Book Review of The Invention of Design: A Twentieth-Century History

This review appeared in Design Issues: Volume 42, Number 2, Spring 2026.

Maggie Gram has published an important book about design. That’s a feat on its own, made even more impressive by her relative newness to the field. Gram did not study design. Instead, she has a BA in African American studies and English from Columbia and a PhD in English from Harvard. Nevertheless, she made herself a designer and has practiced design for around ten years. Now, she manages an experience-design team in Google’s cloud services business.

Her book, The Invention of Design, is an excellent survey of modern design history. Every graduate student in design should read it as a portal into “the discourse of design.” Professional designers may also find that it provides perspective and context on their practices.

The Invention of Design is not a picture book nor a history of artifacts nor even a history of heroes. Rather, it is a history of ideas—a history of ways of framing design.

Gram focuses on six major frames, each paired with a character or characters who bring the histories to life and ground them in particular practices:

• Beauty [or aesthetics], with Eva Zeisel (née Striker)
• Function, with Walter Dorwin Teague
• Problem solving, with Paul Rand and Herbert Simon
• Human-centeredness, with Horst Rittel, West Churchman, and Lucy Suchman
• Experience, with Don Norman and Dori Tunstall
• [Design] Thinking, with David M. Kelley and Tim Brown

Throughout the book, Gram has several theses, including

• Design is not one, fixed thing; it is many things, continuously evolving.
• Ways of framing design are invented and have histories.
• Design attempts to paper over problems in the capitalist system—or, at least, designers’ aspirations to make better worlds often conflict with the realities of the marketplace, and sometimes designers promise more than they can deliver.

She confronts the elephant head on: “Inventing design helped people imagine reversing some of the damage wrought by the Industrial Revolution. … ‘Design,’ in short, made capitalism feel, both to its participants and to its subjects, less brutal and inhumane…”¹ She cites several examples, and yet, she still ends on a positive note: “Chipping away at wicked problems—using broadly participatory methods—is how communities build social power, and building social power is how communities make structural change. Design can contribute to that project, and it should.”²

Gram covers a lot of material (design practice from roughly 1910 to 2010), in little more than 250 pages. Her writing is fast paced and interesting, an easy read. The Invention of Design is also a serious piece of journalism. Gram has done an impressive amount of research, but she has avoided writing an academic tome. The book is well indexed (when too many design books are not).And it has forty-four pages of endnotes (which are all too rare in design books).

Yet, the book may also leave some readers wanting more. Historians of design will likely wonder why Gram left out various frames, events, and people. For example, the writers Gui Bonsiepe, Richard Buchanan, Nigel Cross, J. J. Gibson, Donna Haraway, Donella Meadows, Marshall McLuhan, Donald Schön, and Langdon Winner do not appear, which is a pity, since they all influenced design discourse.

While Gram brings a critical (even Marxist) lens to the book (without overwhelming), a longer, more academic book might have acknowledged efforts to move design outside the frame of capitalism—efforts such as transition design (cf. Terry Irwin) and work in critical and speculative design (cf. Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby) and the many threads of academic design discourse, such as semiotics, cybernetics, systems design, ontological design, and discursive design (cf. Bruce and Stephanie Tharp).

Gram sidesteps the common framing of design in terms of media and production techniques (i.e., architecture, product design, graphic design, interaction design, and service design). But in so doing, she ignores the emerging future of design—the rise of communications networks, data, and AI as materials of design, which John Maeda has called “computational design.” Recently, Shelley Evenson and others have begun to describe the emergence of a new design discipline: “design for agents” or “agentic design.” And the book does not mention synthetic biology, which already invites a new sort of design.

Also, readers might benefit from a comparison of Gram’s model of six frames of design with Richard Buchanan’s model of four “orders” of design (which he defined as symbolic and visual communications, material objects, activities and organized services, and complex systems or environments).

