Urban Shores — Book Design — 2025
Overview
“Urban Shores – Towards Landscape-Based Coastal Adaptation” is written by Anna Aslaug Lund, Ole Fryd, and Gertrud Jørgensen. Published by the Danish Architectural Press, the book focuses on how coastal cities can adapt to rising sea levels through landscape-based solutions.
Book design by me as part of my final graduation project from Strategic Design and Entrepreneurship at the Royal Danish Academy, where I investigated sustainable practices in book publishing, from the design phase to production. I led the entire process, from design to production, in close collaboration with author and landscape architect Anna Aslaug and director Kristoffer Lindhardt Weiss from the Danish Architectural Press (Arkitektens Forlag). The book can be found on the Danish Architectural Press website.
Strategy
Books have long been a cherished medium for knowledge and culture. Yet every stage of a book’s lifecycle carries an ecological footprint — from paper and ink to logistics, overproduction, and storage. By zooming out to examine the broader publishing system, this project explored sustainability in book design not only as a question of materials, but as a question of how books are experienced, valued, and sustained over time as meaningful objects.
While the goal was to produce a high-quality publication in line with the Press’s standards, the project also served as a strategic design inquiry into how books are made and where small, realistic interventions might reduce their overall environmental impact. The process was guided by research into sustainable publishing practices and informed by the Eco-cost/Value Ratio framework, used as a qualitative design lens. This framework helped evaluate design decisions based on both environmental cost and user value — based on the insight that sustainability is strengthened not only by lowering impact, but by increasing perceived value.
Environmental sustainability cannot stand alone. For a book to last — to be read, used, and cared for — it must also be aesthetically sustainable. Designing for longevity means creating objects that invite attention, attachment, and continued use. These dimensions are deeply interconnected: the more a book is valued by its reader, the more likely it is to be kept, shared, and preserved.
A key outcome of the project was the role of the designer as a strategic mediator. Through continuous dialogue with the publisher, printer, and suppliers, I navigated constraints, exchanged knowledge, and translated sustainability ambitions into practical decisions. This collaborative process became one of the most valuable results of the project, demonstrating how design can operate as a bridge between stakeholders within complex production systems.