George Nelson (1908-1986) was an American industrial designer of American Modernism. While Director of Design for the Herman Miller furniture company, Nelson and his design studio, George Nelson Associates, Inc., designed 20th century modernist furniture.

Nelson believed the work of a designer should be to better the world. In his view, nature was already perfect, but man ruined it by making things that didn’t follow the rules of nature. “The contemporary architect, cut off from symbols, ornament and meaningful elaborations of structural form, all of which earlier periods processed in abundance, has desperately chased every functional requirement, every change in sight or ornamentation, every technical improvement, to provide some basis for starting his work.

It has been argued that Nelson might be called a metadesigner – that his intent of study and practice was neither the building nor the product but rather the process of design itself. Nelson’s manner of interdisciplinary design, and therefore progressive thinking, reoriented the entire concern with capitalist destruction around the dynamic of producer and product.