THE ROUTLEDGE COMPANION TO DESIGN STUDIES

 
 
 
Since the 1990s, in response to dramatic transformations in the worlds of
technology and the economy, design – a
once relatively definable
discipline, complete with a set of sub-disciplines – has become
unrecognizable.
Consequently, design scholars have begun to address new
issues, themes and sub-disciplines such as: sustainable
design, design for
well-being, empathic design, design activism, design anthropology, and
many more.
The Routledge Companion to Design Studies charts this new expanded
spectrum and embraces
the wide range of scholarship relating to design –
theoretical, practice-related and historical – that has
emerged over the past
four decades. Comprising forty-three newly commissioned chapters, the
Companion is organized into the following six sections:

• Defining design: discipline, process

• Defining design: objects, spaces
• Designing identities: gender, sexuality, age, nation
• Designing society: empathy, responsibility, consumption, the everyday
• Design and politics: activism, intervention, regulation
• Designing the world: globalization, transnationalism, translation

Contributors include both established and emerging scholars and the

chapters offer an international scope,
covering work emanating from, and
relating to, design in the United Kingdom, mainland Europe, North
America,
Asia, Australasia and Africa.
This comprehensive collection makes an original and significant
contribution to the field of Design Studies.

Penny Sparke is a Professor of Design History and Director of the Modern

Interiors Research
Centre (MIRC) at Kingston University, London. Her
publications include Elsie de Wolfe: The
Birth of Modern Interior
Decoration (2005), The Modern Interior (2008) and An Introduction to
Design and Culture, 1900 to the present, 3rd edition (2012).

Fiona Fisher is a Researcher in Design History at the Modern Interiors

Research Centre
(MIRC) at Kingston University, London. Her recent
publications include Designing the British
Post-War Home: Kenneth Wood,
1948–1968 (2015) and, co-edited with Christopher Breward and Ghislaine
Wood,
British Design: Tradition and Modernity after 1948 (2015).

Contributors: Paul Atkinson, Jeremy Aynsley, Eeva Berglund, Prasad

Boradkar, Christopher Boyko, Christopher
Breward, Ming Cheung, Alison
J. Clarke, Marilyn Cohen, Rachel Cooper, Penelope Dean, Kjetil Fallan,
Fiona Fisher,
Robert Friedel, Tony Fry, Lorraine Gamman, Rama
Gheerawo, Meltem Ö. Gürel, Christine Guth, Paul Hazell, Janice
Helland,
Ben Highmore, Elise Hodson, Tanishka Kachru, Trevor Keeble, Victoria
Kelley, Yuko Kikuchi, Yi-Chang Lee,
Grace Lees-Maffei, Joseph McBrinn,
Deana McDonagh, Victor Margolin, Joana Meroz, Viviana Narotzky, Amy
F. Ogata,
Barbara Penner, John Potvin, Alison Prendiville, Rebecca
Reubens, Penny Sparke, Adam Thorpe, Jilly Traganou,
Louise Valentine,
Noel Waite, Stuart Walker, Lois Weinthal.
THE ROUTLEDGE COMPANION
TO DESIGN STUDIES
 
 

Edited by Penny Sparke and Fiona Fisher

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
First published 2016

by Routledge

2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

and by Routledge

711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

© 2016 selection and editorial matter, Penny Sparke and Fiona Fisher; individual chapters, the
contributors

The right of Penny Sparke and Fiona Fisher to be identified as authors of the editorial material, and
of the
authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78
of the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by
any
electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including
photocopying and recording, or
in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in
writing from the publishers.

Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks,

and are
used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Sparke, Penny, editor.|Fisher, Fiona, editor.

Title: The Routledge companion to design studies/Edited by Penny Sparke and Fiona Fisher.

Description: New York: Routledge, 2016.|Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2015048758|ISBN 9781138780507 (hbk)|

ISBN 9781315562087 (ebk)

Subjects: LCSH: Design.

Classification: LCC NK1510.R58 2016|DDC 745.4–dc23

LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015048758

ISBN: 978-1-138-78050-7 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-315-56208-7 (ebk)

Typeset in Goudy

by Sunrise Setting Ltd, Brixham, UK

 CONTENTS
 
 
 

List of
illustrations
List of
contributors

Introduction

PENNY SPARKE

PART I

Defining design: discipline, process

 1 Free for all

PENELOPE DEAN

 2 Wall Street bounded and unbinding: the spatial as a multifocal

lens in design studies

JILLY TRAGANOU

 3 Connectivity through service design

ALISON PRENDIVILLE

 4 A curious journey into an unknown world

LOUISE VALENTINE

 5 Design decision-making

CHRISTOPHER BOYKO, YI-CHANG LEE AND RACHEL

COOPER

 6 Drawing the dotted line

LOIS WEINTHAL

 7 The craft and design of dressmaking, 1880–1907

JANICE HELLAND
PART II

Defining design: objects, spaces

 8 Artifice, materials, and the choices of design

ROBERT FRIEDEL

 9 Writing the design history of computers

PAUL ATKINSON

10 Keeping it on the surface: design, surfaces and taste

VICTORIA KELLEY

11 Table Stories: history, meaning and narrative in contemporary

homemaking

TREVOR KEEBLE

12 Wall Street(s)

MARILYN COHEN

13 Beyond perfection: object and process in twenty-first-century

design and material culture

VIVIANA NAROTZKY

PART III

Designing identities: gender, sexuality, age, nation

14 Modern dressing: the suit as practice and symbol

CHRISTOPHER BREWARD

15 Arranging the aspidistras: nature, culture and the design of the

feminine sphere in the nineteenth
century

PENNY SPARKE

16 From Bright Young Thing to vile body to posthumous reliquary:

Stephen Tennant, queer excess and the
decadent interior

JOHN POTVIN

17 Designing childhood

AMY F. OGATA
18 Futures fairs: industrial exhibitions in New Zealand, 1865 to 1925

NOEL WAITE

19 A difficult road: designing a post-colonial car for Africa

PAUL HAZELL

20 The cultural representation of graphic design in East and West

Germany, 1949 to 1970

JEREMY AYNSLEY

21 A match made in Utopia? The uneasy love affair of art and

industry in Scandinavia

KJETIL FALLAN

PART IV

Designing society: empathy, responsibility, consumption, the everyday

22 From ergonomics to empathy: Herman Miller and MetaForm

BARBARA PENNER

23 How products satisfy needs beyond the functional: empathy

supporting consumer–product
relationships

DEANA MCDONAGH

24 Refashioning disability: the case of Painted Fabrics Ltd., 1915 to

1959

JOSEPH MCBRINN

25 Socially inclusive design: a people-centered perspective

RAMA GHEERAWO

26 What is “socially responsive design and innovation”?

ADAM THORPE AND LORRAINE GAMMAN

27 User experience design in digital service innovation

MING CHEUNG

28 Design + anthropology: an emergent discipline

PRASAD BORADKAR
29 Design, daily life, and matters of taste

BEN HIGHMORE

PART V

Design and politics: activism, intervention, regulation

30 Configuring design as politics now

TONY FRY

31 Design for the real world: Victor Papanek and the emergence of
humane design

ALISON J. CLARKE

32 Impossible maybe, perhaps quite likely: activist design in

Helsinki’s urban wastelands

EEVA BERGLUND

33 Design for meaningful innovation

STUART WALKER

34 Towards holistic sustainability design: the Rhizome Approach

REBECCA REUBENS

35 Regulating design: spaces and boundaries of the late-nineteenth-

century public house

FIONA FISHER

PART VI

Designing the world: globalization, transnationalism, translation

36 A world history of design

VICTOR MARGOLIN

37 ‘Why then the world’s mine oyster’: consumption and

globalization, 1851 to now

GRACE LEES-MAFFEI

38 Designing and consuming the modern in Turkey

MELTEM Ö. GÜREL
39 Three Dutchnesses of Dutch design: the construction of a national
practice at the intersection of
national and international dynamics

JOANA MEROZ

40 The staging of Indian national identity through exhibitions, 1850

to 1947

TANISHKA KACHRU

41 Exhibiting independent India: Textiles and Ornamental Arts at the

Museum of Modern Art in New
York

ELISE HODSON

42 Design Before Design in Japan

CHRISTINE M. E. GUTH

43 The Cold War design business of John D. Rockefeller 3rd

YUKO KIKUCHI

Index
 LIST OF
ILLUSTRATIONS
 
 
 
 
 

Figures

  2.1 Borders in front of the 911 memorial, September

11, 2014
  2.2 Occupy Wall Street at Zuccotti Park, October 8,
2011
  3.1 Visualizing the service journey through
storyboarding
  3.2 Paper prototyping is used for conceptualizing
digital touchpoints
  4.1 A pin-size overview of the ten-year visualisation
map depicts the
craft practice of a designer of handwoven textiles
  4.2 A snapshot visualisation map or ‘cultural
enrichment cycle’ for the
woven textile designer
  5.1 Digital Lace
  5.2 Mind map used by a designer in the generation of
ideas for an
electronic counter
  5.3 The generation of concepts in the design of an
electronic counter
  5.4 Modified concept E and modified solution A
  6.1 The Gilbreths captured the movement of a hand in
fast and slow
motion using their chronocyclegraph method
  6.2 Drafted pattern of ‘The coat, jacket and riding
habit sleeve’
  7.1 Court dresses worn by the Countess of Aberdeen and
Miss Bigwood
at Her Majesty’s Drawing Room, February 24, 1888
  7.2 Costume embroidered by Irish girls for the
Countess of Aberdeen
  8.1 The bentwood and laminates of Austrian furniture
maker Gebrüder
Thonet used for the classic Vienna café chair and the 1935 tubular
steel chair
  9.1 The Altair 8800 on the cover of Popular Electronics, January 1975
  9.2 The Apple Macintosh, 1984
10.1 Jeff Koons, Balloon Flower (Yellow), Château de Versailles, 2008–9
10.2 Advertisement for
Monkey Brand soap
11.1 A photograph of Aunt
Rose holding one of the ebony sculptures that
she subsequently turned into lamps, c.
1950
11.2 Silver napkin ring
11.3 Nigerian stamp featuring
“Old Manilla Currency,” 1952
12.1 Gekko in his office,
Wall Street (1987)
12.2 Office of Bretton James,
Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps (2010)
13.1 Downloadable blueprint
for the Rough and Ready Chair. Tord
Boontje, 1998
13.2 Knowledge-tools-memory: blanket, by studio mischer’traxler, 2013
15.1 Arrangement of plants
and hanging baskets in window, from John R.
Mollinson’s The New Practical Window Gardener,
1894
15.2 Ornamental plant case
with fountain and hanging basket, from John
R. Mollinson’s The New Practical Window
Gardener, 1894
16.1 Stephen Tennant by
Foulsham & Banfield
17.1 “Chambre d’enfant”
[Child’s Room], designed by André Hellé, 1911
17.2 Alphabet de la Grande Guerre 1914–1916 [Alphabet of the Great
War], designed by André Hellé,
c. 1917
18.1 Exterior of the 1865 New
Zealand Industrial Exhibition building
18.2 Map of Dunedin with the
recent reclaimed land which became the
site of the 1889 New Zealand and South Seas Exhibition
19.1 The Africar
19.2 The Uri pickup truck
19.3 The prototype Mobius
19.4 The prototype “OX”
20.1 Helmut Jürgens cover
design for Gebrauchsgraphik
20.2 Axel Bertram cover
design for Neue Werbung
21.1 Promotional photograph
of telephone Model EB-32 designed by
Johan Christian Bjerknes and Jean Heiberg in 1932
21.2 ‘Speed Bob’, the first
plastic toboggan made in Norway
22.1 Working model of MetaForm shower node, 1988
22.2 Working model of MetaForm toilet node, 1988
23.1 Self portraits drawn
using only feet
24.1 “Three Typical Examples
of the Men Employed by ‘Painted Fabrics’”
24.2 Publicity image of a
model wearing a coat designed and made by
Painted Fabrics Ltd
25.1 Fostering a
people-centered perspective
25.2 A co-design project to
redesign the interior treatment space of an
emergency ambulance brought paramedics and patients into the
design
team
26.1 CaMden anti-theft bike
stand
26.2 Socially responsive
intervention, reframing risk as opportunity
26.3 Socially Responsive
Design Methodology
27.1 Media
Perception-Reaction Model (MPR)
29.1 Queues outside the
Victoria and Albert Museum at the Britain Can
Make It exhibition, 1946
29.2 Installation, The West Indian Front Room, Geffrye Museum, London,
2005–6
31.1 Tin can radio, designed
by Victor Papanek and George Seeger
“developing countries”
31.2 Victor Papenek and
George Seeger’s tin can radio, decorated
31.3 Victor Papanek,
c. 1979
32.1 The Oxygen Room,
Helsinki, 2003
32.2 The Turntable, Helsinki,
Spring 2014
33.1 Designs for an
overpopulated planet: foragers, Dunne and Raby, 2010
33.2 ‘Shake’ sideboard,
Sebastian Cox, 2014
33.3 The Toaster Project,
Thomas Thwaites, 2010
33.4 Functional material
goods and contemplative objects for ‘Inner
Work’, Stuart Walker, 2006–11
33.5 Grandi
Legni GL17, Andrea Branzi, 2010
33.6 Oedipus Eyeglasses, Stuart Walker, 2014
35.1 The Fox Public House,
High Street, Tooting, 1880s
35.2 The Feathers Public
House, Dockhead, Bermondsey, 1880s
37.1 The Great Exhibition,
Hyde Park, London, 1851
37.2 World Revolution Day,
September 17
38.1 Decorator Nizami (Bey)’s
sketches show how contemporary interiors
should look
38.2 Advertisements for
radios
38.3 A bank’s advertisement
for prize apartments
39.1 Critical and humorous
cartoons by Gert Dumbar, working at Tel
Design, for inclusion in NS train timetables between c. 1971 and
1977
39.2 Anthon Beeke and Swip
Stolk, Holland in vorm logo (1987), a
thumbprint in the shape of the Netherlands
40.1 Frontispiece from the
Art Journal regarding the Colonial and Indian
Exhibition of 1886
41.1 Installation view of the
exhibition Textiles and Ornamental Arts of
India, the Museum of Modern Art, New York,
1955
41.2 Installation view of the
exhibition Textiles and Ornamental Arts of
India, the Museum of Modern Art, New York,
1955
42.1 Serving dish in shape of
overlapping fans, Oribe ware
42.2 Interior view of Katsura
Imperial Villa, c. 1650
43.1 Bonwit Teller’s
advertisement for ‘Taj of India’, The New York Times,
April 24, 1961: 3
43.2 “Mrs John Kenneth
Galbraith, wife of the American Ambassador, is
the first customer as she opens an exhibition of Taj shoes”
 

Tables

 
5.1Framework of decision-making
classification.
 
5.2The four Cs of Design.
 
5.3Urban design decision-making
across three case studies
23.1 Categories of objects
and display syntax.
23.2 Building on the
categories of objects from Riggins’s “Fieldwork in
the living room: An autoethnographic essay” (1994).
23.3 Based on the three
different but coexisting dimensions of empathy
(Finlay 2005)
23.4 Empathic design
activities
34.1 Overview of the
Rhizome Approach
34.2 The Holistic
Sustainability Checklist
 LIST OF
CONTRIBUTORS
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Paul Atkinson is an industrial designer, design historian and educator. He
is Professor of
Design and Design History at Sheffield Hallam
University and has authored two books on the design history of
computers: Computer (Reaktion 2010) and Delete: A Design History of
Computer Vapourware (Bloomsbury 2013). He has also written about
the future of the design profession and the
impact of emerging
technologies on the nature of design.

Jeremy Aynsley is Professor of History of Design at the University of

Brighton and current
Chair of the Design History Society. Previously he
was Director of Research at the Royal College of Art in London
where
he was also Head of the History of Design programme run jointly with
the Victoria and Albert Museum. His
publications include Graphic
Design in Germany, 1890–1945 (Thames and Hudson 2000) and
Designing Modern Germany (Reaktion 2010). He is currently
researching the history of
graphic design in the two Germanys, 1949–89
and also the work of Austrian poster designer Julius Klinger.

Eeva Berglund received her PhD in social anthropology from the

University of Cambridge in
1995. She teaches and writes in English and
Finnish, especially on society and the environment, built and
un-built.
She contributes to academic publications and collaborates in networks
pursuing scholarly projects and
with politically engaged groups. In 2011
she became Docent (Adjunct Professor) of Environmental Policy and
Urban
Studies at Helsinki University. Her publications include
Changing Helsinki? 11 Views on a City
Unfolding (Nemo 2015), co-
edited with sustainable design researcher Cindy Kohtala.
Prasad Boradkar is Professor in Industrial Design at Arizona State
University (ASU) in
Tempe. He is the Director of InnovationSpace, a
transdisciplinary new product development laboratory, and
Co-director
of the Biomimicry Center, an organization dedicated to the exploration
of biologically inspired
solutions to problems of sustainability. Prasad is
the author of Designing Things: A Critical
Introduction to the Culture of
Objects (Berg 2010). He is the co-editor of Encountering
Things
(forthcoming), an anthology of essays on the cultural meaning of
objects, and is currently working on
a book on Indian design.

Christopher Boyko is a Senior Research Associate in

ImaginationLancaster at Lancaster
University. His research interests
focus on the interrelationships between people, design and cities. He is
currently leading research on the Liveable Cities project, examining the
connections
between wellbeing, the built environment and low carbon.
This work builds on research from two other projects:
exploring density
within the planning process (Urban Futures) and mapping the
sustainable
urban decision-making process (VivaCity2020).

Christopher Breward is Professor of Cultural History at the University of

Edinburgh, where
he holds the positions of Principal of Edinburgh
College of Art and Vice Principal of the University (Creative
and
Performing Arts). Before taking up his post at Edinburgh he was Head
of Research at the Victoria and Albert
Museum, London. Christopher
has published widely on the history and theory of fashion and its
relationship to
masculinities and urban cultures. His most recent
publication is The Suit: Style, Form and
Function (Reaktion 2016).

Ming Cheung is Associate Professor of Media at the University of

Adelaide, Australia. Her
research centres on media design: visual
communication, digital marketing and advertising, participatory social
media, user experience design, design strategy and service innovation,
design education and creativity, and
intellectual property in design. She
is currently also Adjunct Associate Professor of Design at the Hong
Kong
Polytechnic University’s School of Design. She has published in
The Design Journal,
Semiotica, Social Semiotics, IEEE Transactions on
 Professional Communication, and International Journal of
Technology
and Design, amongst others.

Alison J. Clarke is Professor of Design History and Theory and Director of

the Victor
Papanek Foundation at the University of Applied Arts
Vienna. Her research focuses on the embeddedness of design
in
everyday social relations. Alison is Editor of Design Anthropology:
Object Culture in the
21st Century (Springer 2010) and author of
Tupperware: The Promise of Plastic in 1950s
America (Smithsonian
Institution Press 1999). She is presently completing a monograph for
MIT Press
exploring the politics of 1960s and 1970s design.

Marilyn Cohen holds a doctorate in Art History from the Institute of Fine
Arts, New York
University and an MA in Decorative Arts, Design and
Material Culture from the Bard Graduate Center in New York
City. She
currently teaches in the Parsons School of Design/Cooper Hewitt MA
program in the History of Design and
Curatorial Studies and in the
Parsons School of Design Fashion Studies MA program. She lectures
and publishes in
the field of popular and material culture and has given
papers on Wall Street, I Love Lucy, M*A*S*H, The Best Years of Our
Lives, Toy Story, trench coats
and movie posters. She was the curator
and catalogue author for the exhibition Reginald Marsh’s
New York.

Rachel Cooper OBE is Distinguished Professor of Design Management

and Policy at Lancaster
University, where she is Director of
ImaginationLancaster, an open and exploratory design-led research
centre
conducting applied and theoretical research into people, products,
places and their interactions. She is
currently working on The Creative
Exchange, looking at the growth of the creative
industries through
exploring the ‘digital public space’, and Liveable Cities, working to
identify design solutions that will lead to low-carbon, resource-secure,
future cities in which societal
wellbeing is prioritised. She has published
extensively on these topics.

Penelope Dean is Associate Professor of Architecture at the University of

Illinois at
Chicago where she teaches theory, history and design, and
serves as coordinator for the Masters of Arts in Design
Criticism
program. Her research and writings focus on contemporary architectural
 culture with a particular
emphasis on recent exchanges between
architecture and allied design fields.

Kjetil Fallan is Professor of Design History at the University of Oslo. He

specializes in
the history of industrial design and material culture, and is
the author of Designing Modern
Norway: A History of Design
Discourse (Routledge 2016) and Design History: Understanding
Theory
and Method (Berg Publishers 2010), the editor of Scandinavian Design:
Alternative
Histories (Berg Publishers 2012) and co-editor, with Grace
Lees-Maffei, of Designing
Worlds: National Design Histories in an Age
of Globalization (Berghahn Books 2016) and Made in Italy: Rethinking
a Century of Italian Design (Bloomsbury Academic 2013). He is an
editor of
the Journal of Design History and serves on the advisory board
of Design
and Culture.

Fiona Fisher is a researcher in design history at the Modern Interiors

Research Centre,
Kingston University, London, where she is curator of
the university’s Dorich House Museum. Her recent
publications include
Designing the British Post-War Home: Kenneth Wood, 1948–1968
(Routledge 2015) and, co-edited with Christopher Breward and
Ghislaine Wood, British Design:
Tradition and Modernity after 1948
(Bloomsbury Academic 2015). She is currently researching a history of
design of the modern public house.

Robert Friedel has taught the history of technology and science and
environmental history at
the University of Maryland since 1984. He was
previously a historian at the Smithsonian Institution’s National
Museum
of History and Technology (now the Museum of American History) and
the first director of the IEEE Center
for the History of Electrical
Engineering, in New York. His books include Pioneer Plastic: The
Making and Selling of Celluloid (University of Wisconsin Press 1983),
Edison’s Electric
Light: The Art of Invention (Johns Hopkins University
Press 1986, rev. 2010) and a survey of technological
history, A Culture
of Improvement: Technology and the Western Millennium (MIT Press
2007).

Tony Fry is a designer, theorist, educator and writer. He is Principal of the

newly created
‘The Studio at the Edge of the World’ in Launceston,
 Tasmania – a partnership project with the University of
Tasmania – and
Adjunct Professor of Design, Griffith University, Brisbane. He is
currently consulting and
researching in Asia, the Middle East and Latin
America. Tony is the author of twelve books and is working at the
moment on a book on remaking cities to be published in 2017.

Lorraine Gamman is Professor of Design at Central Saint Martins,

University of the Arts
London, where she founded the award-winning
Design Against Crime (DAC) research initiative in 1999. She has
published widely on design and visual culture and has, together with
Adam Thorpe (2002–15), delivered numerous
socially responsive
design and academic outputs. She is currently Principal Investigator on
the AHRC-funded
‘Extending Empathy’ network, Co-Investigator on
the EU FP7-funded ‘Graffolution’ project and Principal
Investigator on
the AHRC-funded ‘Design Thinking for Prison Industries’ project.

Rama Gheerawo is Director of the Helen Hamlyn Centre for Design at the
Royal College of Art
in London. His research focus on creating
knowledge exchange methods for socially inclusive design builds on his
work with more than fifty collaborative projects with government,
business and public sector organisations such
as Samsung, Toyota and
GOV.UK. He delivers keynotes internationally and writes, curates
exhibitions and runs
workshops for audiences ranging from academics
to business executives. He has recently been a guest editor for
the
Journal of Design Philosophy Papers and The Design Journal.

Meltem Ö. Gürel is an associate professor and the Founding Chair of the

Department of
Architecture at Bilkent University, where she has taught
since 1994. She received her PhD in Architecture from
the University of
Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). Meltem’s research focuses on
cross-cultural histories of
architectural modernism with an emphasis on
society, gender and culture (especially in mid-twentieth-century
Turkey), culture–space relationship and design education. Her research
has been published in edited volumes and
leading journals including the
Journal of Architecture, the Journal of
Design History, and Gender,
Place and Culture. She is the editor of Mid-Century Modernism in
Turkey (Routledge 2016).
Christine M. E. Guth is a senior tutor in Asian design in the Victoria and
Albert
Museum/Royal College of Art postgraduate History of Design
program. She has written widely about aspects of
transnational cultural
exchange. Her publications include: Art, Tea and Industry: Masuda
Takashi and the Mitsui Circle (Princeton University Press 1993); Art of
Edo Japan: The
Artist and the City 1615–1868 (Yale University Press
2010); and Hokusai’s Great Wave:
Biography of a Global Icon
(University of Hawai’i 2015).

Paul Hazell is a senior lecturer in design at the University of Worcester. His

research
focuses on the history of automotive and industrial design and
his PhD examined the emergence of the utility Land
Rover as an
automotive icon. Paul has recently had work published examining the
historical design significance of
the Ford Model T and co-authored ‘The
Enthusiast’s Eye: The Value of Unsanctioned Knowledge in Design
Historical
Scholarship’ with Kjetil Fallan for the Journal of Design and
Culture.

Janice Helland is Professor of Art History at Queen’s University, Canada.

Her research
interests lie in the area of craft and design, particularly as
they relate to the area of philanthropy and fair
trade. She has published
articles in journals such as Textile History, Costume, the Journal of
Design History and the Journal of
Modern Craft, and recently co-edited
Craft, Community and the Material Culture of Place
and Politics, 19th–
20th Century (Ashgate 2014). Her new research will focus upon
embroidered samplers and
the material culture of childhood.

Ben Highmore is Professor of Cultural Studies at the University of Sussex.

He has recently
completed a study of brutalism, The Art of Brutalism:
Rescuing Hope from Catastrophe in 1950s
Britain, (Yale University
Press forthcoming), and is currently working on the relationships
between taste,
retailing, design and domestic life as part of a major
research fellowship for the Leverhulme Trust. His most
recently
published book is The Great Indoors: At Home in the Modern British
House (Profile
Books 2014). His previous books include Ordinary
Lives: Studies in the Everyday (Routledge
2011) and A Passion for
Cultural Studies (Palgrave 2009).
Elise Hodson is the Chair of the School of Design at George Brown
College and a PhD
candidate in communication and culture at York
University in Toronto, Canada. She holds a Master’s in Museum
Studies
from the University of Toronto, and an MA in Decorative Arts, Design
and Material Culture from the Bard
Graduate Center in New York. Her
current research focuses on consumer product design and the global
division of
design labor. Prior to teaching and organizing exhibitions at
the Institute Without Boundaries, George Brown
College, Elise was
Director of Exhibitions and Associate Curator at the Design Exchange,
Canada’s national design
museum.

Tanishka Kachru is Associate Senior Faculty in the Faculty of Visual

Communication at the
National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad, India.
Tanishka’s research is on Indian design history with a focus on
postcolonial perspectives. She is investigating traditional exhibiting
cultures of India and the staging of
national identity through exhibitions
and museums in India. Her publications include ‘Style and Front Doors’
in
M. Snodin and E. Gawne, eds. Exploring Architecture: Buildings,
Meaning and Making
(V&A Publications 2005).

Trevor Keeble is Executive Dean (Learning, Teaching and Research) at the

University for the
Creative Arts London. He holds a PhD from the
Royal College of Art in the history of design, and works on the
design
and material culture of domesticity and the interior. His publications
include the co-edited volumes
Performance, Fashion and the Modern
Interior: From the Victorians to Today (Berg 2011)
Designing the
Modern Interior: From the Victorians to Today (Berg 2009); and The
Modern Period Room 1870–1950: The Construction of the Exhibited
Interior (Routledge 2006). He
has contributed essays to the collections
Domestic Interiors (Bloomsbury 2012) and
The Handbook of Interior
Architecture and Design (Bloomsbury 2013).

Victoria Kelley is a reader in the History of Design and Material Culture at

the University
for the Creative Arts London and a lecturer in Cultural
Studies for Fashion, Textiles and Jewellery at Central
Saint Martins,
University of the Arts London. She researches and publishes in the
material culture and cultural
history of cleanliness and dirt, maintenance
 and surface, and the material culture of working-class Britain. Her
latest
major research project is a history of London’s street markets, to be
published by Manchester University
Press in 2018.

Yuko Kikuchi is a reader at TrAIN (Research Centre for Transnational Art

Identity and
Nation), University of the Arts London. Her key
publications include: Mingei Theory and
Japanese Modernisation:
Cultural Nationalism and ‘Oriental Orientalism’ (2004); Refracted
Modernity: Visual Culture and Identity in Colonial Taiwan (2007).
Recently she has edited and authored two
special issues ‘Transnational
Modern Design Histories in East Asia’, Journal of Design
History
(2014) and ‘Negotiating Histories: Through Tradition and Participation
in Contemporary East Asia’,
World Art (2015).

Yi-Chang Lee is a product designer/researcher at ImaginationLancaster,

Lancaster University.
His research interests focus on the relationship
between design decision-making and innovation in the new product
development process in small and medium-sized enterprises, with a
particular emphasis on design decision-making,
design-driven
innovation, design thinking and creative design methods.

Grace Lees-Maffei is a reader in Design History, Chair of the TVAD

Research Group, and
Programme Director of the professional doctorate
in heritage (DHeritage) at the University of Hertfordshire, UK.
She is
Managing Editor of the Journal of Design History and advisory board
member for
The Poster and AIS/Design: Storia e ricerche. Lees-Maffei
is the author of Design at Home: Domestic Advice Books in Britain and
the USA since 1945 (Routledge 2013) the editor
of Writing Design:
Words and Objects and Iconic Designs: 50 Stories about 50 Things
(Bloomsbury Academic 2012) and co-editor of Made in Italy:
Rethinking a Century of Italian
Design (Bloomsbury Academic 2014)
and The Design History Reader (Berg 2010).

Joseph McBrinn lectures at the School of Art, Ulster University in Belfast,

Northern
Ireland. He has written and lectured widely on Irish craft and
design. He serves on the editorial board of the
Journal of Modern Craft
and the editorial advisory boards of Textile:
Journal of Cloth and
Culture and the Irish Arts Review. His current research focuses
on the
 intersection of masculinity and design. He is presently engaged on two
book-length projects, Men and the Culture of Needlework (Bloomsbury
forthcoming) and The Disabled
Soldier and Design Culture in Interwar
England (in preparation).

Deana McDonagh is Professor of Industrial Design in the School of Art

and Design at the
University of Illinois (Urbana-Champaign) and
faculty at the Beckman Institute of Advanced Science and
Technology.
She is an experienced design practitioner and entrepreneur and an
empathic design research strategist
who focuses on enhancing quality of
life for all through more intuitive and meaningful products, leading to
emotional sustainability. Her research concentrates on emotional
consumer–product relationships. She is currently
a research fellow at
Coventry University (UK) and Director of Research for Herbst Produkt
design consultancy
(USA).

Victor Margolin is Professor Emeritus of Design History at the University

of Illinois,
Chicago. He is a founding editor and now co-editor of the
academic design journal Design
Issues. He has published widely on
diverse design topics, including design history, social design, design
for
development, design education and design theory. Books that he has
written, edited or co-edited include:
Design Discourse: History Theory
Criticism (University of Chicago Press 1989); Discovering Design:
Explorations in Design Studies (University of Chicago Press 1995); The
Idea of Design (MIT Press 1996); The Designed World: Images,
Objects,
Environments (Berg 2010); The Politics of the Artificial:
Essays on Design and Design
Studies (University of Chicago 2002);
The Struggle for Utopia: Rodchenko, Lissitzky,
Moholy-Nagy, 1917–
1946 (University of Chicago Press 1997). The first two volumes of his
three-volume
World History of Design were published in early 2015.

Viviana Narotzky is President of ADI-FAD, the Spanish Industrial Design

Association based in
Barcelona, a founding trustee of the Spanish
Design History Foundation and Director of the Open Design/Shared
Creativity international conference, a leading forum for the exploration
of emerging practices in contemporary
design. Current research
interests include: design, technology and digital culture;
 interdisciplinary design
practices; consumption, production, DIY and
fabrication. She has also published on peripheral experiences of
modernity and the cultural geography of consumption, national identity
and design, and processes of urban
regeneration.

