The whole article is basically expanding a Twitter meme which stems entirely from cherry picking. One of my favourite coffee table books is Designed in the USS

The whole article is basically expanding a Twitter meme which stems entirely from cherry picking. One of my favourite coffee table books is Designed in the USSR: 1950–1989. Pretty much everything in the book could easily rival or even triumph over Western designers of the same era, but the vast majority of the industrial designs shown never made it beyond the prototype stage. They looked like nightmares for mass production and it was hard to perceive a meaningful demand for them even in a market economy. These were made by Design Bureaus staffed with people whose sole job is to design things. It would be unfair to compare their work with products that have stood through the tests of user demand over time.