Industrial Strength Design ─ How Brooks Stevens Shaped Your World

Designer Brooks Stevens created thousands of ingenious and beautiful designs for industrial and household products - including a clothes dryer with a window in the front, a wide-mouthed peanut butter jar, and the Oscar Mayer Wienermobile. ("There's nothing more aerodynamic than a wiener," he explained.) In 1954 he coined the phrase "planned obsolescence," defining it as "instilling in the buyer the desire to own something a little newer, a little better, a little sooner than is necessary." This book, the first publication to document his work, includes 250 illustrations of designs by Stevens and his firm, many in color, detailed studies of individual designs, interpretive essays, a description of the Brooks Stevens Archive at the Milwaukee Art Museum, and several key writings by Stevens himself.

J. Steven Svoboda, J.D., is Founder and Executive Director of Attorneys for the Rights of the Child. He practices human rights law in Berkeley, California. He has published articles in the Journal of Medical Ethics, the Journal of Health Psychology, and contributed to Understanding Circumcision (Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2001). His 2001 presentation to a United Nations meeting in Geneva became the first official U.N. document entirely devoted to the subject of male circumcision as a human rights violation.