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Did you miss our PRINT Book Club with Maggie Gram? Register here to watch the recording and buy your copy of The Invention of Design: A Twentieth-Century History.
Quick … What was your first association with the concept of design?
For Steven Heller, it was slip covers; clothing for Debbie Millman (though her mom called it “tailoring”).
For Maggie Gram, designer, cultural historian, writer, and experience-design team lead at Google, the concept of design started with a decorative picture of some kind that decorated another thing, like something on a t-shirt.
We can all relate to her defensiveness, later, as a design practitioner, when confronted with the idea that design is simply and only about beautification.
What interested Gram in writing The Invention of Design was this tension between the strong associative definitions that people—all of us—have about design.
This book is not a history of design and designed objects. It is also not, as the book title teases, an answer to the question: Who invented design? Michelangelo? The industrialists? For Gram, it’s not a question of who, but rather, why. The beginning of design, Gram explained, “is that moment at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century when people started to think of design as more than one thing. There was a multi-sided discourse around design because of industry.”
The discussion touched upon the compelling people Gram met in her research — from ceramicist Eva Ziesel to industrial designer Walter Dorwin Teague to the designer of the ever-disappearing landline telephone, Henry Dreyfuss (the source of the inspiration for the cover design) to Ray and Charles Eames’ Solar Do-Nothing Machine, an object designed for ‘being,’ not ‘doing.’
We talked about the major eras of design from early industry to modernism to design thinking in the new millennium. This kicked off an interesting look at our current era, and the changing nature of design in the age of AI, which Gram believes will come down to ‘intent.’
Design aestheticizes the brutal reality of capitalism, but that’s only one of the things that design does.
Maggie Gram
Don’t miss our thought-provoking talk with Maggie Gram! Register here to watch the recording and buy your copy of The Invention of Design: A Twentieth-Century History.
And, save the date for our next PRINT Book Club on Thursday, July 24. Keith Sawyer will join us to discuss his new book, Learning to See: Inside the World’s Leading Art and Design Schools.
The post ‘Who Gets to Define Design?’ Book Club Recap with Maggie Gram appeared first on PRINT Magazine.