The Invention of Design: A Twentieth-Century History

During the 20th century, artists, industrialists, politicians, bureaucrats, and executives all “came to understand a set of previously unrelated concepts” like “beauty, function, problem-solving,” and “experience” as “components of one single megaconcept” called design, according to this impressive debut from historian Gram. She profiles individuals at the center of design history, most strikingly Eva Striker Zeisel. Born in 1906 in Budapest to a family of left-wing intellectuals, as a journeyman potter Zeisel pioneered the creation of “molds for mass production.” Though she was primarily focused on the “beautification” of goods, she made clever innovations to the logistics of mechanized production itself. In addition to Zeisel’s story (which eventually takes her to Moscow and New York, shedding light on design’s evolution on both sides of the Iron Curtain), Gram also traces the American postwar rise of think tanks, which attempted to apply design principles developed for mass production to the “optimizing” of society itself. It wasn’t until the 1980s and the human-oriented design of Apple home computers that design instead came to be widely understood as “optimizing” user experience, Gram suggests. Today, she notes, design is entangled in virtually everything, from school lunches to “the vote.” 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. (June)