Amy F. Ogata is Professor of Art History at the University of Southern

California. Her
publications include: Designing the Creative Child:
Playthings and Places in Midcentury
America (University of Minnesota
Press 2013); Swedish Wooden Toys (Yale University
Press 2014);
Fredun Shapur: Playing with Design (Piqpoq 2014); and a book on
Belgian Art
Nouveau, Art Nouveau and the Social Vision of Modern
Living: Belgian Artists in a European
Context (Cambridge University
Press 2011). She is also the author of many articles and reviews on
architecture and design in Europe and the US.

Joana Meroz is a PhD candidate at the Design Cultures department, VU

University Amsterdam.
She holds a research MA in Visual Arts, Media,
and Architecture from the VU University Amsterdam and a MDes in
Contextual Design from the Design Academy Eindhoven. Her doctoral
research on the transnational history of the
social and material
construction of the idea of Dutch design is financed by the Netherlands
Organisation for
Scientific Research (NWO) program Mosaic. Her
research focuses on the intersection of international cultural
politics,
new materialism, and museology. She has published in The Design
Journal, Dutch
Crossing: Journal of Low Countries Studies, and
Kunstforum, and has contributed to Design History Netherlands,
exhibition catalogues and other popular media. She is also guest co-
editor of the Journal of Design History
special issue ‘Beyond Dutch
Design: Material Culture in the Netherlands in an Age of Globalization,
Migration and
Multiculturalism’, forthcoming in 2016.

Barbara Penner is Senior Lecturer in Architectural History at the Bartlett

School of
Architecture, University College London. She is author of
Bathroom (Reaktion 2013) and
Newlyweds on Tour: Honeymooning in
Nineteenth-Century America (UPNE 2009), and was awarded
the 2014
RIBA President’s Award for Outstanding University-Located Research.
She is co-editor of Forty Ways to Think about Architecture (Wiley 2014)
 and Gender Space
Architecture (Routledge 2000). She is a regular
contributor to Places and Architectural Review.

John Potvin is an associate professor in the Department of Art History and

Director of the
PhD Humanities Program at Concordia University,
Montreal. His research explores the relationship between
subjectivity,
interior design and space, as well as the complexities that cut across
contemporary and historical
art and fashion. His publications include:
Material and Visual Cultures Beyond Male
Bonding (Ashgate 2008);
Giorgio Armani: Empire of the Senses (Ashgate 2013); and
Bachelors of
a Different Sort: Queer Aesthetics, Material Culture and the Modern
Interior in
Britain (Manchester University Press 2014).

Alison Prendiville is a Reader at the London College of Communication,

University of the
Arts London. Her research interests include
anthropology and design of service in the public and third sectors
particularly in the areas of health and services for the elderly. She has an
MA in Design Management from the
Royal College of Art and an MSc
in Digital Anthropology from University College London. She has
recently
completed as co-investigator, the AHRC funded research
Mapping and Developing Service Design Research in the UK
and the
DeSID (Design for Service Innovation and Development) project.

Rebecca Reubens is a PhD candidate at the Design for Sustainability

Department (DfS) at
Delft University of Technology in The
Netherlands, where she is researching links between sustainability,
sustainable development, craft, design and bamboo. An industrial
designer who trained at the National Institute
of Design, India, she
practices at the intersection of design, craft and sustainability through
her design firm
Rhizome. She has worked with diverse international
stakeholders towards inclusive and sustainable development for
non-
industrial producers and craft-communities in developing countries.

Penny Sparke is a professor of Design History and Director of the Modern

Interiors Research
Centre (MIRC) at Kingston University, London. She
has participated in numerous conferences, given guest lectures
and
keynote addresses, been a member of journal editorial boards and
research centre management groups, curated
exhibitions, broadcast and
 published in the field of design history. Her publications include: An
Introduction to Design and Culture, 1900 to the Present (Routledge
1986, 2004); Italian Design from 1860 to the Present (Thames and
Hudson 1989); The Plastics
Age (Victoria & Albert Museum 1990); As
Long as It’s Pink: The Sexual Politics of
Taste (Pandora 1995); Elsie de
Wolfe: The Birth of Modern Interior Decoration
(Acanthus 2005); and
The Modern Interior (Reaktion 2008). She is currently working on a
book about plants and flowers in interiors.

Adam Thorpe is Professor of Socially Responsive Design at the University

of the Arts London.
He is based at Central Saint Martins where he is
Co-director of the Socially Responsive Design and Innovation Hub
and
the Design Against Crime Research Centre and Coordinator of the
University of the Arts London’s (UAL) Design
for Social Innovation
and Sustainability (DESIS) Lab. His practice-based research explores
the role of design in
meeting societal goals and challenges. He has
written extensively on design-led open innovation approaches to
generating social benefit.

Jilly Traganou is Associate Professor of Spatial Design Studies at Parsons

School of Design.
Her book Designing the Olympics: Representation,
Participation, Contestation will be
published by Routledge in 2016. She
is also the author of The Tokaido Road: Traveling and
Representation in
Edo and Meiji Japan (Routledge Curzon 2004), and co-editor with
Miodrag Mitrašinovic´ of
Travel, Space, Architecture (Ashgate 2009).
She guest-edited “Design Histories of the
Olympic Games” (Journal of
Design History 2012) and, with Artemis Yagou, “Visual
Communication Design in the Balkans” (The Design Journal 2015).
Her current research
focuses on design and dissent.

Louise Valentine is Head of Enterprise and Entrepreneurship for the

College of Arts, Science
and Engineering at the University of Dundee in
Scotland, which comprises four Schools – computing, engineering,
physics and maths, forensics – CAHID and Duncan of Jordanstone
College of Art and Design. Her principal area of
research is design,
focusing on how designers communicate and strategically apply their
thinking to cultural,
political, social and technological problems. She is
 editor of Prototype: Design and Craft in
the 21st Century (Bloomsbury
Academic 2013) and Past, Present and
Future Craft Practice (NMS
Enterprises Limited 2010).

Noel Waite is a Senior Lecturer in the Master of Communication Design at

RMIT University,
Melbourne, and a member of their Design Futures
Lab. He was a member of the Steering Committee which successfully
achieved UNESCO Creative City status for Dunedin, New Zealand in
2014. In 2013 he published ‘New Zealand on Show:
Industry,
Innovation and Nation’ in Promoting Prosperity: The Art of Early New
Zealand
Advertising, and co-edited anti-po-des 2 (2013) on the theme
‘Design Futures:
Laboratories and Design Foundations’, and is a long-
time contributor to The National Grid,
a New Zealand graphic design
journal.

Stuart Walker is a director of the ImaginationLancaster Creative Research

Centre where he
researches practice-based design for sustainability with
a focus on inner values and human meaning. His books
include:
Sustainable by Design (Earthscan 2006); The Spirit of
Design
(Earthscan 2011); The Handbook of Design for Sustainability (ed. with
J.
Giard) (Bloomsbury Academic 2013); and Designing Sustainability
(Routledge 2014). His
design work has been exhibited in Europe, North
America and Australia.

Lois Weinthal is Chair of the School of Interior Design at Ryerson

University, Ontario,
Canada. Her research and practice investigates the
relationship between architecture, interiors, clothing and
objects,
resulting in works that take on an experimental nature. She is editor of
Toward a New
Interior: An Anthology of Interior Design Theory
(Princeton Architectural Press 2011), co-editor of
After Taste: Expanded
Practice in Interior Design (Princeton Architectural Press 2011),
and
co-editor of The Handbook of Interior Architecture and Design
(Bloomsbury Academic
2013).
 INTRODUCTION
Penny Sparke
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
In the November 2014 edition of Design and Culture, the journal of the
Design Studies
Forum, Stuart Kendall provided the following abstract for
his chapter ‘Positioning Design Studies: An
Institutional Challenge’:

The general economic view of design studies proposed here

outlines an unstable, heterogeneous,
multiply-oriented, multivalent,
multidisciplinary, polydiscursive space. General economy does not
provide a
singular new metadiscourse of design or design practice.
Rather it recognizes that no new metadiscourse is
possible. As a
critical tool, one value of general economy is its ability to help us
productively parse the
limits of intentionality in design practice. As
a heterogeneous community, it is a community connected through
dissensus. The dissensus of design studies is the motivating absence
animating the university.
(Design and Culture 6/3: 345)

Kendall’s idea that there is a dissensus, rather than a consensus, about what
design studies stands for, might
imply that it is not a sensible term to use in
the title of a book that aims to suggest that its contents have
some kind of
disciplinary coherence. However, in spite of the reservations expressed
above, the term design
studies is being used unapologetically in the title to
this Companion. While recognizing the existence of the ‘heterogeneity’ and
the ‘polydiscursiveness’
highlighted by Kendall, the editors of this book
believe, nonetheless, that the term design studies offers an
opportunity to
bring together a wide range of writings that have been produced in different
contexts, from a
variety of perspectives, and are directed at different
audiences, but which also, on one level at least, have
something in common
– namely a desire to better understand that elusive concept, design. In short,
the term
design studies is being used in this Companion to mean, simply,
the outcomes of studying
design.
This book has side-stepped (or perhaps superseded) the heated debate
that has gone on for over two decades about
the relative strengths and
weaknesses of design studies and design history.
Rather than trying to
defend, or attack, either of these areas the Companion is employing
the
term design studies in a new, uncomplicated, baggage-free way as, that is,
an umbrella term that embraces, in
a non-hierarchical way, the wide range
of scholarship relating to design – theoretical, practice-related and
historical
– that has emerged over the past four decades or so. It aims, simply, to bring
these bodies of
material together into a single place and to begin to
understand how they relate to each other, to a wide variety
of academic
disciplines and to a variety of audiences.
Back in the early 1990s the American design scholar Victor Margolin
locked horns with British architectural and
design historian Adrian Forty
over the purpose and relevance of design history, then a relatively new
discipline
formed in the 1970s, and its relationship with design studies, a
product of the previous decade. The former,
Margolin claimed, was overly
dependent on the modernist paradigm and the concept of ‘good design’
(Margolin 1992:
104–16).
A key issue was about audiences. Who was all this work supposed to be
for? Design studies, Margolin claimed in a
1995 response (1995: 19–21) to
the attack on him made by Forty in the Journal of Design
History a few
years earlier (itself a defence against statements by Margolin made in
1992), was of relevance
to the practice of design and therefore needed to be
at the forefront of design pedagogy. For him, design history
was too
humanities-focused and distant from the needs of design students and their
practice. Forty, on the other
hand, defended design history, claiming that it
focused on the actions of individuals as social beings and that
its audience
included consumers of designed artefacts as well as designers. Nigel
Whiteley joined the
conversation in the 1995 issue of Design Issues, which
revisited the debate, supporting
Forty’s position that design history had a
remit that was wider than the education of designers, and claiming
that, ‘It
was Reyner Banham who pointed out that the proof of the pudding is in the
eating, not in the dish’
(Whiteley 1995: 38–42).
The debate ran for some time and, for a while, drove a wedge between
those scholars who identified with ‘design
studies’, which, they believed,
was of most relevance to designers and which subsumed design history, and
those
who identified themselves as ‘design historians’, who saw themselves
working within the mother discipline of
history and who believed that their
work was relevant to design and humanities students alike, even though it
needed to be packaged a little differently for each of those audiences. This
Companion has
chosen to ignore that (historical) wedge and to demonstrate
that, in the early twenty-first century, a level of
continuity can be seen to
exist across all the work that takes design as its subject or object.
Other ongoing debates of more recent years have focused on whether
design theory informs design from the outside
or whether it emanates from
within; whether design research is about or for design; whether design is a
single or a multi-discipline; whether a western-centric history of
design is
still relevant; whether design history subsumes design theory or vice versa;
and what is (and has been)
design’s relationship with culture, politics,
globalization etc.
Arguably, some of those debates have been superseded, as, in the early
twenty-first century, the world has
changed and design has had to adapt
accordingly. With the dramatic transformations that have occurred in the
worlds of technology and the economy, what was still in the 1990s a
relatively recognizable, definable
discipline, complete with a set of sub-
disciplines – product design, fashion, graphics, interior design,
landscape
design, etc. – has become unrecognizable. Arguably, design has become a
much more open-ended subject
with increasingly porous boundaries.
Recently design scholars have been
addressing new issues, new themes and
new sub-disciplines that have a particularly contemporary relevance. These
include design thinking, sustainable design, service design, design for well-
being, empathic design, interaction
design, social design, universal design,
design activism, co-design, participatory design, critical design,
design
cultures, design anthropology, design writing, global design history and
many more besides. This spectrum
of design-related work has stretched the
existing body of knowledge and taken it into new territories. The
Companion sets out to chart that new expanded spectrum and to begin to
make sense of it.
 The work on design that drives this collection of essays has its roots in
the past fifty or so years and came
into being to fulfil a number of different
needs – academic, professional, social, economic and cultural among
them.
One of the earliest manifestations of design scholarship – which was
loosely described as ‘design methods’
– emerged in the 1960s as part of a
general desire to systematize hitherto un-systematized processes. Growing
out
of the anthropomorphic and ergonomic work of the wartime and
immediate post-war years, and linked to the growing
interest in cybernetics,
attempts were made to minimize both the artistic and the commercial
definitions of
design that had hitherto been emphasized by many design
professionals, influenced by earlier developments in the
USA, and to see it,
rather, as a discipline rooted in a rigorous and rational ‘scientific’ process.
An attempt
was made to systematize what had hitherto been seen as
intuitive, to substitute an interest in designed products
by one in the design
process and thereby to make design a respectable academic discipline with
a basis in
scientific methods. The work of Bruce Archer for the famous
hospital bed project, undertaken at London’s Royal
College of Art in the
1960s, set the ball rolling (Archer 1964). The Design Research Society, the
origins of
which lay in a Design Methods conference held in London in
1962, was founded in the United Kingdom in 1966.
Relatively inactive for a
few years the Society’s energies were revived in 1971, however, by an
international
conference on Design Participation, which was held in
Manchester. It was the first of many DRS conferences held
through the
1970s and 1980s and which continue to this day. The design
methods/design research backcloth to
design studies informs many of the
chapters in this volume, forming one of its key strands. It underpins both
those focusing on process and those addressing the contemporary relevance
of design.
From the late 1970s up to the early twenty-first century, a range of
journals were launched that acted as
international fora for the discussions
and debates entered into by design researchers. Their varied missions have
reflected the shifting sands in the discipline over the years. In 1979 the first
issue was launched of Design Studies: The Interdisciplinary Journal of
Design Research which, in cooperation with the
Design Research Society,
remains active and influential today. Its remit was, and is, clearly defined to
cover a
wide range of design activities including ‘engineering and product
design, architectural and urban design,
computer artefacts and systems
design’. It aims to provide ‘an interdisciplinary forum for the analysis,
development and discussion of fundamental aspects of design activity, from
cognition and
methodology to values and philosophy’. The Design Journal:
An International Journal for All
Aspects of Design was launched in 1998,
which, as its sub-title suggests, sets out to cover a wide spectrum
of design-
related topics approached from a wide range of disciplines. Three years
later, the Journal of Design Research was founded. It is described as ‘an
interdisciplinary journal,
emphasising human aspects as a central issue of
design through integrative studies of social sciences and design
disciplines’.
In 2007 the International Journal of Design, ‘a peer-reviewed, open-
access journal devoted
to publishing research papers in all fields of design,
including industrial design, visual communication design,
interface design,
animation and game design, architectural design, urban design, and other
design related
fields’, was launched in Taiwan. It aims to provide ‘an
international forum for the exchange of ideas and
findings from researchers
across different cultures and encourages research on the impact of cultural
factors on
design theory and practice. It also seeks to promote the transfer
of knowledge between professionals in academia
and industry by
emphasizing research in which results are of interest or applicable.’ When
the US-based journal
Design Issues was founded in 1984 it had quite a
different remit. It was committed to
publishing work in the areas of design
history, theory and criticism and claimed to provoke ‘inquiry into the
cultural and intellectual issues surrounding design’. Its point of entry was
somewhat different from that of
Design Studies in that it did not define
design primarily as a process but rather as a
cultural construct. Since the
mid-1980s that approach towards design – one that is more humanities-
facing – has
gone from strength to strength and a number of journals have
supported it. Most recently, launched in 2009,
Design and Culture, the
official journal of the Design Studies Forum, appeared on the
scene, aiming
‘to examine contemporary “design”, broadly conceived, as a cultural
phenomenon and in historical
perspective … Covering a field that is
increasingly interdisciplinary, Design and Culture
probes design’s relation
to other academic disciplines – including marketing, management, cultural
studies,
anthropology, material culture, geography, visual culture and
political economy – seeking rigorous and innovative
critical frameworks
with which to better understand the social, economic, and cultural forces
shaping, and shaped
by, design.’
 All these journals have their origins in the design scholarship that was
initiated in the 1960s. While both the
subject matter and the disciplinary
framework of that scholarship have broadened considerably over the years,
the
common focus has been, and remains, an interrogation of the nature,
function and meaning of design.
In pursuit of that goal some of the journals described above embraced the
historical dimension of design, albeit
within a wider remit. Design Issues,
The Design Journal and Design and
Culture all see it as an integral element
within their definitions of design scholarship. However, it was
left to the
Journal of Design History, founded in 1988, to focus specifically on the
historical face of design. It describes itself as ‘a leading journal in its field
[which] … plays an active role
in the development of design history
(including the history of the crafts and applied arts), as well as
contributing
to the broader field of studies of visual and material culture’.
While 1960s ‘design methods’ lie at the root of a large part of today’s
design studies, design’s historical
dimension has an independent lineage. A
few years after the ‘design methods’ movement had gained momentum a
number of British design educators began to feel that design students lacked
a history of their subject. This
stimulated the emergence of the discipline of
design history as a discrete subject, initially in the UK and the
US. It
quickly developed not only into a component of design education but also,
equally importantly, into a
subject that enriched a number of existing
humanities and social science-based disciplines. Institutions such as
the
UK’s Open University expanded their definition of art and architectural
history to include design, helping to
grow the subject, while several
museums also began to include designed artefacts in their collections.
Looking back at design’s past has grown from strength to strength in the
intervening years, indicated by the
development of a number of educational
offerings in the area in the UK, the
US and elsewhere. It has developed a
multi-disciplinary base and influenced several contingent disciplines,
among
them art history, architectural history, literary studies, cultural
studies, social and economic history,
cultural history and cultural
geography. It has also, very importantly, fed into the education of designers.
While its early methodological roots were in art and architectural history,
and in the museum-based histories of
the decorative and applied arts, social
and economic history has also contributed to the enrichment of the
discipline. In the 1980s cultural studies made a particular impact and design
history began to focus on issues
including the relationship of design with
identities, post-colonialism and globalization.
The Companion has integrated work with a historical focus into its
themed sections, both
to contextualize the issues under discussion and to
show that what we take to be new questions have often been
addressed in
the past. Design’s past enriches, illuminates, sometimes offers surprising
new readings of both its
present and its future and can even provide
solutions to what were perceived as unsolvable contemporary problems.
Increasingly design historians see history as a tool with which to address
the present. In the section of this
volume that focuses on the links between
design and society, for example, Joseph McBrinn’s chapter on the work of
Painted Fabrics Ltd. offers a historical case study which shows that design
has long been at the service of
social issues, while in the section dedicated
to design’s relationship with politics, Alison J. Clarke’s chapter
on the
influence of Victor Papanek demonstrates that the contemporary concept of
humane design has its roots in
the 1970s. Not only do these historical
chapters provide a sense of depth and of continuity, however, they also
provide methodological alternatives that can unlock impasses in
contemporary thinking.
As D. J. Huppatz and Grace Lees-Maffei have explained, the role of
design history is a complex one. It is, they
have written,

the study of designed artefacts, practices and behaviours, and the

discourses surrounding these, in order to
understand the past,
contextualize the present, and map possible trajectories for the
future … design
historians analyse designed artefacts and practices
– that is, the material culture of everyday life and its
production,
mediation and consumption – to create narratives about the human
condition.
(Huppatz and Lees-Maffei 2013: 311)

Importantly, design history does not merely offer a frame within which to
consider design as a static phenomenon
positioned within it, it also
understands that design is itself an ‘actor’, driving all kinds of change –
human
and non-human – and that it is transforming itself in the process.
Like the vast body of work that emanated from
1960s design
methods/research, design history has had its key conferences and
mouthpieces. Formed at an event at
what was then Brighton Polytechnic in
1977, the British-based Design History Society has been an active force in
the field, sponsoring, among other things, the Journal of Design History.
The model was
exported to Japan with the publication of the Design
History Workshop Japan, which emerged in 2002. While design
history has
its roots in the UK, it is now much more international in outlook and a
group called the International Conferences on Design History and Studies,
founded in Barcelona in 1999, organizes
annual conferences in countries
across the globe, including Finland, Turkey, Brazil and Taiwan.
Since the 1960s design research and design history have gone from
strength to strength, mostly in parallel but
increasingly overlapping.
Harnessing ideas, propositions and methods from a
range of academic
disciplines, including the sciences, the social sciences, linguistics,
philosophy and cultural
studies, numerous scholars in many countries have
set out to analyse the concept of design, to attempt to
understand and
explain it and to apply it to a wide variety of contexts. In recent times,
arguably, the two
strands are converging into a single, albeit multi-headed,
discipline that takes as its focus the complex
challenges of the early twenty-
first century.

