California ─ Designing Freedom

Chronicling the roots of Silicon Valley's impact on global contemporary design from the 1960s to the present day

The premise of this book is simple: "Designed in California" is the new "Made in Italy". Designed in California traces the roots of Silicon Valley's impact on contemporary design culture. Starting with the influence of the 1960s hippy counterculture on the first generation of computer hackers, taking us right up to the present where tech giants are 'designing' our daily experiences and impacting on the way we interact, share and live, and into the future where the Internet-of-Things revolution is just around the corner.

Brendan McGetrick is an independent writer, editor, and designer. His work has appeared in publications in over twenty countries, including Wired, Art Review, Domus, and Vogue Nippon. His projects include the books MAD Dinner (Actar), Urban China: Work In Progress (Timezone 8), and Who is Architecture? (Domus/Timezone 8). In 2011, he curated Unnamed Design, a component of the 2011 Gwangju Design Biennale, in collaboration with Ai Weiwei. In 2014, he co-curated Fair Enough in the Russian pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale. From 2002 to 2006 he was head writer at the research studio AMO.

Justin McGuirk is a writer and curator based in London. He is the chief curator at the Design Museum and the head of Design Curating & Writing at Design Academy Eindhoven. He has been the director of Strelka Press, the design critic of The Guardian, and the editor of Icon magazine. In 2012 he was awarded the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale of Architecture for an exhibition he curated with Urban Think Tank. His book Radical Cities: Across Latin America in Search of a New Architecture is published by Verso.