industrial design

—industrial designer.

the art that deals with the design problems of manufactured objects, including problems of designing such objects with consideration for available materials and means of production, of designing packages, bottles, etc., for manufactured goods, and of graphic design for manufactured objects, packages, etc.

[1930-35]

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Design of products made by large-scale industry for mass distribution.

Among the considerations for such products are structure, operation, appearance, and conformance to production, distribution, and selling procedures; appearance is the principal consideration in industrial design. The International Council of Societies of Industrial Design was founded in London in 1957 and within 25 years had members in more than 40 countries. Two significant trends have persisted: streamlining, a design principle pioneered by Raymond Loewy and others in the 1930s; and planned obsolescence, design changes that tempt owners to replace goods with new purchases more frequently than would normally be necessary.

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Introduction

      the design of mass-produced consumer products. Industrial designers, often trained as architects or other visual arts professionals, are usually part of a larger creative team. Their primary responsibility is to help produce manufactured items that not only work well but please the eye and, therefore, have a competitive advantage over similar products. The work of an industrial designer often relates to or includes graphic design, such as advertising and packaging, corporate imagery and branding, and interior design (also called interior architecture or environmental design), the arrangement of man-made spaces.

Origins of modern design: Germany and Europe

 Industrial design is a largely 20th-century phenomenon. The first industrial designer is often considered to be German architect Peter Behrens (Behrens, Peter), who was heavily influenced by the 19th-century English designer and poet William Morris (Morris, William) and by the Arts and Crafts Movement, with which Morris was closely associated. Beginning in 1907, Behrens was the artistic adviser for AEG (the Allgemeine Elektricitäts Gesellschaft, or Universal Electric Company), for which he designed not only industrial buildings but also small electrical appliances, from teakettles to fans. In addition, he determined the company's corporate identity, packaging, and advertising. Behrens's approach was an extension of what architects such as Frank Lloyd Wright (Wright, Frank Lloyd) and Karl Friedrich Schinkel (Schinkel, Karl Friedrich) long practiced: total control of a designed environment at all levels. Behrens, however, created designs for a corporate client, intent on selling a service and related goods to the public, rather than for a middle-class residential client or a royal patron, as in the cases of Wright and Schinkel, respectively.

      Behrens was a leading member of the Deutscher Werkbund (founded in 1907), a society of artists, architects, and craftsmen akin to English arts-and-crafts societies. The Deutscher Werkbund catalyzed communication among German design professionals and sponsored major exhibitions, such as those in Cologne (1914) and Stuttgart (1927); the latter was the Weissenhofsiedlung, a renowned exhibition of model homes designed by Europe's leading modern architects and the epitome of the International Style of minimalist architecture.

      Behrens himself influenced many architect-designers of the next generation, including Walter Gropius (Gropius, Walter), founder of Germany's famed Bauhaus school of design, and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (Mies van der Rohe, Ludwig), who served as a later director of the school. Founded in 1919 in Weimar, Ger., the Bauhaus aimed to elevate and coordinate the design and production of crafts and industrial goods for a new postimperial age. Both Gropius and Mies designed buildings as well as smaller-scale objects. For instance, Gropius was the architect of the new Bauhaus building when the school moved to Dessau in 1925, but he also designed interiors of Adler automobiles (1930–33). The furnishings designed at the Bauhaus were characterized by the extensive use of bent metal, something that was developed with the assistance of the Junkers Aircraft Company in Dessau, a firm known for its early development of the all-metal airplane in 1918, at the end of World War I. Mies—who directed the Bauhaus from 1930 to 1933, when the Nazi Party came to national power and closed it—designed some renowned examples of steel-framed furniture, such as the MR chair (1927), the Barcelona chair (1929), and the Brno chair (1930). During the worldwide Great Depression of the 1930s, when he had few architectural commissions, Mies earned a living from the royalties of those furniture sales. The Bauhaus produced other icons of modern design, notably the sleek glassware and streamlined table lamps of Wilhelm Wagenfeld.