The Companion

The Companion consists of forty-three newly-commissioned chapters, each

of them just over
five thousand words, on subjects, methods, issues and
themes that reflect the above. Organized into six sections,
it focuses on
existing scholarship that still has relevance today and on emerging methods
and themes.
Contributors include both established and emerging scholars
and the book is international in scope, covering work
emanating from, and
relating to, design in the United Kingdom, mainland Europe, North
America, Asia, Australasia
and Africa.
The six sections are designed to provide some of the key frames that
make sense of design today. The first two
are concerned with scoping and
defining the concept. Part
I considers the range of disciplines and
approaches that can be included within design. It also positions its
subject
as a verb (to design), that is, as a process. Part
II approaches it as a noun (a
design), the result of a process, namely a material artefact or a space. The
next four parts address design as it operates within a set of contexts, both as
it is affected by them and as it
influences them. Part III concerns itself with
design’s link with the formation of identities; the case studies presented
here focus on those defined by gender,
sexuality, age and nation. Part IV
explores design’s
relationship with society, social responsibility and
everyday life. Part V addresses the ways in which design links with politics,
not only as a form of active
intervention but also as it is influenced by
politically driven policies and regulations. Part VI opens up to the vast
subject of design’s role within a
global context and the effects of
globalization upon it.
As well as introducing the first part – Defining design: discipline, process
– by
reflecting on the meaning of design in the twenty-first century,
Penelope Dean’s chapter, Free
for all, sets the scene for the whole book. In
examining the emergence of what she dubs ‘universal design’
as a
replacement for the earlier ‘modern design’, Dean provides a useful
overview of the mutation of a contained
definition of design to one that
encompasses the ‘techniques, services, and organizations of other
professions
and everyday practices’. ‘Design’, she tells us, ‘is no longer
simply what or where it used to be’. She describes
six ways in which
boundaries work and four techniques – designation, infusion, emulation and
migration – that
have contributed to design’s expansion. Dean’s ideas are
informed by the work of Jacques Rancière, and she
references the writings
of Reyner Banham and Adolf Loos, showing that both theory and history
inform her
particular approach to studying design.
Extending Dean’s desire to expand our understanding of the breadth of
design in the contemporary world in a
slightly different direction, in her
chapter Wall Street bounded and unbinding: the spatial as
a multifocal lens
in design studies Jilly Traganou wants us to consider the addition of
spatiality to the
more-often discussed materiality of design. Taking the
contemporary design of the bordered territory, Wall Street
in New York, as
an example, she reflects on the agency of designed space and
its ability to
exert ‘control’. Traganou’s historical and theoretical touchpoints for what
she describes as her
‘Spatial Design Studies’ approach include the work of
Michel de Certeau and Henri Lefebvre. Her analysis focuses
on design’s
capacity to influence, and be influenced by, its context and the way in
which ‘bordering’ and
‘counter-bordering’ can occur in a particular spatial
context.
 Returning to the newly expanded frame of the design field proposed by
Dean – her list includes ‘enterprise
design, instructional design, social
design, network design, user experience design, climate design, sound
design, business design, applied design, green design, universal design and
market design’ – in her chapter
Connectivity through service design, Alison
Prendiville focuses on just one new area,
service design, which she defines
as ‘a distinct interdisciplinary collaborative field of design that it still
today
in its infancy’. Not only does she add the area to Dean’s list, she also tells
how it works, namely through
the tools of ‘ethnography, prototyping and
co-designing’. Its stakeholders, she tells us, are ‘local government
and the
third sector’. The chapter takes a historical approach, explaining how the
service sector grew to need an
alliance with design and how the shift to the
digital, and from materiality to non-materiality, played a part in
its
emergence.
In contrast to Prendiville’s preoccupation with a new design area, Louise
Valentine focuses on a much more
traditional field, namely craft, in her
chapter A curious journey into an unknown world.
In her exploration of the
contemporary relevance of craft practice, her approach is far from
traditional. Like
Dean, she too is interested in how subject-specific
boundaries can be transcended – ‘craft needs to rethink its
cultural,
economic, political, social and technological relations with the world’ – but
she is also concerned
about how levels of ‘excellence’ can be maintained
and assessed in the new paradigm. In that context Valentine
discusses the
link between quality and ‘mindfulness’ and the idea of ‘critical craft’
which, she suggests, should
become part of craft education. Her
methodological approach is provided by the sociologists V. M. Bentz and B.
Shapiro.
At the heart of any form of design practice or process, whether
undertaken by a design professional or an
amateur, by an individual or a
group, lies the act of decision-making. This subject is discussed in depth in
Christopher Boyko, Yi-Chang Lee and Rachel Cooper’s chapter, Design
decision making. What
may seem like a simple, intuitive act is shown here
to be more complex and in need of elucidation. The chapter
builds upon the
body of literature that, from the 1960s onwards, has focused on unpacking
the design process as
part of product development as an aid to the
organizations that want to understand and manage it better. Through
the
Samsung case study the authors explain that the complexity of design
decision-making in such a company is
‘why so much work over the years
has been applied to understanding and managing the new product
development
process and understanding who makes decisions and when’. It
has also been done, they explain, to validate the
integrity of design
decisions and ensure that they are not overruled by engineers.
Focusing more on the way in which a particular design method – namely,
using a dotted line – ‘transcends
disciplinary boundaries’, Lois Weinthal’s
chapter, Drawing the dotted line, also considers
design as a process.
Weinthal is a trained architect and therefore familiar with using a dotted
line. She draws
on personal experience to get inside the design process to
show how certain ways of working mean different things
for different kinds
of designers, and how they become visual codes and conventions that
designers use to
communicate with themselves (and others) when they are
designing. Weinthal focuses on architecture, interior
design and apparel
construction, three very different design disciplines, and she takes her
readers through a cultural history of the different processes involved and
concludes by
suggesting that the silos are gradually disappearing.
Staying in the area of apparel construction, Janice Helland’s chapter The
craft and design of
dressmaking, 1880–1907 is the most historically focused
in the first section. She concentrates on the way in
which a network of small
businesses operated in that field in late nineteenth-century London and
Dublin.
Helland’s chapter is a good example of a historical account acting
as an illuminating backcloth to the other
chapters in its section, showing
how issues of contemporary relevance have been addressed before. She
focuses on
re-addressing the (highly sexist) assumption, presented in the
press of the day and taken on board
unquestioningly by historians, that the
dressmaker was ‘exploitative and grasping’, and demonstrating that these
businesswomen were highly skilled designers and craftspeople who often
worked together with fashion illustrators
and had close relationships with
their clients.
Moving away from design as process, Robert Friedel’s chapter, Artifice,
materials and the
choices of design, which opens the second part of the
book – Defining design: objects,
spaces – addresses the issue of the
physicality and materiality of designed artefacts. Although designers
clearly
make choices about how to use them, the materials they engage with have
to be available to them in the
first place. Starting with the Crystal Palace of
1851, Friedel’s account provides an historical look at the way
in which a
range of new materials – rubber, celluloid and aluminium among them –
emerged through ‘the confluence
of three factors: industrialization, science,
and consumerism’. He takes his readers through the story of how and
why
those, and other, new materials came to the fore and how designers and
other stakeholders sought to exploit
them once they had come into
existence.
Still in the area of the physical and the material, but combining it with the
technological and the digital, Paul
Atkinson’s chapter, Writing the design
history of computers, sets out to explain why it is
so difficult to chart the
history of a relatively recently invented object, the electronic computer. An
essay
that focuses on methodological complexity, it reflects on the fact that
computers, as things and as technologies,
are both so ubiquitous and fast-
moving that historians of the future will have huge problems in making
sense of
them. The fact that so many are produced and quickly discarded
makes it much more difficult to chart a meaningful
history of them than it
is, say, of Chippendale’s furniture designs, which were limited in number
and for which
design drawings are in existence. As Atkinson explains, ‘To a
designer and a design historian it was incredible …
to think a whole
industry could produce so many items … that had, for whatever reason,
seemingly disappeared from
collective memory’.
Moving from the physicality and materiality of objects to the sensoriality
of their surfaces, Victoria Kelley’s
Keeping it on the surface: design,
surfaces and taste, commences with its author
reflecting on the scratches on
the surface of her Apple MacBook Pro, and on the fact that that is the way
in
which she interfaces with it. Kelley points out that surfaces are materials-
dependent, but that and pattern also
play an important role. This reflection
takes her to the subject of taste (and to the theories of Pierre
Bourdieu), as it
is through our encounter with an object’s surface, she maintains, that we
develop a relationship
with it and form an aesthetic judgement about it. The
idea of the boundary comes back into play, but, in this
instance, it is the
physical boundary of objects that is under discussion, rather than those that
exist between
disciplines or approaches. Kelley also addresses the
interesting philosophical question, ‘Does crisp linen have a
surface … or is
it a surface?’
Trevor Keeble’s chapter, Table stories: history, meaning and narrative in
contemporary
homemaking, goes below the surface of objects to discover
the stories they have to tell about their
existence over time, to understand
the way in which ‘objects are remade through design and the stories
wrapped
around them’. Positioning it within a theoretical frame that draws
on the work of, among several others, Walter
Benjamin, Paul Connerton,
Jane Rendell and Mary Douglas, Keeble uses as a case study some ‘heavy
shiny Nigerian
napkin rings’ that he has in his home. Aware that the donor
– his partner’s Great Aunt Rose – had said that they
had once been money,
Keeble’s research journey reveals their ‘story’. They turned out to be a form
of
six-hundred-year-old West African currency that had got caught up in the
slave trade at a moment in their
history. From a design studies point of view
it is the fact that objects can neither be considered static, nor
have an easily
understood single meaning, that is the point of Keeble’s story.
Picking up on the subject matter of Jilly Traganou’s account of New
York’s Wall Street, but approaching it from
quite a different angle, Marilyn
Cohen’s Wall Street(s), takes as
its subject Oliver Stone’s two films about
that renowned location. Cohen’s chapter provides an example of how
films
can be approached as designed objects – with an emphasis upon production
design – and can be analysed,
consequently, from a design studies
perspective. Cohen’s account emphasizes the ways in which the designed
set is
used in both films, in different ways, to provide thematic backcloths
for the events that unfold in them. In the
first – Wall Street of 1987 –
interiors filled with commodities are used, according to
Cohen, ‘not only to
define character but also to articulate the loss of value and meaning inherent
in its
particular socio-economic moment’, while in the second – Money
Never Sleeps of 2010 – the
interiors are depicted as ‘vacuous spaces’ that
are in tune with the ‘subprime mortgage debt’ moment in which the
film is
staged.
In its account of the new practices and technologies that are defining
design in the twenty-first century, the
last chapter in Part II, Viviana
Narotzky’s Beyond perfection: object and process in twenty-first-century
design and material culture returns to
the theme of Penelope Dean’s essay.
Narotzky’s thesis is a little different, however. With a focus on the new
digital techniques and social media available to designers, she argues that
we are currently witnessing a shift
away from product (with which
designers have been preoccupied for some time) back to process. This is
nothing
short, she suggests, of a new (third) industrial revolution. With it,
Narotzky claims, comes a new interest in
imperfection and a ‘relinquishing
of a degree of authorship’, such that consumers can also enter into the
design
process.
The third part of the book – Designing identities: gender, sexuality, age,
nation – which
focuses on design’s relationships with a range of different
identities, opens with a set of paired chapters,
Christopher Breward’s
Modern dressing: the suit as practice and symbol and Penny Sparke’s
Arranging the aspidistras: nature, culture and the design of the feminine
sphere in the
nineteenth century. Both deal with design and gendered
identities – the first with masculinity and the
second with femininity – and
both are historically focused.
Breward’s chapter shines a light on the origins, technology, culture and
materiality of its subject, from the
eighteenth century to the present. While
the concept of masculinity is only subliminally present it is
nonetheless
implied in the essay through an emphasis on the suit’s military roots, its
importance to male clerks,
and its link with mass production, rationality and
functionality. A quotation from Daniel Roche reinforces the
inherent
masculinity, and the undoubted power, of the suit to influence the behaviour
of its (male) wearer: ‘It is an instrument in a process designed to shape the
physique and the
bearing of a combative individual, whose autonomy
conditions his docility and whose obedience transforms
individual strength
into collective power’ (Roche 1994: 229).
My own chapter in this volume addresses the issue of gendered (in this
case feminine) identity more overtly,
focusing on the shifting gendering of
nineteenth-century window-gardening in the advice books that explained
how
to do it. While, early in the century, men were encouraged to do the
nurturing and potting of the plants – the
horticulture – as part their
responsibility for the interior decoration of their homes, women gradually
took on
more of the task of window-gardening. Seen as a ‘female
accomplishment’, along with embroidery and crochet,
plant- and flower-
arranging were seen not only as feminized activities in themselves but also
as having the power
and agency to instil femininity into the women who
engaged in those activities.
From Bright Young Thing to Vile Body to Posthumous Reliquary: Stephen
Tennant, queer excess and
the decadent interior, John Potvin’s chapter
moves from a discussion of identities defined by gender to one
linked to
sexuality. Expressed in the furniture and interior settings of his home at
Wilsford Manor in Wiltshire,
Tennant’s queer identity was embedded in
both the man and his environment, the one continually reinforcing the
other
through the medium of personal taste. For Tennant, the decoration of his
home served both as a symbolic
removal of his domineering mother and as
a backcloth for his lifestyle. As his interiors became ‘overburdened by
the
chaos wrought by a disregard for an ever expanding array of objets d’art’,
Tennant’s
health failed.
Among many other factors, individuals’ identities can be formed by
gender, sexuality and age, or a combination of
all three. Amy F. Ogata’s
chapter, Designing childhood, focuses on the third of these. In
it she
explores the development of a link between childhood and designed goods
over recent centuries, showing how
both elite and mass-produced objects
have been directed at children, helping to form and define the notion of
modern childhood in the process. In addition to consumer goods,
environments – from children’s bedrooms to
playgrounds – have also been
designed with children in mind, Ogata tells us, influencing their behaviour
and
their self-images. As she explains, ‘The things that have been created
for children show that design is never
neutral, that it is always embedded in
a wider set of values and expectations’.
The final four chapters in Part III mark a shift away
from design’s
influence on the identities of individuals to its role in forming and
representing national
identities. Noel Waite’s Futures fairs: industrial
exhibitions in New Zealand, 1865 to
1925 traces the way in which the
exhibitions in question represented, and communicated to a popular
audience, a nation in change, the image of which was associated, at first,
with raw materials, then with
industrial production and finally with the
tourist industry. The designed goods and promotional materials at the
fairs
not only reflected the country’s changing self-image, they also helped
visitors identify with their own
nation.
Paul Hazell’s chapter A difficult road: designing a post-colonial car for
Africa provides
an account of four car designs that were aimed at creating a
vehicle appropriate for local conditions in various
areas of Africa. The main
requirement for all four cars – the Africar, the Uri, the OX and the Mobius –
was that
they had to be rugged and economical. Only the Uri had its origins
in Africa and, to date, none of the projects
has been successful. As a result
Africa continues to import western cars. Hazell calls for an ‘Africanization’
of
design thinking and puts its absence down to a lack of investment and
poor governance. He is pessimistic about the future and suggests at the end
of his chapter that ‘cars produced in the
west are becoming even less
appropriate to rural African needs’.
The third chapter on the subject of national identity and design in this
volume – Jeremy Aynsley’s, The cultural representation of graphic design
in East and West Germany, 1949 to 1970 – explains how
the existence of
different political regimes and ideologies in the divided country of Germany
in the period
1949–89 has resulted in two different bodies of graphic design
work. Perhaps even more significantly, differences
also exist, he claims, in
the ways in which the material produced in each sector has been interpreted
historically. The roles of leading official magazines in each location –
Gebrauchsgraphik
in the West and Neue Werbung in the East – are used to
demonstrate these parallels and
contrasts.
The final chapter in this section, Kjetil Fallan’s A match made in Utopia?
The uneasy love
affair of art and industry in Scandinavia, addresses the
way in which an identity for the grouping of Nordic
countries, known
collectively as Scandinavia, was formed through design, in particular a
notion of design that
was defined by a marriage between art and industry.
He focuses on the role of materials – plastics especially –
in that context,
claiming that they were ‘at the heart of the discourse’. The role of the
American curator Edgar
Kaufmann Jr is discussed, as are the influences of
the British and German art and industry movements; evidence
that national
identities are often formed in relation to those of other countries and that,
on one level, they
are only visible from outside the nations in question.
Part IV, Designing society: empathy,
responsibility, consumption, the
everyday, moves into new territory, namely design’s relationship with
society as a whole and, within that, the way in which design has been, and
continues to be, used to engage with
people and to address particular social
issues. Once again, design can be seen to be reflecting, representing and
communicating the context in which it finds itself, as well as engaging
actively with it. To be able to engage
effectively, the section suggests, a way
has to be found in which design can be made to relate to people on their
terms. Barbara Penner’s chapter, From ergonomics to empathy: Herman
Miller and Metaform,
introduces the idea that design can be used to
interface with people through understanding and catering for their
physical
needs and, in so doing, to improve the quality of their lives. This user-
centred design approach is
discussed in the context of the ergonomic work
undertaken firstly by researchers at Cornell University in the
1950s and
1960s and, secondly, by the American furniture manufacturer Herman
Miller in the 1980s. Penner uses
these historical case studies to demonstrate
that ‘the “new” design culture … emerges from a distinct strand of
design
practice with its own history, methods and evolution’.
In her discussion of her case studies Penner introduces the word empathy,
the emotional means by which designers
recognize human needs. ‘The
empathetic model that began to emerge in the 1970s and 1980s’, she writes,
‘is
intriguing because it was integrally connected to the desire to create a
safer, healthier and more inclusive
environment’. In her chapter, How
products satisfy needs beyond the functional: empathy
supporting
consumer–product relationships, which follows on from Penner’s, Deana
McDonagh adopts a
contemporary perspective on the subject of empathy.
As she explains: ‘Designers are now actively seeking both
tangible and
visceral needs to ensure real solutions are designed for real people, that
satisfy real needs.’ Referencing the work of theorists who
focus on the
meaning of objects – among them Stephen Riggins, David Wolfe and
Robert Synder – McDonagh digs deep
into the subject of empathy (one
writer has claimed that there are forty-three definitions of the term) and
ends her chapter by offering a case study of ‘empathic design approaches in
the
design curriculum’ at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign.
Offering us another historical case study of socially oriented design in his
chapter Refashioning disability: the case of Painted Fabrics Ltd, 1915 to
1959 Joseph McBrinn uses new
research to construct an account of a
Sheffield-based charitable enterprise that employed disabled soldiers from
the First World War to design textiles. Like Penner’s, the deep relevance of
this chapter is for contemporary
design studies, especially in terms of the
methods it uses. As McBrinn explains, ‘An interrogation of how
disability
was refashioned in inter-war Britain … might enable us to expose,
problematize, and possibly
destabilize, ideas about the regulation and
normativization of design in Western capitalist societies that
continues to
stigmatize, marginalize and exclude the disabled’.
Rama Gheerawo’s chapter, Socially inclusive design: a people-centered
perspective,
develops the theme of design’s relationship with people in a
contemporary context and provides a brief historical
survey and an
overview of the current state of play. Gheerawo’s text is based on his
experience of working in the
Helen Hamlyn Centre for Design at London’s
Royal College of Art. Keen that ‘designing for people’ is replaced by
‘designing with people’ and ‘designing by people’, Gheerawo offers case
studies of companies that have adopted an
inclusive design approach, Ford
and Toyota among them. He emphasizes the shift from the focus on design
for an
ageing population to a more open-ended approach and the need to
stop thinking of people as ‘users’ and to work
with them, rather, as
‘collaborators’.
Moving from a chapter that emanates from one socially led design
project at the Royal College of Art to another
derived from a project based
at London’s University of the Arts, Adam Thorpe and Lorraine Gamman,
who are both
involved with the Design Against Crime Research Centre
(DAC) have penned an essay that asks the broad question,
What is ‘socially
responsive design and innovation’? Following an overview of some of
DAC’s work the authors position the term ‘socially responsive’ against the
more commonly used ‘socially
responsible’, arguing that the latter is
‘paternal’, and question the idea of design being about
‘problem-solving’,
preferring the concept of ‘co-design’. They situate their discussion within a
wide body of
work by design researchers, among them Richard Buchanan,
Victor Margolin and Ezio Manzini.
In her chapter User experience design in digital service innovation Ming
Cheung sticks
with the term user, but turns her focus away from material
design to discuss people’s experiences of the digital
world. Cheung’s
contribution to the debate is the use of a conceptual framework, which she
calls a ‘Media
Perception-Reaction Model’, to measure people’s responses
to using digital media. It is a model she developed and
used in an earlier
research project. She emphasizes the importance of privacy to users of
digital services and
makes reference to the situation in China, which is
experiencing rapid growth in the e-commerce market, and
therefore needs
to be made aware of the importance of the user experience in the digital
context.
Prasad Boradkar’s chapter, Design + anthropology: an emergent
discipline, introduces a
discussion about multi-disciplinary methodology
into the question of the relationship between design and
society/people. He
explains that, while this is not a new debate and ‘designers and design
researchers have been
borrowing heavily from anthropology’s research
methods for use in the early stages of the design process’, it has
recently
come under the spotlight again. Offering definitions from a range of writers
on the subject, Alison
Clarke, Adam Drazin, Wendy Gunn and Jared
Donovan among them, he suggests that the most common understanding of
anthropology’s contribution is through its desire to understand ‘how
people
operate within their socio-cultural context, focusing on the activity in
addition to the artefact,
recognizing the significance of relationships, and
taking into account the entire lifecycle of artefacts and
processes’.
The last chapter in this section – Ben Highmore’s Design, daily life and
matters of taste
– also explores methodology, this time with a focus on the
role of design within everyday life and the
importance of the socio-
culturally constructed concept of taste as a key mechanism in the interface
between them.
Building on a background of theory that includes the work
of Thorstein Veblen, Pierre Bourdieu, Antoine Hennion,
Henri Lefebvre
and Judy Attfield, Highmore posits the argument that taste is ‘ordinary’, a
form of ‘sensual
engagement with the world’, an essential component of
people’s interaction with the world they inhabit on a daily
basis. In
Hennion’s words it is a process of ‘attachment and orientation’.
Furthermore, Highmore suggests, taste
does not stop at the point of
consumption but continues through the process of use.
Several of the chapters in Part V, Design and politics: activism,
intervention, regulation, address what has, in recent years, been
referred to
as design activism, a movement that is rooted in the belief that design has
the capacity to change
the world, not merely to reflect it. A heightened
sense of the need for design not only to be engaged with
contemporary
issues, but also to become a political tool for activism and intervention in
issues that need
addressing – especially the project of Sustainment –
pervades Tony Fry’s chapter, Configuring
design as politics now. Looking
back to his 2011 book, Design as Politics, Fry
reflects on the changes that
have taken place over the three years since he wrote it, including
transformations
in the Asia Pacific region and the Middle East, vector-
borne diseases, climate change, world poverty and the
powerlessness of
politicians. Design, for Fry, is both the problem and, potentially at least, the
solution, a
fact, he believes, that should inform design education in the
future.
Travelling a few decades backwards in time in her chapter, Design for the
real world: Victor
Papanek and the emergence of humane design, Alison J.
Clarke claims that, ‘The brand of design activism
Papanek and his
followers promoted in the 1970s laid the foundations for a field we now
recognize as a branch of
“design studies”’. She goes on to say that Papanek
pre-empted the ‘twenty-first-century shift towards design as a
dispersed
phenomenon’. Her claims are underpinned by an account of Papanek’s life
that emphasizes his status as a
refugee émigré in his early life, a fact which,
Clarke believes, led to his ‘critical approach’ to the industrial
design
profession, as well as to his ‘visionary capacity’. This, combined with his
experience of the critique of
American consumerism that exploded in the
1950s and 1960s and his knowledge of the work of Marshall McLuhan,
helped form, according to Clarke, Papanek’s intellectual and emotional
make-up, which subsequently informed his
politicized approach towards
design. This broadening of the Papanek story serves to reinforce the fact
that
design activism may be a new phenomenon but that it is rooted in
socio-cultural phenomena of the past.
Papanek’s ‘critical approach’ had a significant impact in the Nordic
countries. In her chapter, Impossible maybe, perhaps quite likely: activist
design in Helsinki’s urban wastelands, Eeva
Berglund describes its recent
appearance in Finland’s capital, especially in the context of the urgency to
address the issue of sustainability – that is, the capacity to create what Fry
called Sustainment. Berglund tells
us about two greenhouses in Helsinki –
the Oxygen Room of 2000 and the Turntable of 2012 – which were created
in
this context, manifestations of ‘grassroots’ design which aim to ‘foster
alternative social realities’. In this context design has been used, Berglund
explains, ‘to trigger new thoughts
or unanticipated behaviours’. She spells
out many of the strategies that are employed to that end, all of which
are
‘creative and specific to place’ and, importantly, ‘have political
implications’. Berglund makes another
important distinction in this context,
that between ‘design activism’ and ‘activist design’; the former is being
subsumed, she maintains, within the latter.
In his chapter, Design for meaningful innovation, Stuart Walker also
focuses on the need
for designers to address the issue of sustainability. If
design is to play a role in making the world a more
sustainable place,
Walker maintains, designers need to work more subjectively and focus on
values. A maker
himself, Walker is keen that design practice is seen as a
form of design research as it is, he believes, through
practice that the
strongest interventions can be made. ‘A designed object’, he explains,
‘represents an argument
in form’ and is very different from design research
that works within the scientific paradigm. As a practising
designer Walker
aligns himself strongly with what he describes as ‘critical design,
speculative design, durable
design, grassroots design, associative design,
counterpoint design and propositional design’ and is concerned
that work of
this nature should exist in the academy alongside the many books and
articles that are produced in
the name of design research.
Staying with the same theme in her chapter Towards holistic
sustainability design: the Rhizome
approach, Rebecca Reubens seeks to
widen the term sustainability beyond the ecological and environmental to
include the social, cultural and economic. Because of the complexity
involved in designing from this perspective,
and to help designers in their
difficult task, she borrows the term rhizome (research which has multiple
entry
and exit points – Reubens tells us it ‘is named after bamboo’s
complex underground rhizome system’) from Deleuze
and Guattari to
develop an approach, or map, that has seven steps. Reubens outlines the
seven steps, which,
together, act as a guide to what to avoid and what to
address if design is to contribute to sustainability. She
then tells us how she
trialled her method in India in 2011.
Fiona Fisher’s chapter Regulating design: spaces and boundaries of the
late-nineteenth-century
public house, takes a different approach from those
of its neighbours, albeit one that still involves an
interaction between design
and politics. Her chapter discusses the design of London’s late nineteenth-
century
public houses and the ways in which changes to national licensing
legislation and local licensing policy
gradually increased the powers of the
authorities to intervene in the design of licensed sites. Showing how the
design and use of London’s public houses was contested at a local level, she
suggests a reciprocal relationship
between design and politics, one in which
design can be viewed either as the product of socio-cultural forces and
a
driver of political change, or as the spatial and material outcome of an
existing political frame.
The final section, Designing the world: globalization, transnationalism,
translation, has
a geographical emphasis and presents the reader with eight
chapters which address, from a variety of
perspectives, one of the most
powerful forces of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries,
globalization. It also deals with the ways in which the design culture of one
nation has impacted on that of
another and how translation has occurred in
that context. The issue of design in colonial and post-colonial
contexts is
also discussed. While design is a worldwide concept, it is, paradoxically,
defined both by the fact
that it goes beyond local, regional and national
boundaries, and yet still has many local, regional and national
manifestations and meanings. Victor Margolin’s chapter, A world history of
design, is a
reflection on the challenges he confronted while compiling a
three-volume book he has recently written on the
subject, which covers the
period from ‘the first toolmakers’ to the present
day. Providing a brief
history of design history and its early literature, and highlighting their
British and
North American bias, it asks the important question of ‘whether
or not a single voice could or should dominate a
world history of design’.
Another challenge the author encountered was how to represent the ever-
broadening
spectrum covered by the word design, as well as representing it
adequately in terms of gender, race and
ethnicity.
Grace Lees-Maffei’s chapter, ‘Why then the world’s my oyster’:
consumption and globalization,
1851 to the present, takes on the same wide
geographical spread as Margolin’s but in a shorter time period
and with a
tighter focus. The author’s starting point is that ‘the consumption of
designed goods has always been
global’, and she cites the Silk Road as an
early piece of evidence. Following an overview of the story of
consumption
in the period under review, Lees-Maffei addresses the complexity of
globalization, suggesting that,
in its most recent manifestations, it is perhaps
best understood as ‘an accommodation of the global, national and
local’.
She goes on to discuss some of the anti-consumerist activities happening
around the world, from Slow Food
to Buy Nothing Day, and, at the end of
her chapter, exhorts designers and scholars of design studies and design
history ‘to engage with the politics of consumption and globalization as
activists and engaged stakeholders to
influence policy and practice’.
Moving from a worldwide perspective to a single country, the modern
design tradition of which was heavily
influenced by forces outside its
borders, the discussion in Meltem Ö. Gürel’s Designing and
consuming the
modern in Turkey focuses on the way in which ‘design served as a
mechanism for constructing
and consuming modern identities associated
with Westernization’. By the late nineteenth century Ottoman culture
and its
architectural and interior manifestations were beginning to show signs of
Western influences, resulting
in a new eclecticism. The early twentieth
century saw that process accelerate, partly as a result of
international
practitioners coming to teach in Turkish educational institutions. By the
1930s the question of
what a Turkish home should look like was being
asked. In the 1950s women’s domestic roles were being influenced
by
American models, such that the ‘modern Turkish woman’ owed much to the
West. The modern home also took on a
Western appearance. However,
Gürel warns at the end of her chapter that ‘it would be a fallacy to read the
contemporary home … as Western imitations’ and explains that, ultimately,
hybridity ruled the day.
Joana Meroz’s chapter, entitled Three Dutchnesses of Dutch design: the
construction of a
national practice at the intersection of national and
international dynamics, addresses the issue of
national identity in design
from the perspective of it being formed at the intersection of national and
international/transnational dynamics and interests. Over the period 1970 to
2012, she explains, subtle changes
occurred in the ‘discursive construction’
that was ‘Dutch Design’. What did not change, however, was the key role
played by Dutch international cultural policy in that construction.
Inasmuch as they have a similar geographical focus, and they follow on
chronologically from each other, the next
two historical chapters – Tanishka
Kachru’s The staging of Indian national identity through
exhibitions, 1850
to 1947 and Elise Hodson’s Exhibiting independent India: textiles and
ornamental arts at the Museum of Modern Art in New York can be seen as a
pair. In tune with some of Part III of this book Kachru’s chapter provides a
discussion
about the construction of a national identity for colonial India
through the staging of exhibitions in India and
Britain in the period.
However, it is a construction of a national identity
that had to negotiate the
presence of a colonial power, that is, with a country outside its borders.
That renders
the situation much more complex. ‘Indian-ness’ was thus
exhibited in nineteenth-century Britain in order to
reinforce British power
and authority, and to stimulate an international market for Indian goods
from which
Britain would benefit, rather than to create an identity for the
people of India. Indian nationalists also held
exhibitions in India, however,
in an attempt to create an image based on simplicity and indigenous
industrial
progress.
Hodson’s chapter focuses on a single exhibition of Indian goods held in
New York in 1955 which ‘helped solidify
images of the newly independent
country in the minds of designers, visitors and press’. Hodson’s view of the
event, from working in the archive, is that, rather than it being just a
Westerners’ take on Indian decorative
arts, there was a strong Indian
influence. The reason for holding the exhibition was to improve Indian–US
relations as Nehru’s modernization programme was based on American-
style mass production. Indeed, the question of
what is ‘modern India’ was
widely debated. The curator, Edgar Kauffmann Jr, wanted to show
Americans ‘a side of
India they have never seen before’. The issue of
British colonialism had to be handled gently. The American
public
responded positively to the show, seeing it as a display of exoticism. It led
to the visit to India by
Charles and Ray Eames in 1958 and the
‘Americanization’ of the design educational programme at Ahmedabad.
The last two chapters, which are also historical and which both focus on
Japan, can also be paired. They discuss
Japanese design’s relationship with
the West, although from different perspectives. Christine Guth’s Design
before design in Japan addresses the way in which what has come to be
called Japanese design is predicated upon Western modern and modernist
assumptions and discourses. As there is no
equivalent for the concept of
design in the Japanese language, she tells us, it took the idea from Britain,
Germany, France and the United States. While Guth’s emphasis is on the
period 1603 to 1867, and on its effects on
print technology, crafts and
architecture, her argument also has implications for the later period and for
more
contemporary design media. She accepts the need for hybridity and
wants to avoid a ‘fossilized idea of
“traditional” Japan’, but seeks,
nevertheless, to encourage new thinking about the way in which we read
Japan’s
contribution.
Yuko Kikuchi’s chapter brings to light some new material about
transnationalism and design in Asia, namely John
D. Rockefeller 3rd’s
business involvement with that area during the period of the Cold War in
the consumer goods
areas of fashion, carpets, luxury boats and ladies’
shoes. Rockefeller’s intention was to use American design
expertise to
assist in Asia’s economic growth. In 1955 he established a company called
Products of Asia, which
initially focused on Japan but subsequently
extended its reach, and in 1959 he formed Products of India. As well
as
helping economically, these initiatives were also intended to prevent the
spread of communism.

References

Archer, B. (1964) ‘Design of Hospital Beds’, British Medical Journal 1(5394) (May):
1383.
Huppatz, D.J. and Lees-Maffei, G. (2013) ‘Why Design History? A Multi-national Perspective on the
State and
Purpose of the Field’, Arts and Humanities in Higher Education 12(2–3) (April/July):
 310–30.
Kendall, S. (2014) ‘Positioning Design Studies: An Institutional Challenge’, Design and
Culture 6(3)
(November): 345–68.
Margolin, V. (1992) ‘Design History or Design Studies: Subject Matter and Methods’, Design
Studies
13(2) (April): 104–16.
Margolin, V. (1995) ‘A Reply to Adrian Forty’, Design Issues, 11(1) (spring): 19–21.
Roche, D. (1994) The Culture of Clothing: Dress and Fashion in the Ancien Regime,
Cambridge,
Cambridge University Press.
Whiteley, N. (1995) ‘Design History or Design Studies?’ Design Issues 11(1) (April):
38–42.

Design journals

Design and Culture, www.tandfonline.com/loi/rfdc20#.Vu_LFEdAq90,

accessed 21 March 2016.
Design Issues, www.mitpressjournals.org/loi/desi, accessed 21 July 2015.
Design Journal, www.tandfonline.com/loi/rfdj20#.VinyDTZdETM,
accessed 23 October 2015.
Design Studies, www.journals.elsevier.com/design-studies, accessed 21 July 2015.
International Journal of Design, www.ijdesign.org/ojs/index.php/IJDesign/,
accessed 23 October
2015.
Journal of Design History, www.oxfordjournals.org/our_journals/design/about.html, accessed 23
October 2015.
Journal of Design Research, www.inderscience.com/jhome.php?jcode=JDR, accessed 23 October
2015.
 Part I

DEFINING DESIGN:
DISCIPLINE, PROCESS
 1

FREE FOR ALL

Penelope Dean
 
 
 
 
If at the beginning of the twentieth century “design” referred to the
activities, objects, graphics, and
interiors produced by the modern design
disciplines and professions—architecture, graphic, industrial, and
interior—
today it refers to all of this and more. New types of design have emerged
within, between, and in
combination with, the traditional specializations to
bring forth a surging landscape of designs: enterprise design, instructional
design, social design, network design, user experience
design, climate
design, sound design, business design, applied design, green design,
universal design, and market
design to name a few. As if by genetic
mutation, design has inflated in scope beyond the confines of the
aesthetic
disciplines to encompass the non-aesthetic techniques, services, and
organizations of other professions
and everyday practices as well.
Inhabiting all previously distinct domains of specialist expertise, along with
the un-designed gaps that were left between them, design has come to
define an environment where every dimension
is conditioned by controlled
application. Today, it connotes a generalized condition, a natural fact more
than a
constructed field. From objects to cities, landscapes to national
identity, design is no longer simply what or
where it used to be.
For many cultural critics and historian-theorists, this delta-like
dissipation of design’s status has represented
a distinct cultural decline
(Foster 2002: 13–26; Gregotti 2009: 121–4; Hays 2010: 168–9). The spread
of design
activities, values, discourses, identities, and practitioners has
generally been construed as a great fall from
grace relative to the clarity and
purpose of design in the early twentieth century: from disciplined form-
making
to superficial surface styling; from expert practices to non-expert
ones; from utilitarian to non-utilitarian;
from objects to services and
experiences. These critical narratives portray a situation where expansion
culminates in confusion and a loss of distinctions: between design and art;
between design and architecture;
between design and politics; between
design and individuals. Yet, from another perspective, the infiltration of
design offers equally exciting potentials. In a fundamentally transformed
design world that has subsumed former
modes of modern design and
adopted myriad values often antithetical to the received dogma, the validity
of core
beliefs becomes questionable. At stake is not the loss of distinctions
between areas of expertise, but rather the
need to re-imagine the terms on
which distinctions get made. In short, the situation presents the opportunity
for
recalibrated conceptions of design where the expansion of design can
only be accounted for through
re-conceptualizations of its boundaries.

Out of bounds

Critical lines of thinking assume that boundaries exist a priori, or that it is

possible
and desirable to police such pre-existing borders. But the
contemporary situation reveals that boundaries do not
really “exist”; they
are, in fact, designed. Indeed, they are design. The call for fixed
definitions
and delimitations is an incoherent demand in the new world of design.
There is no place for referees
in a free-for-all, only participants in
imagining new zones of exchange. Rather than revert reflexively to
primary
definitions of fields and assign their proper domains today, the first task is
to suggest how design’s
recent expansion establishes new characteristics for
what might constitute a design boundary. The following six
points offer a
schematic outline to uncover how boundaries among design fields emerge,
what they do, and how they
behave.
Boundaries erupt from within. If there is nothing outside design, to
paraphrase Jean
Baudrillard’s famous observation that “everything belongs
to design” (Baudrillard 1981: 200), then design is more
usefully approached
as an accumulation of carefully labeled local properties than an externally
imposed
definition. Ever-increasing numbers of design genres, practices,
objects, activities, and institutions of every
description continue to manifest
themselves in differing contexts—corporate, governmental, institutional,
academic, domestic—are authored by different people—lay, expert—and
are imagined, produced, packaged, and
distributed for different purposes—
business profit, public utility, mass consumption, personal pleasure. Various
practices and forms of design jostle side-by-side without hierarchy; few
achieve pre-eminence and even fewer
longevity. Indeed, design is as diverse
in character as it is in resolution; there are efficient states
(commercial);
pure states (disciplinary); and unsophisticated states of do-it-yourself (DIY
culture). The litany
of terms applied to design, “recognition tags” as Reyner
Banham (1955a: 355) once remarked in another
context—“information,”
“participatory,” “critical,” “adaptive,” “applied,” “social,” and so on—not
only evidence
this internal differentiation, but more importantly show the
attempts to distill limits through the act of
labeling. Labels are to design
culture what images are to Gestalt psychology: they are attempts to
articulate
well-defined figures from less-defined backgrounds. Labels bring
legibility and specificity to a situation where everything is design.
Boundaries are extrapolated. The alignment of design culture with
market culture (here
understood as the culture of competition between
organizations and/or individuals for consumers) yields similar
structural
characteristics in both domains: the intense degree of specialization that
typifies design culture
closely mirrors the extent of differentiation attained
in niche market culture. This alliance of previously
antithetical domains
through organizational characteristics renders obsolete long-standing
adversarial relations
between high modes of design and “the rest.” Indeed,
the century-long impulse by art and architectural historians
to draw lines in
the sand, to define boundaries along old lines of separation between culture
and market, to pit
commercial design activities against those of the fine arts,
architecture, or even modern design no longer makes
sense.1 Design
values
are not always in opposition to commercial standards; design culture is not
sequestered away in groves
beyond the reach of markets; and design
practice is not the sole charge of experts (see Edgar Kaufmann Jr. 1954).
Equally, commercial “standards” themselves no longer exist in that
totalizing manner. It is not simply, or even
primarily, that design exists “in”
the market, but that markets today have,
themselves, been designed, or are
constituted “by design.” In circumstances where conflation supersedes
separation, design boundaries cannot be imposed a priori on the basis of old
values, but
must be extracted a posteriori to express “differential
specificity,” to borrow a term
from art historian Rosalind Krauss (2000), on
a case-by-case basis.
 Boundaries are provisional. As with market cultures, design cultures
select their own
audiences—customers, consumers, institutions,
corporations, clients, critics, and practitioners—through the
filter of
discourses, tastes, and practices, and in a particular space and time. Design
now meets the potential
consumer—“you”—more than halfway; it
anticipates your needs before you know you have them. This
reception-by-
selection model is exactly what optimist-critics—Reyner Banham, Peter
and Alison Smithson, and Paul
Reilly among others—recognized in the
1950s and 1960s during the British pop movement. As Reilly, then head of
the British Council of Industrial Design, retroactively put it: “a design
might be valid at a given time for a
given purpose to a given group of
people in a given set of circumstances, but outside that limit may not be
valid
at all; and conversely there may be contemporaneous but quite
dissimilar solutions that are equally defensible
for different groups” (Reilly
1967: 256). Trading an attitude of opposition for one of acceptance, Reilly
reluctantly rejected the long-standing universal design principles laid down
by modern architects as setting the
limits for industrial design
—“[f]unctional efficiency, fitness for purpose, truth to materials and
economy of
means”—in favor of temporal, looser, and more popular values
(ibid.: 255).2 Further, he alluded that
these new values were “permissive,
precocious, [and] commercially successful” (ibid.: 256). In one fell swoop,
design values were no longer assumed given, but were instead produced
and manipulated; design limits were not definitively imposed but
provisionally excerpted.
Diagrammatically, boundaries had passed from
fixed, adjacent boxes, to mutable Venn diagrams. Boundaries are acts
of
(re-)design.
Boundaries evolve from shared principles. In his essay “The Surface
of Design,” French
philosopher Jacques Rancière distills differences
between things from the starting point of what they have in
common
(Rancière 2009: 91–107). He juxtaposes German architect-designer-
engineer Peter Behrens with French poet
Stéphane Mallarmé, to argue that
both share the idea of “type” in their work, despite acknowledging that one
designs for commerce and the other for art: for Behrens, through the formal
language of the industrial object;
for Mallarmé, through the graphic
language of typography. This shared investment in “type” is predicated on a
shared desire to outline certain physical communities: Behrens a new
communal life expressed through objects;
Mallarmé a domicile where “man
is at home” expressed through the alphabet. Rancière’s point is that both
Behrens
and Mallarmé propose certain ways of inhabiting the world, but
achieve their ends through different material
expressions (ibid.: 95–7). The
boundary that separates their practices originates from a shared ambition—
i.e., to
project new forms of life. From this starting point, activities then
diverge through respective techniques of
production.3
Boundaries originate,
evolve, and differentiate design activities from the degree zero of sameness,
not from
imposed difference (whose ultimate fate is convergence).
Boundaries are products of shared desires or, in
Rancière’s words, of
equivalences (ibid.: 99).
Boundaries correlate horizontally. Rancière goes on to imply that
boundaries emerge through
the dynamics of lateral exchanges, or in his
words, “how two things resemble or differ from one another” (ibid.:
92).
For Rancière, Mallarmé’s and Behrens’s types are connected by proximity
and by distance: on the one hand,
they are conceptually similar; on the
other, they differ in their contexts. Importantly, both conditions occur
simultaneously. Boundaries manifest themselves in the oblique relations
between things; they are zones of
exchange that permit surprising
contradictions and strange bedfellows; they give license to connection and
separation.4 They are not hierarchical dividing lines. They do not enforce
binary oppositions of center
and periphery, design and non-design, inside
and outside, part to whole. Instead, they mark points of inflection,
areas
where one mode of design mis-recognizes itself in the other. This does not
amount to disorder or a loss of
distinction between things; on the contrary,
it leads to equilibrium. Design boundaries associate laterally (Dean
2012:
28).
Boundaries regenerate. Boundaries not only articulate provisional kinds
of design inside an
expanded situation; they enable expansion. The historic
interactions between related
fields (e.g., architecture, interior, graphic and
industrial design) have been exceeded in a contemporary context
by
exchanges across previously unrelated contexts, expertise, practices, and
resolutions. A new understanding of
boundaries sheds light on what has
always been true of the design fields across time: an exponential
multiplication of boundaries actually accounts for design’s extraordinary
expansion. Boundaries provisionally
construct, sustain, dismantle, and
buckle under pressure. They proliferate. Their effects are both inward
(toward
precise articulation) and outward (toward dissipation). To
concentrate on the momentary
character of specific relationships between
fields—e.g., as being cordial, symbiotic, volatile, ill-disposed,
anxious,
reconciliatory—is a mistake, since emphasis is too often placed on border
skirmishes. The focus instead
should be on what boundaries propagate, not
what they protect. Boundaries facilitate design exponentiation.

