Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
The Invention of Design: A Twentieth-Century History

The Invention of Design: A Twentieth-Century History

Gram, Maggie

Hardcover

20th Century United States History21st Century United States HistoryGeneral Design

Publisher Price: $30.00

PREORDER - Expected ship date June 3, 2025

ISBN10: 1541600630
ISBN13: 9781541600638
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: Jun 3 2025
Pages: 336
Height: 1.09 Width: 6.25 Depth: 9.50
Language: English
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.

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