Streamlining and the industrial design profession

During the Depression products got new, rounded forms to sell better, and industrial design became a profession.

Raymond Loewy, Henry Dreyfuss, Walter Dorwin Teague and Norman Bel Geddes opened offices that designed everything from locomotives to telephones. Loewy's Coldspot refrigerator for Sears and Dreyfuss's telephone for Bell show how form was used to sell and to make products easier to use.

The Museum of Modern Art's exhibition Machine Art in 1934 showed industrial objects as art. The New York World's Fair of 1939 with Bel Geddes's Futurama showed a future with motorways and streamlined cars.