History of Modern Design

This insightful, wide-ranging book surveys applied arts and industrial design from the eighteenth century to the present day, exploring the dynamic relationship between design and manufacturing, and the technological, social, and commercial context in which this relationship developed. The effects of a vastly enlarged audience for the products of modern design and the complex dynamic of mass consumption, are also discussed. Part of this dynamic reveals that products serve as symbols for desires that have little to do with need or function.

Wide-ranging examples of product and graphic design are shown—and their significance within the history of design explained—including vessels and other objects made from glass, ceramics, plastic, or metal, as well as tableware, furniture, textiles, lighting, housings for electric appliances, machines and equipment, cars, tools, books, posters, magazines, illustrations, advertisements, and digital information. The book also explores the impact of a wealth of new manmade industrial materials on the course of modern design—from steel to titanium, plywood to plastic, cotton to nylon, wire to transistors, and .from microprocessors to nanotubes. The research, development, and applications of these technologies are shown as depending upon far-reaching lines of communication, stretching across geographical and linguistic boundaries. In this way, David Raizman reveals the history of modern design as a "global" history.

Filling the gap for an extensively illustrated history of modern design, this introduction provides a balanced chronological survey of decorative arts, industrial design and graphic design from the eighteenth through the twentieth centuries. Focusing on the appreciation of design as a creative activity, as well as an enterprise conditioned by economic, technological and social history, Raizman includes the study of products and furnishing designed for mass consumption, and examines the social context for the democratization of culture.

Filling the gap for an extensively illustrated history of modern design, this introduction provides a balanced, chronological survey of the decorative arts, industrial design and graphic design from the eighteenth through the twentieth centuries. Focusing on the appreciation of design as a creative activity, as well as an enterprise conditioned by economic, technological and social history, Raizman includes the study of products and furnishing designed for mass consumption, and examines the social context for the democratization of culture. The author examines supply, demand, and design from 1700-1850, arts, crafts, and machines from 1850-1914, design after the Great War, 1918-1944and international modernism and mass culture after World War II. For design professionals.

II. ARTS, CRAFTS, AND MACHINES, 1850-1914.

III. AFTER THE GREAT WAR, 1918-1944: MODERNE, INDUSTRY, AND UTOPIAS.

IV. HUMANISM AND LUXURY: INTERNATIONAL MODERNISM AND MASS CULTURE AFTER WORLD WAR II, 1945-1960.

V. PROGRESS, PROTEST, AND PLURALISM, 1960-2000.