History has its calm spots, long stretches where nothing much happens and the lives of men remain fundamentally unchanged. The last two decades were not such a time. Such has been the dizzying, disruptive advance of digital technology – creating seismic behavioural shifts and tech companies of vast wealth and power – it is easy to imagine the material world, the world beyond the screen, stuck in slow motion, an analogue also-ran with the wrong sort of engine.
Two decades of Design: charting the finest design innovations of 1996-2016