From a brilliant cultural historian, a fascinating history of the twentieth century told through the story of design and its utopian promises "Fascinating, rigorously researched." ―
Atlantic A
New Yorker Best Book of the Year
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.
