Hello World by Alice Rawsthorn: review This rapid-fire, judgmental approach is extremely entertaining, though it can also be a little tiring. It's like reading a blog that goes on for 200 pages. Rawsthorn's tendency to leap arbitrarily from one thing to another can also lead to omissions and distortions. Arguably the most interesting thing about the Jabulani football, for example, is the novel way it was made - not by hand in sweatshops in Pakistan, like most footballs, but at a hi-tech customised factory in China, using materials sourced from all over Asia. Rawsthorn probably knows this, but she doesn't take the time to mention it. Rawsthorn's method is that of a journalist rather than a historian, and the shakiest parts of the book are those in which she ventures earlier than about 1900. In one passage, she writes that "few of Josiah Wedgwood's late-18th-century customers could have analysed the quality of the clay used to make a plate, but they would have known instinctively whether or not they warmed to its floral pattern and particular shade of blue." Here, as often, she makes the mistake of assuming that people in the past were more or less like us. In fact, most late-18th-century consumers were highly attuned to the materiality of ceramics, but they were bewildered and uncertain about the range of stylistic choice on offer, leading to acrimonious debates about the arbitration of taste. When Rawsthorn writes about contemporary design, by contrast, she does so with real insight. The title of her book is a good example. The words "hello world" appear on the screen of a computer when a programming language is designed successfully, and she ingeniously adopts it as a symbol of design's attempts to meet its public. She finds a similar effect of calculated friendliness in the multicoloured Google logo and its "doodle" variants that appear on certain days, which she argues are amateurishly designed in order to lower our guard. We are meant to think, "how can something so gauche be manipulative?" She provides many other fascinating facts about the digital environment, too: for example, the symbols @ and # came to be fixtures in our lives because they'd been added to typewriters in the 19th century for use by stockkeepers and accountants, and had been sitting there more or less unused ever since. Rawsthorn's tart, observational style also pays off in her descriptions of designers such as Philippe Starck, whom she hilariously describes as "a burly, mal barbu figure who bears a distinct resemblance to Desperate Dan, the pie-scoffing hero of a cartoon strip." She skewers Wolff Olins's 2012 Olympic logo, which was designed to be easily recognisable in multiple applications - "admirable though versatility is, what is the point if the logo is equally dire in every incarnation?" And she finds delicious irony in the colour green, which turns out to be anything but environmentally friendly: the pigment is often made using toxic chemicals. On a more positive front, she includes warmly admiring passages about social design projects like Studio H, which has worked to empower poverty-stricken children. At the end of the day, Rawsthorn has all the merits and the limitations of an evangelist in any field. She thinks of design primarily in heroic terms, and celebrates "alpha products" such as Thonet chairs and Braun appliances. And while she distances herself from the modernist proclamation that "form ever follows function," her idea of what makes good design is ultimately as black-and-white as Hello World's typography. But even readers who see things in less absolute terms should be grateful to her for illuminating the world of contemporary design with such conviction. You may not agree with everything Rawsthorn stands for, but if she did not exist, it might just be necessary to invent her. Hello World: Where Design Meets Life Alice Rawsthorn Hamish Hamilton, £20, 281pp 1 Talk to Me: Design and the Communication between People and Objects by Paola Antonelli (2011). Antonelli, a design curator at the Museum of Modern Art, is New York's answer to Rawsthorn. In this exhibition catalogue she surveys the field of contemporary interaction design. 2 The Craftsman by Richard Sennett (2008). Sennett prescribes craft as a cure for what ails modern society. 3 The Language of Things by Deyan Sudjic (2008). Rawsthorn's successor as director of the Design Museum, Sudjic asks how designers should approach the making of new things, given that the world is too full of stuff already.