Back in 1960, an obscure Dutch cultural critic named Constant Nieuwenhuys predicted that someday we would all become architects. Stuck in a world where everything looked the same, he suggested, we would be so alienated from our environment by technology that we would constantly redesign the space around us just to recover the joy of living.
Nieuwenhuys was wrong about only one thing. We're not alienated at all. Here we are, roaring into the 21st century, powered by the longest economic boom in U.S. history, wired to the Web and to one another, thirstily consuming new technology even before we know how to use it. In the frenzy of perpetual motion we want to re-create the space around us, not as our only joy but because we can, and because that way it's our space. We're snapping up translucent blueberry-tinted computers, bubbled cars and little chrome cell phones as fast as they can be produced. We're fully employed, and we want something to show for it, even if we're not Internet billionaires. So where design used to be considered vaguely precious, the province of the Sub-Zero-refrigerator-owning elite, it's now available to all--from the crowd that shops at Target to those aesthetes who can pick out an Enzo Mari from 20 paces. If we learned anything from the barbaric old '80s, we learned that more is not enough. We want better--or at least better looking.
Ladies and gentlemen, may we present the design economy. It is the crossroads where prosperity and technology meet culture and marketing. These days efficient manufacturing and intense competition have made "commodity chic" not just affordable but also mandatory. Americans are likely to appreciate style when they see it and demand it when they don't, whether in boutique hotels or kitchen scrub brushes. "Design is being democratized," says Karim Rashid, designer of the Oh chair by Umbra and winner of a 1999 George Nelson award for breakthrough furniture design. "Our entire physical landscape has improved, and that makes people more critical as an audience." And more willing. Says Mark Dziersk, president of the Industrial Designers Society of America: "This is the new Golden Age of design."
Make that platinum, because design has become big Big Business. Nobody is quite sure how big, but just consider that Americans spent some $6 trillion on goods and services last year, and roughly one-fifth of it went into buying stuff for their homes. The stunning success of the colorful (read: No more beige!) iMac, for instance, not only helped save Apple but has also inspired a raft of whimsically styled, low-cost personal computers from firms like Dell, Gateway and Compaq. The New Beetle rescued Volkswagen's image two years ago and became a catalyst for change in the auto business. Carmakers are finally putting a premium on how their products look because they know that otherwise we won't buy them anymore.
So it is with makers of just about everything. "When industries are competing at equal price and functionality, design is the only differential that matters," says Dziersk, echoing the credo first spouted in the '30s by Raymond Loewy, father of industrial design. Loewy was the man who gave America the Lucky Strike pack and the sleek Greyhound bus, and when he added a flourish to the Coldspot refrigerator, to make it look just a little more streamlined than its 1934 competitors, Sears' sales skyrocketed.