{"product_id":"9781541600638","title":"The Invention of Design : A Twentieth-Century History by Maggie Gram","description":"A critical history of the idea of design-and its utopian promiseDesign 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.\u003cbr\u003eBinding: Hardback","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56304152805749,"sku":"9781541600638","price":25.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781541600638.jpg?v=1762795501","url":"https:\/\/backstory.london\/products\/9781541600638","provider":"Backstory","version":"1.0","type":"link"}