 Beyond those designers specifically associated with the Bauhaus, other German architects of the time created high-profile designs; for instance, Fritz August Breuhaus de Groot created the interiors of the steamship Bremen (1929) and the airship Hindenburg (1931–35), and in the 1930s Gropius protégé Carl August Bembé designed motorboats for Maybach, a company that built internal-combustion engines for airplanes and boats and automobiles for the German car manufacturers Opel (Opel AG) and Adler.

 Early developments in industrial design were not, however, taking place solely in Germany. In the first decades of the 20th century, architects and designers in other countries were also creating distinctively designed consumer products. These include such items as the undulating Savoy vase (1936) by the Finnish architect Alvar Aalto (Aalto, Alvar), the avant-garde geometric porcelain teapots and cups (1923) by Russian Suprematist (Suprematism) painter Kazimir Malevich (Malevich, Kazimir), the classic double-lever corkscrew (1930) by Italian designer Dominick Rosati, and the ubiquitous, highly flexible Anglepoise desk lamp (1932) by the British automotive engineer George Carwardine.

Modern design in the United States

      Despite what is often seen as German leadership in creating industrial design as a profession, the United States has an equally compelling claim to being industrial design's parent country. The United States emerged from World War I (1914–18) physically undamaged; in contrast, many European cities and industrial facilities were not only damaged but in some cases downright decimated by those years of war and by the subsequent socialist and communist revolutions. In some ways the radical sociopolitical change of the interwar years catalyzed equally radical changes in attitudes toward design, as can be seen in the growing popularity of the Bauhaus within Weimar Germany. European society was in a state of turmoil and radical reform, but the United States, despite its share of social unrest, was somewhat more stable. During the war the country had established a reputation for large industrial production, and afterward its wartime factories were adapted for the civilian consumer economy. With this great output capability, most probably, came a tendency toward planned obsolescence. This term was supposedly coined after World War II by American industrial designers and writers to indicate industry's desire to produce consumer items that would be replaced even before their actual utility expired. Although the concept is often linked with the second half of the 20th century, it is likely that American industrialists saw this profit-making opportunity well before then.

      The United States at this time was thus ripe for the development of the industrial design profession. In fact, the U.S. Patent Office recognized the term industrial designer in 1913, and, as in Europe, organizations were formed to unite the visual arts professionals who helped create consumer products and environments. The American Union of Decorative Artists and Craftsmen (founded in 1927), for instance, was followed by the American Designers Institute (1938) and the Society of Industrial Designers (1944), all of which eventually merged to form the Industrial Designers Society of America (1965). As with the Deutscher Werkbund and most professional organizations, these served to validate the profession in the view of the public and to facilitate communication among their members.

      One of the first major public expressions of the newfound commitment to showcasing well-designed consumer products was Macy's department store's Art in Trade Exposition (1927), which was designed by the scenic designer and Theatre Guild founder Lee Simonson (Simonson, Lee) and owed a major conceptual debt to the Arts Décoratifs exposition that had taken place in Paris two years earlier. Throughout the rest of the interwar years, other exhibitions were likewise mounted to inform the public and endorse the objects and artists exhibited as well as to promote well-crafted consumer items. Even museums such as the new Museum of Modern Art (Modern Art, Museum of) (MoMA) in New York began to recognize the field; MoMA established a department of architecture and design (1932) and organized important exhibitions of industrial design, such as “Machine Art” (1934).

      Moreover, department stores and direct-mail merchants, including Montgomery Ward (Montgomery Ward & Co.) and Sears, Roebuck and Company, created corporate design departments to control the look of their merchandise. Montgomery Ward was probably the first store in the United States to do so (1934), hiring design educator Ann Swainson to be their first woman executive and architect Dave Chapman to be the head of product planning. Sears followed soon afterward, scooping the competition by hiring noted German Modernist architect Karl Schneider, a Gropius and Behrens protégé, to design furniture and furnishings for the company's line (1938–45). In 1926 Walter Paepcke founded the Container Corporation of America, and in 1936 he hired Egbert Jacobson to establish a consistent design identity for its products and advertising, a development that had far-reaching consequences in the American graphic design and advertising worlds.

