This book was first published in 1970 and has long become a bibliographic rarity. In today's conditions, the text has acquired new relevance, as design, marketing, and branding have firmly entered the vocabulary of Russian practice. Understanding the social nature of design has become all the more necessary because its technologies have long been used in all types of design tasks, as long as many people are involved. People involved in the development of programs and projects, promoting finished products, and above all, people who constantly find themselves in the role of consumers. Without changing a single line in the previous text, the author supplemented it with comments written from today’s position, and a final chapter that briefly characterizes the metamorphoses of project activity for a whole generation that has passed since the first edition of the first Russian monograph on design.