318 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Objects of Desire: Design and Society from Wedgwood to IBM. By Adrian Forty. New York: Pantheon, 1986. Pp. 256; illustrations, notes, bib liography, index. $24.95. Adrian Forty sets out to expand the boundaries of design history— the study of the process by which manufacturers have determined forms and materials of objects intended for mass production. He maintains that scholars have considered industrial design primarily from an art-historical perspective by making aestheticjudgments, by focusing on the lives of designers, and by tracing the supposed evo lution of good design. Objects of Desire, by contrast, explores two dif ferent but interrelated areas: the economic function of design, understood in Marxian terms, and the function of designed objects as expressions of cultural ideology or mythology, in the sense of Ro land Barthes. Forty’s central argument is that economically successful mass-produced objects embody popular or dominant ideas about so cial reality. Otherwise they would not succeed in the marketplace. And as physical objects, materially present in everyday life, they in turn reinforce the power of the ideas that brought them into being. Al though Forty sometimes convincingly presents design as a manipu lative process, serving capitalist needs by manufacturing desire, he admits that it is “almost impossible to say to what extent the needs that consumer-oriented design satisfied were felt independently, rather than being the products of persuasion” (p. 220). Unlike other recent historical surveys, such as John Heskett’s In dustrialDesign (1980) and ArthurJ. Puloss American Design Ethic (198?>), Forty’s work is organized thematically rather than chronologically. This strategy frees him to employ his considerable talents as an es sayist. Most convincing are the first four chapters, which trace in dustrial design—the devising of prototypes to be precisely and mechanically copied by hand or by machine—back to the 18th and 19th centuries. Josiah Wedgwood, for example, is revealed as quite aware of the anxieties surrounding progress; although he brought considerable technological innovation to the pottery industry, he gave his products neoclassical styling that suggested the comfort ofa golden age. Equally impressive is Forty’s analysis of 19th-century product differentiation—opening with a discussion of Montgomery Ward’s 131 types of pocketknife—as a means of expressing and reinforcing gender, age, and social distinctions. The book’s later chapters, each running roughly from 1880 to the present, focus on domestic interiors, office furnishings, hygiene, elec tric appliances, labor-saving devices, and corporate identity. In each case, he follows a similar method, presenting the published advice of reformers and self-help writers on a particular task, and then dem onstrating the embodiment of these popular ideas in mass-produced objects. Most effective is the essay on the office, which documents the use of furnishings to extend efficiency from the factory to the office TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 319 and then, in recent decades, to disguise that goal behind a facade of egalitarian sociability. More often, however, one is left with a sense that the products of design are mere epiphenomena of the ideas that precede them. Forty does not effectively reveal how things later take on a life of their own, impinging on the people who use them. But his attempt is not only provocative, well researched, and elegantly written; it also suggests new ways of thinking about the material cul ture of industrialization. Jeffrey L. Meikle Dr. Meikle is associate professor of American studies and art history at the University of Texas at Austin. He is at work on a cultural history of plastics in America. Technological Utopianism in American Culture. By Howard P. Segal. Chi cago: University of Chicago Press, 1985. Pp. x + 301; illustrations, notes, appendix, bibliography, index. $30.00 (library binding); $14.95 (paper). Howard Segal has chosen a difficult but interesting subject that bridges the history of technology and the history of American culture. Technological utopianism, which Segal defines as “a mode of thought and activity that vaunts technology as the means of bringing about utopia” (p. 10), is a useful ifsesquipedalian label for a persistent strand of thought in American history. Segal deserves credit for popularizing this phrase, which can be used to...