 At this time several outstanding industrial designers were at work in the United States—among them Donald Deskey, Henry Dreyfuss, Walter Dorwin Teague, Raymond Loewy, and Norman Bel Geddes, who are often considered to be the founders of the industrial design profession in the United States. They created iconic items, ranging in scale from large (locomotive engines) to small (table lamps), that typify great moments in American design. These designers came from a variety of professional backgrounds, mostly in the visual arts. For instance, Donald Deskey (Deskey, Donald) was a furniture and interior designer who used an elaborate Art Deco style in his product design; his masterpiece was the interior of Radio City Music Hall in New York's Rockefeller Center (a contract he was awarded in 1932). Henry Dreyfuss (Dreyfuss, Henry) is best known for his interest in ergonomics, particularly in his design of Bell telephones (1930 and later), but he is equally acclaimed for his bullet-shaped Hudson J3a locomotive (1938) for the New York Central Railroad, his interiors for Lockheed Aircraft and American Airlines, and his products for Thermos and Hoover. Engineer Raymond Loewy (Loewy, Raymond) designed appliances for Sears, Roebuck and Company, but he is perhaps best remembered for his transportation design, from the S1 locomotive (1937) for the Pennsylvania Railroad and the Scenicruiser bus (1944 and later) for Greyhound to Studebaker automobiles (automotive industry) (1953 and later). Packaging and advertising specialist Walter Dorwin Teague (Teague, Walter Dorwin) is best known for his design work on Kodak Brownie cameras (1927–30 and later) and on gas stations and corporate imagery for the Texas Fuel Company (1935–36; later renamed Texaco), as well as his long-term work on Boeing airliner interiors, from the Stratocruiser (1945) through the 707 (1957–59). His firm, Walter Dorwin Teague Associates, continued to design Boeing airliner interiors into the 21st century. Joining those active and important practitioners was the more theoretically minded Norman Bel Geddes (Geddes, Norman Bel), a set designer best known for the futuristic transportation designs featured in his General Motors Pavilion and Futurama exhibit at the New York World's Fair (1939–40) and in his books Horizons (1932) and Magic Motorways (1940). The streamlined teardrop shape of his Motor Car No. 8 (1931) prefigured the similarly shaped Dymaxion car of American inventor R. Buckminster Fuller (Fuller, R Buckminster), unveiled at the 1933 Century of Progress Exposition in Chicago. Clean lines and streamlined shapes, suggestive of movement and speed, were characteristic of American design of the time and paralleled the design work produced by the aviation industry's wind-tunnel research of the 1920s and '30s.

 During World War II (1939–45) industrial designers came into their own, creating design solutions and products to help win the war, such as the Walkie-Talkie, a two-way FM radio invented by Galvin Manufacturing (later called Motorola, Inc.) in 1943 and used by the U.S. Army. These designers also helped to usher in a postwar consumer society after the long hiatus in individual spending that had begun with the Great Depression of the 1930s. Henry Dreyfuss, for example, worked for the Consolidated-Vultee Aircraft Company during the war; he proposed (1944) to convert the company's B-24 bombers into postwar airliners, and he planned and tested the Convair car (1947), a flying vehicle whose wings could be unbolted and whose fuselage could then function as an automobile, with that same company. Walter Dorwin Teague worked on converting the C97 military transport for Boeing into the double-decked Stratocruiser (1945) airliner, the conceptual forerunner of that company's jumbo jets. Buckminster Fuller (Fuller, R Buckminster) reshaped his military Airbarac (1946), designed to serve as a metal barracks for the members of the army and air corps, into the all-aluminum Dymaxion House for the Beech Aircraft Company in Wichita, Kan. (today on exhibit at the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Mich.). The war years catalyzed something else that had started during the Great Depression: architects' and designers' use of new and plentifully available materials, from aluminum and plastic to wood laminates. The postwar era witnessed a boom in industrial design throughout the world, as factories accustomed to churning out tens of thousands of machines for war transitioned to making mass-produced consumer goods. This was particularly so in the United States, where factories were not damaged or destroyed by wartime bombing. In a way, this circumstance guaranteed that American designers would be at the forefront of making consumer products immediately after the war.

