Career
He is best known for two studies of American material culture: Twentieth Century Limited: Industrial Design in America, 1925-1939 (1982), and American Plastic: A Cultural History (1997). He is generally credited as one of the founders of the discipline of design history. His essay, "Ghosts in the Machine: Why lieutenant"s Hard to Write about Design," published in 2005, lays out some of the central issues confronting the field
