User Friendly: How the Hidden Rules of Design Are Changing the Way We Live, Work, and Play

by Cliff Kuang

Dreyfuss realized that fixing any of them required an intimate knowledge of how they were produced, the ability to know enough detail about the process so that he could actually catch a decision as it was being made, with an eye to something greater than simply manufacturing products cheaply. It wasn’t enough to just add a pleasing shape to an essentially finished product.

He was perhaps the first American designer to articulate and then act on the idea that design wasn’t just styling—it sprang from a knowledge about how things were made and what was possible.