The 1979 Palo Alto telephone directory listed every design office in Northern California-all 9 of them! Today, there are, arguably, more design professionals working in the San Francisco Bay Area than anywhere else in the world. How, and why, did this transformation happen? How far back do we need to go to find the roots of the Silicon Valley/Bay Area design culture? And how do we account for the incredible diversity of professional practice today, and its unprecedented role in some of the most influential companies in the world? These are some of the questions Barry Katz sets out to answer in Make it New: The History of Silicon Valley Design.
Barry M. Katz is a published research scholar, design historian, professor at the California College of the Arts and Stanford University, Fellow at IDEO Inc., and author.