Borderline behaviors

In order to further specify the operational nature of boundaries, it is possible

to identify four
techniques—designation, infusion, emulation and migration
—that have contributed to the
expansion of design as well as to refining its
internal make-up. The four relational exchanges are not
exhaustive, but
each isolates a significant relational act that in some way contributes to
expansion. They are
intended to show some of the ways in which design
simultaneously emerged as a continuous practice of indebted
selection, as
well as a collective situation, and are best viewed in terms of the historical
transformation from
modern design to what today might be called universal
design. From the early twentieth century onwards, it was
not uncommon for
non-expert design to be given equal status with expert design; for fields like
interior design
to model themselves after architectural design; for architects
to upgrade their production through the lessons of
industrial production;
and for architects to embrace commercial ideas in form-making.

Designation
In 1898, Viennese architect Adolf Loos proclaimed: “everyone should be
his own decorator” (Loos 1982:
23).5 His
declaration that inhabitants be
designers of their domestic realms was not
only a protest against the total
design of interiors being proposed by the architectural avant-garde at the
time,
but a call for the centrifugal expansion of design agency: from the
closed world of trained experts to the
general world of non-experts. His
appeal for design inclusivity would be reiterated and transformed
throughout
the twentieth century by a diverse range of design figures: by
American designer George Nelson in 1949 who also
advocated for
individuals to express their personal tastes freely (Nelson 1949: 72); by
French philosopher Jean
Baudrillard in 1968 who announced the arrival of
“man the interior designer” (a successor to the “user”), who was
“an active
engineer of atmosphere” (Baudrillard 1996: 25); and by the Italian
architectural group Superstudio in
1972 who polemically called for the
conflation of designing with living, or simply “existence as a design”
(Ambasz 1972: 250). Reality may have only just caught up with these
historical designations. Today, the design of
domestic interiors is no longer
the terrain of architects, interior designers, and decorators exclusively, but
of
contemporary subjects at large who construct themselves through their
ongoing practice of design. Indeed, Loos’s
proclamation finally became
reality: today’s designing subjects make aesthetic and moral choices about
their
environments and modes of inhabitation. As the intelligentsia ceded
exclusive agency of the “designer,” the realm
of design ideas passed into
the world of everyday actions; the realm of expertise into the world of DIY
culture.6 Just as
differences between modes of design get articulated
through acts of labeling, designation cancels out differences
to enable
inclusion.

Emulation
Between 1948 and 1959, critical essays, reviews, and special segment
features published in North American
architecture and interior design
periodicals exposed interior designers and architects, redefining the nature
and
scope of their professional activities in relation to one another, but in
opposing directions: interior design
from the outside in as it copies
architectural design principles;
and architecture from the inside out as it
reproduces the range of services offered by interior design (Dean
forthcoming). In both cases, emulation leads to an
expansion of design
territories. For architecture, the new specialization interior architecture is
coined and
makes its appearance as a new monthly segment in professional
magazines and as a new department in commercial
architectural offices.
Interior architecture—a new form of internal space planning—brings new
residential and
corporate clients, new types of commissions, and the
opportunity for architects to duplicate billings. For
interior design, the
elevation of the interior designer’s professional status to that of an architect
leads to
escalating diversity in the range of commissions: offices, banks,
hotels, restaurants, shops, showrooms,
religious buildings, hospitals, and
schools. This growth in the scope of service parallels the real-time
propagation of interior design institutions, professional societies, new
publications, events, in-depth features,
and statistical analysis, marking the
progress of the interiors industry. In both cases, expansion of services
and
specializations are by-products of emulation.

Infusion
In 1962, design critic Edgar Kaufmann Jr. quipped “[t]he Bauhaus added
principle and subtracted vulgarity” when
it elevated industrial design’s
streamlined style into an architectural aesthetic (Kaufmann 1962: 143).
Kaufmann’s statement highlights the essence of infusion: the introduction
of a new quality into something, thereby altering its state. Architects, artists,
and industrial designers would
repeat this technique across the twentieth
century to advance new modes of design within and between existing
ones.
During the 1920s, Swiss architect Le Corbusier attempted to infuse an
industrial logic of mass production
into architecture for his numerous
housing projects, turning architecture into a large-scale version of
industrial
design (Le Corbusier 1986). Between 1955 and 1956, British architects
Peter and Alison Smithson
attempted to infuse the logic of car design into
the architectural design of their Ideal Home Exhibition
House of the Future,
reconceiving the architectural object as an industrially conceived
one
(Smithson 1994: 115). In 1980, designer Ettore Sottsass attempted to infuse
the logic of architecture—scale,
weight, and proportion—into his furniture
pieces by rendering them “like monuments in squares” (Sottsass 1980).
And
between 1997 and 2000, architect Greg Lynn infused the market logic of
mass customization into architectural
envelope studies for an
Embryological House Project, producing thousands of
individualized,
formal variations. With each act of infusion, a new design style is proposed
by being upgraded
into something else. This idea resonates with Bruno
Latour’s understanding of design being remedial: “Design is a
task that
follows to make something more lively, more commercial, more useable,
more user-friendly, more
acceptable, more sustainable and so on” (Latour
2011: 114). New gradients of design quality pass from low
definition to
high definition, from purity to impurity, from dilution to concentration.
Infusion reconditions the
positions of existing modes of design. Expansion
is incidental to alteration.

Migration
Ever since architect-designer Peter Behrens was hired by the Allgemeine
Elektrizitäts-Gesellschaft (AEG) in 1907 to design a range of industrial
products, design companies have
repeatedly given architects many
opportunities, famously and infamously, to experiment at miniaturized
scales of
production. When the Italian manufacturing company Alessi
commissioned eleven international architects to design
Tea and Coffee
Piazzas in 1980, and another twenty-two for Tea and
Coffee Towers in
2000, two generations of architects would expose, under identical briefs,
emblematic
episodes in the migration of ideas between architecture and
product design, disciplines and consumers (Dean
2007). In the 1980 brief,
Alessi required architects to provide a unified signature style for a line of
mass-produced tea and coffee sets; the results reflect a single historicist
postmodern visual order:
architectural elements scaled down and sized to fit
tea and coffee pots. In 2000, Alessi brought in architects to
literalize a
business idea in product form, namely the multiplication of unique product
choices for many
individual consumers. Subsequently, the twenty-two
designs are marked by generational, geographic, material,
metaphorical,
and technological differences. Instead of formal unity, formal disparity
prevails and no tea or
coffee pot looks like another. Across the span of
twenty years, the demand for individualized consumer choices
has directed
a single signature (historicist postmodern in 1980) into twenty-two different
signatures (multiple
architectural genres in 2000). A business idea has
necessitated more formal genres and more taste cultures.
Design expansion
unfolds through an explosion of differences.

***

The entire landscape of design continues to fill between (and transform

within) the modern disciplines and
professions of architecture, industrial,
interior, and graphic design, subjecting them to often contradictory values,
practices, and discourses. This proliferation of
design produces a
provisional world without borders precisely through the multiplication of
boundaries—a
free-for-all in the most literal of senses—a situation in which
design itself becomes free for
all. Design is no longer the sole property of
disciplines or professions, it is the medium within which
everyone moves,
interfaces, and chooses. Design is now public domain, appropriable by
anyone. Indifferent to
fields or levels of professional expertise, design
provides opportunities for disciplinary commentary, prescribed
inhabitation,
and self-expression. Without dichotomies of inside or outside, the freedom
to design occurs through
the invention of new boundaries; liberty zones to
rethink how we choose and designate new worlds.

Acknowledgment

The author thanks Zehra Ahmed for her insightful comments on this
chapter.

Notes

1 Clement Greenberg’s “Avant-Garde and Kitsch”

(1939) and Michael Fried’s “Art and
Objecthood” (1967) are key essays advocating for strict boundaries between
art and popular
culture.
2 Reyner Banham had already anticipated the rise
of a new, popular aesthetic in 1955 when he
divided aesthetic standards into two camps: the aesthetics of
expendability for products of
popular culture and the aesthetics of perennity for fine arts (Banham 1955b).
3 For Rancière, shared ambitions also render as
a fiction the modernist separation of art into
autonomous art on one side, and heteronomous art on the other
(Rancière 2009: 105).
4 Analogous to this idea of active boundaries is
Richard Wagner’s mid-nineteenth-century
theoretical model for the interrelationship of art in his The Art-Work of the Future. Wagner argued
that each art—dance, music, poetry—achieved its full
potential by defining itself against the
other arts. The model received numerous critiques, but provides an early
understanding of
boundaries as active, horizontal conditions. For principles see “Outlines of the Artwork of the
Future” (Wagner 1993: 97–113) and Koss (2010: 1–24). For critiques see “Nietzsche Contra
Wagner” (Nietzsche 1954:
661–83) and “Music Drama” (Adorno 1981: 97–113).
5 Interestingly, this side of Loos is in
opposition to his use by critical art and architecture historians
today as a corrective to the expansion of
design agency.
6 Of course this was also facilitated by
socio-economic changes, but here I am narrowing the scope
to the naming of things.

References

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 2

WALL STREET BOUNDED AND

UNBINDING
The spatial as a multifocal lens in design
studies
Jilly Traganou
 

Introduction

In the last quarter of the twentieth century, the visitor to New York had no
doubt about which was the ideal spot
to view the city from above. The
World Trade Center (WTC), the iconic twin towers in the heart of Wall
Street,
the most dense and tense locale of the city, were that place,
physically and symbolically:

Seeing Manhattan from the 110th floor of the World Trade Center
… The gigantic mass is immobilized before the
eyes. It is
transformed into a texturology in which extremes coincide—
extremes of ambition and degradation,
brutal oppositions of races
and styles … The spectator can read in it a universe that is
constantly exploding.
In it are inscribed the architectural figures of
the coincidatio oppositorum formerly
drawn in miniatures and
mystical textures. On this stage of concrete, glass and steel … the
tallest letters in
the world compose a gigantic rhetoric of excess.
(de Certeau 1984)

Thirty-five years after de Certeau’s view of New York from above, the
coincidatio
oppositorum (coincidence of opposites) that he encountered
from the top of the WTC, “the immobilized” and
“gigantic mass” on the
one hand, and a “universe that is constantly exploding,” on the other,
remains the reality
of the Wall Street area, with its totality and its cracks.
Taking its name from the palisade that separated the colonized from the
indigenous territory in the seventeenth
century, Wall Street, the center of
New York’s financial district, is a locale of global importance and, hence, a
highly bordered area. From the 2001 9/11 terrorist attack to the
encampment of the Occupy Wall Street movement in
Zuccotti Park in 2011,
the Wall Street area has been the site of significant events in recent US
history. In
2012, part of the area was severely damaged by Hurricane Sandy
due to its location on reclaimed coastal land.
Perceived as a symbolic target
of attack, but also a topographically vulnerable area, Wall Street is subject
to
constant monitoring acts of security preparedness and control.

Figure
2.1 Borders in front of the 911
memorial, September 11, 2014.
Photo: Jilly Traganou.

Assuming a (spatial) design studies approach, some caveats have to be

made. It may appear awkward to choose a
financial district in order to
speak about design, particularly to speak about the district “as design.”
Upon
exiting any of the subway stations in the financial district of Lower
Manhattan you are confronted with a
disconcerting soundscape of building
constructions, temporary and permanent barriers that hinder your
circulation, police watchtowers, and a sense of contingency that hardly
matches the mental image of a financial
district’s entryway. The few
examples of iconic design in the WTC reconstruction complex are
surrounded by a
bundle of everydayness (see Figure 2.1); the jumbled
designscape of the Wall Street area as
both a site of spatial production (new
constructions and land turned into commodity of high value), and a site of
consumption (of space, objects, capital).
Even though talking about the district “as design” might be a risky
proposition, I see the Wall Street area as a
case study par excellence of what
“Design Studies” with a “spatial” attributive can offer. Its binding function
and its unbinding potential helps us illuminate the coexistence of two
fundamental aspects of design—control and
agency. It also helps us to be
mindful of what Clive Dilnot has alerted us to, quoting designer Jan van
Toorn:
the “complex factors of institutional power” which contribute to the
production of design and which “have mostly
been ignored … despite the
enormous dissemination of information.” By not losing “sight of context …
of the real
‘spaces and places’ … in regard to which design works,” we will
be reminded of the “real capabilities design
deploys” (Dilnot 2008: 182).

The border condition

Wall Street, an unfinished socio-spatial assemblage, will be seen as an

example of the fundamental functions of
space, and the interplay of scales,
ontologies, and forces that create its magnetic field-like function. I
discuss
the Wall Street area by paying attention to its borders, attempting to show a
dialectic between space and
counter-space that emerges in conditions of
bordering. I see bordering as an inherent function of abstract space,
or the
political, institutional space, constituted originally by the state. According
to Henri Lefebvre, at first
sight this space appears homogeneous. The forces
of abstract space “seem to
grind down and crush everything before them …
performing the function of a plane, a bulldozer or a tank”
(Lefebvre 1991:
285). It originates in a tabula rasa mode of production that eliminates
difference, only to reintroduce it later in the shape of commodity.
I define bordering as the act of drawing lines, or establishing
checkpoints, in a territory to delineate spatial
differences in terms of
sovereignty, ownership status, or spatial rights. Border need not always be
material.
From being based on linear fortifications, such as the palisade,
material lines of separation between social,
political, and economic spaces,
bordering has given way to new articulations—matrixes of outposts, or
dromological borders, that are based on the perception of space as an elastic
entity (Weizman 2007). Surveillance
technologies are part of the act of
bordering, functioning as tools for classifying and ordering people, deciding
who has access to a given territory and who lacks it. The condition of
bordering transforms space into a magnetic
field. The border is both
attracting and repelling. It evokes both disavowal and a desire for
transgression.
From a geographical viewpoint, New York’s financial district, one of the
fastest-growing neighborhoods in the
city, roughly overlaps the boundaries
of the New Amsterdam settlement of the late seventeenth century. It
expands
from Chambers Street in the north to the southern tip of
Manhattan, and from the East River to Broadway. A
construction boom
emerged in the area after the major destruction brought about by the 9/11
terrorist attack.
After this tragic moment, the city elites seemed determined
to rebuild the area from its ashes. Building was seen
as an expression of
patriotic confidence to which architects, politicians, and developers
naturally subscribed.
Today the area is guarded by an army of public and
private security enforcement personnel: police with uniforms,
undercover
officers, informants, police videographers, photographers, users of manned
and unmanned aircraft, and
analysts in data centers that keep watchful eyes
on real-time events (Gillham 2011).

Socio-spatial duality

Space, being both the envelope of human action and the outcome of it, has a
unique position within the ontology
of design. It is both a dominating
framework that shapes design action, and a product of the design acts it
envelops. It is also “simultaneously a medium of social actions, because it
structures them, and a product of
those actions” (Gottdiener 1985: 128).
Within design studies space can be both the object of an inquiry, seen as
a
designed artifact, and an irreducible nexus within which multiple distinct
design actions occur. This dual
aspect may appear to differentiate space
from other typical products of design (a chair, a poster, a tool) that
seem to
lack this binding nature, giving the user the choice to ignore or abandon
them. Nevertheless, this
distinction is not necessarily something that design
theorists would agree with. The dictum that “what we design
‘designs’ us”
is an established understanding of design as a formative realm that redefines
the condition of
humanity (Fry 2012). This view resonates with Langdon
Winner’s syllogism that artifacts, or “technical
arrangements,” are “ways of
building order in our world” that deliberately, or inadvertently, structure our
daily
routines of communication and circulation (Winner 1980: 127). At the
same time, design is used as a means of
social exclusion and control; it
structures social divides.
Wall Street’s primary spatial function has been that of harboring the
institutions of financial capitalism. It
comprises the offices and headquarters
of several of the city’s major financial institutions, including the New York
Stock Exchange and the Federal Reserve Bank of New
York. Such
institutions impose a network of systemic arrangements that start from
physical in-situ
fortifications, which are expressed by spatial choices and
materials, to invisible technological networks of
surveillance and control,
which regulate vehicular and pedestrian access. At the same time real estate
and zoning
changes have caused the construction of new office buildings,
condominiums, chain hotels, boutique hotels, and
rentals, each of which
applies its own system of security. The construction of the 9/11 memorial
and museum have
brought an influx of tourists, and new regulatory maps of
vehicular circulation (encircling the site with a
fortified palisade of guard
booths, vehicle barricades, and sidewalk barriers, restricting access to
through
traffic). These are being resisted by members of the WTC
Neighborhood Alliance which sees them as regimes that
obstruct and
colonize their everyday life.
Numerous actors have been involved in the area’s rebuilding: from the
9/11 victims’ families and grassroot
community planning coalitions (Civic
Alliance to Rebuild Downtown New York, Rebuild Downtown Our Town),
who
envisioned a new Lower Manhattan; to high-profile global architects,
such as Santiago Calatrava, Daniel
Libeskind, and Fumihiko Maki who
were commissioned to design important buildings in the area. New York
City
mayors Rudolph Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg (each with a
different agenda), Homeland Security, the New York
Police Department, the
Port Authority, and Silverstein properties, have been constant key players
whose will is
reflected in both the blueprints and current built environment
of the area. The result is the parcelization of
land into zones of distinct
ownership and legal status ranging from private to public–private
partnerships (such
as privately owned public spaces), to spaces that belong
to the city, the state, or the federation. Within this
system of abstraction,
enclosures are being established to defend and protect the assets of those
constituencies
that have the capacity to hold a spatial stronghold.
 The spatial ensemble of Wall Street does not end with the area’s physical
boundaries. Like all designed
artifacts, space too is not tied to singular
locational binding. Not only do designed objects flow as
commodities,
diasporic entities, or perishable things, but spaces are also multi-sited. The
physicality of a
spatial agglomeration carries with it relations with trans-
local networks: the location of foreign labor that
brought a building into
being; the harvesting of material for a construction from distant territories;
the flow
of capital through transnational channels; and interactions within
transcontinental networks that were part of
its making or its destruction.
The origin of Wall Street is already a product of multi-sitedness: a strategic
seventeenth-century post of the Dutch Republic in the new continent; the
flooding of the district is triggered by
planetary pressure systems; the 9/11
attacks were interconnected with the geopolitics of the Middle East. At the
same time, the Wall Street area is elevated from its specific geographical
location, to being part of a network
of sites of national and transnational
significance, at once bordered (protected, fortified) and bordering
(prohibiting and controlling).
The street level becomes the terrain where the contingency of these
forces obtains a physical definition. A
complex and diffuse system of
bordering strategies has been applied in the area, employing infrastructures
that
originate in prisons, warfare, and military bases. Modular concrete or
plastic barriers (also known as Jersey
barriers), fencing, wedge barriers,
heavy tree planters, controlled entryways such as sally ports, canine
inspection teams, checkpoints, watchtowers, armed police personnel and
security guards, controlled passage points (such as those in airports)
comprise the variety of defensive
strategies used today in the district.
Besides the visible borders, a more pervasive counterterrorism and
policing system has an intangible presence.
The Lower Manhattan Security
Initiative comprises a network of private and public cameras in close
collaboration
with financial institutions in the area. In conjunction with this,
the NYPD and Microsoft worked to develop the
Domain Awareness
System, modeled after London’s Ring of Steel. The program aggregates and
analyzes real time “public safety” data streams, in combination with pre-
existing databases, to alert NYPD
investigators and analysts about potential
threats and criminal activity in the area (NYC Gov 2012). The Domain
Awareness System is a real-time mapping system that provides a
comprehensive pan-spectric view of the area.
Nevertheless, its effect in
crime prevention, and its ability to eliminate prejudicial surveillance and
racial
profiling, are questionable.
Who is the designer of this spatial condition of bordering that transcends
physicality? It is obvious that no
single mentality has produced or controls
this aggregation of synergetic, or at times even conflicting, bordering
systems. Spatial authorship is distributed, elusive, often secretive and
undisclosed. Within this polyphony the
synergetic agency of the State, its
financial and policing institutions, major IT players, and the interests of
New York City elite developers, prevail. The collective will of this actors’
network not only materializes their
power through the “gigantic rhetoric of
excess” (de Certeau 1984: 91) expressed in their edifices, but also
determines the movements and physical experiences of citizens, residents,
and newcomers. Disparities between
these two poles of action should not be
disregarded. While some feel protected or entitled to the protection that
this
bordering offers, others feel threatened or offended. These others (who
numerically might comprise the
silent majority) do not necessarily comprise
a fixed group, a community, or a social class. They might include
mid- and
low-level employees in the district, long-term residents, people of a certain
geographical origin, civil
rights activists, or individuals who simply defend
their right to privacy. For instance, the NY Civil Liberties
Union has raised
concerns about the erosion of privacy rights, blanket policing, the lack of
legal
accountability, and judicial review that are the results of these
practices.
By taking this into account, the choice of abstractions like us, social
actions, our world that were used in the early paragraphs of this section
acquire an
uncomfortable resonance, as if trying to mask the unevenness
that lurks behind them. While there might be no
disagreement about the fact
that space “designs” or controls “us,” its users, one should be cautious of
the
identification of designers with those who are subjected to a design’s
controlling power. Indeed, has the
bordering condition of space been the
decision of those who opposed the rebuilding of the financial district in
the
business-as-usual mode? Have the actions of these actors led to the
particular bordering designs that were
described above? If not, to what kind
of designs have they led? Where do they belong in the spectrum of design
action? It seems that the understanding of the words design, society, or
space in the singular, elides the plurality of social action, and
the power
dynamics (inequality, asymmetry, suppression, resistance) between different
social actors. If this
proposition of the reciprocity of space and society is
correct, it should only be conceived as a constantly
unsettling condition.

Spatial trialectics

An understanding of space as a design outcome of diffuse authorship,

constantly under construction, urges us to
consider it in its trajectorial form
from the stage of production to the moments of use, appropriation, or
transformation. Henri Lefebvre provides a comprehensive framework for
understanding space as both the condition
and the product of social action
in a dynamic manner. Lefebvre sees space as a triadic entity: perceived,
conceived, and lived. Perceived space is found in the physicality of space,
the establishment of spatial
practices that colonize everyday life and
reproduce the dominant socio-spatial order. Conceived space is found in
the
realm of ideas that are mentally invested in space, in the ideologies and
representations of space by expert
knowledge and vision. Lived space is the
realm of desire and mythification; it escapes prescription, utility and
discipline (Lefebvre 1991). This trialectical understanding of space
addresses both the realm of spatial (and
designerly) production—at once
physical, ideological, and strategic—and the interconnected realms of use,
appropriation, and agency. With this, we can perform an epistemological
shift from conceiving “things in space”
to that of the “actual production of
space” (Merrifield 2006: 106). Neither things nor spaces should be studied
in isolation. Rather, the consideration of space allows for the social
relationships that are latent in design to
come to the surface, relations that
introduce “the contradictions, for instance, between the private ownership
of
the means of production and the social character of the productive
forces” (Lefebvre 1991: 90).
Michel de Certeau’s terms “strategy/tactic,” “maps/itineraries,” “space
from above/ below,” help us further
qualify Lefebvre’s three realms, and
especially the “lived space.” Lefebvre’s first two aspects of space are akin
to de Certeau’s notion of panoramic space, a “texturology” of space seen
from above by those in power, while
Lefebvre’s third spatiality is analogous
to de Certeau’s realm of tactical space that unfolds on the street
level, and
exceeds the typical scripted understanding of spatial use (de Certeau 1984).
And if the specialized
tool of mapping, both in its projective and descriptive
dimensions, is a method for developing and controlling
the first two
(perceived and conceived space), attention to the elusive nature of the
“itineraries” (another de
Certeau term) of the anonymous walkers would
give us a lens for understanding the way space operates from below
(lived
space). Space (as well as design) is indeed the product of calculation,
ideology, and imposition. But, at
the same time, there are a myriad hidden,
incoherent, subversive “designerly” (Cross 1982) or proto-design
actions
taking place in space that escape the panoramic gaze and will of the spatial
producers, border makers,
spatial planners, and cartographers.
Attention to all three realms comprises what I call “Spatial Design
Studies,” an understanding of space as both a
controlling apparatus, applied
by those with productive capacities (the state and its bureaucracies, the
markets,
multinational institutions), and as carrying the possibility of
agency (by community, social movements,
non-professional designers).
Replacing the terms “used” or “consumed” space with the term “lived
space” brings
our attention to a much broader realm of social action and
imagination. “Lived space,” nested with all the
designerly, creative, and
libidinal opportunities, can be agentic rather than simply productive. This
understanding transcends the perceived/conceived, or
producing/consuming, dialectics. The agentic is based on the
belief that
engagement with space provides the capacity for resistance to the
encompassing coercive function of
the very space that was meant to shape
its subjects. Agentic design thus describes the capacity of those who
operate
within space, whose voices might be marginalized or excluded from
the
realm of public deliberation, and whose productive capacities—physical,
political, or financial—might be
limited. Advocates of community
planning, neighborhood organizations, political activists—subjectivities that
wish to change their lifeworld or the political world beyond them—might
belong to this category. Led by
imaginaries that are being brewed within the
“lived space,” their “designs” might be material or intangible,
tactical or
strategic, radical or insurgent, antagonistic to an overpowering condition, or
prefiguring a future
society.
As a physical space Wall Street is dominated by a dehumanizing regime
of spatial practices that converts the
walker, the worker, the visitor into a
part of an ominous socio-technical mechanism that secures and safeguards
the dominant form of space. As a conceptual space, Wall Street is the
temple of financial capitalism, while it is
also shaped by numerous other
mental fabrications, such as the Domain Awareness System, an Orwellian
invention of
totalized spatial mapping, or the Wall Street memorial, a site
that commemorates national trauma and reinstates
the national unity. These
two layers of space stand in a dialectical relationship: the first implies the
system’s
machinery, its hardware, the banality of daily operation; the
second points to the lofty and the utopian of total
control and national
healing. These two spatial layers are bound together, establishing the realm
of coerciveness
and control, fixing both meaning and action into mental and
physical constructions and enclosures. These ideas
and realities that derive
from the synergetic acts of power/finance/knowledge-holders are indeed the
designs that
“design” society, but it would be a sweeping generalization to
claim that they are being produced by “us,” as the
will of society as a
whole.
If urban life is fully colonized in a web of blockages and controls is there
any mental or physical territory
left for lived space? For Lefebvre, it is
space that “holds the promise of liberation:
from the tyranny of time, from
social repression and exploitation, from self-imprisoning categories—
liberation
into desire” (Smith 2003: xiii). Differential spaces (or counter-
spaces) operate “against the Eye and the Gaze”
(Lefebvre 1991: 382),
trying to “restore unity to what abstract space breaks up … put an end to
those
localizations which shatter the integrity of the individual body, the
social body, the corpus of human needs, and
the corpus of knowledge”
(ibid.: 52). Counter-spaces and new unpredictable capabilities emerge even
in the highly
controlled spatiality of Wall Street, in the fissures of the
systems that fail to cover the full terrain, or at
the opportunities afforded
when things fall apart, and when quantities are turned into qualities, for
example,
the ninety-nine percent becoming a political subjectivity. Such
attempts lead to the emergence of differential
space, where design, in the
form of the agentic and the imaginary, in contrast to the
productive/conceptual, can
play a role.

Unbinding Wall Street: the Occupy Wall Street encampment as

differential space

In the fall of 2011, a differential space emerged that aimed to question the
society of financialization as
incarnated by Wall Street (Occupy Wall Street
2011) (see Figure 2.2). It materialized as the
occupation of Zuccotti Park, a
privately owned public space in the heart of the financial district, and it
comprised an encampment in which processes of direct democracy could be
exercised in-situ. The Occupy Wall Street
(OWS) movement that brought it
into being revitalized a “revulsion against the large-scale centralized and
inhuman institutions” (Breines 1980: 422) of the financial district that
shaped politics in the US and beyond,
and sought to prefigure a future
society. For this, it strived to practice horizontality, transparency and
participation, the opposite of what those institutions stood for. The OWS
protesters joined a series of global
activists from Cairo’s Tahrir Square to
the Syntagma Square in Athens. Between September 17 and November 15,
2011, Zuccotti Park was transformed from “an utterly obscure …
downtown plaza” to “a miniature polis” of “global
consequences”
(Kimmelman 2011).

Figure
2.2 Occupy Wall Street at Zuccotti
Park, October 8, 2011.
Photo: Jilly Traganou.

