"This insightful, wide-ranging book surveys applied arts and industrial design from the eighteenth century to the present day, exploring the dynamic relationship between design and manufacturing, and the technological, social, and commercial context in which the relationship developed. The effects of a vastly enlarged audience for the products of modern design and the complex dyanmic 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." -- book jacket.