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Connecting the dots : a collection of ad hoc design thinking

by Garry Emery

This volume documents the 60-year career of Australian designer Garry Emery and his firm, EmeryStudio. It compiles his writings on design theory alongside projects ranging from graphic design to urban signage and architectural installations.

Accession 9781743799451 ISBN 9781743799451 Publisher Hardie Grant Publishing

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spine_text: A collection of ad-hoc design thinking About Garry Emery and EmeryStudio Forms of thinking Modernism and its critics Place identity and Australian design Branding and visual identity Typefaces, alphabets and letterform design Connecting the Dots Signs, cities and wayfinding Design for architecture Design for exhibitions Design for print Wherever we go, there we are Etcetera Garry Emery

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Topics and Themes

1. **Graphic Design as Cross-Disciplinary Practice**
Emery's work defies the boundaries of conventional graphic design, extending into alphabets, typography, branding, books, websites, furniture, installations, and building facades. The book reflects how design thinking permeates every scale of human-made environment, from the intimate to the monumental.

The central idea is that graphic design is not a discrete discipline but a connective tissue linking communication, space, object, and culture.

Connect to books about: graphic design history, interdisciplinary design, visual communication, design theory.

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2. **Wayfinding & Environmental Design**
EmeryStudio's most prominent projects — signage and wayfinding systems for the Burj Khalifa, Petronas Towers, Taipei 101, Parliament House of Australia, and the Sydney Opera House — form a major strand of the book's practical content. These projects reveal design as orientation: helping humans navigate complex built environments.

Connect to books about: wayfinding design, environmental graphic design, signage systems, urban navigation.

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3. **Design Thinking as Reflective Practice**
The book is explicitly framed as "ad hoc design thinking" — a non-systematic, intuitive, and exploratory mode of creative reflection. Emery's essays, ramblings, meditations, and opinions resist fixed conclusions, embracing ambiguity, contradiction, and uncertainty as legitimate design attitudes.

The book's central proposition is that design knowledge is lived, contingent, and resistant to formula.

Connect to books about: reflective practice, creative process, design methodology, tacit knowledge.

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4. **The Designer as Author & Public Intellectual**
Rather than a conventional monograph, the book assembles writings, essays, and personal notes alongside studio work — positioning Emery as a thinker and writer, not merely a practitioner. This blurs the line between the designer and the intellectual commentator on culture.

Connect to books about: designer-as-author, creative writing, design criticism, practitioner voices.

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5. **Architecture, Urbanism & the Built Environment**
Emery has served on national juries for architecture and urbanism, and his studio's work spans building facades, car parks, public streets, and major civic institutions. The book engages with how design shapes — and is shaped by — architectural and urban contexts.

Connect to books about: architecture and design, public space, urban design, civic identity.

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6. **Australian Cultural Identity in a Global Context**
The book documents over 60 years of contribution to Australian culture while operating on an international stage — embassies, global landmarks, the Venice Biennale. It implicitly asks what it means to produce a distinct cultural voice from Australia within a globalised design world.

Connect to books about: Australian art and design history, cultural identity, postcolonial design, national cultural institutions.

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7. **Branding, Identity & Visual Communication**
Emery's portfolio spans branding and identity work for governments, private corporations, and cultural institutions across multiple continents. The book engages with how organisations construct and communicate meaning through visual language.

Connect to books about: brand identity, corporate communications, visual identity systems, semiotics.

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8. **The Creative Essay & Fragmentary Knowledge**
The book's form — collecting "comments, insights, thoughts, quotations, snippets, questions, answers, essays, articles, meditations, opinions, ambiguities... ruminations, not so many facts, no certainties" — is itself a literary and philosophical stance. It privileges the fragment over the treatise, the question over the answer.

Connect to books about: the essay form, aphorism and fragments, creative non-fiction, philosophy of creativity.

Connecting the dots : a collection of ad hoc design thinking

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