Surveying applied arts and industrial design from the eighteenth century to the present day, this book explores the dynamic relationship between design and manufacturing, and the technological, social, and commercial context in which this relationship developed. The effects of a vastly enlarged audience for the products of modern design and the complex dynamic of mass consumption are also discussed. Part of this dynamic reveals that products serve as signs for desires that have little to do with need or function. The book also explores the impact of a wealth of new manmade industrial materials on the course of modern design from steel to titanium, plywood to plastic, cotton to nylon, wire to transistors, and from microprocessors to nanotubes. The research, development, and applications of these technologies are shown as depending upon far-reaching lines of communication streching across geographical and linguistic boundaries.