Industrial Strength Design: How Brooks Stevens shaped your world by Glenn Adamson, MIT Press, 拢29.95/$45, ISBN 0262012073 Reviewed by Adam Goff
IN the economic boom years after the second world war, American industrial designers seduced the consumer into wanting products a little newer, a little better and a lot sooner than was necessary. Brooks Stevens was in the thick of the sales pitch. In a phrase coined by Stevens himself, 鈥減lanned obsolescence鈥� became the norm.
By his own admission, Stevens and his designers were omnipresent. 鈥淵ou cannot mention a product that we might not of touched somewhere. I mean, if you said refrigerators, washing machines, lawnmowers, outboards, boats, airplanes鈥� Think of something and ask if we鈥檝e had anything to do with it.鈥� Industrial Strength Design gives great insight into how that new take on design massively manipulated the consumer鈥檚 appetite to acquire goods, only to discard them in favour of the next latest thing.
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