ABSTRACT
In the years after the Second World War, consumer demand continued to set the pace for design innovation. However, the speed of technological change made it possible. New production technologies, emanating for the most part from the USA, dramatically influenced the way in which industry organized its manufacturing. Mass production, albeit modified to the tastes and desires of the marketplace, became the common means of ensuring that consumers had large numbers of goods available to them at prices that they could afford. In addition, technology joined with design in a hungry pursuit of new materials with which to meet consumers’ enhanced desire for novelty and industry’s demands for ever cheaper means of manufacturing goods. It continued to be the designer’s task to ensure that those new materials acquired forms and meanings that were both appropriate and desirable.