American hegemony and challenges from abroad

      American designers continued to be at the forefront of industrial design, at least in its initial postwar manifestation. Some major examples include advertising and packaging designer Walter Landor, who established Landor Associates (1941), a design consultancy renowned for creating brand identity and corporate imagery; industrial designer Charles Butler, a protégé of Raymond Loewy (Loewy, Raymond) who in the 1950s and '60s designed British airliner interiors, from Viscounts for Capital Airlines (1955) to the Concorde (1969 and later); Harley Earl, the creator of the design department at General Motors who was responsible for putting the fins on Cadillacs (1948 and later) and who also developed the Corvette sports car (1952–53); and Charles and Ray Eames (Eames, Charles; and Eames, Ray), the husband-and-wife design team that popularized molded plywood furniture in the 1940s and '50s. The design impact of the Eameses extended throughout American society, in part because they did not limit themselves to the design of furniture and furnishings. They created a number of important educational films, most notably Powers of Ten (1977), and they designed a number of significant public exhibitions, such as “Mathematica” (1961), that were shown throughout the nation and within World's Fair pavilions. Other designers who made important contributions to American industry in the postwar era include Eliot Noyes, an employee of Norman Bel Geddes (Geddes, Norman Bel) who in the 1950s and '60s redesigned IBM (International Business Machines Corporation)'s product line, most notably the Selectric typewriter (1961); Richard Ten Eyck, who designed Cessna airplanes and Hesston tractors and is best known for creating the Vornado fan (1945–59, with 1988 and later variants) for the O.A. Sutton Corporation; and John Frassanito, a former Loewy employee who designed Datapoint computers in the early 1970s and spacecraft for NASA beginning in the mid-1980s.

      Museums, both large and small, often showcased the work of such designers; the Albright Art Gallery in Buffalo, N.Y., for instance, organized the early exhibition “Good Design Is Your Business” in 1947, and MoMA displayed the best of design in its “Good Design” exhibitions (1950 and later). Also in those decades there was an expansion of the design curriculum within art and architectural schools. The Hungarian-born Bauhaus artist and educator László Moholy-Nagy (Moholy-Nagy, László) established the trendsetting New Bauhaus in Chicago (1937) and subsequently developed the Institute of Design at Illinois Institute of Technology (1944). It and similar schools began to train the next generation of American industrial designers.

      Industrial design flourished in postwar Europe as well. Even in war-ravaged West Germany, design was given a boost by the establishment of the Hochschule für Gestaltung in Ulm, or the Ulm Design School (1953–68), which was often considered a successor to the Bauhaus. One of its founders was the typeface designer Otl Aicher, a corporate-branding specialist, noted author of graphic standards manuals for his clients, and designer whose clients included Lufthansa and Munich's transportation authority. Aicher's contributions to the development of postwar graphic design and corporate identity may have even surpassed those of the legendary Herbert Bayer (Bayer, Herbert), the Bauhaus typeface designer who introduced a surrealistic collage style into periodicals of the 1930s and who continued his work in the United States with Gropius at Harvard after leaving Germany in 1938. After World War II, Bayer continued typeface innovations while helping design aficionado and industrialist Walter Paepcke to develop Aspen, Colo., as a resort and think tank location with the establishment of the Aspen Institute (1950). West Germany produced other great designers, such as Dieter Rams, who, beginning in 1955, was the creative force behind all Braun electric appliances, which epitomized the clean, minimalist look of modern German design.

 After World War II, Japanese (Japan) design benefited from an active reconnection to Europe and the United States. Japan's Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI), formed in 1949, sent Japanese industrial designers for study abroad in an effort to upgrade the quality of the country's products, which were considered, in the immediate postwar era, to be cheap imitations of Western products. Under this program Takuo Hirano—founder of one of Japan's largest industrial design firms, Hirano & Associates (1960)—studied at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, Calif. In 1957 MITI established the Good Design Awards (formerly the Good Design Selection System), or G-Marks. The G-Mark award system consists of an annual juried competition of new consumer products, with awards given for products within various categories and one grand prize that spans all. Awards are based on aesthetics of design as well as a product's features related to safety, function, value, and even post-sales consumer service. Such measures helped Japan become a worldwide leader in the export of home electronics and automobiles in the 1980s. Other countries also developed in terms of consumer product design after World War II. In Denmark, for instance, architect Arne Jacobsen (Jacobsen, Arne) established an international reputation with his iconic plywood-and-steel Ant chair (1951), and Jacob Jensen designed minimalist Bang & Olufsen stereo equipment from 1963 to 1993. In England the economical Mini automobile was created in 1959 by Morris Motors chief engineer Alec Issigonis (Issigonis, Sir Alec) and became an icon of the 1960s. The French architect Jean Prouvé (Prouvé, Jean) created Modernist wood-and-metal furniture before and after the war. But perhaps the most remarkable postwar industrial design occurred in Italy.