Gram also skips over the role of time or the pace-of-change in design practice. Stewart Brand’s pace layer model describes “fashion” as changing more quickly than commerce, which changes more quickly than infrastructure, which changes more quickly than governance (cf. Bruce Sterling’s wonderful essay on the model). Jorge Arango describes how design often focuses on the top, faster layers (i.e., fashion and commerce), but he also notes a shift among some designers to grapple with deeper, slower layers (i.e., infrastructure and governance).

Gram ends the book with a cautionary tale of hubris about designers who tried to reinvent the city government of Gainesville, Florida, with little success. But she does not include more successful case studies, such as design work helping reinvent the Australian tax system.

My biggest critique of the book is that it is not more explicit about two major frames of design—design as politics/rhetoric and design as play.

First, it does not explicitly define design as essentially political (though the book does touch on design’s relationship to capitalism and government). It does not acknowledge that, in large part, the role of designers has become one of facilitation, gaining consensus on problems or goals as a prerequisite to agreeing on means. But to her credit, Gram does report on Horst Rittel, among the first writers to frame design in terms of politics. I hope she will expand the next edition to include the frame of design as politics and rhetoric (cf. Buchanan) and that she will expand the sections on design justice and co-creation.

Second, the book does not mention play and its role in the design process—accepting constraints and experimenting within a set of rules as a generative process—riffing on a theme with variations. She does report on Paul Rand, but she does not mention his classic essay on education, “Design and the Play Instinct.”

While The Invention of Design is a survey (not a complete history), it is an important contribution to design discourse and a hugely helpful contribution to design education. It is the first book I know of that attempts to provide a history of the major frames of design practice. It deserves a wide audience. If you’re a design student or a practicing designer, I urge you to read it.

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1. Maggie Gram, The Invention of Design: A Twentieth-Century History (New York: Basic Books, 2025), 2. ↩︎
2. Ibid, 257. ↩︎

How Might We Help Designers Understand Systems?

By Hugh Dubberly and Paul Pangaro
Published in She Ji: The Journal of Design, Economics, and Innovation 
Volume 9, Issue 2, Summer 2023

Abstract

The Future of Design Education working group on systems outlines the growth of professional practice from a focus on designing artifacts to also include designing systems and designing in the context of systems. They describe a holistic approach to design, one grounded in systems theory and recognition that systems intersect with all aspects of design. They acknowledge that systems are social constructions and can be framed in many ways. They assert that systems exhibit structural and behavioral patterns across instances, and they advocate for the development of models (proxies) that forefront these patterns and make it possible to align views of situations and possible future ways of being with teams and stakeholders under participatory design processes. The working group also notes that systems are never complete and that even small changes may have large effects. This article lists a series of recommendations aimed at design students regarding the knowledge that they should have and the actions that they should take when working around systems, and it provides an overview through which to consider more specific recommendations related to natural, social, and technical systems by other Future of Design Education working groups.

Rethinking Design Education

By Meredith Davis and Hugh Dubberly
Published in She Ji: The Journal of Design, Economics, and Innovation 
Volume 9, Issue 2, Summer 2023

Abstract

This opening article for the special issue on the Future of Design Education traces paradigmatic shifts in design, from the twentieth-century mass production of artifacts to the twenty-first-century stewardship of evolving product-service ecologies. These shifts argue for a systems approach appropriate to the complex problems brought on by the industrial and information revolutions. Setting the stage for the following topical articles, the authors describe connections among human activities and technologies that are life-centered in their long-term impact on and by humankind. These changes are not simply in the things designers make but in the “why” of design practice under a paradigm that no longer focuses on the production of tangible goods. The article also addresses corresponding shifts in where designers now take action (for example, influencing organizational purpose, governance, infrastructure, and strategy, not just consumer-facing messages, objects, and spaces) and the lengthening of time horizons for evaluating design effects in natural, social, and technical systems. Ten principles for today’s designers offer guideposts for practice and inform a critique of the industrial-era traditions still present in much of contemporary design education.

