Every designer should browse through the Sears, Roebuck & Company mail order catalogues of a century ago. Take the 1908 catalogue. What do you find in there? Everything. Really everything a person needed for a comfortable life. Complete houses, built ready for occupancy ($ 725 for a nice two-storey wooden house, with a choice of doorknobs and hearth decoration), completely modern looking bathrooms, eyeglasses (with an eye chart in the catalogue), fashion, Bibles, carriages and carts, pianos (with the patented mouse-proof pedal), underwear, toys, cans of food, medicine - absolutely everything. The catalogue was the only outlet for Sears, Roebuck & Company. It contained 1100 pages, and was distributed for free in an edition of 600,000 copies (!). It was a huge success. Every- body knew Sears - The Cheapest Supply House on Earth.

A century later, this catalogue gives a designer the humbling impres- sion that everything has already been done. Human needs do not change that much, and the products which fulfil those needs don't really change either, despite all our efforts to the contrary. What are the differences between then and now? Electricity was not widely available, and there were no electric motors - so all tools were hand tools. The fridge had no cooling pump, but a block of ice. But these are just minor differences in operating principles, providing essentially the same functionality.

The only product categories we have now that really provide us with a different functionality than there was around a hundred years ago, are the computers and mobile phones of the recent information revolution. They are still new to us, and they are set to change our lives dramatically. More so than all the design work in the past century.