      In the second half of the 20th century, Italian (Italy) design was showcased for American museum audiences in exhibitions ranging from “Italy at Work” (1950) at the Art Institute of Chicago to “Italy: The New Domestic Landscape” (1972) at the MoMA (Modern Art, Museum of) in New York. In the former exhibition, Italian design captured the public's imagination with its sensual curvilinear forms; in the latter, museum visitors were shown the flexibility of modular furniture. Examples of great Italian product design created during the middle decades of the 20th century include Corradino d'Ascanio's peppy Vespa motor scooters (1946–48); Carlo Mollino's sensuous Arabesque table (1950); architect Vico Magistretti's lacquered aluminum Eclisse lamp (1965; also called the Eclipse lamp), which resembles a space helmet; artist Joe Colombo's innovative molded-plastic furniture, such as his 4867 Chair (1965) and popular Boby trolley (1970); Mario Bellini's calculators for the office-equipment company Olivetti (Olivetti & C. SpA) beginning in the 1960s and continuing through the 1980s; Alessandro Mendini's work in design publishing as well as kitchen-accessory design for the Italian design factory Alessi in the 1980s; and architect Ettore Sottsass's lifelong contributions to design for Olivetti (1958–80) and his founding in 1980 of the Memphis group of architects and designers. With its tendency to imbue its creations with whimsical historical references, this group was the epitome of postmodern design. Sottsass's work within the group includes his multicoloured Carlton room divider (1981).

Postmodern design and its aftermath

      In the mid- to late 1970s, architects around the world began to question the validity of minimal Modernist architecture and design as providing the universal solution to all environments. There was a renewed appreciation of history and historic details and of local and regional historic contexts and a renewed expression of those historicist interests within popular exhibitions of the era, such as MoMA's renowned display in 1975–76 of 19th-century architectural renderings in watercolour from the École des Beaux-Arts and the First International Architecture Exhibition for the 1980 Venice Biennale, which took as its title and theme “The Presence of the Past.” For this show, contemporary architects were encouraged to create streetscapes that related to traditional architectural environments.

      It was particularly in the postmodern 1980s that architects such as Michael Graves (Graves, Michael), Stanley Tigerman (Tigerman, Stanley), and Hans Hollein created home accessories for companies such as Alessi in Milan and Swid Powell in the United States. Certain designers, including Sottsass and his Memphis colleague Matteo Thun of Austria, became household names, much as Mies (Mies van der Rohe, Ludwig) and Breuer (Breuer, Marcel) had been in the Modernist era, when their furniture designs were reissued by Knoll Associates and other companies. International exhibitions and publications, such as “Design Heute” (1988; “Design Today”), a traveling show organized by the German Architecture Museum in Frankfurt, displayed these often-outlandish postmodern creations for members of the public and professionals alike. This individualism reached its apex in the late 1980s, just before the recession of the early 1990s induced design to assume a more-subdued profile and pushed architecture into a more-sober focus on value engineering, an examination of the cost of the service and product provided in relation to its fulfillment of function.

 Since then, two pronounced tendencies have been evident in industrial design: one showcases the artistic creations of a talented star designer, and the other relies on teamwork among design and engineering professionals to shape the final product. The former model is still evident in the field of architecture; witness the international celebrity achieved by Frank Gehry (Gehry, Frank O.) when he designed the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain (1991–97). In product design and industrial design at the turn of the 21st century, however, few individuals achieved that sort of status. One exception is French designer Philippe Starck (Starck, Philippe), whose plywood bucket chair called the Costes chair (1982) was popularized after he used it extensively in the Café Costes in Paris (1984). Starck continued to design dramatic interiors—most notably for hotels developed by entrepreneur Ian Schrager in the 1980s and '90s—as well as consumer products such as vases and toothbrushes. In a broadening of the public appeal for “designer” products, the department-store chain Target hired Michael Graves to develop a line of home furnishings, and, after that proved successful, Target enlisted Starck to do the same, with his products reaching stores in 2002. The wide public awareness of Starck's strong designs was an exception for industrial designers at the time.

