Lamps, bicycles, computers, books, web sites, systems, and services... Such "things", be they physical or immaterial, are part of our daily lives and are the end product of a comprehensive planning process, involving conception, production, communication, use, consumption, and re-use: in other words, design. After having described design's main features and its operational domain, the author shows the reader how design varies in an international context and then focuses on how design has found a particularly fertile environment in Italy, where it has reached the utmost level of expression and transformed some objects into icons of everyday life. Finally, the book addresses the challenges awaiting design in the third millennium.

Alberto Bassi is a design historian and critic who teaches at the University Institute of Architecture in Venice.