A dominant force of the 20th century, Fordism derives from the name of American automobile mogul Henry Ford in the years prior to the First World War. Ford's use of the moving assembly line in 1913 unbelievably cut the assembly time for a complete Model T Ford chassis from over twelve hours to approximately one and a half.
Ford's development of mass production thus transformed the industrialized world by breaking production into countlessly small, unskilled steps. The result was lower costs and higher profits.
Designer, thinkers, and consumers began to consider the threats that standardization and conformity posed on individualism and self-expression. Aldous Huxley's apocalyptic vision of the industrialized world in Brave New World (1932,) Eugene Schumacher´s Small is Beautiful: A Study of Economics as if People Mattered (1973,) and Ivan Illich´s Tools for Conviviality (1973) represented varying reactions to Fordism. In the 1960s especially movements like the Pop, Postmodernism and Designmovements later challenged the corporate status quo.