Do we need another book club? Yes, actually.

Thursday 25 July marks the very first edition of the Disegno Book Club, a three-way collaboration between Zetteler, Disegno and De Beauvoir Block. As close neighbours, you could think of it as some sort of community street party. But an educational sort of street party at our place, in De Beauvoir Block. And with books instead of, or indeed as well as, beer. 

The first book club kicks off with Caroline Criado-Perez's Invisible Women, a book that exposes and explores the gender data gap and its effects on everything from mobile phone design to drug testing. Did you know that it wasn’t until 2011 that car manufacturers in the US  started using crash test dummies based on the “typical” female body? The book is a gold mine of these facts and, as a review on the Guardian points out, crushing gender inequality is nothing new but it is “useful and sobering to have it listed in this way, to have numbers to quantify our pain and misery.” 

In founding Disegno Book Club it was essential to be welcoming and inclusive. So it’s completely free and open to all. You don’t need to have read the book to attend: just bring yourself, an open mind and an interest in design. 

That said, reading the book beforehand may well give you a wonderful sense of being. Our local bookshop, Burley Fisher Books, is offering 15% off the books if you use the code DISEGNO15.

Ahead of the event, we grabbed Disegno editor-in-chief Oli Stratford and gave him a grilling. We took great pleasure in putting him in the hot seat for a change. 

It’s predominantly an excuse to slake our own interests. Everyone on the Disegno team reads widely, and any opportunity to inflict our interests on others is not to be sniffed at.

More generally, we think a book club could be a nice way to foster critical engagement with some of the issues facing contemporary design. A book provides a concrete jumping off point for discussion, while also admitting of enough interpretative wiggle room to ensure you hear a variety of views. Books are always a fabulous entry point to any topic, and that’s exactly what we’d like this to be – an informal, relaxed way to start thinking about what design is, does, and could be today.

We’re not too prescriptive about this.The charm of something like a book club is that you don’t know what people will make of a given text or what will come from it. It’s a crapshoot, and long may it remain as such. Broadly speaking, however, we’re interested to see how other people’s reading of a text might shape our views as a journal, and we’re excited to share books that we value with as wide an audience as possible.

It’s our debut text, so we wanted something that not only felt timely and vital (which Perez’s book absolutely is), but which could also speak about quite how pervasive design’s impact can be – for both better and worse. Invisible Women is a dissection of the myriad systems in place (both overt and concealed) that maintain gender disparity within society; it’s something that affects everyone and which everyone ought to be aware of. It felt like the perfect vehicle for showing why a design book club might be a valuable thing.

Oh god, this is the sort of question that terrifies me. How can you possibly know what book might satisfy you for the rest of your existence?

There’s nothing for it, I’ll just have to have A4 printouts of the internet in its entirety as it currently stands. I imagine these could be stapled together in discrete, manageable chunks which are then presented in a solitary display case to satisfy the requirement of it being a single work. I’ll wear trousers with a colossal pocket to satisfy the other aspect of your stipulation.