The invention of design : a twentieth-century history /
"Design has penetrated every dimension of contemporary society, from classrooms to statehouses to corporate boardrooms. It's seen as a kind of mega-power, one that can solve all our problems and elevate our experiences to make a more beautiful, more functional world. But there's a bac...
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| Format: | Book |
| Language: | English |
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New York, NY :
Basic Books, Hachette Book Group,
2025.
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| Edition: | First edition. |
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| Summary: | "Design has penetrated every dimension of contemporary society, from classrooms to statehouses to corporate boardrooms. It's seen as a kind of mega-power, one that can solve all our problems and elevate our experiences to make a more beautiful, more functional world. But there's a backstory here. In The Invention of Design, designer and historian Maggie Gram investigates how, over the twentieth century, our economic hopes, fears, and fantasies shaped the idea of "design"-then repeatedly redefined it. Nearly a century ago, resistance to New Deal-era government intervention helped transform design from an idea about aesthetics into one about function. And at century's end, the dot-com crash brought us "design thinking": the idea that design methodology can solve any problem, small or large. To this day, design captures imaginations as a tool for fixing market society's broken parts from within, supposedly enabling us to thrive within capitalism's sometimes violent constraints. A captivating critical history, The Invention of Design shows how design became the hero of many of our most hopeful stories-dreams, fantasies, utopias-about how we might better live in a modern world"-- |
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| Physical Description: | vii, 322 pages : illustrations (black and white) ; 25 cm |
| Bibliography: | Includes bibliographical references (pages 263-307) and index. |
| ISBN: | 9781541600638 1541600630 |