THE INVENTION OF DESIGN

Tracing the arc of modern life reveals how design created our systems, objects, and beliefs.

Over the past decade, human-centered design has become a buzzworthy term for problem-solving across a range of fields. But where did it originate? Gram—design lead at Google and a cultural historian—offers a rich, literate exploration of how the concept of design emerged as a way to humanize and soften the harsh edges of capitalism. Gram carefully lays out her intellectual territory, but the narrative gains momentum as she introduces individual design thinkers, their complex lives, political entanglements, and layered motivations. She includes familiar and lesser-known voices, arguing that design is a force shaping political, cultural, and intellectual life—from the Industrial Age and Progressive Era through Modernism, Postmodernism, and Globalism into our current era of “human-centered design.” Examples include Eva Zeisel—a German ceramicist who survived Soviet imprisonment to become a celebrated artist at New York’s Museum of Modern Art—and Charles and Ray Eames, whose work framed design as systematic problem-solving. Gram contrasts early computational theorists Herbert Simon and Henry Dreyfuss—who embraced machines as optimal problem solvers—with Horst Rittel, who, in the 1960s, argued that design problems are not rule-based puzzles with definitive solutions, but rather arguments with better or worse outcomes. Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), Steve Jobs, and pioneers of human-computer interaction play roles in transitioning design thinking into the age of user-centered design. Gram is engaging, though her arguments occasionally verge on the Talmudic, weaving together diverse threads—from capitalist critique and chaos theory to the roots of artificial intelligence. Her annotations provide a valuable roadmap for deeper dives into design as discourse or “an amalgam of optimistic human values.” Ultimately, Gram suggests, our understanding of design may depend on the state of the world.

Following the surprising pathways that shaped the modern world.