The conversion of Zuccotti Park into Liberty Plaza, despite the

heightened surveillance and constant policing of
the financial district, is
illustrative of the possibility of differentiated space and spatial agency, even
in a
fortified location of extreme control. Here, as in the case of other
protest camps, we notice the development of
strong collective identities,
which shape and are shaped by the creation of internal democratic processes
(Feigenbaum et al. 2013). Thus, like space at large, protest camps are both
being formed
and formative of their subjects, while at the same time, due to
their participatory nature, they strive to defy
the disjunction between the
subjects that produce these formations and those who are subjected to them.
The
spatial practices of the OWS protesters included the installation of an
elaborated network of interlinked
do-it-yourself infrastructures. The site
was domesticated and gradually filled with tents and other ephemeral
structures for supporting shelter, food and energy supply, self-governance,
learning, and sanitation. Governing
infrastructures were set up in designated
spaces for general assembly meetings and for other decision-making
processes characterized by horizontality. The site also included a comfort
center, a prototype of a sharing
economy, where food and supplies were
circulated.
Design played a major role in the lived space of the camp, ranging from
the realm of “metis, a tacit type of
practical knowledge” (Scott 1999) and
“proto-design,” to more mature configurative processes. This is the realm
of
agentic design that was integrated with every level of the camp’s
realization, from the overall spatial
arrangement and the creation of
alternative socio-technical propositions, to the distinctive bodily
preferences
of many of the protesters manifested in a sense of group
subculture. The creation of most of these forms does not
depend on expert
knowledge, but is based on the development of agency-focused capabilities,
peer-to-peer dissemination, and alternative pedagogies. These capabilities
expanded from
securing the protesters’ well-being and prototyping
conditions of self-management to emancipation from power
structures for
the broader society, such as the development of alternative energy
production stations or a gray
water system. Most importantly, these
practices emerged from “the realm of imagination as a social practice …
and
a form of negotiation between sites of agency (individuals) and globally
defined fields of possibility”
(Appadurai 1996: 31).
In this process, different subjectivities appeared, such as new agents,
following Amartya Sen’s definition of the
agent not only “as someone who
acts and brings about change, whose achievement can be evaluated in terms
of his
or her own values and goals,” but also “as a member of the public and
as a participant in economic, social and
political actions” (Sen 1999: 18–
19). Participation in the encampment of OWS was a pivotal experience for
its
members. But a collective new agent was also formed; the ninety-nine
percent, or the majority of the United
States population that is subjected to
decisions made by the one percent that holds the wealth. It is not that
the
ninety-nine percent did not exist prior to the fall of 2011, but that through
the OWS intervention it
acquired an image in the collective imaginary and
became a potential political acting subject that united
individuals and
dispersed groups. In this sense, the differential space of OWS constituted a
new body politic. In
political terms, it created a counter spatio-temporal
arrangement that prefigured a political model, using
Breines’s definition of
prefigurative politics as a means to “create and sustain … relationships and
political
forms that … embody the desired society” (Breines 1980: 421).
Occupying Zuccotti Park was an anti-bordering, anti-surveillance action
par excellence, what I call an unbinding
act. Zuccotti Park formed an area
of different status from its surrounding territory. Unlike other public spaces
of the city, the park, being a privately owned public space, had no curfew
restrictions, and thus complicated the
protesters’ evacuation by the police.
Nevertheless, Occupy activists became slowly bordered in, confined in a
private space of special status. The occupiers’ actions unfolded as a
counter-bordering game of chess. Their
containment was established by the
police’s action to create hard and soft zones of control, the first being
permanently barricaded spaces, and the second temporal spaces with
restrictions on speech and activity. The
occupiers were constantly under the
gaze of the police from a thirty-foot high portable surveillance tower and,
on the ground, through patrol officers. Protesters performed a range of
counter- and anti-bordering resistance
moves against the police’s efforts to
incapacitate their behavior. During their street march along the Brooklyn
Bridge on October 1, 2011, kettling, a typical bordering police practice, was
used as a method of crowd control
that aimed to confine demonstrators to a
limited area, leading to arrests. OWS protesters frequently breached the
barricaded perimeters, physically or through the projection of protest
images. Protesters also managed to
mobilize counter-surveillance methods
by using scouts, live streaming, and cameras (Edwards and Gillham 2013).
It
is important to note the adversarial nature of these moves:

The interactions between OWS protesters and the NYPD resembled

an adversarial dance … as each side performed a
series of overt
moves intended to counter the other and prevail in the struggle to
shape the location,
substance and interpretation of protest.
(Edwards and Gillham 2013: 16)
With the above it becomes clear that overarching notions, such as those of
space, technology, and design do not
reside on just one side of the
spectrum; rather they are resources that can be used for the creation of both
abstraction and differentiation. But the ways these are used
differ greatly,
and the extreme power asymmetry between the two groups could not make
their adversarial dance
possible for much longer. Indeed, on November 15,
2011, in a manner reminiscent of Urban Renewal’s slum
clearance, police in
riot gear removed the encampment from the park on the grounds of
unsanitary and hazardous
conditions.
Numerous people supportive of the OWS were outraged, while many
others expressed their relief at the dismantling
of the encampment at
Zuccotti Park. Reporters had already started talking of “an insidious
hierarchy” (Shapiro
2011) and social cracks emerging in the micro-
neighborhoods of Zuccotti Park. Several OWS committees continued to
hold meetings, decentralizing, and trying to connect with local
communities. They hoped to move the protest from
the realm of the
extraordinary to that of the everyday, in order to give rise to insurgent
spaces that would
empower populations beyond those that had already
joined OWS (Traganou 2013). Occupy The Pipeline (an
anti-fracking
campaign), Occupy Sandy, and Occupy Foreclosure emerged in the
following years. The lesson from
this transposition is that differentiated
space is fugitive and nomadic, and that it has to be transformed or it
will
fall into the same pitfalls that it tried to resist.

Conclusions

By introducing the “spatial” into the field of design studies (Traganou

2009) we are presented with a context
that sheds light on some of the field’s
blind spots. An extreme spatial condition, a coincidatio oppositorum, Wall
Street district is helpful in this inquiry because of several of its
characteristics. First, as a bounded territory it incarnates the ultimate wish
of the producers of space and
design for achieving absolute control over the
finitude of their forms. Second, being a district that has
repeatedly attracted
deviance, disobedience, and destruction, Wall Street reveals the futility of
bordering and
the inability of full control. Third, having been the locale of
one of the most important resistance movements in
recent US political life,
it indicates the possibility of differentiated space and agentic design
emerging
through the spatial ruptures in even the most fortified of locations.
These point to the fact that a fugitive
process is at work—that of
bordering/splintering/differentiating, rather than simply
producing/consuming/appropriating—to which object-based inquiries often
adhere. Design studies is called upon to
trace this process in the expansive
and imploding geographics of space, from Wall Street, to other parts of
New
York City, to other urban areas. Thus attention to the spatial provides
us with a multifocal lens for
understanding the spectrum, the trajectory, and
the metamorphoses of designing beyond the myopic view of the
market/non-market dichotomy as the main site of design’s biography. It also
allows us to overcome the static
categories of design (print, object,
architecture), and to be always on the watch for the interconnected
(synergetic, adversarial, antagonistic) actions of the different political
subjects of space and design, of space
as a field of constantly evolving
designs and imaginaries.

Acknowledgment

I am indebted to my research assistant Julia Borowicz for her support, my

colleague Victoria Hattam for
continuing intellectual stimulation, and to all
of the students in our co-taught class “Visual/Spatial Politics”
(Spring 2014)
for critical conversations on borders. In particular, I want to thank Aaron
Cooper, Selim Heper,
and Daniel Cherin for their work on Wall Street that
inspired the writing of this chapter.

References

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Books.
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 3

CONNECTIVITY THROUGH
SERVICE DESIGN
Alison Prendiville
 

Introduction

Service design’s emergence as a new field of design at the end of the

twentieth century, and its ongoing
evolution into an interdisciplinary,
collaborative, and holistic field of design, is not easily definable.
Equally,
its origins cannot be attributed to developments within one design
discipline, nor can it be viewed,
unlike its more traditional counterparts of
graphic and product design, as a clearly bounded design practice.
Service
design’s arrival at the start of the millennium is shaped by its intrinsic
human-centered approach and
the unique nature of services that are
irrevocably entangled in a socio-technical and political landscape. In
this
chapter I explore the different paths that led to service design, from both
practice and research
perspectives, with the aim of showing how its origins
and future directions are interlinked.

A service economy

Britain’s Industrial Revolution in the eighteenth century brought about

developments in service infrastructures
with the creation of transportation
networks such as canals and railways to support the movement of goods
and
people. However, this has received little attention compared with the
explosion of consumer goods. It was not
until the 1960s that economists
began to refer to a service economy as, with the arrival of mainframe
computers,
companies were able to build the capability to develop, store,
manage, and manipulate customer records and thus
build value around
relationships with their products through more tightly defined customer
profiles (La Salle and
Britton 2003: 25). This growth of the service sector
continued over the following forty years so that, by the
start of the twenty-
first century, developed countries had seventy to eighty percent of their
GDP and employment
reflected in services (ranging from government,
healthcare, education, retail, financial, business and
professional,
communication, transportation and utilities) with fifteen to twenty-five
percent in the
manufacturing sector (Tien and Berg 2006). This dominance
of the service sector continues today.
This structural transformation to a predominantly service economy is
entangled with developments in ICT
(information communication
technologies) that inevitably impacted on the nature and practice of design
(Kimbell
2009). As product design began to shift from discrete objects,
such as electronic products, to digital devices
produced and consumed
through two-way networked infrastructures (Miller
2011: 15), newly
graduating designers at the turn of the century began to adapt and reinvent
themselves. With
automation and interaction as key components of the
“digital,” designers were now tasked with creating interfaces
for services,
distributed across networks; these included internet-delivered services, such
as web, email,
computer-supported work and mobile phone services
(Kimbell 2009: 157). Such new web-based design outputs saw
designers
repositioning themselves as interaction designers, experience designers,
service and transformation
designers.

The nature of services and the connection with service design

Service design’s role in the development of services is connected to its

unique nature, which has evolved over
the past thirty years. It is also
important to recognize that distinct disciplinary perspectives generate
different service models, such as service marketing, service management,
service engineering, and economics
(Secomandi and Snelders 2011). In this
chapter key literature is selected to illustrate how these various
frameworks
have been applied to services and to highlight how the emerging discipline
of service design has
itself played a role in service conceptualization and
delivery.
 On one level services are socially and culturally embedded, inherently
human activities that are relational
between people and things, and
influenced by the political and economic context in which they are situated.
At
their simplest they may involve exchanging food with neighbors or
offering a school drop-off. At their most
complex they encompass public,
commercial, and third-sector services—transportation, healthcare, banking,
mobile
phone services, and charitable and community work—more often
than not with a digital dimension.
The current definition of services emerged from services marketing
literature in the 1970s and focused on their
non-material, intangible, and
indistinct nature compared with manufactured goods (Shostack 1977). This
demarcation from goods led to services being described in opposition to
them with a focus on four key
characteristics: inseparability, heterogeneity,
intangibility, and perishability (IHIP) (Zeithaml et al. 1985).
Grönroos (2006: 317) has traced the evolution, from the 1970s onwards,
of “service-based concepts and models” as
opposed to a goods-logic that
had its origins in two recognized European schools of service marketing
research,
one based in the Nordic countries and the other in France.
According to Grönroos, both of these schools called
for a new service
marketing perspective. Grönroos states that the Nordic school, instead of
accepting the
traditional goods-based marketing model, “took the
phenomena of service in its marketing context as a starting
point, and
asked: ‘How should marketing look like to fit this phenomenon?’”(2006:
318). For Grönroos this meant
that “existing marketing models that had
been developed based on a different logic did not restrict the
development
of service marketing” (ibid.). Thus, by the end of the 1990s, in the Nordic
school the clear
delineation between goods and services was seen to be that
services emerge in “open processes” with the
participation of customers “as
co-producers and thus directly influenced by the progress of these
processes,
whereas the production of physical goods are perceived by the
customer as outcomes of the process” (ibid.). Thus
a service began to be
conceived as a process consisting of a series of more or less tangible
activities that
normally, but not necessarily, takes place in interactions
between the customer on one side and the service
employee and/or physical
resources or goods and/or service problem-solving
device on the other
(Grönroos 2000, cited in Han 2010: 10).
 As Lovelock and Gummersson note (2004: 27), the 1990s brought the
arrival of the internet, greater automation of
services, and the lifting of
restrictions on international trade in services. This last development also
magnified the limitations of the IHIP service concept, which failed to
account for the synergies between goods
and services. In response to these
developments the definition of services evolved further. Shifting the focus
away from the goods and services dichotomy, Edvardsson, Gustafsson and
Roos (2005) offered a new view of service
research that was based instead
on different methods of portrayal to customers of value creation, wherein
the
customer perspective is emphasized. In this context service is a
perspective on value creation rather than a
category of market offering
(ibid.: 118).
At the same time management studies was also shifting from a goods-
dominant logic, “in which tangible outputs and
discrete transactions were
central, to a service dominant view, in which intangibility, exchange
processes and
relationships are central” (Vargo and Lusch 2004a: 2). This
move away from tangibles towards intangibles—such as
skills, information
and knowledge, interactivity, connectivity, and ongoing relationships—also
reflects the
impact of computing and digital technology. Thus the authors
define services as “the application of specialized
competences (knowledge
and skills) through deeds, processes and performances for the benefit of
another entity or
the entity itself” (ibid.). Developing this argument further,
Vargo and Lusch (2004b) go on to propose that the
term services is
grounded in a goods-based model as it implies units of outputs rather
than a
process as implied by the singular service. According to the authors, this
emphasis
on the word service also points “to the provision of benefits and
assistance and this is more consistent with
consumer orientation. In fact it
may obviate the need for delineating the orientation” (ibid.: 333). Instead of
a
goods-dominant logic, Vargo and Lusch thus propose a new paradigm
within marketing in which “service provision
rather than goods is
fundamental to economic exchanges” (Vargo and Lusch 2004a: 1). This
they describe as a
service-dominant logic. With this concept they proposed
eight foundational premises, later extended to ten (Vargo
and Lusch 2008),
that focus on the interactions between the service provider and service
receiver and the effort
required to make a service transaction meaningful
(Segelström 2013: 19).
 Of these ten foundational premises (FP), Blomkvist, Segelström and
Holmlid (2011: 7) identify four that are of
specific interest to service design
and prototyping:

• FP3. Goods are a distribution mechanism for services provision.

• FP6. The customer is always a co-creator of value.
• FP7. The enterprise cannot deliver value, but only offer value
propositions.
• FP8. A service-centered view is inherently customer orientated and
relational;
customers are placed at the core of the service activities and
without the participation of the customer, the
service fails to deliver.

Recent definitions of service have been extended to embrace aspects of

sociology and anthropology. In Meroni and
Sangiorgi’s (2011: 1) service
design perspective, services are presented as complex, hybrid artifacts
consisting
not only of things, places, and systems of communication and
interaction but also of human beings and
organizations. Here the human is
just one part in the provision of services
with recognition given to other
factors. This definition resonates with Bruno Latour’s Actor Network
Theory
(ANT), which attributes agency to both human and non-human
actors (artifacts) and acknowledges the wider,
decentralized networks that
support technological innovation. In addition, Blomberg and Darrah (2014:
127) also
present a human-centered and ANT frame by further suggesting
an anthropology of services, as “less designed and
more assembled from
fragments of practices, institutions, lifestyles, technologies and networks.”

Service design practice

Designers have always been involved in the design of services. For

example, in the design of a transportation
system different design and
engineering disciplines are responsible for the disparate elements that make
up the
system: product and engineering designers for the carriages, graphic
designers for online web information,
way-finding, and ticketing
information (Han 2010: 14). However, each of these different service
elements was
designed in isolation, often from an engineering perspective,
with the system configured as a jigsaw that would
often result in inadequate
service outcomes (Prendiville 2001). Prior to the advent of service design it
was rare
for “designers to be used to oversee the design outputs in channels
—with an understanding of the whole process of
developing a service
system” (Han 2010: 14).
Pioneers of service design practice such as Engine and Live|Work
(established in London in 2000 and 2001
respectively) initially worked in
commercial sectors such as banking, in-flight, and mobile phone services
(Cook
2011: 72). These early practitioners established service design
principles, applying practical tools and concepts
that presented information
visually through customer journey maps, prototyping, and stakeholder
mapping to
support collaborative and social ways of working between
different stakeholders. In particular, use of Post-it
notes has come to
symbolize service design practices and, in some instances, they are
ridiculed for their
ubiquity in such contexts. However, their exceptional
versatility within a workshop environment facilitates
collaborative and
democratic processes of working. Such practices have become synonymous
with service design as
they are based on a user-centered perspective whilst
capturing the holistic. In many of these early commercial
sector projects,
service design is treated as a discrete and bounded object, focusing on the
customer journey and
the development of touchpoints, delivered by the
external agency, and separate from developing innovation
practices within
the organization.
Along with the growth of commercial service design agency work in
Britain in the early 2000s, there was growing
awareness within the public
sector of the importance of participatory approaches to design, which
focused on
developing social innovation. At the same time it was
recognized that there was also a shortage of socially
focused design
agencies needed to fulfill this growing area (ibid.: 85). This led bodies such
as NESTA (National
Endowment for Science and Technology and the Arts,
founded in 1997) and the Design Council to encourage the
establishment
and support of socially focused design agencies. Through the Design
Council’s pioneering agenda,
RED was established in 2004 as a section
within it to apply design to social challenges, together with programs
such
as The Design of The Times (DOTT07). At DOTT07 in the North East,
design was used to facilitate
collaborative participation with different
communities to tackle social and economic issues through design-led
innovation. This championing of design within social contexts accelerated
the acceptance of service design amongst local government and other
public-sector bodies, including the National
Health Service, as having the
potential to transform organizations (ibid.: 99).
Over the past decade a range of methods and tools has been developed
that have come to characterize service
design. Taken from both the social
sciences and various design disciplines, these have been amalgamated then
adapted, and now form a distinct range of design options at the disposal of
service designers.

Visual tools

The use of visual processes in the design of services, prior to the emergence
of service design, can be
attributed to Lynne G. Shostack (1982; 1984) and
the field of service marketing. As an early advocate of the
design of
services, Shostack proposed the application of diagrammatic and visual
representations, in the form of
the service blueprint, to communicate the
complex nature of services and transactional pathways. This would help
a
service developer to identify both nascent problems and future marketing
opportunities (Shostack 1984: 134).
For Shostack, the service blueprint,
now adopted by service designers, allows an organization to explore “all the
issues inherent in creating or managing a service” and proposes the
mapping of the process that constitutes the
service (ibid.). However, these
service representations developed in service marketing were produced from
the
standpoint of the service provider, in order to identify problems in
service delivery. In contrast, the service
blueprints in service design are
used collaboratively and created from a user-centered viewpoint, although
they
also incorporate the behind-the-scenes support needed to deliver the
service.
Service design practices are known for their highly collaborative,
interdisciplinary, and visual outputs that are
mediated through a range of
design tools such as customer journey maps, stakeholder mapping, and
personas.
Service design draws on established design disciplines of visual
communication, information design, and
interaction design (Schön 1983)
and its “practices operate both as a tool for the designer’s own
understanding,
as in reflection in action and as a tool for communication,
for developing ideas and presentations” (Wetter Edman
2011: 66).
Stickdorn and Schneider’s comprehensive book This is Design Thinking
(2010) presents
twenty-five visual methods and tools that constitute service
design practice, such as personas, customer journey
maps, and story-telling,
to name but a few. In various combinations these tools have come to
represent the core
of service design. They are not exhaustive, however, as
innovative methods are constantly being developed and
existing techniques
adapted to new contexts. The purpose of these tools is to allow a level of
democratic
engagement between different stakeholders and also to provide
a highly visual and holistic understanding of
complex systems from the
specific standpoint of the users (see Figure 3.1).

Ethnography

Ethnographic fieldwork is the most important method of generating new

knowledge in anthropological enquiry
(Eriksen 2001: 33) and the starting
point of any ethnographic writing “constitutes a valuable and distinctive
way
of asking and answering a recurrent question—‘what does it mean to
be human?’” (Gay y Blasco and Wardle 2007: 1).
The ethnographic method
has a long and established theoretical tradition, combining fieldwork and
immersive
participant observation with the observations framed and
interpreted through anthropological concepts and
theories. The
appropriation and use of these techniques within various design disciplines,
most recently
including service design (Segelström et al. 2009), has
frequently been seen as problematic
owing to the comparatively short time
frames of the participant observation and the resulting superficiality of
the
results.
Figure
3.1 Visualizing the service
journey through storyboarding.
Photo: Alison Prendiville.

For anthropologist Rob van Veggel (2005) there are four areas of tension
when anthropology and design
collaborate:

• translation of anthropological insights into usable insights for designers;

• designers’ inadequate training in ethnographic techniques (including
ethical
protocols)—this is an ongoing criticism of service design as,
increasingly, the work involves engagement in
socially complex areas;
• how to link people’s actions and thoughts together; and
• that anthropology is excessively theoretical.

Yet, despite these tensions, over the past fifteen years ethnographic methods
have become an accepted part of the
practice of service design, with the
caveats that their use does not lead to truly anthropological insights and
that
designers should be respectful of how and why the methods are used in
anthropology, that is, “to understand
and document the knowledge,
relationships and beliefs of social or cultural groups” (Polaine et
al. 2013:
50).
This acceptance of ethnographic methods in service design is also
evidenced in the UK Government’s Service Design
Manual that promotes
the use of ethnography (www.gov.uk/). The
website offers a guidance
document on how and when to undertake ethnographic work as part of the
development
process to design government digital services. Here
ethnography is outlined
as the practice of a simple set of processes that
includes participant observation, analysis of artifacts, and
video diaries,
with the overall aim of gathering insights into how people live, how they
appropriate and use
things, and what they need in their everyday personal
and professional lives.
For Segelström, Raijmakers and Holmlid (2009: 3) service design “aims
to make empathic connection with future
users of a service by stepping into
their shoes as a starting point for speculation about a new service concept.”
This is undertaken by use of a range of visual and verbal methods that may
include observation and participatory
methods. From a workshop with
service designers the authors identify the themes that recur in ethnographic
methods:

• Ethnography requires a designer to be in the field of study, undertaking

observations in real world contexts. Alternatively the data come from a
primary source in the field of study,
thus being contextualized and
situated—such as material gathered through design probes.
• Ethnography provides a rich data source that includes diaries,
observational
protocols, video recordings, and personas.
• Ethnography requires elaborate tools for documentation, such as video,
audio probes.
• Ethnography provides opportunities to involve informants in the
research process,
through games, plays, and card-sorting.

Within service design the use of ethnography has also been acknowledged
for its contribution well beyond the
discovery phase of a project as it
focuses on “the experience of people in their own context during all stages
of
the design process” (ibid.: 2).

Co-designing

Co-design is a core feature of service design and is seen as an effective

method for engaging people in a
collaborative process leading to useful
insights and effective results. According to Mattlemäki and Sleeswijk
Visser’s (2011) comprehensive literature review, which compares co-design
and co-creation, the terms are often
used interchangeably (they describe a
range of creative methods used to engage a range of stakeholder
contributions). However, the authors make a clear distinction: in co-design,
which belongs to the “larger mindset
of use centered design (UCD),” the
designers typically facilitate the collaborative process, whereas in
co-
creation “the users step into the shoes of the designers and are given tools to
create new ideas and
facilitate the creative process” (ibid.: 2). The
following summary of co-design by Mattlemäki and Sleeswijk
Visser
captures the essence of the process in service design:

• It describes the general involvement of designers and users when

exploring,
envisioning, and developing solutions.
• It brings a political and power dimensional aspect of empowerment,
giving voice and
tools to those who are not usually involved in a design
process (e.g. participatory design).
• It describes the engagement of potential users and stakeholder
collaboration.
• It is a general process or tool for collaborative engagement.

For Akama and Prendiville (2013), when co-designing through the use of
tools such as customer journey maps,
story-telling, and service role play,
the unique features of services—such as intangibility, experience,
temporality and more commonly co-production—are magnified. In
addition, the authors adopt a phenomenological
approach that exposes a
more nuanced level of “continuous growth, movement and transformation
of people,
relationships and understandings. Phenomenologists see
knowledge as active, created in the ‘living’ moment and
affective bodily
encounters in our world” (ibid.: 31). This phenomenological interpretation
also exposes the
possibility of over-prescriptive co-design methods and
instead proposes that co-designing is described as a mode
of awareness that
unlocks tacit knowledge which can be non-verbal, non-linear, and intuitive.
The importance of the materiality of co-designing, paper prototyping, and
the material engagement of making is
also beginning to be seen for its
contribution to the design of services, less through its pre-designed
proposals
than as an acknowledgment of participating materials and
formatting co-designing in the situation and network
where people and
material meet, align, and make each other (Eriksen 2012: 24). These recent
contributions on
co-designing by Akama and Prendiville, and Eriksen, share
similarities with the emerging field of design
anthropology in which
anthropology and design are converging to combine their shared human-
centeredness through
anthropological concepts and design practices.

Prototyping

A service prototype, as defined by Stickdorn and Schneider (2010: 192), is

“a simulation of a service experience.
These simulations can range from
being an informal ‘role play’ style conversation, to a more detailed full-
scale
recreation involving active user participation, props and physical
touchpoints” (see Figure
3.2). Blomkvist and Holmlid (2010) explore what
service design practitioners mean by service prototyping and
describe the
prototyping process. They discover that definitions vary considerably and
also identify how the
improvisatory nature of prototyping may draw on
“everyday objects or a deliberately constructed artifact or
social interaction”
(ibid.: 8). Most significantly, and linking with the definition from Stickdorn
and Schneider,
they discover that prototyping is a highly collaborative effort
and the success of the service depends on that
collaboration.

Limitations of service design practice and the need for service

design research

In a relatively short period of time the application of design methods within

the public sector, both to improve
and to create services, has prompted
criticism that there is very little reliable evidence available to evaluate
the
results delivered through these creative practices (Mulgan 2014). This issue
was also raised by Cook (2011:
157) who notes how the Design Council’s
DOTT Cornwall project

included in its legacy, visible outputs from a project which usually

took the form of continued thinking, ideas
and practice that are
used by project participants, and/or people who become champions
for co-design and
disseminate the related methods and tools within
their organizations and communities.
Figure
3.2 Paper prototyping is used for
conceptualizing digital touchpoints.
Photo: Alison Prendiville.

For Cook, this focus on the visual outputs is not evaluative enough as most
service design projects, by their
very nature, have some form of visual
outcome. Instead she provides alternative frames of evaluation that
demonstrate the adoption and replication of a project’s outcome in a new
context (ibid.).
Recent research by the Service Design Research UK Network (Sangiorgi
et al. 2014) has also
identified the lack of rigorous research into the
implementation and impact of service design. Within the
report’s
discussions healthcare presents specific challenges to the adoption and
implementation of quality
improvements through co-design with different
stakeholders (Macdonald and Robert 2014: 36). As Bate, Mendel and
Robert (2008) have indicated, barriers to implementation are shaped by
“less well attended issues such as
culture, language and cognition, identity
and citizenship.”
Prior to service design’s establishment as a subfield of design, Sangiorgi
(2009) notes the contribution made by
a number of key design academics
from the 1990s onwards (Hollins and Hollins 1991; Buchanan 1992;
Manzini 1993;
Erlhoff et al. 1997). These individuals have been credited
with defining and describing
the changing nature of design and the
emergence of a new design agenda (Meroni and Sangiorgi 2011: 9). Early
on
Hollins and Hollins (1991: 58) acknowledged the lack of a model for the
design of services and the need for them to be designed. Alongside,
Buchanan’s “four orders of design” (1992;
2001) recognized design’s
ability to “address systems and environments that consist of information,
objects,
human interactions and more general roles” (2001: 12). Manzini’s
contribution to the early discussions on the
design of services drew
attention to their potential “to move the system of production and
consumption towards
environmental and social sustainability” (Pacenti and
Sangiorgi 2010).
As already noted, service design’s emergence also reflects different
European perspectives (Wetter Edman 2011:
62). In Italy, its origins can be
attributed to architecture and interaction design with three interlinked and
overlapping areas of research: investigations into product service systems;
investigations into social
innovation; and sustainability (Pacenti and
Sangiorgi 2010: 26). In particular Sangiorgi links service design’s
origins
with interaction design (2009: 416).
In Germany the emphasis has been on services as a product, seeing them
as objects of a design process with less
emphasis on their specificity
(Sangiorgi 2009: 416). In 1995 Brigit Mager became the first professor in
Service
Design at Köln International School of Design and in 2006 the head
of the SEDES research center for service
design research at the University
of Applied Sciences Cologne (Wetter Edman 2011: 60). By 2004, service
design’s
growth in both the practical and academic fields resulted in the
formation of the Service Design Network, which
is a collaboration between
Köln International School of Design in Germany, Carnegie Mellon
University in the USA,
Linköpings Universitet in Sweden, Politecnico di
Milano and Domus Academy in Italy (Segelström 2013: 22). This
network
formulated a definition of service design that was to become the “Service
Design manifesto” (Wetter Edman
2011: 60):

Service Design addresses the functionality and form of services

from the perspective of clients. It aims to
ensure that service
interfaces are usable, and desirable from the clients’ points of view
and effective,
efficient and distinctive from the suppliers’ points of
view.

Reviewing the Service Design Network website at the beginning of 2015,

the definition has been expanded beyond
the nature of service interfaces to
include a much broader remit of service design’s role in organizational
structures and practices in the delivery of effective services.

Service design is the activity of planning and organizing people,

infrastructure, communication and material
components of a
service in order to improve its quality and the interaction between
service provider and
customers. The purpose of service design
methodologies is to design according to the needs of customers or
participants, so that the service is user-friendly, competitive and
relevant to the customers.
(http://uk.service-design-network.org)

In addition to the Service Design Network’s most recent definition of

service design, there are many others that
have been generated over recent
years by service design consultancies, design organizations, educational
institutions, and individuals. Many of these definitions have features in
common, but it is important to
recognize that the definitions are constantly
evolving as service design
continually repositions itself and expands its
disciplinary borders.
As a relatively new subfield of design research, service design has been
building a research foundation that,
according to Blomkvist, Holmlid and
Segström (in Stickdorn and Schneider 2010: 308), can be categorized into
five
trends. The authors contrast earlier research, which mainly focused on
establishing and justifying service
design’s existence, with its current state,
where its subject matter is expanding to include:
• Design theory, whereby the fundamental questions of service design and
the language
of Service on Co-Creation are explored.
• Management, with a focus on learning from integrating with existing
discourses on
services within services management and marketing.
• A systemic approach where the focus is on product service systems.
• Design techniques used in service design projects.
• Case studies where the practice of service design is examined
(Blomkvist et al. 2010).

It should be noted that although there are plenty of published case studies in
service design, relatively few of
them present results that have been
subjected to academic scrutiny (Blomkvist et al. 2010:
308; Wetter Edman
2011: 62).
The transformative character of the design object for Wetter Edman
(2011: 68) means that designers increasingly
engage in issues of
organizational and behavioral change. For Sangiorgi (2009) this change
takes place at
individual, organizational, and societal levels. The report
Restarting Britain 2 (Design
Commission 2013) addresses how design “can
be applied to different levels of transformational challenge:
redesigning
individual services, redesigning policies and moving beyond the idea of
discrete services and
redesigning what organizations as a whole do, i.e.
systems-level design” (ibid.: 29). However, the report also
notes that, up
until the point of publication, it remains far easier to achieve the small-scale
repurposing of
services than to deliver large-scale organizational change. A
contributing factor that may assist the delivery of
a systems-level design is
identified by Sangiorgi, Prendiville and Ricketts (2014: 4) who see the need
for a
better understanding of existing organizational design practices within
institutions and for a move away from
design-centric perspectives. The
work also identifies how service designers are now working at different
levels
within client organizations, developing varying kinds of relationships
with their clients and dealing with
diverse types of projects (service
redesign, behavioral changes, or setting up of new services) (ibid.: 3). For
example, the authors identify how service design, as a recognized discipline
that focuses on improving customer
service interface and interactions, is
now expanding to explore and contribute to the ideation of new service
configurations and business models, which increasingly touch on issues of
organizational and social change.
Junginger (2007) suggests that if
designers are aware of the different ways institutions change, it will
enhance
their ability to reflect on their own design efforts. However, until
recently, little attention has been paid to
either the different ways in which
service design agencies work, or the impact their work has on the client
organization, or the levels of service innovation achieved (Sangiorgi et al.
2014).
Drawing back to services as part of the human condition, Blomberg and
Darrah (2014) propose an anthropology of
services in order to better
understand how services affect everyday lives and institutions, and how
services can
contribute to human betterment (ibid.: 123). For the authors,
this approach
explicates the social contexts of co-creation and co-
production, value propositions and service systems, whilst
also paying
attention to the conceptual and methodological messiness of service worlds.
Prendiville (2014) also
proposes an anthropological perspective and
suggests design anthropology be engaged to understand the
significance of
place in the design of community-based services. For the author this
perspective helps reveal the
temporal and fragile nature of place and how
everyday lives are woven into communities.

Conclusion

As a new and emerging area of design, service design’s origins are

interdisciplinary from both practice and
research perspectives. Service
design’s rapid adoption by both commercial and public sector organizations
demonstrates its importance as a dynamic and flexible subfield of design.
This chapter has traced the short
history of service design through the
reconceptualization of services, from service marketing and service
management literature and its early distinction from goods-based models, to
its current service-logic
perspective, with its focus on value creation and
connectivity.
Since the millennium the adoption of service design, first within the
commercial sector and then within the
public-sector, has come about
because of social and cultural changes as well as rapid developments in
technology.
During this period service design has sought to legitimize its
methods and tools by means of case studies as well
as research, although its
output has been acknowledged as needing greater visibility and cohesion
(Sangiorgi
et al. 2014).
 As service design matures as a discipline, its interventions and intended
outcomes are attracting scrutiny. The
term service design tends to be treated
as all-encompassing; although this is helpful from a practice perspective
it
fails to acknowledge the different levels of organizational reach, types of
projects, and intended outcomes of
the design object. This ranges from
stand-alone service redesign, to policy-level projects, via all points
between. Finally, service design is now connecting with anthropology and
design anthropology as a way of ensuring
a more deeply human-centered
approach, and a more critical understanding of service design’s own
practices.

