and abstraction engaged artists from Ed Rossbach, Kay Sekimachi, Ruth Asawa, Lenore Tawney, and Sheila Hicks to Rosemarie Trockel, Ellen Lesperance, Jeffrey Gibson, Igshaan Adams, and Liz Collins, whose textile-based works continue to shape this discourse. Including essays by distinguished art historians as well as reflections from contemporary artists, this ambitious project traces the intertwined histories of textiles and abstraction as vehicles through which artists probe urgent issues of our time.
 

Writing Centers and Learning Commons presents program administrators, directors, staff, and tutors with theoretical rationales, experiential journeys, and go-to practical designs and strategies for the many questions involved when writing centers find themselves operating in shared environments.

The chapters comprehensively examine the ways writing centers make the most of sharing common ground. Directors, coordinators, administrators, and stakeholders draw on past and present attention to writing center studies to help shape the future of the learning commons and narrate their substantial collective experience with collaborative efforts to stay centered while empowering colleagues and student writers at their institutions. The contributors explore what is gained and lost by affiliating writing centers with learning commons, how to create sound pedagogical foundations that include writing center philosophies, how writing center practices evolved or have been altered by learning center affiliations, and more.

Writing Centers and Learning Commons is for all stakeholders of writing in and across campuses collaborating on (by choice or edict), or wishing to explore the possibilities of, a learning commons enterprise.
 
Contributors: Alice Batt, Cassandra Book, Charles A. Braman, Elizabeth Busekrus Blackmon, Virginia Crank, Celeste Del Russo, Patricia Egbert, Christopher Giroux, Alexis Hart, Suzanne Julian, Kristen Miller, Robby Nadler, Michele Ostrow, Helen Raica-Klotz, Kathleen Richards, Robyn Rohde, Nathalie Singh-Corcoran, David Stock