Maggie Gram, early on in her fascinating new book “The Invention of Design: A Twentieth-Century History”:

People all over the world tried to ride these waves in ways that might preserve their own dignity and power. Our contemporary idea of design—that hopeful amalgam of a concept—was born in the process. Inventing design helped people imagine reversing some of the damage wrote by the Industrial Revolution. It helped people convince themselves that capitalism fundamentally served human interests; that positive social change could be achieved without politics and governmental action; that problem solving could be both generative and profitable. And it enabled people of substantial power and privilege to imagine themselves as benevolent actors. ‘Design,’ in short, made capitalism feel, both to its participants and to its subjects, less brutal and inhumane—less destructive, in Joseph Schumpeter’s terms, and more creative. It seems to give them a way to reclaim the things they’d made and to re-embed them in a human order.