The Invention of Design

<B>From a brilliant cultural historian, a fascinating history of the twentieth century told through the story of design and its utopian promises<BR/><BR/> “Fascinating, rigorously researched.” ―<I>Atlantic</I><BR/><BR/> A <I>New Yorker</I> Best Book of the Year</B><BR/><BR/> 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. <BR/>   <BR/> But there’s a backstory here. In <I>The Invention of Design</I>, 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.   <BR/>   <BR/> A captivating critical history, <I>The Invention of Design</I> 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.