An Introduction to Design and Culture, 3rd Edition

8    Designer culture

International designers

As economic, social and technological forces combined to ensure that more and more people were able to define themselves through the consumption of designed images, objects and environments, so the need to provide levels of differentiation became increasingly imperative. Design was one of the ways in which that differentiation could be insured and, in the years after 1945, it increasingly operated in two modern worlds – those of modern mass culture and of a new élite, high culture, defined by its links with good taste. While the mass market could afford to consume the former, it increasingly desired the latter.

While all goods, services, images and spaces are designed, only some were understood by ...