Where Stuff Comes From: How Toasters, Toilets, Cars, Computers and Many Other Things Come to Be as They Are (review)

Many books deserve a second reading, and while Where Stuff Comes From is not in that category, this does not mean it should not be read a first time. At least in part, sociologist Harvey Molotch succeeds in demystifying the creativity and constraints that impel or impede products ("stuff") on their way to market. His account is based on some four years of interviews with and observation of industrial designers; and even though his sample is relatively small, geographically localized, and nonrandom, it reflects the nature and goals of the profession (he describes his methodology on pp. 264-65, note 2). As he makes clear, while every product is designed, however well or badly, at least in the United States industrial design is little known as a profession, and most of its practitioners are poorly paid and anonymous. Those with reputations as product designers tend to be dead (such as Raymond Loewy) or to have established that reputation in another field (the architect Michael Graves). The situation is apparently less dire in Great Britain and on the Continent.

Molotch's style is conversational and energetic; he is entertaining without being comic, enlightening without being didactic. He also has a gift for the summary statement: "Nostalgia transforms the past in the act of recalling it" (p. 113); "The unspeakable becomes speakable" (p. 145). These strengths play best when he presents the macrocosm: the interdependence of product and culture (chapter 1), of product and industry (chapter 2), of product and environment (chapter 8). In each of these chapters, he verbalizes what we would readily acknowledge if we stopped to think about it. "Stuff" is culture-dependent: the toaster, titular star of this treatise, does not exist in societies that breakfast on tortillas and ignore the club sandwich (p. 2). He casts a wide net as he explores the creative tension between cultural influences and manufactured products, but discourses with equal enthusiasm on first names, AIDS, drugs, drinking water, NGOs, branding, and toileting postures.

Readers bring a particular knowledge base to every book, however. Backgrounded in art, architecture, and interior design, I blinked at reading that "higher seating . . . increased the liabilities of low ceilings" (p. 67), when nobody would accept a chair that bumped him against the rafters. Some entries are simple howlers. Lord [Frederick] Leighton and [Peter] Gwynn-Jones are unaccountably associated with William Morris and the British Arts and Crafts movement (p. 75), although the former painted in the Victorian classical style and the latter (unrelated to Morris's colleague Edward Burne-Jones) is our contemporary, having been appointed Inspector of Regimental Colors for the College of Arms in 1995. The person who designed the Ford Highland Park plant in 1910 (p. 122) was neither the cited Lewis Kahn (contemporary violinist/trombonist) nor the homonymic architect Louis Kahn (then nine years old), but Albert Kahn (already responsible for the Packard factory). The Frankfort School did not shop at the Bauhaus (p. 123), since the Bauhaus was not a store. It is not certain that Charles Eames's wife Ray contributed to the design of his iconic fiberglass armchair of 1949 (p. 183), but it is certain that this chair originated with the wood prototype that Eames and (the unmentioned) Eero Saarinen created in 1940 for the "Organic Furniture" competition sponsored by the Museum of Modern Art. It's a stretch to associate Marcel Breuer's "Wassily" chair with Piet Mondrian (p. 75), since neither Wassily Kandinsky nor Breuer belonged to the De Stijl movement exemplified by Mondrian and, in any case, it was Gerrit Rietveld who translated Mondrian to furniture.

In the end, such errors in matters I know something about caused me to wonder how many lurked in my areas of ignorance, and I came to distrust nearly every "fact" Molotch presented. Did the Romans really base road dimensions on...