Bruno Munari 'Fantasy' Book Launch with Jeffrey Schnapp & Peter Lunenfeld

Bruno Munari 'Fantasy' Book Launch & Signing with Jeffrey Schnapp & Peter Lunenfeld. The first-ever English translation of Bruno Munari’s classic treatise on creativity.

Bruno Munari translator Jeffrey Schnapp will discuss Fantasy: Invention, Creativity, and Imagination in Visual Communications with author and educator Peter Lunenfeld with a Q&A and book signing to follow.

Copies of Fantasy signed by the translator Jeffrey Schnapp are available to pre-order here and copies of Peter Lunenfeld's City of the Edge of Forever: Los Angeles Reimagined will be available for purchase at the event.

Never-before translated into English, Bruno Munari’s Fantasy (Fantasia, 1977), invites the reader to explore their own imagination, creativity, and fantasy through a journey in Munari’s mind and work experience. His theory of creativity, developed in conversation with the Reggio Emilia approach and the work of Jean Piaget, foregrounds the book’s journey through Munari’s own design processes, and his work for clients and with children.

By turning life and work into a classroom, Munari unlocks a path through imagination in order to access his, and in turn our, deepest sense of play. The facsimile reprint is accompanied by new contextual annotations by Munari scholar and design historian Jeffrey Schnapp. These micro-interventions highlight the innovations that make this work as relevant today as when originally published.

Bruno Munari (1907–98) was an Italian artist, designer and inventor who contributed fundamentals to many fields of visual arts (painting, sculpture, film, industrial design, graphic design) in Modernism, Futurism and Concrete art, as well as to nonvisual arts (literature, poetry) through his research on games, didactic method, movement, tactile learning, kinesthetic learning and creativity.

Jeffrey Schnapp is an American university professor who works as a cultural historian, designer, and technologist. Until joining the Harvard University in 2011, he was the director of the Stanford Humanities Lab from its foundation in 1999 through 2009. At Harvard, he holds the Carl Pescosolido Chair in Romance and Comparative Literatures in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and also teaches in the Department of Architecture at Harvard's Graduate School of Design. Effective June 2015, he assumed the position of Chief Executive Officer and co-founder of Piaggio Fast Forward, the robotics division of the Piaggio. In 2018 he transitioned to the role of Chief Visionary Officer, handing over the role of CEO to his co-founder Greg Lynn. In October 2021, Piaggio Fast Forward launched a second product, gita mini. https://jeffreyschnapp.com

Peter Lunenfeld is a professor in UCLA’s Design|Media Arts department and on the Digital Humanities and Urban Humanities faculties, and founding director of the Institute for Technology & Aesthetics (The ITA). City at the Edge of Forever: Los Angeles Reimagined, is published by Viking/Penguin. Other books and projects include Digital_Humanities (co-author, 2012), The Secret War Between Downloading and Uploading (2011), USER (2005), Snap to Grid (2000), The Digital Dialectic (editor, 1999), and the MIT Press Mediawork series. He holds a Ph.D. in Film, Television and New Media from UCLA. http://www.peterlunenfeld.com

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