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 4

A CURIOUS JOURNEY INTO AN

UNKNOWN WORLD
Louise Valentine
 

Introduction

Irrespective of the life and times we live in, our quest for achieving,
maintaining and redefining excellence is
an aspiration. Of primary concern
is realising that this goal is often achieved through the application of new
knowledge developed through research and within academia. In the context
of paradigmatic change this
responsibility is heightened. In craft, for
example, a need for the design and creation of new management
framework(s) of excellence has emerged from this increased responsibility
and, with it, the development of
language within practice.
Quality is connected to mindfulness and mindful design proposition(s)
appear through a series of questions,
observations and insights; the vision
develops through a deeply rhetorical conversation, which occurs in multiple
languages through the entire design process (Valentine 2004). As a journey it
is influenced by culture,
economics, politics, society and technology, guided
by values and filled with emotional ‘highs’ and ‘lows’ – a
jamming of
confusion, delight, bewilderment, exhaustion, exhilaration, frustration and
satisfaction. This
creative process of design has received a heavy investment
from academic research (1970–present), across a
spectrum of subjects –
engineering, product, philosophy, management, textiles, interaction, to name
but a few.
The work of the European Academy of Design (EAD) offers a
sense of scale of this investment (for example, Biggs
2001; Chow et al.
2009; Davey et al. 2007; Friedman 1999; Fry 1999;
Gornick 1997; Gowans
et al. 2003; Hekkert 2001; Hollins 1997; Julier 1997; Kristensen
1997;
Strickfaden et al. 2009; Walker 2009; Wood 2007). Outside of EAD, other
notable
works (which are by no means exhaustive) include Richard
Buchanan (1994; 1995), Nigel Cross (1999), Anthony Dunne
(2005) and Bill
Moggridge (2007). The new knowledge has been invaluable in
understanding the nature of design and
its role in contemporary life.
However, as we embrace the second decade of the twenty-first century we
find
ourselves in an era in which boundaries between subjects are
increasingly blurred and their relationships
increasingly complex. The
central challenge, irrespective of profession, is the interdependent and
interrelated
global nature of problems.
The resultant problem space is highly dynamic with an elevated demand
for the effective exchange of knowledge and
skills across cultures and
languages. The environment stresses a rethinking of how we think and why
we think the
way we do. As Einstein famously suggested, if we are to make
progress and
resolve the problems of our time, we need to change our
mindsets from the ones that created the problems in the
first place (Einstein
cited in Calaprice 2005). In design, a transformation in practice is underway
in a variety
of ways, including the development of design as: leadership
(Maeda 2012); a strategic discourse (Alben 2002;
Borja de Mozota 2006;
Cooper, Junginger and Lockwood 2011); an attitude (Michelwski 2015);
new methods focusing
on participation and language (Kimbell 2011; Sanders
2010; Stappers 2008); and alternative methodologies, such as
the work of
Terry Irwin (2012) who argues for design to create a more holistic
framework for practice where
‘people, planet and profit’ is the context for
creating solutions for ‘meaningful change’.
An emphasis on design process
thinking, its underpinning values (such as dialogue, people and serious play)
and
associated design competencies (such as improvisation, visualisation
and teamwork) has resulted in new areas of
practice, such as Service Design,
and consolidation of infant practices, such as Design Management. In the
emerging landscape of design in action, knowledge exchange between
public, private, volunteer and third sector
organisations and across disparate
fields of inquiry is facilitating the creation and application of new values,
public awareness, business and social practices (AHRC 2011; Inns 2010;
Kimbell 2011).
In relation to craft, design process thinking and its associated research
have much to offer the discipline as
the conception and planning of ideas
underpins both fields of inquiry. Also, both are concerned with the
integration of technical, material and aesthetic issues existing within a social,
cultural and philosophical
framework. The key difference between the two
disciplines lies in their approach to manufacturing or production
and, as a
consequence, their related markets and audiences.
Reflecting on design process thinking research is the context for
reconsidering craft in relation to global
change.

Craft: UK context

The craft sector has witnessed an upsurge in critical debate this past decade
and has much to be encouraged by as
a result of the increased attention.
Alongside a plethora of new books dedicated to the debate, most notably the
work of Glenn Adamson (2007; 2010; 2013), is the addition of a first series
of academic journals, namely,
The Journal of Modern Craft (published by
Berg from 2008) and The
Journal of Craft Research (published by Intellect
from 2010). In the UK, new knowledge and greater awareness
of craft was
supported by, for example, the emergence of the Arts and Humanities
Research Council in 2005, the
arrival of Craft Scotland in 2007 and the
continued work of the Crafts Councils in Ireland, London and Northern
Ireland. This recent investment is significant; it denotes a transformation in
attitude and behaviour towards the
leadership and management of craft in
the contemporary world.
From this perspective, it is reasonable to suggest that momentum has
gathered and the issue of why craft needs to
rethink its cultural, economic,
political, social and technological relations with the world is being attended
to. Emerging from this landscape is the exigent problem of mindfully
managing this asset to receive a return on
investment that effectively
supports craft in all its guises, the asset being how craft engages with the
principle of uncertainty. Sustaining change is now the critical challenge.
Part of the sustainability plan, proposes the author, is a new strategy for
craft
education and a new addition to be made to the lexicon of craft, that of
the term critical
craft: an analytical form emerging from the praxis of craft
research, concerned with scholarly questioning
of an idea, its place and
impact in the real world. For the author, the concept of critical craft builds
upon her
design research (2004; Valentine and Ivey 2009) and focuses on
articulating craft as a strategy, developing
reflective management tools to
support innovative practice (2010; 2011; Valentine and Follett 2007;
Valentine
et al. 2007). In this work, the development of new mechanisms for
partnership creation and
relationship management between higher education,
the craft sector and the public is integral, with prototyping a
primary method
for extending the dialogue. That is not to say other people are not engaging
in this emergent
practice or that there is one particular form associated with
it, rather it is simply a means of capturing and
contextualising the change
and a proposition as to how it can be nurtured and extended.

Critical craft: an example

Drawing on the methodological work of sociologists Valerie M. Bentz and

Jeremy J. Shapiro (1998) the author
proposes a shift from the mainstream
model of communicating professional practice; from craft as a material and a
technical concern for making an object, to that of craft as a life-world.1 The
perspective of craft as a life-work is an ethos developed through time in
which market,
method, attitude and behaviour evolve within a mixture of life
experiences, for example, behavioural tendencies,
educational background
and cultural engagement activities. This vista is of craft as a constantly
moving and
continually growing process, with embedded layers of meaning
and experience; layers of activities running
concurrently through the
everyday life of an individual. The deep personal tendencies and individual
values of
the maker are integral.
Adopting the methodology of mindful inquiry (Bentz and Shapiro 1998)
and using a series of interviews and visual
mapping techniques, the layers of
activity affecting an individual’s decision-making are identified. Figures 4.1
and 4.2 reveal the outcome of this process and in doing so, an
example of
craft as a life-world is offered.
The layers of activity in this example are participation in exhibitions,
people, personally designed craft
objects, teaching, sojourns to Japan, textile
fibres and writing (academic and non-academic). Why? It is a
tradition in
craft that the exhibition is a primary means of developing a business and a
place in the market.
This is evidenced in the plethora of exhibitions designed
and staged annually by national institutions and
organisations in Britain,
such as the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Crafts Council, the Dovecot
and National
Museums Scotland. Exhibition is a primary means of testing
the market and selling work, demonstrating artistic
ability, cultural
sensitivity, political positioning, aesthetic sensibility and intellectual
integrity.
Exhibiting is a way of connecting practitioners with the public and
provides an opportunity for practitioners to
assess their personal values and
aesthetic direction. It is a way of educating and exchanging knowledge,
skills
and expertise. It can also be a means of attracting a patron, as is clearly
evidenced in the art world through,
for example, the work of artist Damien
Hirst and patron and collector Charles Saatchi. Therefore, in interview
conversation with this individual craft person, these questions were asked:
To what degree, if at all, do you
participate in exhibition(s)? Do you
perceive this as a key part of your practice? If yes, can you detail the
exhibitions you have participated in? The answers showed that contribution
to exhibitions began in earnest at the
midway point of the first ten years of
practice; that participation increased in intensity as the geographic
spread
became international and cross-cultural.

Figure
4.1 A pin-size overview of the
ten-year visualisation map depicts the craft practice of a
designer of handwoven textiles. From top to
bottom, the concurrent layers of activity that
constitute craft practice are: exhibition participation; the
people in his life who influence
his thinking; the objects of his craft; the teaching undertaken in Britain
and Japan; his
sojourns to Japan; the textile fibres directing his thinking; and engagement with writing
for
academic and professional practice journals.

© Louise Valentine. With thanks to Jeremy Sutton-Hibbert for his photographic contribution.

People are influencers; they listen and question our ideas, helping us to
see, for example, assumptions, glitches
and alternative perspectives more
clearly. People are also supporters, encouraging us to accept challenges and
to
persevere when we are tested. Therefore working with the craft designer,
the questions were asked: to what
degree, if at all, do people influence key
decision-making in your craft thinking? In the intimate space of
developing
an idea, do you allow people ‘in’ to your process and, if so, who are they?
People were a definite
part of the craft dialogue for this individual and
seventeen people were cited as having direct influence, with
three of these
people being credited for deeper, sustained impact.
Objects are the end result of the craft process of making. They are the
primary vehicle for entering a market and
establishing a position within it.
The mainstream categorisation of craft objects includes basket weaving,
ceramics, glass, jewellery, silversmithing and textiles. What objects have
resulted from your process of making
and in your mind exemplify your craft
in each year? In this example, handwoven textiles (produced by the maker in
Britain) were made to create products such as fashion accessories and
garments. Industrially woven textiles
(designed in collaboration with a
Japanese company and manufactured in high volume) were also created to
service,
for example, the European haute couture market.
Teaching is a recognised means of generating income for craft
practitioners, most often in a part-time capacity.
This can be partially
attributed to the fact that in Britain today, annual income for the majority of
professional craft practitioners is approximately £16,000, which is
significantly less than the national average
wage, which currently stands at
£22,568 (www.ons.gov.uk
statistics for July 2011). Teaching is also a means
of developing abilities to communicate ideas, project manage,
inspire
people, learn new skills, access high-end technologies and network. Part-
time teaching was identified as
a form of practice within this woven textile
designer’s portfolio and was duly mapped in the associated year(s),
across
the ten-year framework. It essentially featured from the very beginning of
their professional practice and
steadily gained significance over the ten years
to the point where undergraduate teaching is a fixed aspect of
their work.
Figure
4.2 A snapshot (of four of the ten
years) visualisation map or ‘cultural enrichment cycle’ for
the woven textile designer, created by the author,
allowing greater detail to be observed.
The visualisation map offers an alternative viewpoint from which to
understand the term
craft practice.
© Louise Valentine. With thanks to Jeremy Sutton-Hibbert for his photographic contribution.

In British higher education environments (i.e. in the universities in which

this teaching sits), research is an
embedded feature. Subsequently, in
questioning the role and impact of teaching on craft decision-making, the
activity of writing was identified as a reflective tool through which the
designer developed his practice. Both
academic and industry writings were
identified as ways in which decision-making for craft was supported. This
aspect of practice appeared only latterly in the individual’s work, but
(through questioning) the personal experience was found to have impacted
significantly on their understanding of
the values underpinning his craft
practice, specifically collaboration, prototyping, time, repetition and
intimacy.
Inspiration comes in many guises and within contemporary UK design
and craft education, developing cultural
awareness and experience is directly
nurtured as a way of understanding what it is to be inspired and be
inspiring.
Has the ability to inspire and be inspired been nurtured in the designer’s
professional craft
practice? If so, how has it? Travel was identified as a
means through which inspiration was cultivated through
the woven textile
designer’s sojourns to Japan. But to what degree did it feature? A substantial
and sustained
investment of time was made through living in Japan and
working with international Japanese textile designers and
manufacturers,
leading to a unique cross-cultural collaborative methodology for woven
textiles design. The
methodology values hand-produced and industrially
manufactured designing in equal measure, with knowledge from
processes,
markets and technologies working intimately together to create
contemporary design(s).
Natural and man-made fibres in their raw state, such as abaca, banana,
flax, paper, linen and silk, were also
identified as a key means through which
inspiration and ideas were fostered in this craftperson’s thinking. The
specific types of fibre were subsequently identified and visually mapped
along the timeline. They are a central
tenet of their voice and often lead
decision-making across the entire process, from conception to planning to
realising a physical craft. The palette of fibres is relatively small, with eleven
identified over the ten-year
period. It contains predominantly natural fibres,
all purposefully chosen for their behavioural tendencies and
personality
traits. These materials are seen to reflect the values underpinning the
individual’s practice, such
as authenticity, integrity, longevity, sustainability
and beauty.
In constructing a ten-year timeline of professional craft a new definition
of craft practice emerges, in which it
is represented as a multi-dimensional,
interconnected, living process; a dynamic series of related activities and
competencies, nurtured through time to facilitate creative, cultural, economic
and/or spiritual wellbeing. This
process of analysis widens the concept of
craft.
Arguably, such visual redefinition affords the practitioner a means by
which to understand development in their
craft and offers a framework for
supporting growth. It offers a means through which to engage and reflect on
why,
how and what they are making. It potentially facilitates how the level
of innovation in practice can be
heightened and hindered and where
change(s) could be made to enhance the craft. For example, let us take the
constructed map in Figure 4.2 to demonstrate where a reflective
conversation could begin:
what circumstances do you operate under most
effectively? What are the key competencies within your practice? Are
these
all of your professional competencies and, if not, which one(s) are not
captured in the map? In observing
your recent practice can you identify
whether the journey is linear, moving in a forward direction, laterally or
backwards? Is this how you would like it to proceed?
The ten-year visualisation map encapsulates the working life and
environmental constructs in a practitioner’s
work. The model has the
potential to act as a management tool for ongoing use by practitioners to
enable them to
reflect critically, to understand how they operate within
certain parameters and what effect(s) apparently
disparate elements have on
their practice and, to what degree if at all, the level of innovation in their
craft
is progressing.

Making changes in craft education

In the twentieth century the mainstream approach to production was for a

craftsperson to take sole
responsibility; this essentially underpinned the craft
methodology. Indeed, the aforementioned woven textile
designer operates, in
part, using this mainstream model. Over the course of the author’s research
into ‘Mindful
craft: past, present and future practice’ (2005 to 2010), a
number of observations were made on developments in
craft practice,
including the introduction of co-production and community involvement in
the creation of ideas
and their final forms (White 2010); the employment of
co-creation, where new work is developed collaboratively
(Marshall 2007;
Chicks on Speed 2010) and across cultures (Parry-Williams 2007); use of
craft knowledge as a
means of designing with interactive technologies
(Kettley 2007; Wallace 2004; White and Steel 2007); the
remodelling of
computer programs to produce individually crafted objects using CAD-CAM
(Masterton 2007); and a
general increase in the use of highly sophisticated
technologies to design and manufacture one-off or small
batches of objects
(Bunnell et al. 2007; Mann 2010). These new developments indicate to a
degree, and for some craft practices, a lessening of the idea of skilful making
as a prerequisite of future
craft. It also opens up the craft debate, enabling
broader and more open methodologies for craft to engage with.
Craft practice has changed and the disciplines of design have changed.
The established disciplines include (but
are not limited to) visual
communication, industrial design, interior design, architecture and
interaction
design. And the new disciplines include design for service,
design for innovation, design for experience, design
for transformation and
design for sustainability (Sanders 2010). Inherent in this shift is a greater
emphasis on
social innovation in and through design. We see, for example
through MIT’s ‘Future Craft’ programme (Bonanni and
Parkes 2010), the
impact of digital media on product design, whereby new methodologies
address

the fundamental problem of what should be made and how to make

it … [they] consider how the processes of design
and production can
be used to reflect new social values and to change dominant cultures
of practices …
addressing design as both a process and a result of a
process.
(Bonanni et al. 2008: 2)

Collective intelligence and deeply participatory ways of identifying and

solving problems are now the norm in
design. This is both a strategic and an
operational shift. But what is the impact of this transformation on craft
education where design is a fundamental part of the methodology? What
new strategies need to be created to
support craft practice and the future craft
sector? I propose that this is a leadership issue and suggest design
management as a suitable lens through which to observe, audit, reflect and
transform the practice of craft
education. There is a fundamental need to
make sustainable connections between arts organisations, businesses,
charities and education that are focused on the business of programmes of
learning for future craft education.
There is a responsibility for research to
offer educational institutions a return on investment in terms of
pedagogy.
The impact of craft and design research has, arguably, yet to be fully
considered in this way in
Britain. Yet, if it is not, research cannot help the
sector and the professional practice of craft. It is
suggested that the co-design
and development of a new strategy for craft education arguably lies in the
spaces
between each stakeholder in the sector.
At the moment a British craft practitioner (for example, a jeweller or a
textile designer) receives traditional
design training in an undergraduate
programme of learning and, should they opt to engage in postgraduate study,
is often encouraged to move away from this practice and advised to work
towards the aforementioned new
disciplines of design, such as design for
services or innovation. Here, in this learning space, many of the
making
skills specific to a craft are shelved and, as a result, the investment in
developing the practice of
craft is diluted. It is incumbent on us to ask what
value this brings to craft business rather than assume it is
helpful and
effective in terms of performance and excellence. Are we inadvertently
undermining craft by not
offering a graduate programme befitting craft in
the twenty-first century? How should we co-create programmes of
learning
that combine the principles underpinning craft business practices with new
markets and their associated
values?
The development of method(s) for craft is recognised and attended to in
British design education (such as
interdisciplinary working or new digital
manufacturing methods) and, without undermining the significance of this
development, it is arguably insufficient as it avoids the issue of strategy in
craft education. Subsequently, the
context for evaluating new forms of
design in craft practice remains unresolved. Indeed, it is unattended to in
any
meaningful way and, to a degree, the problem of overproduction and mass
consumption remains – albeit in a
different form (i.e. process). If the
problems of the modern world are increasingly chaotic, then a key
responsibility is to deepen knowledge and understanding of why and how
craft practice contributes to and lessens
the chaos. At present there are two
identified and interrelated missing discourses in craft education that can
potentially develop understanding of this future direction: management and
innovation.
This chapter presents the challenge for designers and craft education in
Britain as being more complicated than
simply understanding the industrial
context of a shift from manufacturing to service, where traditional subjects
such as advertising or graphic design or product design, including textiles
and jewellery, have moved from being
a concern with art to a concern with
science. It is essentially a proposal for cultural change where leadership
for
craft and the language of craft are directly incorporated into higher education
research and teaching
programmes; a mindset more befitting the problems of
the day.
In closing, there are two management suggestions made in this chapter.
The first is for there to be a shift in
communication, to view craft as a system
rather than a market, method or object, a series of dynamic interrelated
processes occurring on multiple levels in different time frames, often with
conflicting agendas. The second
suggestion is for craft to extend its dialogue
and engage directly with the discourses of innovation and
management to
create effective evaluation matrices. Through further development of the
concept of critical craft,
the author seeks to investigate this hypothesis.

Note

1 A life-world is essentially the world of everyday life. For

example, the author’s life is situated
within the field of design, as she trained as an industrial designer
(textiles) and has developed her
visual thinking through interactive media over the past decade. Richard
Buchanan’s philosophy of
design has shaped her knowledge of design and her understanding of its role within
contemporary
society and culture. Buchanan’s work emphasises the rhetorical dimension of design thinking and
is
discussed in the context of the liberal arts. He articulates design as both a language and a meta-
language.

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 5

DESIGN DECISION-MAKING
Christopher Boyko, Yi-Chang Lee and Rachel Cooper
 
 
What is a design decision one may ask? We are critically aware of the results
of design decisions, indeed
countless books, papers and the popular press
comment on design artefacts, on products, on architecture, on
fashion and
analyse all aspects of their design. Much work exists on the design process
(Cross 2007), design
methods (Jones 1992), and how designers think
(Lawson 1980). However, there is little specific knowledge of the
anatomy
of design decisions. How do they really occur and can one be specific about
when a design decision occurs
and who actually has made it?
First we must be clear what we mean by design and how we will consider
the topic in this chapter. Generally
design means ‘to plan or mark out’
(Concise Oxford English Dictionary 2015), an activity
everyone does daily.
More specifically, the verb ‘to design’ in a professional sense means to plan,
mark out and
create something in response to an idea or a problem.
Traditionally this has been in relation to something
tangible, such as a
product, place or message, but has more recently encompassed less tangible
outcomes, such as
services or policies (Bason 2014; Meroni and Sangiorgi
2011). And, as Potter (1980) states, everyone is a
designer but some do it as
a ‘profession’ and are trained to consider all the elements that make up
facets of the
design activity.
In this chapter we first consider how decision-making theory can help us
understand design decisions. We then
look at what a design decision is when
it is undertaken by a ‘designer’ (someone who makes design decisions in a
professional capacity as a trained designer).
However, we will see that there is a continuum between the trained
designer and others who make choices during a
design process. Thus the
decision-making process becomes increasingly complex and opaque in terms
of our ability
to understand it and allocate responsibility for design
decisions, as is illustrated in the later part of the
chapter.

Decision theory

The word decision comes from a Latin verb decidere, which means to cut
off. The word
decision is defined in the Concise Oxford English Dictionary
as ‘a conclusion or
resolution reached after consideration’ as well as ‘the
action of deciding’.
Decision-making itself has been subject to significant analysis and
discourse. For the purposes of this chapter
the field of business and
management is a useful place to start. Here numerous definitions of
decisions have been
proposed. Harrison (1999: 555) defined decision as: ‘a
moment, in an
ongoing process of evaluating alternatives for meeting an
objective, at which expectations about a particular
course of action impel the
decision-maker to select that course of action most likely to result in
attaining the
objective’. Baron (2008: 600) echoed Harrison’s definition that
decision is a moment of selection that is
supposed to meet an objective and
defined decision as ‘a choice of action – of what to do or not do. Decisions
are made to achieve goals, and they are based on beliefs about what actions
will achieve the goals.’ However,
others see decision-making not just as a
sudden transaction, commitment or simple action of choosing among
alternatives, but as a process that occurs over a period of time (Cooke and
Slack 1984: 4; Robbins 1988: 92).
Srinivas and Shekar (1997) defined a
decision-making process as ‘a set of actions and dynamic factors that begins
with the identification of a stimulus for action and ends with the specific
commitment to action’. Furthermore
Nutt (2006) defined decision-making as
‘made up of activities that span intelligence gathering, direction
setting,
uncovering alternatives, selecting a course of action, and implementation’.
There have been attempts to classify decisions. Simon (1960: 11)
proposed a distinction between ‘programed’ and
‘non-programed’ decisions.
Much of the literature in this area presents different terms, such as structured
and
unstructured decision-making (Srinivas and Shekar 1997: 100; Harrison
1999: 19; Zabala-Iturriagagoitia 2012: 34).
Gorry and Morton (1971: 28)
developed Simon’s concept of classification into three categories:
unstructured,
semi-structured and structured decisions. Harrison (1999: 21)
stated that what those several classification
schemes have in common can be
reduced and divided into two categories:

• Category I decision: structured, programmable; routine; generic;

computational;
negotiated; compromise.
• Category II decision: unstructured, non-programmable; unique;
judgemental; creative;
adaptive; innovative; inspirational.

Harrison (1999: 21) also claimed that Category II decisions are the very
essence of
management and differentiate management from other
occupations. One might also argue that design decisions belong
in the main
rather than the second category.
The process of decision-making has been examined most often in the
context of the organisation or group, for
instance, Langley et al. (1995: 261)
suggested that decision-making means ‘periods of
grouping followed by
sudden sharp insights that lead to crystallization’ (cited in Mintzberg and
Westley 2001:
90). Simon advanced three essential phases in the decision-
making process: intelligence – finding occasion for
making a decision;
design – finding a possible course of action; and choice – choosing among
courses of action
(Harrison 1999: 4; Courtney 2001: 18). According to
Drucker’s (2007: 305) research, there are five distinct
phases within the
decision-making process and time should be spent on the first three phases,
especially on
defining the problem:

• Defining the problem: finding out what the ‘critical factors’

are, then
determining the conditions for its solution.
• Analysing the problem: classifying the problem and finding the
facts
that show which data are relevant.
• Developing alternative solutions: it should be an invariable
rule to
develop several alternative solutions for every problem.
• Finding the best solution: there are four criteria for picking
the best
from among possible solutions – risk, economy of effort, timing and
limitations of resource.
• Making the decision effective: applying the decision by other
people to
make it effective.
If we come back to design and compare the various stages of the design
process with Drucker’s stages of
decision-making, they are very similar.
Lawson (1980) proposed a typical design process as follows: 1) analysis;
2)
synthesis; 3) evaluation; extended to 4) revision; and 5) implementation (see
also Tovey 1997). More commonly
used today is the Design Council’s
(2006) double diamond of ‘Discover, Define, Develop and Deliver’.
However,
this does not take into account the nuanced design decisions that
are taken at every stage of the process and
every level of an organisation.
Thus we have design decisions within decisions.
A significant amount of research has been done to find an optimal model
for group and organisational
decision-making (Likert 1967; Vroom and
Yetton 1973; Hatvany and Pucik 1981). Vroom and Yetton (1973: 248)
developed five decision-making models based on different problematic
situations:

• Un-participative model: you solve the problem or make the

decision
yourself, using information available to you at the time.
• Little-participative model: you obtain the necessary
information from
your subordinate, and then decide on the solution to the problem
yourself.
• Much-participative model: you share the problem with the
relevant
subordinates individually, getting their ideas and suggestions without
bringing them together as a
group. Then you make the decision, which
may or may not reflect your subordinates’ opinions.
• Group-participative model: you share the problem with your
subordinates as a group, obtaining their collective ideas and suggestions.
Then you make the decision, which may
or may not reflect your
subordinates’ opinions.
• Perfect-participative model: you share the problem with your
subordinates as a group. Together you generate and evaluate alternatives
and attempt to reach agreement
(consensus) on a solution.

There is considerable disagreement among researchers about which kind of

model of decision-making is most
effective and efficient in specific
situations. Very often it is related to individual style and organisational
culture. Beach and Mitchell (1978: 439) asserted that choosing a decision
strategy depends on the ‘type of
problem, the surrounding environment, and
the personal characteristics of the decision maker’. The problems and
environments a decision-maker faces are very varied, but a personal
decision-making style can be explained and
framed by Brousseau et al.’s
(2006) theory, which separates decision-makers into four
styles based on low
and high use of information against single versus multiple options:

• Decisive: people value action, speed, efficiency and

consistency. Once a
plan is in place they stick to it and move on to the next decision.
• Flexible: people focus on speed, as with the decisive style,
but here the
emphasis is on adaptability. They quickly change course if need be.
• Hierarchic: people analyse a great deal of information, expect
others to
contribute and will readily challenge others’ views, analyses and
decisions.
• Integrative: people tend to frame any situation very broadly;
they make
decisions that consist of multiple courses of action and a wide range of
viewpoints before arriving at
any conclusion. This style is naturally a
‘design’ style of decision-making.

To take this further, in his research in the construction industry Woodhead

(1999) classified four roles in the
decision-making process related to
transforming proposals into funded construction projects. These roles offer a
different way of considering the groups involved in decision-making within
this context and are as follows:

• Decision-approvers: people who authorise decisions and assign

funding
for major capital investments; often board members or those who sit on
capital expenditure committees;
use their position to ensure the
sustainability of their organisation and to protect the interests of
shareholders and key stakeholders.
• Decision-takers: people who meet often with the development
proposal
team; often senior managers and sometimes executive board members or
those who sit on capital
expenditure committees; use their position to
ensure that high-quality proposals are submitted to
decision-approvers.
• Decision-shapers: people who develop the proposals and whose
work is
approved, rejected or deferred for revision by decision-takers and
decision-approvers; seen as the expert
focus group and tend to be from
construction-related backgrounds (e.g. architects, engineers, quantity
 surveyors); ensure high quality proposals go forward for approval, thus
achieving project delivery.
• Decision-influencers: people with different roles in the
pre-project stage
(e.g. local authority planners, residents); may include people who are
internal and external to
the project who may have some influence,
formally or informally, over the development of the proposal.

In Woodhead’s (1999) classification for the construction industry, the

professional ‘designers’ are the
decision-shapers (e.g. architects). Yet each
of these decision-makers could be making design decisions,
especially if we
take into account Gorb and Dumas’s (1987: 150) notion of ‘silent design’.
Taking all the dimensions of decision theory that we have discussed above
it is possible to develop a frame
through which to consider decision-making
and, for the purposes of this chapter, design decision-making. This
includes
the focus of responsibility, the design process stage, the classification of
decisions, the approach
(participative/non-participative), the role of
decision-makers and the style, as illustrated in Table 5.1.
Walsh et al.’s (1992) four Cs of design indicates that decision-making is
critical in the
process of design and can be undertaken by both the individual
and the group (see Table
5.2). Indeed design decision-making works on
many levels of detail and complexity. This can be illustrated by
looking at
three design situations: the designer-maker, the product designer and urban
design.
Table 5.1 Framework of
decision-making classification.
Source: Yi-Chang Lee and Rachel Cooper.

Table 5.2 The four

• Creativity: Cs of
Design.
creation of something that has not existed
before (ranging from a variation on an
existing design to a completely new concept)
• Complexity: design involves decisions on large numbers
of parameters and variables (ranging
from overall configurations and performance to components,
materials, appearance and methods
of manufacture)
• Compromise: design requires balancing multiple and
sometimes conflicting requirements (such
things as performance and cost; appearance and ease of use;
materials and durability)
• Choice: design requires making choices between many
possible solutions to a problem, at all
levels from basic concept to the smallest detail of colour or
form
Source: Walsh et al. (1992), p. 308.

Designer-maker decision-making: from individual to group

Adair (2007: 110) argues that the skills a problem solver needs centre on a
particular field, whilst a
decision-maker needs much wider-ranging skills.
Designers, however, are both problem solvers and decision-makers
and,
even though their work forms a particular field, it requires wide-ranging
skills. When a designer puts
pencil to paper, cursor to screen, or hand to
material, they begin the exploratory yet intellectual phase of
responding to
the stimulus and information upon which a decision is made. The degree to
which this is explicit
and tangible often depends on the context or the
discipline and therefore can be both a Category
I and Category II type of
decision (see Table 5.1). Design as a
field is extremely diverse; designers
operate at different scales, from the lone designer/maker to the product
designer working with forty or more designers in a team. The model of
decision-making may range from
non-participative to perfect participative,
and the designer may take on all the decision roles or only one.
In making decisions about the creation of a new artefact, be it a product, a
building, a fabric or a piece of
clothing, designers are trained to deploy all
aspects of their personal sensitivity to the world around them.
They gain an
understanding of aesthetics through intense and conscious study of the
natural and material world,
of history, of cultural languages and through
interpretation. Using all five senses, they recall and deploy this
knowledge
during the design process. Many people refer to this as an
empathic
understanding of materials, processes and people (Press 2014).
Designer-makers tend to work intimately with their materials, their
inspiration coming both from external
stimulus and from the process of
making. For instance, potters who make on a potter’s wheel use their hands
to
form the shape of the pot, making slight design decisions as the wheel
turns and the clay is forming shape. After
training and experience those
decisions are intuitive. Concerned with shape, density and texture, they are
not
only a response to aesthetics, often the maker’s own personal choice, but
also a response to knowledge of what a
buyer of such pots will like.
In response to the times, technologies and social practices, the designer-
maker’s practice has changed. First,
many designer-makers have turned to
the digital, initially using CAD and CAM and then 3D printing and related
technologies. This means they have moved from a hands-on decision-
making relationship with materials to one in
which knowledge of both the
materials and the technologies requires some forethought and planning.
Chris
Bathgate, a self-taught metalworker, machinist and machine-builder,
was quoted (Hanus 2014) as saying of adapting
or reprogramming digital
technology:

It forces us to justify the creative choices we make … What once

might have been a matter of instinct or gut
feeling – reaching for a
particular tool, for example – becomes an analytical process [and, in
the end]
dedication to logistical problem solving can foster an
appreciation for our creative intuition … as we are
forced into
logically assessing what our gut is telling us.
In one sense we might classify this as Category I decision-making (see Table
5.1).
Whilst designer-makers, and indeed artists, work with technology to make
their own creations, in some cases
technology requires the co-operation and
collaboration of a number of skills and knowledge bases. For that reason
designer-makers often join forces. Sara Robertson, who has a background in
printed textile design, and Sarah
Taylor, an optical fibre specialist,
collaborated on ‘Digital Lace’ (see Figure 5.1). Their
project uses smart inks
and fibre-optic technologies, to create ambient materials that respond to heat
by colour
change and light emission. The designer-makers tend to work in
creative harmony with discursive and iterative
decisions, based on common
objectives. Sara Robertson (2015) explains,

The decision-making process in the development of ‘Digital Lace’

was tacit to some extent but as two of us were
involved a lot was
discussed, tested and re-iterated based on those tests. We were able
to take more risks, as
we were two minds and four hands for
problem solving.

