The Invention of Design: A Twentieth-Century History

di Maggie Gram (Autore)

Basic Books, 2025

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

• Autore: Maggie Gram
• Editore: Basic Books
• Anno: 2025
• Rilegatura: Hardback
• Pagine: 336 p.
• Dimensioni: 235 x 152 mm
• EAN: 9781541600638

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