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History of Modern Design by David Raizman (Prentice Hall) Design plays an integral part in our lives, surrounding us at home and in the office. The products of design—whether in the form of household products, packaging, fashion, software, industrial equipment, or promotional images in the mass media—can be seen both as objects of beauty and as the result of creative human endeavors. 

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. 

As a subject for historical investigation concentrating upon describing and understanding change, the meanings of design may emerge from the study of art history, technology, politics, economics, as well as consumer behavior – that is, we may appreciate the products of design as objects of beauty and cre­ative human endeavor, as efforts of designers to engage with new materials, methods of production, or to promote particular social ideologies, as outcomes of economic conditions within a system of capitalist free enterprise which requires and stimulates ever-expanding markets and increasing levels of consumption, as challenges to that system, and as examples of the complex moti­vations of the mass market. A plurality of perspectives allows us to think about the considerations of artists, engineers, designers, manufacturers, and consumers in determining the meaning of design history.

The material for this study includes vessels and other objects made from glass, ceramics, plastic, or metal, tableware, furni­ture, textiles in their use for curtains, carpets, upholstery, cloth­ing, and wall coverings, patterns printed or woven for surface decoration, lighting, housings for electric appliances, machines, and equipment, automobiles and tools, books, posters, magazines, illustrations, advertisements, and digital information. This list, though hardly exhaustive, is sufficiently representative to demonstrate that design plays an integral part of each of our lives. It surrounds us in the home and office in the form of industrial equipment, products, and packaging, and bombards us with promotional images in the mass media.

A survey of three hundred years permits an appreciation of continuity as well as change, and the thoughtful consideration of both of these phenomena is a major theme of this book. It provides for the examination of the rich legacy of craft produc­tion, the creative use of natural materials and newer materials that have emerged as a result of industrial or digital technology, the discourse revolving around an artificial and often-contested duality between artist and artisan within the western tradition of the visual arts, the expanding market for the products of design, and the phenomenon of reform and standards as they attempt to regulate and inform that market.

Finally, the Age of Exploration, from the journeys of Columbus and other adventurers at the close of the fifteenth century to the voyages of Captain James Cook in the eighteenth century, created the basis for a cross-cultural fertilization that also forms an integral part of the history of modern design. The transformations in the craft industries that lie at the heart of Part I are, simply put, unthinkable without the economic and cultural interaction that transpired at that time between east and west. Awareness of new processes like the manufacture of porcelain and lacquer in Europe during the eighteenth century, of products like woven silk and cotton, of pastimes like tea-drinking, all pro­foundly affected the history of design through trade, competition, and travel, stimulating invention, marketing, and unprecedented commercial expansion on a new global scale.

One may also extend this theme further into history, for instance to the techniques of papermaking, invented in China, brought to southern Europe by Muslim civilization, and expanding in Europe with the invention of printing using moveable type in Germany in the fifteenth century.

More recently such expansion has come to include a wealth of new man-made industrial materials, processes, and information, from steel to titanium, plywood to plastic, and cotton to nylon, from wire to transistors, and from microprocessors to nanotubes. The research, development, and applications for these technologies depend upon far-reaching lines of communi­cation stretching across geographic and linguistic barriers. Thus the history of modern design is indeed a "global" history, and it is important to recognize the interconnections between cultures both western and non-western.

The text and illustrations which follow attempt to suggest themes of resonance as well as change in the history of design from the eighteenth through the twentieth centuries. It is my hope that the selection and presentation of the material will encourage students to appreciate design and to examine the rela­tion of both unique and everyday objects to a variety of forces and influences that give them meaning.

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