The Invention of Design – Maggie Gram

A critical history of the idea of design-and its utopian promiseDesign 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.