(FORTUNE Magazine) – Apple's Cube, VW's Beetle, Michael Graves's toaster: The material world has never looked so good. It is, to some degree, a Brooks Stevens world. A pioneer of industrial design's first golden age (and coiner of the term "planned obsolescence"), Stevens (1911-95) gave consumerism a museum-quality luster by treating "the joyful ring of the cash register," not cosmetic purity, as the ultimate beauty. A retrospective of his sleek, exuberant designs--the 1949 Harley-Davidson, the civilian Jeep, the Miller logo--is at the Milwaukee Art Museum.

--Tom Ehrenfeld and Jerry Useem