The Invention of Design. A Twentieth-Century History

From a brilliant cultural historian, a fascinating history of the twentieth century told through the story of design and its utopian promises "Fascinating, rigorously researched." ?Atlantic A New Yorker Best Book of the Year 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.