In the essay "Comprehensive Man" (Reader, p.329) Fuller includes a damning section on the vacuity of industrial design, which he sees as a kind of deceitful epiphenomenon of industrialization.
The name "industrial design" was coined in about 1926 by advertisers "working on behalf of large banking groups investing in the automobile industry".
In Fuller's experience, industrial designers are the sort of people who claim to have designed ships which were really designed by naval architects, on the grounds that they designed the ship's furniture or window curtains.
© Paul Taylor 2001