Design is cool - when I see something that looks great - looks beautiful - it's a fantastic feeling - that feeling of desire - I must own that thing. I have just got my new Macbook air - and it is great design!

But why? How does it work - if something is designed today that looks incredibly desirable then why did it take until today to design it - why couldnt it have been designed 2 years ago? 20 years ago?

Of course technology has something to do with that - we can do things now that we couldn't do earlier - but is it also something to do with our DNA?

Is design incremental? So that we don't see something as desirable unless it is somehow connected with something we have already understood to be desirablefrom an earlier experience? Are we all design lemmings?