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A Twentieth-Century History
by Maggie Gram
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.
"Sweeping and superbly researched, Gram's account makes an intriguing case that design 'helped people imagine' that society was governed by 'rational' forces at a time when mass industrialization was tearing apart the social fabric. It's a riveting intellectual history." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"[Gram] offers a rich, literate exploration of how the concept of design emerged as a way to humanize and soften the harsh edges of capitalism." —Kirkus Reviews
"A sharp, perpetually surprising, connection-filled excavation of how 'design' came to rule our present. You won't look at your phone, your chair, or the horizon the same afterward." —Hua Hsu, author of Stay True
"This book is the secret history of the twentieth century. Gram introduces us to a cast of characters whose names you have never heard, but whose ideas produced the user-friendly look and feel of our world. Her approach is beautifully balanced. She distinguishes the ingenuity from the hype—and there was a lot of hype. But she shows us that although design alone will not cure all the inequities of life under capitalism, it can help." —Louis Menand, author of The Free World
This information about The Invention of Design was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Maggie Gram is a writer, cultural historian, and designer. She leads an experience-design team at Google. She has taught at the Maryland Institute College of Art, Washington University in St. Louis, Ca' Foscari University of Venice, and Harvard University, and she has written for n+1 and the New York Times. She lives in New York.
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