At first glance, Where Stuff Comes From looks as if it will cover the same ground as Henry Petroski's wonderful work The Evolution of Useful Things. Published back in 1992, The Evolution of Useful Things looked at the original invention of, and engineering refinements to, everyday objects such as forks and paper clips.

Petoskey is a professor of civil engineering, and he considered 'things' primarily in terms of their usefulness, and improvements to them as engineered to make them 'lighter', 'cheaper' and so on.

Where Stuff Comes From takes a quite different attitude to designed objects. The author is interested not so much in objects themselves and how they work, as in the sociology of why we want 'stuff', how it fits into our lives, and how and why designers create it for us. Molotch is professor of metropolitan studies and sociology at New York University, and Where Stuff Comes From is a serious, copiously footnoted work, but it is written with a minimum of jargon.

Molotch sees both the creation and the desirability of 'stuff' as coming from a whole 'lash-up' of things in the culture of a specific place and time. Each element is just one fragment of a larger whole. In the case of toasters, Molotch lists many other factors, including bread sliced to a particular width, jams that need a crusty base, standards for electrical regulations, a global system to provide raw materials, and so on.

The view of designers is as responsive to environmental and social messages, and critical to a fair, sustainable future. Despite the success of the 4WD, and the explosion of paper that came with computers and the paperless office, Molotch finds reasons for hope. For example, designers find ways to use less mass and power: between 1960 and 1990, European yoghurt containers dropped more than half of their bulk, and the amount of steel required in office buildings reduced by two thirds.