The Genius of Design

The first episode of this new series tells the fascinating story of the birth of industrial design. Alongside the celebrated names, from Wedgwood to William Morris, it also explores the work of the anonymous designers responsible for prosaic but classic designs for cast-iron cooking pots to sheep shears - harbingers of a breed of industrially produced objects culminating in the Model T Ford. Includes interviews with legendary designer Dieter Rams and J Mays, Ford Motors' global head of design.

In the crisis-stricken decades of the 1920s and 1930s, with the world at the tipping point between two global wars, design suggested dramatically different ideas about the shape of things to come, from the radical futurism of the Bauhaus to the British love affair with mock-Tudor architecture and the three-piece suite. In Europe, the 'modern movement' promoted the virtues of the machine and the machine-made with theories and products like open-plan living, the fitted kitchen and tubular steel furniture which have become absorbed into the mainstream of the designed world. In the USA, designers like Raymond Loewy and Henry Dreyfuss explored and exploited the dreams and desires of American consumers to develop a market-based approach to design which has become one of the bedrocks of the modern consumer society. Featuring Niels Diffrient and Tom Dyckhoff.