The most famous designs of the twentieth century are not those in museums, but in the marketplace. the Coca-Cola bottle and the McDonalds logo are known all over the world, and designs like the modernistic Frankfurt Kitchen of 1926, or the 1954 streamlined and tail-finned Oldsmobile, or Blow, the inflatable chair ubiquitous in the late sixties, tell us more about our culture than a narrowly-defined canon of classics. Drawing on the most up-to-date scholarship (not only in design history but a...