Furthermore, as designer-makers move away from their solo situation they

are, in fact, not making alone. Rather,
there is a trend towards some taking
the role of ‘curators of technologies, materials, tools and practices, as
much
as an originator’ (Press 2014). This has been enabled by the growth in social
media, the ability to form
networks, to convene workshops and to share
knowledge, techniques and skills, both digitally and physically.
Despite the
immersive nature of the digital, in effect the desire ‘to make’ has generated
interest in both
digital and physical making emerging from the hackathon
movement into the makerthon, resulting in design jams and
maker spaces,
where the activity of ‘making’ generates rapid and collaborative design
decision-making. But how do
those decisions get made? Little work has
been undertaken to understand this process in design jams. Research so
far
indicates they are not focused on making design decisions, rather they are
about tackling and understanding
problems and problem solving through
learning from each other and, as a result, learning how to make design
decisions as a group. This takes us into the domain of group decision-
making.
Figure
5.1 ‘Digital Lace’. Sarah etching
the optical fibres to release light.
Courtesy: Sara Robertson/Sarah Taylor, 2015.

In the realm of designer-makers we can see that decision-making operates

across the whole design process on an
individual and group level. The
decisions move from tacit, intuitive and unexpressed (Category
II decisions)
to more explicit, analytical and shared (Category I decisions) and are
also
influenced by the nature of the individuals involved, their interpersonal
styles and potential leadership
styles. The roles they adopt are very
dependent on their working relationships, together they will be
decision-
approvers, shapers, takers and influencers.

Product design: individual, group and organisation decision-

making

Product design and similar fields (industrial, graphics, packaging and service
design) move beyond the boundaries
of the designer-maker or maker
collaborations, into more formal relationships with commercial
organisations. In
these situations designers either work within or as
consultants to the organisation to develop new products and
services. In this
case we are looking at individual design decisions operating within a group
or organisational
situation. In most cases this involves making decisions not
only about the design of an artefact but also about
the management of a
design project. Managing a design project also means managing design
decisions during the
design process. The outcome of a design project
depends heavily on design decision-making activities (Schade
et al. 2011).
As Deck (2002: 165) asserted, ‘phase-based go/no-go decision-making is the
glue that holds the new product development together’. Product design is a
part of new product development. Therefore the product design process can
be seen as a process of accumulated
decisions.
Some design decisions are not made by the organisation’s design team.
Gorb and Dumas (1987: 150) used the term
‘silent designer’ to describe non-
designers who make important design decisions. For example, deciding
which
designer should be responsible for the project is a critical design
decision that could significantly influence
the outcome.
A substantial body of research related to design decision-making focuses
on how to evaluate alternative solutions
in the final design stage (see Xu and
Tang 2007; Besharati et al. 2006; Bonnardel and
Sumner 1996; Sen and
Yang 1994). This points out that the evaluation of final options is important.
For example,
Huang (2004) argued that there are at least three important
design decision points within an industrial design
process: the verification of
formal design drawing; the verification of mock-up; and the verification of
test
production. However, critical design decision-making points do not only
exist here; Huang (2004) asserted that
each phase within a design process
will produce several solutions while an optimal one will be chosen for
developing the subsequent stages. The decisions during the design process
are actually all important, especially
the early design decisions that have a
significant influence on the following design decisions, as well as on the
success of the new product development (NPD) project (Schade et al. 2011).
It is clear that the design process of individual design decision-making sits
within the overall product
development process. This can be illustrated by
any analysis of how a designer works in collaboration with other
disciplines
in the product development process. Lee (2015) studied the actions and
decisions of the designer as
an action researcher and provides insights into
the detailed decisions of the designer in relation to other
people he was
working with throughout the development of products. In one example the
designer/action researcher
illustrates how he used a mind map (see Figure
5.2) to decide the principal design issues
that were used to inform his design
of an electronic counter for a small company.
 In Figure 5.3, the generation of concepts, he illustrates some of the
eighteen various
concepts developed and also the decisions about shape and
function made by the designer. For instance, decisions
on shape were
informed by external imagery, such as from brands like Nike, as well as
from a consideration of
function: ‘combining the ideas of handy shape,
irregular shape, and rubber for easily holding the counter and
easily
identifying and pressing the buttons’ (ibid.: 290).
‘Owing to the client’s preference, most of the colours of the solutions in
the design proposal were black and
blue’ (ibid.: 296). Figures 5.3 and 5.4
illustrate how the primary
decision on the resulting product was informed by
the designer but taken by the client.
The client selected solution E, for the following reasons: 1) the client
liked the colour combination (black and
blue) of solution E; 2) the client
thought the tooling cost of concept E was the cheapest in the design
proposal;
3) the concept had a tick symbol on the top of the shape. Then the
client informed the designer he had changed
his mind from solution E to
solution A because of the manufacturing cost. The client’s contractors had
told him
the estimated tooling cost of solution A was cheaper than for
solution E. Solution A was the client’s second-best
choice based on
aesthetics in the design proposal. Lee (2015) categorised the decision-
making at this stage in
the design process as more participative and that the
decision-approver and taker was the client, the
decision-shaper was the
designer, and the decision-influencer was both the contractor/manufacturer
and the
designer.
Figure
5.2 Mind map used by a designer in
the generation of ideas for an electronic counter.
Drawing by Yi-Chang Lee.

This is just one example of design decision-making between the product

designer, one other person and external
advisers. Obviously, when we look
at product development in large manufacturing companies this process is
magnified significantly. For instance, Samsung has a number of design
departments as part of a much bigger NPD
development process and
therefore part of more complex decision processes. This is why so much
work over the
years has been applied to understanding and managing the
new product development process (Cooper 1986) and
understanding who
makes decisions and when. The introduction of stage gates into new product
development in the
1980s was an attempt to manage decision-making and
move it from what was called over the wall decision-making, in
which the
design was developed then thrown ‘over the wall’ to engineering or
marketing to take further, with
little or no understanding of why decisions
had been made. As a result these decisions could be easily changed,
often
resulting in the loss of design integrity and the original response to the
problem. However, the NPD stage
gate process only brings the different
perspectives together, enabling a more common understanding of the
alternative perspectives. An understanding of how detailed design decisions
are made during the product
development process in large organisations is
still very vague; yet it is increasingly crucial to ensure that
ethical, global
and social responsibility issues which can be driven by design are
maintained during the life
course of a product’s development. This is
amplified when we consider another design arena in which many
individuals
and organisations are involved.
Figure
5.3 (a–k) The generation of
concepts in the design of an electronic counter.
Drawing by Yi-Chang Lee.

Figure
5.4 Modified concept E (left) and
modified solution A (right).
Drawing by Yi-Chang Lee.

Urban design: design decision-making within a system

Urban design moves us to a situation in which the designer is working not

just in collaboration with an
organisation, and teams within that
organisation, but also within a wider system of actors, all of whom get
involved in design decisions. Indeed, there are multiple design decisions and
multiple stakeholders.
Work undertaken by Boyko et al. (2010) illustrates the complexity of such
a situation. The
researchers analysed three development sites over different
periods of time to better understand, among other
things, who the decision-
makers were. The sites included: a prospective urban regeneration site in
central
Salford, followed for three years; a retrospective study of a repair and
recovery neighbourhood in Sheffield,
followed over twenty-five years; and a
retrospective study of a mixed-use, infill development site in London,
followed for ten years.
Using Woodhead’s (1999) classification, all four types of decision-makers
could be found across the three case
studies:

• Decision-approvers in the public sector were elected representatives on

local
authority planning boards. They took written reports from the
decision-takers and made informed decisions about
whether or not to
 proceed with an urban development. Decision-approvers in the private
sector were financiers and
landowners who would sanction the decision
to spend money on a planning application and, if successful, the
construction of the development.
• Decision-takers in the public sector were people from local authority
planning
departments or other governing bodies (in central Salford this
was an urban regeneration company that ran a
design competition for a
new vision for the area) which create reports for the decision-approvers.
In the private
sector, decision-takers were development site owners or
development firms.
• Decision-shapers varied, depending on the case study. For central
Salford the
decision-shapers were members of a design team who
entered and won an international design competition to take
forward the
vision for urban regeneration (e.g. architects, town planners,
urban
designers). For Sheffield it was public and private landowners who
helped develop initial designs and plans
for the neighbourhood, lending
ideas that would shape the renewal process. For London, private sector
architects
and designers guided designs and plans for most of the infill
project, with a registered social landlord involved
in shaping the
affordable housing component of the mixed-use scheme.
• Decision-influencers were local residents, local businesses, community
groups and
third sector organisations. They were external to the main
decision-making bodies (e.g. local authorities and
private sector
development firms), yet had some influence on the decisions being made
(see Table
5.3).

In urban design then, specific decisions about the form of a building or a

place can be strongly shaped by
professional designers, but these are then
influenced and altered by a multitude of non-designers. The idea of
understanding why a decision is made, for what reason and by whom
becomes much more complex. It is therefore more
difficult to track the
integrity of the design decision and maintain it over the life course of a
project. For
example, if a specific design decision made by professionals
includes a certain type of lighting under Design
Against Crime principles
(Davey and Wootton 2015), and the decision is not documented or tracked,
later decisions
to amend the lighting for efficiency or residential purposes
may make the initial, valid design decision
redundant.
 Conclusion: understanding design decision-making

It is clear that design decision-making operates on various levels. For the

purpose of simplicity one might
isolate design decisions that address
aesthetic, emotional, spiritual and other similar domains to which
individuals
often resort from their intuition and tacit knowledge as one level. A second
level would include the
more functional aspects that require technical
knowledge of, for instance, ergonomics/user needs, material
qualities,
engineering principles and production requirements (e.g.
manufacturing,
construction, service, policy). A third level represents the intervening
variables that relate to
achieving both explicit and implicit goals, such as
social, ethical, environmental and economic issues. Taking
these into
account alongside the numerous variables that contribute to how, when and
by whom a design decision is
made (as shown in Table 5.1), means that
design decision-making is an extremely complex
arena. However, one might
ask why understanding the detail of design decision-making is important. As
consumers
it may be that we want to enjoy the product or experience, take
satisfaction from it and connect it to a
higher-order sense of wellbeing.
However, the more complex the design, the more the integrity of the
decisions is
important for its long-term viability. Design decisions in these
circumstances need a genesis so that the
original purpose is understood and
any later modification either maintains and enhances that purpose or
knowingly
adjusts it. This is especially important in areas such as urban
design or policy design because such modification
or redesign, in ignorance
of the original design intention, can create unintended consequences that do
not
enhance the design. Indeed, they can be harmful and dangerous.

Table 5.3 Urban design

decision-making
Central Salfordacross threeSheffield
case studies Clerkenwell
Decision-
Elected representatives/ Elected representatives/ • Elected
Approvers planning board planning board representatives
• Financiers
• Landowner
Decision-
• Urban regeneration Local authority Local authority case
Takers company planners officers and planners
• Local authority
planners
Decision-
Appointed consortium Private and public land • Architects
Shapers from the design owners • Designers
 competition Registered social
• landlord
Decision-
• Local residents • Devonshire Quarter Local residents
Influencers • Businesses Association
• Key organisations (neighbourhood
group)
• Devonshire Quarter
Retailers Association

In conclusion, in complex, fast-moving environments in which design

decisions (both explicit and implicit) are
taken by both designers and non-
designers, there will be a significant impact upon millions of people in their
current daily lives and for future generations. It is becoming increasingly
important that we understand, and can
make as transparent as possible, the
design decision-making that occurs and understand how it can be enhanced
and
informed for the benefit of humanity and the planet.

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 6

DRAWING THE DOTTED LINE

Lois Weinthal
 

Introduction

In my last year of architecture studies as an undergraduate student, my

degree project advisor told me to use a
dotted line to show movement in my
project to help me overcome a hurdle I had reached in visualizing my
design
process. The discussion took place with trace paper and heavy
graphite pencils for quick drawings as was often
the medium for discussion
between instructor and student. I had known about the dotted line, but I had
reserved
it for formal uses, such as architectural elements that were hidden
behind other elements in a section drawing,
or an element hovering above
the plan cut line. It was a precisely drafted line with alternating measured
increments between solid and void that drove the line. In that moment of
conversation, I tried to convey the
movement of architectural elements, but
not of conventional elements often found in construction drawings.
Instead,
this was out of a need to convey a design process where specific forms
underwent an arabesque of
rotations in order to land in their final location.
There was a need to show movement, which the dotted line
could fulfil
because of its slightly ambiguous nature even though it was grounded in
architectural conventions.
The design process relied upon visual
representation, which, in turn, reinforced a rigorous method where
emphasis
was placed on the development of a process rather than on the
final outcome of architecture. The project afforded
me the time to learn how
to think as a designer rather than perform the prescribed tasks drawn in
construction
documents used in the language of professional practice.
The design process allows for interpretation under the guidance of rules
and notations inherent to a discipline,
lest it stray too far and no longer be
able to perform as part of that discipline. These rules and notations can
also
be understood as tangible and non-tangible characteristics that materialize
as quantitative and qualitative
entities. As designers work through processes
that incorporate these factors, early schematic design ideas are
made visible
by sketches and models that translate the intended final outcome into
scalable, measurable
constructs. The conceptual phase of a design project is
where ideas start to take shape and allow for
disciplinary boundaries to
overlap and share influences. For example, interior design has its own
history,
theory, and tools of production, yet the conceptual design phase
allows for an overlapping of disciplines to
invigorate it. The looseness and
creative process associated with the conceptual design phase is conducive
to
this relationship.
In order to address the overlap of boundaries, this chapter places
emphasis on the notation of a dotted line,
which appears in multiple design
disciplines as a means of informing processes and instructing final
outcomes.
Because of the ambiguous nature of the dotted line, it has a
universal quality that represents the intangible in
order to construct the
tangible. The dotted line can represent the path of occupants through space,
give hints at
architectural elements that are out of view, or represent the
stitch line in apparel construction as a guide for
piecing together patterns.
This subtle notation often falls away after a project is complete, yet its
meaning
endures as it shapes our experience of the constructed realm.
The dotted line is, at the same time, a means for uncovering background
knowledge that informs a design process
on its way to a realizable outcome.
This chapter uses architecture, interior design, and apparel construction as
disciplines that design for the body and use the dotted line in contributing to
the design process. Apparel
construction has one of the most direct
relationships to the body, whereas architecture and interior design
engage
the body by designing for its relationship to objects and ease of flow
through architectural spaces. The
following two sections uncover the use of
the dotted line in these disciplines. To emphasize the design process,
the
dotted line is looked at through the lens of its ability to be dynamic versus
static. Dynamic moments in
architecture and interior design can be found in
the design process, the body in motion, and the dynamic
movements of
architectural elements, to name a few. Dynamic moments of apparel
construction can be found in the
instructional action of folding textiles such
as dart notations, the flexibility of sizing, and tools that
produce dotted
lines. This chapter seeks to understand the role of the dotted line as a
transitional design tool
rather than the product of a final fixed form. To
view the dotted line through the lens of process it is
necessary to understand
its meaning and assigned role in each of these disciplines.

Static versus dynamic

In a “hard-line” architectural drawing, the dotted line represents a formal

role in the finished drawing after
completion of the design process phase,
but during the design process it is often loose and flowing (Emmons 2014:
548). It allows the designer to make ideas visible about how the body
moves through space, or engages
architecture, in ways that the hard-line
drawing makes static. This is not to say that the hard-line drawing
lacks the
set of intriguing lines in process drawings, but they fall into a set of
universal drawing standards
that allow for an objective reading of building
construction as a shared document. The dotted line—as a term used
in this
chapter—acts as a catch-all for the many types of line that appear in
construction drawings and apparel
construction. The dotted line takes on
varying forms of representation, such as any combination of a dash, dot,
and space, but ultimately it stands in contrast to the solid line. In
architectural drawings, line type
conventions can be found in reference
manuals, such as Architectural Graphic Standards,
that have come to
represent a universal language (American Institute of Architects 2007). The
variations in these
line typologies fulfil an important role in confirming that
a design process has been diligently undertaken and
the resulting form is
made evident through the language of construction documents. But, if we
back up a few steps
from the typologies of construction documents, the
accepted norms of drawing conventions find themselves in a
looser state of
representation in the design process (Eisenman 1987; Libeskind and
Eisenman 1983). So, while the sketch-like dotted line may be flowing and
loose in design process
drawings, it stands at attention in the construction
document, often taking the form of structural grid lines or
other accepted
drawing conventions that help guide engineers, builders, and trades.
The interior design process inherently designs for the body since it has a
direct relationship to the
architectural environment and is defined in the
larger context of human factors, an area of study that places
emphasis on
the experience of the occupant. Within human factors are anthropometric
studies that guide interior
designers in the placement of objects in
relationship to the position of the body for the best complementary
range of
motion. These studies then inform the overall placement of objects in the
interior to support the
dynamic movements of the body. A precursor to
anthropometric studies can be seen in examples of the dynamic body
documented in motion through chronophotography, also known as
sequential photography. The most notable of these
images were produced
by Jules Etienne Marey and Eadweard Muybridge in the late 1800s (Braun
1992; 2010). The flow
of the body and the empirical data generated from
chronophotography provide a foundation in this chapter for
revealing the
dynamic relationship of dotted lines to the flow of the body.
The dotted line in apparel construction is a fundamental notation found in
patterns. But, similar to
architectural hard-line drawing, it also has a dual
role of being static and dynamic. Robin Evans, in his essay
“Translations
from Drawing to Building,” highlighted the difference between the
practices of an artist and an
architect. An underlying difference, Evans
argues, is the immediacy with which the artist works directly with the
object they make at full-scale, whereas in architecture, once the design is
finalized through drawings, the
project leaves the hands of the architect and
is received by the builders for construction into full-scale (Evans
1997:
156). Apparel construction has a similar relationship to the artist in Evans’s
comparison, whereby the
process drawing and its notations are full-scale
and continue in their meaning to the finalized garment. In this
process, the
dotted line finds itself dynamic and static at various points along the way as
it goes back and
forth between representation and instruction. The tools and
process of construction rely upon the flexibility of
the dotted line to allow
for articulation in the design process, but as a notation it is static, waiting
for
action to take place. The dotted line is dynamic in the space of process
and dormant in the space of
representation.
By framing the dotted line through the lens of tools and notations, the
opportunity for translating design
processes, and therefore new proposals
for alternative ways of making, come to the foreground. The following
section uncovers the fluid movement of the body as a means for generating
the dotted line where natural forces
are made visible. The appearance of the
dotted line through natural gestures of the body reinforces the role of
the
dotted line as a dynamic notation. Once this relationship between the dotted
line and body are established,
the subsequent section focuses on the dotted
line in apparel construction and the language that emphasizes its
dynamic
role in the process of making.

Tracking the moving body

The dotted line inherently requires interpretation, even as an established

notation in the discourse of
architecture. Adrian Snodgrass and Richard
Coyne’s book, Interpretations in Architecture,
emphasizes the role of
interpretation in the design process and the complexity of approaches that
have informed
design outcomes (Snodgrass and Coyne 2006). More
specific to notations,
Paul Emmons, in his essay “Demiurgic Lines: Line-
making and the Architectural Imagination,” provides an
interpretation of
the evolution of the dotted line as seen through a historical overview.
Emmons reveals how
notational lines in architectural drawings developed
alongside building practices. While line types have come
primarily to
represent boundaries and materials, he explains how many of these line
types have their origins in
the physical act of building, where lines are
meant to mimic materials and forces shown as flow lines that act
upon
buildings (Emmons 2014: 536).
Interior designers anticipate the flow of people as part of the design
process. The dotted line is conducive to
representing this dynamic
movement that breaks from the static notation in architectural construction
documents.
In construction documents, structural elements come to the
foreground as thick solid lines, inherently static,
while the dotted line
bounces back and forth between virtual space and static space. Virtual space
refers to the
space that is out of view, hidden or above. It is there but only
through reference to other surfaces.
One of the primary differences that establishes architecture and interior
design as independent practices is the
ability for architecture to claim the
responsibility for designing load-bearing structures, whereas interior
design
stays within the realm of non-loadbearing. Representation of load-bearing
structures in drawing utilizes
the dashed column grid to locate the static
nature of structures. With the burden of structures removed from the
interior
designer, the role of understanding the fluidity of elements inherent to the
interior comes to the
foreground. These include space planning, designing
for the flow of occupants, and the location of moveable
elements that
include furniture, fixtures, and equipment (commonly referred to as FFE in
professional practice).
Representation of the body moving in space has a history with flow lines
and, subsequently, visualization of the
dotted line. The history of the body
as represented in interiors and architecture reaches back to antiquity and
its
evolution through various forms of mechanical representation. The
architectural historian Joseph Rykwert
provides a concise overview of the
body throughout history in his book The Dancing Column: On
Order in
Architecture (1996). George Dodds and Robert Tavenor continued the
trajectory of the body’s
representation from formal geometric studies to
larger societal influences in their book Body
and Building: Essays on the
Changing Relation of Body and Architecture (2002). Classical examples of
the
body, as seen in the drawings of Albrecht Dürer and Leonardo da Vinci,
set the foundation for subsequent drawings
to build upon. In many of these
examples, the body is static, in order to situate it within geometry, which
aided
drawing the body in perspective (Pérez-Gómez and Pelltier 1997: 29–
43). In the late nineteenth century, a
significant shift took place in
representing the body from static imagery as seen in drawing, painting, and
sculpture, to dynamic forms of documentation made with tools and
mechanical instruments to capture the body in
motion. Marta Braun
researched the approach and development by both Marey and Muybridge to
the use of
chronophotography, in which motion was captured over time.
Marey, trained as a doctor, approached
chronophotography in search of
capturing data directly from the body for medical research. His early
instruments
recorded internal movements of the body, such as the
movement of nerves, but the invention of chronophotography,
which he saw
developing in Muybridge’s work, afforded him the precision needed to
document the moving body in
relationship to motion, time, and space
(Braun 1992; 2010). These works would return to fine arts as seen in the
influence on Marcel Duchamp’s 1912 painting Nude Descending a
Staircase, No. 2, in which,
ironically, chronophotography would lend its
sequential concept back to the static representation of painting in search of
conveying movement. A similar example can be found in the
painting,
Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash by Giacomo Balla, also from 1912. The
painting
captures movement in a similar fashion to Marey and Muybridge,
but in this view of a small dog being walked by
its owner, the movements
of both characters are represented in multiples linked by a sequence of
dashed lines
(Duchamp and Schwarz 1975).
At the start of the twentieth century, chronophotography would be
assigned more robust applications by industrial
designers and engineers
who understood the results of Marey’s and Muybridge’s images as data that
could inform
diagrams used in the design of work environments (Garcia
2010; Pai 2002). The conceptual shift from documentation
to application
revealed the importance of measured variables. These early industrial
designers and engineers
included Jules Amar, who made reference to
chronophotography as used by Marey and Muybridge in the English
translation of his 1920 publication, The Human Motor. He identified the
variables used in
their photographs to document the body whereby white
sticks or stripes against a black background helped indicate
the location of
key areas on the body, such as limbs, joints, and the spine (Amar 1920: 11).
At the same time the
industrial designers and engineers Frank and Lillian
Gilbreth undertook similar motion studies more specific to
work
environments, as shown in their 1917 publication, Applied Motion Study.
The Gilbreths
sought to analyze the motion of a worker in order to improve
efficiency. Early forms of their documentation were
similar to those of
Marey and Muybridge, until they introduced the chronocyclegraph method,
which consisted of
“fastening tiny electric-light bulbs to the fingers of the
operator … whose motion path it is desired to study.”
(Gilbreth and
Gilbreth 1917: 46). As the worker went about his or her task, movement of
the fingertips would be
captured in photography through points of light
relative to direction, time, and speed, resulting in an image of
white dots or
dashes against a darker background (see Figure 6.1). These images were a
turning point for interior designers to learn from since they represented
bodily movement in relation to work
environments. The dotted line would
appear as a direct translation of
bodily movement through an advancement
in tools, technology, and the alignment of workers to a new era of
industrial
processes.
Figure
6.1 The Gilbreths captured the
movement of a hand in fast and slow motion using their
chronocyclegraph method, resulting in dotted lines of
light.
Source: Gilbreth and Gilbreth 1919.

These early images full of dynamic movement were tamed as industrial

designers continued to simplify
representations of the body. The industrial
designers Henry Dreyfuss and Niels Diffrient continued to develop the
body’s range of motion from the 1950s to the 1970s and brought precision
to the body through a universal language
of anthropometric representations
in relationship to the interior, furniture, fixtures, and equipment, as found
in
Architectural Graphic Standards (Dreyfuss 1967; Diffrient et al.
1974;
1981). Dreyfuss and Diffrient formalized bodily movement into two-
dimensional views, such as front, side,
and top, surrounded by arcs, semi-
circles, and lines to show a range of motions alongside measurements. But
the
flow of movement caught through points of light helped ground the
hypothetical gestures of the body in motion.

Apparel construction

In the process of constructing a garment, the dotted line appears in multiple

roles, including instructional
notations on patterns for the tools of making.
The immediacy with which the patterns and tools produce the final
garment
reinforces the set of art-based disciplines representative of those that Robin
Evans distinguishes as
working at full-scale from start to finish. Evans
juxtaposed the process of working at full-scale throughout
design and
construction to those disciplines that work at the scale of a maquette, only
to have the final product
constructed at full-scale by others (Evans 1997:
156). This section on the dotted line in the context of apparel
construction
highlights its dynamic role in conveying instructions from start to finish. In
the previous section,
the dotted line was used to identify the body in motion
as a dynamic force able to generate its own
representation through the use
of points of light. The dotted line is also framed within a dynamic context in
apparel construction. While it is notational, it is also instructional, which
prompts the maker as to how to fold
and sew textiles. In contrast, the
dashed column grid of an architectural drawing is representational and
assists
in locating architectural elements in relationship to one another, but
does not prompt a one-to-one relationship
of working directly from drawing
to making, as clothing patterns do to the final product, without first passing
through a series of increasing scalar interpretations. Simply put, the further
representation is from the
immediate scale of making, the more static the
dotted line remains as a form of representation rather than active
instruction.
The dual role of the dotted line as representational and instructional in
apparel construction will be addressed
first and then segue into the tools
that physically imprint the dotted line on to textiles through the tracing
wheel and sewing machine.
The history of clothing patterns and tailoring reaches back to the Middle
Ages as materials, economy, and
tailoring techniques contributed to the
foundation of guilds (de Alcega 1999). A significant reference in the
documentation of tailoring can be found in the 1589 edition of the Spanish
tailor Juan de Alcega’s Tailor’s Pattern Book (Emery 1999). In the
introduction to the English translation, J. L. Nevinson
emphasized Alcega’s
attention to the economy of textiles through his placement of pattern pieces
so that the
fabric was used in the most economical manner. Alcega’s
drawings do this by showing the layout of pattern pieces
outlined on the
cloth with a solid line, yet dotted lines appear within the patterns as
additional instructions
for tailoring. There is little discussion about the
dotted line but its appearance in the pattern book confirms
the need for an
alternative line type that would continue in the evolution of pattern books
(Hayward
2005).
Figure
6.2 Drafted pattern of ‘The coat,
jacket and riding habit sleeve’. The dotted line allows for
greater fullness as a variation of the sleeve.
Source: Fourier 1895, p. 4.

Three hundred years later, the dotted line would persist as part of the
visual and verbal language, as found in
The Parisian Tailor Complete
Instructor and Practical Guide to Ladies’ Tailoring of 1895
by Paul A.
Fourier. In one example, a pattern for the sleeve of a woman’s coat
juxtaposed the solid line to the
dotted line, where the smallest amount of
textile required to wrap the shoulder was denoted as a solid line, and
a
variation with the most fullness at the shoulder was bound by a dotted line
(see Figure
6.2). At this time, visual and verbal instructions referring to the
dotted line appear regularly throughout
the pattern book (Fourier 1895: 4).
The variation of fitted or full sleeves hints at what would later become
variations in sizes (Emery 1999: 1). Decades later, this simple gesture
would become the standard notation used
to denote the multiple sizes
offered on standard commercial patterns, represented as broken lines
(Reader’s
Digest 1989).
The tracing wheel is a tool used in apparel construction for the purpose of
transferring patterns on to cloth
with graphite paper as the transferring
medium. As the wheel is drawn across the broken lines in the pattern, the
serrated edge of the transfer wheel transfers a set of dotted lines from the
graphite paper on to the fabric. The
act of rolling the tracing wheel across
the surface of the fabric shares a meaning with the word tract, from the
Latin tractus, being the action of drawing, trailing, extension, track, and
space of time
(Merriam-Webster 1981: 241). By definition, the act of
tracing with the wheel shares a similar action to that of
the Gilbreths’
motion study images, with points of light being traced through the air and,
on an even larger
scale, the movement of a tractor across the landscape as a
tool moved across a field leaving an impression. The
field, whether it be a
landscape, air, or cloth is bound together by traces.1 The traces are dynamic
and represent motion, each producing a dotted line through its action.
Returning to Paul Emmons’s essay on “Demiurgic Lines,” he provides an
example of tools used in the making of
dotted lines as part of the drawing-
to-building process in architectural construction. One example makes
reference to the architect Serlio’s method of transferring dots, or points, as
“a common practice to use
spolvero or pricking through paper to transfer
lines on to another surface with a series
of points” (Emmons 2014: 543). In
this example, the tool initiates an action which, in turn, produces the
physical dotted line. The act of physically puncturing paper as a means of
transferring information is inherent
to apparel construction with the use of
the transfer wheel. Apparel construction continues this concept one step
further with the use of a sewing machine that makes a direct translation
from drawing to making (Evans 1997:
157). What starts as a visible dotted
line on clothing patterns transforms into a sequence of punctures made by
the sewing machine.
Whether in architecture or apparel construction, the notation of the dotted
line disappears once the building has
been constructed or the garment has
been assembled, yet hints remain visible as columns in a grid or seam lines
providing the connective stitch.

Conclusion

The previous two sections sought to puncture the silos of design disciplines
as a means of introducing
opportunities for overlap in the design process.
The dotted line appears in many disciplines, and by highlighting its role in
architecture, interior design, and apparel
construction the intent is to
uncover its role in each to expand its application from one discipline to
another.
While the notation has been introduced through the lens of these
disciplines, highlighting its application
specific to the design process is
equally important since it provides a moment for design to be informed by
variables. This simple notation spans conceptual processes to final
construction drawing. It holds a unique
position since it is loose enough to
represent variables yet it is always tethered back to foundations so that it
can return to its established notation inherently grounded in the respective
practices. Tools, materials, and
technology may change, but notations
transcend these changes.
The dotted line has been introduced in this chapter through the lens of
dynamic and static. At the core of
construction documents representing
interior spaces, the static dotted line plays a significant role by conveying
information about what is hidden or out of sight. Architectural drawing
conventions typically take the plan cut
as approximately three feet above
the floor in order to capture the most amount of significant information.
When
needing to show an element out of view, the role is to objectively
convey it by gauging true measurement between
the solid and dotted lines.
The solid line exerts its dominance by referencing what is being cut, while
the
dotted line is secondary, always referencing back to true measurement
as a means of stitching together
architectural elements that have a spatial
relationship to one another. As Emmons describes, “the nature of
making
the dashed lines reveals that they occur on two planes; one is on the
drawing surface and the other is
floating above it” (Emmons 2014: 542). In
architectural drawing, the dotted line helps span the process phase to
final
representation. In the process phase, its ability to represent dynamic forces,
such as the moving body,
allows the dotted line to emerge from activities
that take place in the constructed world.
In apparel construction, representation and instruction co-exist in the
same line and inform the maker which
tools to use to materialize the dotted
line. Not only does it act as representation, it also transforms the
pattern
into construction through the sewing machine and its resulting stitch line of
dots and dashes. At the
same time, the dotted line shares the intriguing role
of informing what is hidden, as found in the notation of a
dart. The dart
represents the location where cloth is to be tucked and folded away to allow
curvature to an
otherwise flat cloth. Where the dotted line in architecture
represents what is hinted at in reference to the
larger drawing, the dotted
line does the same for textiles by instructing the maker on how to
manipulate the
surface of cloth only to be hidden in the garment. In both
disciplines, measurement and location are necessary as
the dotted line
bounces back and forth against the solid line as a way of registering its
location in space.
The foundation of the dotted line in the design process helps promote
disciplinary crossover. As process turns
into construction, disciplinary silos
are formed to help keep the respective professions intact. But before then,
the perforation of silos suggests there are opportunities for one discipline to
inform another, keeping the
design process dynamic.

