The Invention of Design: A Twentieth-Century History

From a brilliant cultural historian, ＂a secret history of the twentieth century＂ (Louis Menand) told through the story of design and its utopian promises

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.

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.