“If you’ve looked at computers, they look like garbage,” Steve Jobs said to the crowd assembled in Aspen, Colorado, for the 1983 International Design Conference. Apple was going to sell three million computers that year, he continued, and by 1986 they were going to sell 10 million—“whether they look like a piece of shit or they look great.”

But Jobs was gunning for the latter. “This new object,” he said, “it’s going to be in everyone’s working environment and it’s going to be in everyone’s educational environment. It’s going to be in everyone’s home environment, and we have a shot at putting a great object there.”

Some eight decades earlier, in Germany, the artists, designers, and craftspeople associated with the Bauhaus school had tackled a similar problem. They’d observed the rise of manufacturing in the early 1900s and decided that the resulting mass-produced household goods were artless and soulless. So they intervened, creating furniture, appliances, even textiles that were elegant and eminently functional—and that could also be manufactured en masse... [ read more ]