دانلود کتاب اختراع طراحی

This book is about how people constructed one of the ideas that shapes the world we live in. Over the period from about 1890 through about 2010, people around the globe came to understand a set of previously unrelated concepts—beauty, function, problem solving, human-centeredness, experience, even thinking itself—as components of one single megaconcept. They invested faith and capital in this megaconcept, made it meaningful and valuable, and used it to shape first consumer objects and then institutions and systems. In English, they called it “design.” This could have happened only in the twentieth century. By the 1890s, the changes we now call the Industrial Revolution had transformed Great Britain, most of Europe, and the United States from agrarian and handicraft economies into machine-driven industrial ones. Meanwhile, the “invisible hand” of the market—largely unconstrained by states—had come to dominate everyday life. Industrialization and unregulated markets were uprooting people, degrading their working conditions, squeezing their leisure time, exploiting their children as workers, polluting their rivers and air, and alienating them from the products of their labor. Now a battle played out over what to do about it. In the 1930s, in response to a global economic crisis and to workers’ demands, Western governments regulated markets and built safety nets: social democratic institutions like redistributive tax regimes, social insurance systems, and labor laws. Then, in the 1970s—after business leaders revolted, and as Westerners obsessed over the perceived existential threat of Soviet communism—nation-states from the United States to Indonesia to Chile systematically dismantled these regulatory constraints and safety nets. Their dismantling opened doors to globalization: the rise of fast-moving global markets dominated by sprawling, effectively unregulated networks of corporate actors, all of which dissolved national identities and subordinated local preferences and needs. The dismantling of regulatory constraints and safety nets also enabled financialization: the displacement of traditional material production, as the chief driver of economies, by complex financial engineering. And it drove a resurgence of wealth inequality across the globe.