Reviews for Humble Masterpieces: Everyday Marvels of Design

The average rating for Humble Masterpieces: Everyday Marvels of Design based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2009-10-21 00:00:00 Matthew Barton I heard Paola speak at the Business Factory Innovation's BIF-5 Summit earlier this month. This is a fantastic little book about an exhibit at the MOMA where Paola is curator of design. The exhibit included the Q-tip, the paperclip, the zipper, crochet hook, Swiss Army knife, guitar pick and other everyday inventions that are so brilliant in their function and beauty. Some of the stories behind the inventions are just great. Like Leo Gerstenzang, a Polish born American, who watched his wife stick wads of cotton on toothpicks to clean their baby's ears. Or Makoto Hagiwara, a Japanese born American, who invented the Fortune Cookie in 1914... not Chinese but Japanese, but because of all the Japanese Americans being put into determent camps during WWII, the Chinese restauranteurs were able to adopt the practice and propagate it. The invention of putting notes into "cookies" or mooncakes was actually a Chinese invention from the 13th century as a military practice to get strategies past the Mongolians who disliked mooncakes so never bothered with them. Anyway, that's just a couple examples, the book is fascinating, and it's great to see designers being given a prominent place alongside Picasso and Matisse at one of the great museums of art.

Review # 2 was written on 2009-05-18 00:00:00 Alan Taft this is an enjoyable MoMA-produced (it came out of an exhibition of the same name) book with many cocktail-party worthy anecdotes about the design and development of 'indispensable' everyday items like band aids, post-its, chinese take-out boxes, safety pins, coffee cozies, ballpoint pens, and more. it is interesting to see how these items came to be and you can really appreciate the innovation and creativity of the inventors, but the book is also a celebration of excessive consumption and the creation of a global disposable mindset which has led to trash, trash and more trash. aside from the literal trashing and landfill filling of items designed to be thrown away, there is also the issue of the pollution caused by the development of the plastics and various chemicals necessary to many of these things. so while i enjoyed learning the various factoids, my enjoyment was heavily tempered by the feeling that need is relative and i don't know that we 'needed' all of these items which we now have in such abundance.