Objectivity

Objectivity: A Designer's Book of Curious ToolsBy David UsborneThames & Hudson, £14.95FT Bookshop price: £11.96

There is an unexpected poetry in many of the names of the items featured in David Usborne's Objectivity: A Designer's Book of Curious Tools: shaft, stay, beater; agitator, buttris, truss; pounder, snuffer, forcer.

They are mostly nouns derived from verbs yet when collected together they acquire an artistic quality that seems both to challenge and emphasise their practical origins.

A similar concept lies at the heart of the book. The majority of the objects Usborne has collected are exercises in industrial design - items to help the very skilled and the unskilled alike complete tasks with greater ease or efficiency. Yet they also have an aesthetic appeal that it seems doubtful that their pragmatic creators ever considered.

Whether they are objects of beauty is, of course, a matter of opinion - foreword author Thomas Heatherwick, a member of the current design in-crowd, certainly seems to think so - and thus the book neatly and pleasingly brings together subjectivity and objectivity while divorcing aesthetic enjoyment from the artistic baggage often associated with it. A great book for provoking debate round the coffee or dinner table.

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