An Introduction to Design and Culture: 1900 to the Present

by Penny Sparke

Overview

An Introduction to Design and Culture provides a comprehensive guide to the changing relationships between design and culture from 1900 to the present day with an emphasis on five main themes:

• Design and consumption
• Design and technology
• The design profession
• Design theory
• Design and identities.

This fourth edition extends the traditional definition of design as covering product design, furniture design, interior design, fashion design and graphic design to embrace its more recent manifestations, which include service design, user-interface design, co-design, and sustainable design, among others. It also discusses the relationship between design and the new media and the effect of globalisation on design.

Taking a broadly chronological approach, Professor Sparke employs historical methods to show how these themes developed through the twentieth century and into the twenty-first century and played a role within modernism, postmodernism and beyond. Over a hundred illustrations are used throughout to demonstrate the breadth of design and examples – among them design in Modern China, the work of Apple Computers Ltd., and design thinking – are used to elaborate key ideas. The new edition remains essential reading for undergraduate and postgraduate students of design studies, cultural studies and visual arts.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781032849041
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	10/20/2025
Edition description:	5th ed.
Pages:	376
Product dimensions:	6.12(w) x 9.19(h) x (d)

About the Author

Penny Sparke is a Professor of Design History and the Director of Modern Interiors Research Centre at Kingston University, London. Her research interests include nineteenth- and twentieth-century design and the modern interior with a special interest in the role of gender.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Design and Culture revisited

PART I: Design and Modernity, 1900-1945

1. Consuming Modernity
2. The Impacts of Technology
3. The Designer for Industry
4. Modernism and Design
5. Designing Identities

PART II: Design and Post-modernity, 1945-1990

6. Consuming Post-modernity
7. Technology and Design, a New Alliance
8. Designer-culture
9. Post-modernism and Design
10. Redesigning Identities

PART III: Designing the New Century, 1990 to the present

11. Consumer Culture at the Millenium
12. Design in the Digital Age
13. New Designers
14. Theory and Practice in the New Century
15. Designing Identities in a Globalised World