The most famous designs of the twentieth century are not those in museums, but in the marketplace. The Coca-Cola bottle and the McDonald's logo are known all over the world, and designs like the modernistic 'Frankfurt Kitchen' of 1926, or the 1954 streamlined and tail-finned Oldsmobile, or 'Blow', the inflatable chair ubiquitous in the late sixties, tell us more about our culture than a narrowly-defined canon of classics. Drawing on the most up-to-date scholarship (not only in design history but also in social anthropology and women's history), Jonathan Woodham takes a fresh look at the wider issues of design and industrial culture throughout Europe, Scandinavia, North America, and the Far East. He explores themes such as national identity, the 'Americanisation' of ideology and business methods, the rise of the multi-nationals, Pop and Postmodernism, and contemporary ideas of nostalgia and heritage, and sets the proliferation of everyday design against the writing of critics as different as Nikolaus Pevsner, the champion of Modernism, and Vance Packard, author of The Hidden Persuaders. In the history which emerges design is clearly seen for what it is: the powerful and complex expression of aesthetic, social, economic, political, and technological forces.

乔纳森·M. 伍德姆，设计史研究重镇布莱顿大学的设计史教授、设计史研究中心主任，在英国长期从事设计史研究。著有《20世纪的装饰: 1900-1990年的装饰艺术》等，现任《设计史杂志》（牛津大学出版社）和《设计问题》（麻省理工学院出版社）编委。现任设计史协会主席 。

译者 周博，中央美术学院博士，现任教中央美术学院设计学院，从事现代设计史、当代艺术与设计思潮的研究。沈莹，中央美术学院博士，现任教北方工业大学艺术学院，从事西方美术史的研究。