      The more-prevalent tendency in industrial design is for the designer to be part of a larger team that creates the marketable product. One important firm that embraced this approach was Frog Design. A company founded in 1969 by Hartmut Esslinger, it upheld the founder's idea that “form follows emotion,” in contrast to the traditional Modernist dictum “form follows function.” Frog Design is best known for its work on Sony Trinitron televisions (1978) and early Apple (Apple Inc.) computers (1984). In the mid-1990s it expanded with offices in Europe and the United States to accommodate more clients, such as Lufthansa, for which it designed gate areas and airplane interiors, and Microsoft (Microsoft Corporation), which it advised on the design interface of the Windows XP operating system. Frog Design's Lufthansa work provides a good example of the firm's shift from expressing “function” to expressing corporate “emotion.” The ribbed silver curvilinear design of Lufthansa's business-class seats relates to the tradition of the corrugated aluminum German airliners of the 1920s and '30s with their bucket seats. The check-in counters and waiting areas blend that early aviation vocabulary with medieval heraldic references, using curved forms to suggest a knight's shield protecting the check-in agents.

 Another teamwork-oriented design firm active at the start of the 21st century was IDEO. Founded in Palo Alto, Calif., in 1991 by Bill Moggridge, Mike Nuttall, and David Kelley, it grew rapidly, adding offices in San Francisco, Chicago, and Boston as well as London, Munich, and Shanghai. With its design studios operating globally, IDEO stressed the team approach to the design process. Its successfully executed projects are diverse and include the overall image and design of Amtrak's high-speed train Acela (2000), the original computer mouse for Microsoft (1987), modems for 3Com (2000), printers for Apple (1994) and Hewlett-Packard (1999), personal digital assistants for Palm, Inc. (1999), and for Palm's competitor Handspring (2000), and even everyday items such as toothbrushes for Oral-B (1997) and CD-ROM cases for TDK (2000).

      In their global reach, both Frog Design and IDEO were typical of the design world at the turn of the millennium. Unlike their 20th-century counterparts (at least, perhaps, until the postmodern 1980s), such design firms practice internationally. This has contributed to the blurring of national identity in the look of designed products, with the exception of those few designers, like Starck, whose work is characterized by its individuality, though it is marketed throughout the world and on a very popular level through retail stores such as Target.

 Further evidence of the globalization of industrial design can be seen in the automotive industry; many non-U.S. car companies maintain their design offices in California with staff members from around the world. One of the most-noted auto designers is J Mays, an American who trained at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, Calif., and then worked for German auto companies BMW and Audi in the 1980s. From 1989 to 1993 he served as chief designer of Volkswagen of America, where he devised the concept for the new Beetle (1998), the bulbous form of which recalled the basic lines of the original, designed by Ferdinand Porsche (Porsche, Ferdinand) some 60 years earlier. In 1997 Mays was appointed head of Ford (Ford Motor Company)'s design studio, which, under his direction, introduced the retro-looking Thunderbird (2002). International boundaries were likewise blurred when German carmaker BMW (Bayerische Motoren Werke AG) enlisted American designer Frank Stephenson to create the new Mini (2002), a revival of the iconic British car of the 1960s.

Design in the 21st century: technology and democracy

      As in earlier decades, museums have continued to present industrial design to the public. Many museums specifically devoted to design were constructed, expanded, or remodeled during the 1980s and '90s; examples include the Design Museum and the Victoria and Albert Museum, both in London, the museums of applied art in Frankfurt and Vienna, the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, and the Neue Sammlung (New Collection) in Munich.