Unimaginable Death: Visualizations of COVID-19 Pandemic Milestones

Paul Kahn, Hugh Dubberly, and Liuhuaying Yang
December 15, 2022

Abstract:
From its emergence in 2019, millions of people have died from COVID.
Representing milestones (1,000 deaths, 100,000 deaths, 1 million deaths) challenges journalists and designers.
Such large numbers are difficult to comprehend, and they are difficult to represent meaningfully.
At the same time, each number was once a living person.
Reconciling the large group while also acknowledging each individual is quite difficult.
Maya Lin achieved such fusion in the Vietnam War memorial.
The AIDs quilt is another example.
Also the Stolpersteine Project in Germany.

COVIC: Collecting Visualizations of COVID-19 to Outline a Space of Possibilities

This article appears in Design Issues, Volume 38, Number 4, Autumn 2022

Why we should stop describing design as “problem solving”

This article appears in Geoff Kaplan’s book
“After the Bauhaus, Before the Internet: A History of Graphic Design Pedagogy,”
published this fall by MIT Press.
The book grew out of a conference at Yale in 2019.
A presentation on the same topic was delivered at the conference.

Gui Bonsiepe: Framing Design as Interface

This article appears in Lara Penin’s book
“The Disobedience of Design: Gui Bonsiepe,” a collection of essays about and by Bonsiepe,
published by Bloomsbury, as part of its series:
Radical Thinkers in Design, edited by Clive Dilnot.

The relevance of cybernetics to design and AI systems

Knowledge of cybernetics is increasingly relevant to both what and how designers design.

Cybernetics is the science of feedback, information that travels from a system through its environment and back to the system. A feedback system is said to have a goal, such as maintaining the level of a variable (e.g., water volume, temperature, direction, speed, or blood glucose concentration). Feedback reports the difference between the current state and the goal, and the system acts to correct differences. This process helps ensure stability when disturbances threaten dynamic systems, such as machines, software, organisms, and organizations.

More…

Making sense in the data economy

We perpetually interact with our technologies. On the one hand they serve us, and on the other hand they control us.¹ Computers, smartphones, and the infrastructure surrounding them now mediate much of our communications, affecting not only whom we can reach and who can reach us but also what we can say and what we can hear. Our communications tools free our language and our thinking and also govern them. Our technologies affect not only how we “make sense” but also what we mean by “making sense.”

The proliferation of sensors, smart-connected products (Internet of Things), the measurements they generate (big data), on-demand computing (the cloud), and pattern-finding software (AI) are changing how individuals and organizations interact. New distributed structures challenge established centralized organizations. Boundaries between inside and outside are blurring. And everywhere, more and more of what we do is recorded.

As we design with these new technologies, they offer new tools and new materials on which to work, but they also change the design process and the roles designers play in it.

More…

Cybernetics and Design: Conversations for Action

Design Cybernetics: Navigating the New
Thomas Fisher and Christiane M. Herr, Editors, Springer

This is an update (with changes) to an earlier version.

Abstract 
Ranulph Glanville came to believe that cybernetics and design are two sides of the same coin. The authors present their understanding of Glanville and the relationships they see between cybernetics and design. They argue that cybernetics is a necessary foundation for 21st century design practice: If design, then systems: Due in part to the rise of computing technology and its role in human communications, the domain of design has expanded from giving form to creating systems that support human interactions; thus, systems literacy becomes a necessary foundation for design. If systems, then cybernetics: Interaction involves goals, feedback, and learning, the science of which is cybernetics. If cybernetics, then second-order cybernetics: Framing wicked problems requires making explicit one’s values and viewpoints, accompanied by the responsibility to justify them with explicit arguments; this incorporates subjectivity and the epistemology of second-order cybernetics. If second-order cybernetics, then conversation: Design grounded in argumentation requires conversations so that participants may understand, agree, and collaborate on effective action – that is, participants in a design conversation learn together in order to act together. The authors see cybernetics as a way of framing both the process of designing and the things being designed – both means and ends – not only design-as-conversation but also design-for-conversation. Second-order cybernetics frames design as conversation, and they explicitly frame “second-order design” as creating possibilities for others to have conversations.