A critical history of the idea of design-and its utopian promise
From a brilliant cultural historian, “a secret history of the twentieth century” (Louis Menand) told through the story of design and its utopian promises
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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