      Even more spectacular new museums featuring industrial design products were established in the 21st century, the most notable being the Glass Pavilion of the Toledo Museum of Art in Ohio, U.S., designed by Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa (opened 2006); the Mercedes Benz Museum in Stuttgart, Ger., designed by Ben van Berkel of UN Studio (opened 2006); and the Harley-Davidson Museum in Milwaukee, Wis., U.S., designed in 2006 by Jim Biber of Pentagram Architecture.

      While museum buildings and exhibits lent a seriousness to the field of industrial design, the general public was increasingly obtaining firsthand experience with affordable designed artifacts through successful chains of specialty stores that concentrated on home furnishings, such as Williams-Sonoma, Pottery Barn, Crate and Barrel, IKEA, and the EXPO Design Centers created by Home Depot. Those stores owed an enormous debt to the design mogul Sir Terence Conran and his pioneering designs for the Habitat Stores (1964 and later).

      Conran wanted his stores to promote affordable, attractive, and functional modern goods to the general public. His consistently well-designed displays and products prefigured contemporary efforts by manufacturers such as Apple (Apple Inc.) to effectively retail their products within a compatibly designed space. Tim Kobe of the San Francisco architectural firm Eight Inc. designed the standard Apple computer stores from the earliest establishments in San Francisco (2001) to shopping malls and renovated buildings across the United States (2001–04), including larger new structures in Chicago (2003) and New York (2006). In part because of the success of these spaces, Kobe's firm is planning and building similar standardized stores across the world for other firms. In all, these environments consistently present a company's products in a way that is both ennobling, as in a museum, and approachable. In one particular, specially designed stores are more effective tools than design museums because the consumer can actually touch and take home the products on display.

      The public's increasing access to well-designed objects has been accompanied by a growing integration of technology into design. In part, this has been made possible by the wealth of new materials available to designers, from electronic liquid crystal displays (liquid crystal display) to composites such as carbon fibre, which provides great strength despite its light weight. Since the 1980s, industrial designers have helped produce the small electronic appliances—including laptop computers, mobile telephones with video capabilities and GPS (Global Positioning System) devices, and iPods—that have permeated people's lives around the world.

John Zukowsky

Additional Reading

Good surveys of 20th-century international design include Volker Albus, Reyer Kras, and Jonathan M. Woodham, Icons of Design: The 20th Century (2000), which is popular and readily available; Charlotte Fiell and Peter Fiell (eds.), Designing the 21st Century (2001), a pictorial survey of global design; Catherine McDermott, 20th C[entury] Design (1997), another pictorial survey with short texts; and Michael Tambini, The Look of the Century (1996), an affordable, extensive pictorial survey of design compiled by one of the founders of Pentagram, a major design firm. Among the classic works on industrial design are Sheldon Cheney and Martha Candler Cheney, Art and the Machine: An Account of Industrial Design in 20th-Century America (1936, reissued 1992), on early American industrial design and designers, particularly during the early era of streamlining; Carma R. Gorman (ed.), The Industrial Design Reader (2003), an anthology of historic writings compiled by a design historian; and John Heskett, Industrial Design (1980, reissued 2003), by one of the leading design writers in the field. Specific topics, designers, and design companies are discussed in Brook Hodge (ed.), Retrofuturism: The Car Design of J Mays (2002), an exhibition catalog on the work of this contemporary auto designer; Jeffrey L. Meikle, Twentieth Century Limited: Industrial Design in America 1925–1939, 2nd ed. (2001), an important text by a major design historian; Jeremy Myerson, IDEO: Masters of Innovation, rev. ed. (2004); Fay Sweet, Frog: Form Follows Emotion (1999); and Paul Kunkel, AppleDesign: The Work of the Apple Industrial Design Group (1997), with photographs by Rick English. Richard Guy Wilson, Dianne H. Pilgrim, and Dickran Tashjian, The Machine Age in America (1983, reissued 2001), is one of the major exhibition catalogs related to streamlined design; John Zukowsky (ed.), Chicago Architecture and Design, 1923–1993: Reconfiguration of an American Metropolis (1993, reissued 2000), has essays by design historians Pauline Saliga and Victor Margolin; and Japan 2000: Architecture and Design for the Japanese Public, compiled by Naomi R. Pollack, Tetsuyuki Hirano, and Tetsuro Hakamada (1997), surveys G-Mark design products.

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