Harvard Design School Guide to Shopping

What fun! The Harvard Design School has gone to town with this richly illustrated, coffee-table-size tome on the consumer experience, as the second installment in its anticipated four-volume Project on the City series. (Volume one, Great Leap Forward, focused on five fast-growing cities in China's Pearl River Delta region.) Flip through almost 800 pages of vibrant photos, ad illustrations, funky graphs and blueprints; check out the learned essays on "Predicting the Consumer" and "Postmall Urbanism." As appealingly designed and presented as it is, the deeper message here is how shopping, having moved beyond ancient bazaars and modern Main Street and into everything from museums to airports, has become as elemental to human life as eating and breathing.