Why is 'designer' such a dirty word?

It's not as though anyone will actually have bothered to count them, but a typical Western consumer, or so the statisticians say, is exposed to as many as 3,000 corporate logos a day. That's everything from the flash of a FedEx logo whizzing by on a van and a crumpled Tesco carrier bag lying in a gutter, to the four letters spelling S-O-N-Y at the end of a TV commercial.

As John Heskett explains in Toothpicks and Logos: Design in Everyday Life, those 3,000 logos are only a fraction of the plethora of designed emblems, environments and objects that clutter our daily lives. Design, he writes, "affects everyone in every detail of what they do throughout the day". Why then, Heskett argues, is so ubiquitous a phenomenon with such power to change our lives for better or worse, dismissed as "banal and inconsequential"?

Why indeed? We live in the land of Changing Rooms where the average Brit still thinks that design is about style, not substance, and the word "designer" is a pejorative. If a house is described as a "designer home", you'd presume it was pretentious and over-priced; while "designer restaurants" charge too much for fussy, inedible food. Perish the thought of a politician being accused of dabbling in "designer diplomacy", he's bound to be a dilettante.

Yet we also live in the land where Design and Technology is the most popular optional subject in schools (number four overall after English, Maths and General Sciences) with the lowest truancy levels, which suggests that kids actually enjoy studying it. Our design industry is the world leader with annual exports worth more than £1 billion. Many of the world's greatest architects live here - cue Lords Foster and Rogers, David Chipperfield and Foreign Office - as do leading designers, like Jasper Morrison, Marc Newson and Peter Saville. And which country did major multinationals like Apple and Motorola import their design directors from? The UK. With so much design in our lives and so many design coups to boast about, why don't we take it seriously?

John Heskett looks for the answer by tracing the history of industrial design from the mid-18th century when manufacturers turned to artists to advise them on the decoration of their products, as Wedgwood did with John Flaxman. With a few honourable exceptions, the work of these artist-designers was so feeble that by the late 19th century William Morris and John Ruskin had led the British into a backlash against industry by championing the craft revival.

The notion of the heroic industrial designer was propagated by Soviet constructivists after the 1917 Revolution and by the Bauhaus design school in 1920s Germany. Heskett describes how this model was commercialised by the postwar US manufacturers which hired designers like Raymond-Loewy and Donald Deskey to make their products more marketable. Yet they were principally concerned with styling and revived the 18th century artist-designer tradition which is perpetuated today by Philippe Starck and Michael Graves in an era when even The Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter Day Saints in Utah employs 60 designers.

Heskett cites a handful of contemporary companies, like Apple, which have adopted a more intelligent approach to design by integrating it into every area of activity but, as he points out, mediagenic stylists like Starck still dominate popular perceptions of designers. Maybe one day the word "designer" will conjure the likes of Jonathan Ive, Apple's British-born design director instead - but not yet.

Alice Rawsthorn is director of the Design Museum.