This is the first volume of the World History of Design, the definitive historical account of global design by pre-eminent design scholar Victor Margolin. The first volume explores the earliest cave art and human tools, including the key examples of the visual and material culture that were produced in all parts of the world from the first stages of human civilization, the Industrial Revolution and its aftermath, and finally World War I. This richly illustrated volume contains over 380 images, with 72 in full colour.

This is the definitive historical account of global design from prehistory to the end of the Second World War, by pre-eminent design scholar Victor Margolin. These two richly illustrated volumes contain over 850 images, with over 160 in full colour.

This is the second volume of the World History of Design, the definitive historical account of global design by pre-eminent design scholar Victor Margolin. The second volume covers the period between World War I and II, when mass production and mass communication spread to most parts of the world. There are also focused accounts of design in particular places and in particular periods during this period, among these topics are the relations between art and industry in Germany between 1890 and 1914; the avant-gardes in Eastern Europe, 1917-1930; design in the Weimar Republic, 1918-1933; and the consultant designers in the United States, 1929-1939. This richly illustrated volume contains over 490 images, with over 80 in full colour.

"Discovering Design" reflects the growing recognition that the design of the everyday world deserves attention not only as a professional practice but as a subject of social, cultural, and philosophic investigation. Victor Margolin, cofounder and an editor of the journal "Design Issues," and Richard Buchanan, also an editor of the journal, bring together eleven essays by scholars in fields ranging from psychology, sociology, and political theory to technology studies, rhetoric, and philosophy. The essayists share the editors' concern, first made clear in Margolin's "Design Discourse: History, Theory, Criticism," with the the development of design studies as a field of interdisciplinary research.
The contributors (Gianfranco Zaccai, Albert Borgmann, Richard Buchanan, Augusto Morello, Tufan Orel, Nigel Cross, Victor Margolin, Langdon Winner, Carl Mitcham, Tony Fry, and Ezio Manzini) focus on three broad themes that form a sequence of fundamental issues: how to shape design as a subject matter, how to distinguish the activity of designing in the complex world of action, and how to address the basic questions of value and responsibility that persistently arise in the discussion and practice of design. The editors' introduction provides a useful overview of these questions and offers a multidisciplinary framework for design studies. The essays discuss such topics as the relation of aesthetics to technology, the place of design in social action, the role of the consumer in design decisions, and the need for ethical practice in contemporary design. Manzini's concluding essay shows how the issue of ethics should connect responsible behavior to decisions made every day in the manufacture of objects.

Following 1917, a new artistic-social avant-garde emerged aiming to engage the artist in the building of social life. Through close readings of the works of Alexander Rodchenko, El Lissitzky and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, this book examines the way in which these three artists negotiated the changing relations between their social ideals and political realities they confronted.