True Cost Button-Pushing: Rewriting Industrial Design in America

Abstract

Histories of industrial design in the USA, with their flamboyant characters, Depression to postwar boom narratives, and eminently photogenic objects, are so deeply and vividly embedded in other histories of the twentieth century that any attempt to rewrite them faces palpable resistance. This paper is an attempt to encourage a re-writing by examining the pitfalls in predominant histories, which are premised on a model of a "naturally" acquisitive American character-type and a design profession invented to initiate and sustain a consumer culture of instant gratification through strategies of obsolescence.