The Invention of Design: A Twentieth-Century History

The Invention of Design: A Twentieth-Century History

Maggie Gram • Basic Books

ISBN-10: 1541600649 · ISBN-13: 978‑1541600645 · 2023 · 1st Edition

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By Maggie Gram 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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