Share How people live, work, travel, consume and communicate have changed in extraordinary ways since 1900. Designed objects help us understand these changes and prompt us to ask questions about the past, present and future. A robot as my colleague? The first decades of the 20th century saw vast changes in how goods were manufactured. The introduction of the first moving assembly line at Ford Motors in 1913 dramatically altered the way things were made. Mechanised production had a direct impact on workers, with more repetitive work on the one hand and incentives like higher wages and the first paid holidays on the other. How things were designed also shifted. Simpler shapes and fewer decorative features made manufacturing more efficient, as is the case with the