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.

喬納森·M. 伍德姆，設計史研究重鎮布萊頓大學的設計史教授、設計史研究中心主任，在英國長期從事設計史研究。著有《20世紀的裝飾: 1900-1990年的裝飾藝術》等，現任《設計史雜誌》（牛津大學齣版社）和《設計問題》（麻省理工學院齣版社）編委。現任設計史協會主席 。

譯者 周博，中央美術學院博士，現任教中央美術學院設計學院，從事現代設計史、當代藝術與設計思潮的研究。瀋瑩，中央美術學院博士，現任教北方工業大學藝術學院，從事西方美術史的研究。