Note

1 I am grateful to Mark Kolodziejczak, Studio Tractor

Architecture PLLC for introducing me to
this connection.

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 7

THE CRAFT AND DESIGN OF

DRESSMAKING, 1880–1907
Janice Helland
 

Introduction

In 1884 Queen, The Lady’s Newspaper published an account of “Female

Labour in England,”
which suggested there had been a “great increase in the
past ten years in the number of females engaged in
various industries, while
some entirely new classes of female labour have been created.” Queen
compiled its list from the 1881 census (and acknowledged that the census
probably
underestimated numbers): “female bookbinders numbered 10,592,
exceeding the men;” “female musicians and music
mistresses, 11,376;” and,
among others, “workers and dealers in dress, 616,425” (September 27, 1884:
313). Two
years later, another periodical published an article about
dressmakers that claimed a good one might earn as much
as a hundred and
twenty pounds per year while “those at the very top of the tree” could earn
considerably more.
Nevertheless while the magazine touted dressmaking as
a career for women, it reminded readers that the “main
difficulty in the way
of well-bred girls choosing dressmaking as a profession … was the question
of caste.” No
matter how much she might be paid she remained a
tradeswoman, unlike a governess who might earn less but remain
“a
gentlewoman in reduced circumstances” (Lady, December 16, 1886: 476).
These “tradeswomen,” however, were business women who required
considerable skill in the areas of both design and
craft. Patricia Zakreski, in
her exemplary study of nineteenth-century “female artistic labour,” contends
that
“originality in dress design” was highly valued and that “some dress
houses wooed customers by the boast of their
own in-house designers”
(Zakreski 2006: 23–4). Queen, by 1887, had eschewed the “question
of
caste” in order to emphasize the necessity of training, skill, and business
acumen for those aspiring to
become dressmakers (June 11, 1887: 710). This
widely circulated women’s magazine lauded the Society of Lady
Dressmakers as a “practical organisation, conducted on ordinary business
principles,” and supported the society’s
aims to educate working women
“who appreciate the dignity of labour, and are willing to set aside the
prejudices
of caste, and earn their own living in place of being dependent on
others” (Queen, April
9, 1887: 425). In earning “their own living,”
dressmakers required a place in which to work and which could
accommodate assistants. The census, when the name of a dressmaker can be
confirmed, can offer some insight into
these establishments.
For example, the bridal gown for the daughter of the Marchioness of
Londonderry, Helen Stewart, was made by Kate
Reilly, “one of the most
famous firms in London,” and her travelling dress
by Mme E. Durrant; both
shops were located in London’s fashionable West End (Lady’s
Pictorial,
February 1, 1902: 148–50). Together they represented the business acumen
and design aptitude
evident amongst a number of independent women who
succeeded in running their own establishments and training
newcomers to
the trade. Both shops employed senior dressmakers along with younger
women in training to become
dressmakers who specialized in making one
part of the dress. The 1901 census shows that Alice Mary Crouch, for
example, worked at Mme Durrant’s making sleeves for dresses, while Edith
Field and Jessie Lawson worked on the
main or fitted part of the dresses;
however, it would have been the senior dressmaker in the shops who
designed
the garments, possibly with input from Stewart and her mother.
Another London dressmaker, Adaline “Ada” Nettleship, prospered during
the latter part of the century and likely
supported her not-so-successful artist
husband and their children on the proceeds of her business. Most known for
costumes for the theatre, particularly for Ellen Terry, she was, according to
her granddaughter Rebecca John,
“highly determined in all her business
affairs” (1987: 17). Nettleship’s costume for Terry’s performance of Lady
Macbeth in 1888, done in collaboration with Alice Comyns Carr, was one of
Nettleship’s “greatest triumphs,”
according to Terry. “I am glad to think,”
wrote Terry in her autobiography, “it is immortalised in Sargent’s
picture”
(John Singer Sargent, Ellen Terry as Lady Macbeth, 1888–9, Tate Britain).
Another
“magnificent queenly dress,” wrote Terry, was constructed from
“base materials” for Henry
VIII by Comyns Carr (designer) and Nettleship
(maker) (Terry 1908: 350). Terry’s memoir, with its extensive
discussion of
the designing and crafting of her costumes, clearly established the complex
relationships between
patron, designer, and craftsperson. Terry, for example,
was inspired to suggest a design to Comyns Carr and
Nettleship for her Lady
Macbeth costume after she observed a dress worn by Lady Randolph
Churchill at a supper
party (ibid.: 353).
With these examples in mind, this chapter demonstrates that, at least by
the latter half of the nineteenth
century, British and Irish dressmakers were
skilled designers, artisans, and collaborators; that as designers and
craftspeople they successfully operated numerous small businesses in major
British and Irish cities. This calls
into question the historical narrative as
regards their work, which has been tainted by press coverage that
tended to
present a picture of the dressmaker as exploitive and grasping, most
famously illustrated by Punch in its frequently reproduced 1863 caricature of
“Madame La Modiste,” the avaricious dressmaker
who so blatantly exploits
her worker (“The Haunted Lady or ‘The Ghost’ in the Looking Glass.
Madame la Modiste:
We would not have disappointed your Ladyship, at any
sacrifice, and the robe is finished.” Punch, or the London Charivari, July 4,
1863). Although Wendy Gambler (1997) effectively challenged
this
perception of a “female economy of fashion” in her examination of
nineteenth-century Boston, little has been
done to change the perception of
British and Irish dressmakers. Through reference to selected dressmakers
and, in
one instance to a specific dress (designer unknown), the chapter
investigates the concept of dressmaker as
designer, artisan, and collaborator
whose practice was often enhanced by the illustration of fashion in late
nineteenth-century magazines. In addition to partnerships such as the one
between Comyns Carr and Nettleship,
dressmakers often collaborated with
other skilled craftspeople, such as embroiderers. In the examples considered
here the emphasis will be upon the relationship between specific
dressmakers and what might be deemed
“benevolent” organizations, such as
the Royal Irish School of Art Needlework. Such a partnership causes the
narrow definitions of dressmaker and workshop to expand into areas
generally considered philanthropic rather than strictly business. The
emphasis, however, always will be to return to
the materiality of the
dressmaker’s practice (what did she produce and how?), who consumed her
product, and the
link between her object (generally not extant) and sketched
designs viewed by her customers. Furthermore, as
evidenced by Ellen Terry,
and as Mairead Dunlevy has suggested, a reciprocal relationship existed
between patron
and dressmaker; the dressmaker “put much thought into
gowns that were intended to complement the character of the
wearer”
(Dunlevy 1999: 147). In other words, the entire practice of late nineteenth-
century dressmaking might be
considered a multifarious and complex craft
and design venture.
While a reassessment of the dressmaker is necessary, it is crucial to
recognize that exploitation was an issue in
the dressmaking business, as it
was in most nineteenth-century businesses. Christina Walkley’s The Ghost in
the Looking Glass: The Victorian Seamstress (1981) remains one of the most
thorough
accounts of the dark side of the profession; and, more recently,
Christopher Breward reminded us: “The glamorous
setting and fanciful
products of London’s elite dressmaking sector, dominated by women
proprietors in this
period, still disguised exploitive working practices” (2004:
66). Nevertheless, while the degree of exploitation
in any given
establishment doubtlessly varied, the degree of vilification of the female
dressmaker remained
remarkably constant. Walkley even selected the Punch
caricature to grace the cover of her
book. The entire reassessment exercise
thereby must be filtered through a lens that recognizes gender as a
contributing factor to both the plight of the “white slaves of England”
(Zakreski 2006: 26). and the construction
of the heartless “Madame La
Modiste.” Notably, Zakreski, in her discussion of dressmakers, understands
that the
“lonely figure was a popular image for art and literature that, while
extremely pathetic and sensibly moving for
the general public, had little
basis in the reality of the seamstress’s life” (2006: 26–7).
Here, I should like to move beyond the gendered denigration of the
dressmaker’s workplace and construct a
narrative focused upon the person
and her production, accepting that, as publicity about poor working
conditions
escalated, some establishments took care to ensure better
standards while some did not. To do this, I shall look
at selected dressmakers
as case studies to develop a sketch of the design practices and the women
who
successfully engaged in catering to, or directing the taste of, their
undeniably elite customers. As well, Diana
Crane’s contention that the
reputations of court dressmakers, or “simply dressmakers,” were local rather
than
national or international and that in the main “these artisans depended
upon Paris for fashion ideas and
materials” (2000: 137), must be reassessed
in light of traces of text and images that attest to their successful
businesses,
their collaboration with clients, and their partnership with other skilled
artisans such as
embroiderers, all of which suggests their histories require
some scrutiny—they are independent business women and
successful
artisans whose art and industry was recognized by their wealthy patrons.
And, even after the highly
publicized 1863 scandal surrounding the death of
a seamstress in the workshop of Madame Elise of Regent Street
(upon whom
the Punch caricature was based), Madame Elise continued to be patronized
by
Princess Alexandra (Wakeley 1981: 36–54; Strasdin 2013: 180–97),
which may suggest a more thorough investigation
of the workshop may be
required.
In her memoir, Irish aristocrat Elizabeth Fingall reminisced about her
London dressmaker, Sarah Fullerton
Monteith Young, who lived next door
and was thus very convenient: “I could hammer on the wall when my dress
had
not come for a party,” wrote Fingall, “which I frequently did” (Fingall
1938: 220). Most telling is the location
or space occupied by Young, in
South Audley Street, therefore in the midst
of her elite clients. Also
revealing is the description Fingall provides of Young’s practice, which
involved both
original design and copying. She “was an artist and studied
her subject as an artist would” and, according to
Fingall, Young “never had
any models but frequently copied old pictures” (ibid.: 220). Once the fabric
had been
selected (“she would take pieces of lovely material, put them up
against you and study their effect”), Young
would “make the dress and never
tell you in the least what it was going to be like, until it was finished.”
Fingall also credits Young with being “the first to ally fine dainty
embroidery with serge and cotton” (ibid.:
221). Whether or not Young was
“the first,” she certainly provides an image of success. Again, according to
Fingall, Young “made clothes for the ‘Souls’, and for many of the beauties
of the time—Lady Granby amongst
others” (ibid.: 220). Birmingham
Museum holds one of Young’s dresses (designed and made in 1893) that
incorporates a Flower Garden pattern designed by William Morris, which
complements Fingall’s assertion that Young
was associated with the Souls, a
group of aesthetic intellectuals and aristocrats, including Margot Asquith,
George Curzon, and Percy Wyndham, who were entertained by Millicent,
Duchess of Sutherland on Friday evenings in
the sumptuous interiors of the
Duke and Duchess of Sutherland’s London home, Stafford House (Helland
2010:
85–104).
 Elizabeth Fingall patronized another dressmaker, this one based closer to
her home in Ireland: Mary Sims (d.
1897), or Mrs. Sims as she was
consistently referred to in the press. Fingall considered Sims “an artist, and
we
were so many canvases for her to work on” (1938: 60). Frances Gerard,
in Picturesque
Dublin, styled Sims the “most popular of modistes,” graced
with “an inborn touch of genius” (1898: 415). A
close look at Sims provides
an example, or case study, of dressmaker as designer, craftsperson,
collaborator, and
business woman. Her name appears in a Dublin directory
in 1861 as a seamstress and robe maker, then, by 1885, as
a “court milliner
and dressmaker.” A brief reference in the Irish Times in 1886 comments
upon her trip to Paris (April 13, 1886: 7), and, by 1889, Sims had obtained
custom from royalty: the Princess of
Wales wore an “exceedingly
magnificent” Court dress “made for her in Dublin” by Mary Sims (Queen,
June 1, 1889: 754 and 755). Press comments such as these complement
Elizabeth Fingall’s
observations of Sims as the “famous Dublin dressmaker
… The position of Worth in Paris could not have been more
firmly
established and more magnificent than that of Mrs. Sims in the Dublin of
those days” (1938: 60). Fingall
also confirmed Sims’s trip to London and
Marlborough House to “fit and make” dresses for the Princess of Wales
(ibid.: 60). In 1895, two years before her death, Gentlewoman commented
upon “the
well-known establishment of Mrs. Sims, who, as Court dress-
maker to the Princess of Wales, the Duchess of York,
the Duchess of Fife,
and to the Viceregal Court, has an enviable reputation. Her designs for Court
and wedding
gowns are particularly graceful, and her patronesses include the
best names that Ireland can boast” (supplement
to The Gentlewoman, August
31, 1895: xiv). A year later, when a description and sketch of
the trousseau
gown Sims designed for Princess Maud appeared in the press, her business
was called a “far-famed
establishment in Dawson-street” (ibid., August 1,
1896: 157). Sims also designed and made gowns for the Princess
of Wales
and the Duchess of York in 1896 (ibid., July 4, 1896: 23; August 8, 1896:
205), and she designed
Princess Edward of Saxe Weimer’s dress for Princess
Maud’s wedding (Queen, August 1, 1896:
231).
Mary Sims was not the only Dublin dressmaker to bring design together
with craft. Harriet Manning, whose clothes,
like those of Mary Sims, were
sketched for leading magazines such as Lady’s Pictorial,
Queen, and
Gentlewoman, also appeared in the Dublin directory
as milliner and
dressmaker to the Irish court. Although obviously
responsible for designing
and making numbers of dresses for Dublin Drawing Rooms, she did not
obtain a connection
with royalty. Manning did, however, have a high profile
as a designer for the elite, as evidenced by the
frequency with which
sketches of her dresses appeared in women’s magazines. She also designed
for the Countess of
Aberdeen and, on one occasion, a press back-and-forth
took place with regard to the incorrect attribution of a
court dress made for
the countess. A full-page sketch, “The Countess of Aberdeen at the State
Ball, Dublin,”
graced the cover of Lady’s Pictorial with her elaborate blue
satin and dark blue velvet
dress embroidered with silver being attributed to
Manning (Lady’s Pictorial, March 6,
1886: 205). Another sketch of
Aberdeen in black velvet “adorned with Irish lace” also appeared in March,
again
attributed to Manning (ibid., March 13, 1886: 225). A few days later
the magazine published a letter that
reported an error—the black velvet dress
was not a Manning design but had been made by Sims (ibid., March 27,
1886: 264).
This mistake on the part of Lady’s Pictorial, and its correction, alludes to
the
importance of published sketches; they acted as sophisticated
advertisements for dressmakers’ businesses and
complemented the more
elaborate and spectacular performance enacted at Court Drawing Rooms
(Helland 2002).
Queen, The Lady’s Newspaper noted that the first Drawing
Room of the season, typically
held in February, demonstrated “what the
fashions are to be” as well as giving women the “opportunity of doing
homage to Her Majesty” (Queen, February 18, 1888: 205). The display was
a
nineteenth-century version of the red carpet, or a precursor to the catwalk.
Although court dresses, specially
designed and made for these spectacular
performances, conformed to a set of prescribed patterns, there were,
within
the decorative accoutrements, variations and alterations that provided an
endless range of spectacular
characteristics. Styles were similar; the details
were infinitely different and signposted the special talents of
the
dressmakers. A court dress replete with Celtic-inspired decoration designed
for the Countess of Aberdeen by
Mary Sims (see Figure 7.1) appeared in a
full-page sketch along with a more traditional
court dress worn by a Miss
Bigwood (Queen, March 3, 1888: 258). Both shared particular
characteristics with all other court dresses: the trains were “at least 3/1/2
yards long and 3 breadths wide” and
the “hard and severe” bodices were
“either pointed back and front with folds and no tuckers, or they are trimmed
stomacher fashion with elaborate beading and embroidery” (Queen,
February 11, 1888: 175).
Frequently, large bows or floral and beaded
epaulettes were placed on the shoulders and, while the backs of the
dresses
were generally full and plain, the fronts were elaborately draped with lace or
the most costly
embroideries; such a mass of artificial flowers could be
added to the bodice that the dress might, according to
the Queen’s fashion
critic, “resemble the wall of a conservatory” (ibid.)
The dresses (and this was certainly true of Miss Bigwood’s dress) often
included large ruches of flowers placed
above the hem of the gown, with
garlands carried up the side and huge masses of blooms placed on the panels,
“just as if they had been gathered with a lavish hand, and pinned in
carelessly, their exuberance kept within
bounds by long ribbon looped bows”
(Queen, March 3, 1888: 258). Shoes and stockings
matched the dresses; the
“plumes and the gloves must, according to regulation, be white; or, in
mourning, black”
(ibid.). The dresses used so much fabric and intricately
worked panels that following the event it was possible
“to arrange for three
evening gowns to be made from one court costume” (Queen, February
11,
1888: 175). To complement sketches, contemporary fashion magazines
described selected dresses in great
detail, carefully itemized the materials
used, the extravagant details of the dress, the elaborate accessories,
and
frequently included the name of the designer/maker.
Figure
7.1 Court dresses worn by the
Countess of Aberdeen and Miss Bigwood at Her Majesty’s
Drawing Room, February 24, 1888.
Source: Queen, 3 March 1888: 258. Toronto Public Library

Mary Sims, established as a court dressmaker by 1888, designed the

elegant
and distinctively Irish gown for Ishbel Aberdeen. This particular
dress attracted much attention in the press,
assisted in no small part by the
tasteful sketch. The dress included panels embroidered by women at the
Royal
Irish School of Art Needlework; some of Sims’s most memorable and
significant dresses incorporated sumptuous
panels embroidered by women in
the school. In this instance the dress and train of cream Irish poplin were
“embroidered in gold from Celtic designs copied from old Irish manuscripts”
(Queen, March
3, 1888: 258). Sims frequently collaborated with non-profit
organizations; as late as 1897, the Duchess of York,
when she made her state
entry to Dublin, wore a Sims dress with a “deep yoke of exquisite gold
thread and sequin
transparent embroidery, executed by Lady Duncannon’s
cottage workers at Garry Hill” (supplement to The Gentlewoman, August 21,
1897: 7).
The embroidered panels on Lady Aberdeen’s 1888 gown, however, were
unusually dramatic and contributed to a unique
dress, even though its basic
form (length of dress, length of train, fitted waist) followed court-dress style.
Certainly, Celtic designs were rarely, if ever, found on such dresses and the
collaboration between dressmakers
and Dublin’s art needlework school—
both Mary Sims and Harriet Manning incorporated panels embroidered in
the
school into their dresses—signalled a synergetic relationship between
craft and design manifested in elaborate
gowns worn by the elite and
frequently sketched for women’s magazines. The same year Sims
incorporated the Celtic
panels into Aberdeen’s court dress, Harriet Manning
included embroidery on a “costume” designed for the
Marchioness of
Londonderry. According to Lady’s Pictorial (and sketched for the magazine),
Theresa Londonderry “turned out very smartly in a Manning costume of
black Sicilienne … the gilet was of white satin, embroidered with forget-me-
nots” by the Irish School of Art Needlework
(Lady’s Pictorial, May 5, 1888:
487).
The Royal Irish School of Art Needlework had begun as part of the
Queen’s Institute (Dublin) but drew its
inspiration from the Royal School of
Art Needlework, which opened in London in 1872 under the patronage of
Princess Christian who, “with great energy and thoughtfulness,” brought the
school to its “state of prosperity”
(The Times, January 7, 1874: 12). The
Dublin school’s inception can be dated to December
1876 when Princess
Christian “consented to become” president of an Irish school with the
Duchess of Abercorn its
vice-president, along with a committee of “forty-
three distinguished ladies” (Irish Times,
December 2, 1876: 2). In 1886 the
immensely efficient and talented Baroness Pauline Prochazka (d. 1930)
became
manager of the school. She had won prizes for her drawings (Irish
Times, March 9, 1875:
5), and was considered “an accomplished
watercolourist and needlewoman” (Bowe and Cumming 1998: 183). An
article
that appeared in Queen attributed the school’s excellent work to the
“happy genius for
designing of its manager the Baroness Prochazka” (Hart
1886: 742).
Thus by 1888, when the Countess of Aberdeen appeared at court in her
sumptuously embroidered Celtic dress, the
school had established a working
relationship with Dublin dressmakers that extended into the twentieth
century.
In 1906, for example, the countess ordered from Mrs. Switzer (of
Switzer & Co., Grafton Street, Dublin) a
“beautiful Drawingroom Gown and
Train which is to be embroidered in the Royal Irish School of Art
Needlework”
(Irish Times, December 24, 1906: 6). A significant display in
1907 again highlighted the
productive relationship between the school and
dressmakers, signifying the rapport between design and
craft as manifested
in gowns. Switzer & Co. exhibited seven dresses in
the Irish International
Exhibition, considered by the Irish Times the pièce de resistance of the
exhibition, “not to have been excelled in the recent Paris Exhibition:
the
Embroideries were all executed by the Royal Irish School of Art
Needlework” (June 7, 1907: 8).
While some garments designed by Dublin dressmakers can be identified,
the makers named, and working relationships
with the school of needlework
confirmed by accessing various accounts in women’s magazines and
newspapers,
another dress, skillfully embroidered by Irish workers, cannot
definitively be linked with the name of a
designer. Because, however, it
exemplifies a relationship between craft and design, it is worth examining in
detail. Characterized as a “Costume Embroidered by Irish Girls for the
Countess of Aberdeen” in Lady’s Pictorial in July 1888 (see Figure 7.2), the
women who worked on the
dress did so under the auspices of the Donegal
Industrial Fund, a non-profit organization founded in the 1880s
and operated
by Londoner Alice Rowland Hart. “The girls,” readers were told, “must be
of Irish nationality … and
all of those who were taken were sorely in need of
occupation. They are trained for a month, and are then set to
work, on day
wages, at ecclesiastical or artistic embroidery of a high class; their work,
however, being closely
superintended” (Lady’s Pictorial, July 7, 1888: 12).
The embroidery was designed at London
House, the Donegal Industrial
Fund’s London storefront located in Wigmore Street. The work was
“superintended” by
accomplished arts and crafts embroider Una Taylor.
According to Alice Hart, who sought to address poverty and
promote Irish-
made materials and objects, the dress served a purpose beyond its elegance:
“It is earnestly to be
wished that such efforts as this may be encouraged by
ladies giving orders for embroidered dresses at home,
instead of buying the
flimsy and extravagant productions of foreign markets” (ibid.). Silver
embroidery,
“medieval in character,” lavishly covered the panels and sleeves
of the chic black satin dress and even extended
to the shoes (ibid.).
The sumptuous black and silver dress was sketched by the talented French
émigré artist Georges Pilotelle,
considered the leading fashion illustrator of
the late nineteenth century. He presented the dress as fashion on
an
elongated, archly posed body that barely suggested the aristocratic presence
of the countess. The elegance of
late nineteenth-century fashion consistently
was enhanced by representation in women’s magazines particularly
when,
like this, it was sketched by Pilotelle: “it is to him that we owe the chic
elegance of the modern modes”
(British Biographical Archive, 1709: 107–
10). Although Ishbel Aberdeen was photographed wearing the black dress
for a spread done by Gentlewoman which highlighted former vicereines of
Ireland
(supplement to Gentlewoman, August 31, 1895: iii), the photograph
did not showcase the
gown to the same extent. Pilotelle’s sketch performed a
much more intense form of advertising, in this case for
Alice Hart’s Donegal
Industrial Fund rather than a specific dress designer—although not
mentioned in the article
and, given Hart’s earlier artistic training, she may
well have designed the dress herself or it may have been
designed
collaboratively.
The dress itself, without the name of a specific dressmaker attached,
nevertheless stands in for or represents
items produced by nineteenth-
century dressmakers who were, as noted in an 1887 article, “Lady
Dressmakers,”
published in Queen, “educated gentlewomen of small means”
(April 9, 1887: 425). It also
highlights the collaborative aspects of
dressmaking, the designing and making of a beautiful object constructed
by
more than one hand, frequently illustrated as desirable or even coveted,
which often incorporated input from
the consumer. The process and the
product of late nineteenth-century dressmaking tell us much about the
rapport
between design and craft, collaborative practices, and fashion.
Whether the object be an extravagant gown for the
stage or a chic dress for
royalty, it is only through an assemblage of parts and skills that the whole
assumes
its own character which, in turn, can reveal a historical narrative.
Figure
7.2 Costume embroidered by Irish
girls for the Countess of Aberdeen.
Source: Lady’s Pictorial, July 7, 1888: 12. Toronto Public Library.

References

Bowe, N. G. and Cumming, E. (1998) The Arts and Crafts Movements in Dublin and
Edinburgh,
Dublin, Irish Academic Press.
Breward, C. (2004) “Popular Dressing: 1890–1914,” in C. Breward, E. Ehrman and C. Evans (eds),
The London Look: Fashion from Street to Catwalk, London, Yale University Press.
British Biographical Archive, Series 2, 1709, Munich and New York, K. G. Saur.
Crane, D. (2000) Fashion and Its Social Agendas: Class, Gender and Identity in Clothing,
Chicago,
University of Chicago Press.
Dunlevy, M. (1999) Dress in Ireland: A History, Wilton, Cork, The Collins Press.
Fingall, E. (1938) Seventy Years Young: Memoirs of Elizabeth, Countess of Fingall,
London, Collins.
Gambler, W. (1997) The Female Economy: The Millinery and Dressmaking Trades, 1860–1930,
Urbana and Chicago, University of Illinois Press.
Gerard, F. (1898) Picturesque Dublin: Old and New, London, Hutchinson.
Hart, A. (1886) “The Women’s Industries of Ireland,” Queen, December 18: 742.
Helland, J. (2002) “The Performative Art of Court Dress,” in B. Elliott and J. Helland (eds),
Decorative Excess and Women Artists in the Early Modernist Period 1885–1935, Aldershot, UK,
Ashgate.
Helland, J. (2010) “Translating Textiles: ‘Private Palaces’ and the Celtic Fringe, 1890–1910,” in J.
Potvin and
A. Myzelev (eds), Fashion, Modern Identity, and Interior Design since 1740, Aldershot,
UK, Ashgate.
John, R. (1987) Caspar John, London, Collins.
Strasdin, K. (2013) “Fashioning Alexandra: A Royal Approach to Style 1863–1910,” Costume, 47(2):
180–97.
Terry, E. (1908) The Story of My Life (2nd ed.), London, Hutchinson.
Walkley, C. (1981) The Ghost in the Looking Glass: The Victorian Seamstress, London,
Peter Owen.
Zakreski, P. (2006) Representing Female Artistic Labour, 1848–1890: Refining Work for the
Middle-
Class Woman, Aldershot, UK and Burlington, VT, Ashgate.
 Part II

DEFINING DESIGN: OBJECTS,

SPACES
 8

ARTIFICE, MATERIALS, AND THE

CHOICES OF DESIGN
Robert Friedel
 
 
The fashioning of anything requires a maker to confront substance, to
consider how a material or set of materials
can be shaped or assembled to
affect a purpose. The choice of material is thus one of the first choices of
design. It should not be surprising, therefore, that changing material choices
can be important influences on
design, but the linkages between material
changes and design are not often appreciated in design histories. These
linkages have been particularly important since the middle of the nineteenth
century, when the confluence of
industrialization, scientific and technical
innovation, and the emergence of a culture of consumption upset many
long-standing design assumptions and traditions.
The novelty of the emerging design order of the nineteenth century was
marked strikingly in 1851 in a gigantic
glass building put up for several
months in the middle of London’s Hyde Park. The Crystal Palace was a
remarkable
statement of the possibilities of the new order; almost a quarter
of a million panes of glass were combined with
3,300 iron columns, and
almost 2,500 girders and trusses to make an unprecedented exhibition
space, filled with
air and light. Its designer, Joseph Paxton, was, not
surprisingly, a greenhouse builder, and his genius lay not
simply in the
remarkable structure itself but also in its means of fabrication, for the
Crystal Palace was
through-and-through an industrial product, each piece
fabricated off-site (mostly many miles away in Birmingham)
and then
assembled in less than nine months by simple fitting. While glass was an
ancient material, the recent
removal of the general tax on window glass
encouraged new factory methods, so that the almost twenty-four acres
of
plate glass represented industry’s capacity for providing radically new
materials’ capabilities even in
ancient substances (Davis 1999; Ffrench
1950).
Inside the Crystal Palace there were some 14,000 exhibitors, showing
more than 100,000 objects. While most of
these were conventional in both
material and form, there was plenty of novelty as well. The possibilities of
new
materials and new methods of production were on display everywhere.
Indeed, one of the ostensible reasons for the
“Great Exhibition of the Works
of Industry of all Nations,” to give this first World’s Fair its full name, was
to
instruct craftsmen and industrialists in the best means of meeting the
challenges posed by new industrial
materials and methods, especially in
matters of “good taste” and design. It can be argued, in fact, that our
modern notion of product design was a product of the 1851 Fair, for up to
this point much of what went under the
name of design was little more than
ornament or decoration. As the “Report on Design” that accompanied the
Reports of the Juries of the exhibition declared, “designers are too apt
to
think of ornament before construction, and … to construct ornament rather
than ornament construction.” While
such an approach might work in an age
of handicraft, the report went on to say, in the industrial age this could
not
suffice: “This state of modern manufacture, whereby ornament is multiplied
without limit from a given model,
by the machine or the mould, ought at
least to awaken in the manufacturer a sense of the importance of the first
design” (Redgrave 1852).
In the Great Exhibition, audiences encountered for the first time a new
consciousness of material novelty, which
joined the more familiar new
machines, vehicles, and factory methods as means of distinguishing the
products of
the nineteenth century from the past. Perhaps the best examples
of this were the exhibits of rubber. While
caoutchouc, as the gummy elastic
from tropical trees was called, had been known for more than a century, the
only
widespread use in Europe until recently had been for erasing pencil
marks (hence the name rubber). The
possibilities of using coatings of the
material for waterproofing, or even to make boots, had attracted numerous
experimenters, but it was not until the late 1830s, when Thomas Hancock in
England and Charles Goodyear in the
United States devised means of
stabilizing the substance by heating it with sulfur (a process called
vulcan-
ization), that wider uses became practical. By the 1851 Exhibition
Goodyear, especially, was able to show
a great variety of rubber products,
from inflatable globes and rafts, to hard but unbreakable objects like toys
and buttons (a “plastic wood,” one observer called hard rubber), impressing
visitors with the possibilities of a
truly novel material (Reports 1852).
This consciousness of novelty in materials and the possible implications
for design found wider expression in the
middle years of the nineteenth
century. At the same time, the discourse over design continued to reflect the
tensions that were so manifest in 1851: handicraft versus machinery, skill
versus science, tradition versus
novelty, form versus ornament, imitation
versus authenticity, and artifice versus sincerity. We can see much of
this
captured in the work of one English artisan whose work was almost
certainly on display in the Crystal
Palace, although his name appeared
nowhere. Alexander Parkes was the son of a Birmingham brass worker who
followed in his father’s trade but by 1840 found himself fascinated by the
new art of electroplating. The
availability of reliable electric batteries
encouraged experimentation in using electric current to deposit
precious
metals, especially silver, on to cheaper copper alloys. Silverplate was
already common, but the new
process promised easier and cheaper
fabrication of plated articles. More importantly for Parkes, however, the
technology opened up the possibilities of a higher art. Working for the
Birmingham firm of Elkington and Mason he
described himself as an
“artist” (in his early patents), and devised remarkable techniques for
electroplating
flowers and other fragile pieces of nature. When Prince
Albert visited his employers’ works, Parkes presented him
with a
silverplated rosebud, from which he extracted a tiny spider’s web in silver.
Parkes later began describing himself as a chemist, identifying more and
more with the promise of science for
extending the reach of art. In the
London Exhibition of 1862, Parkes independently displayed a new material
he
had devised expressly for its artistic possibilities, later declaring that he
had been convinced for years “that
a new material might be introduced into
the arts and manufactures, and in fact was much required” (Parkes 1865:
81). He immodestly called his substance “Parkesine,” explaining that it was
made from “pyroxyline and oil,”
combined with a variety of other
ingredients. Pyroxylin was essentially paper reacted with nitric acid—one
form
of a range of products broadly known as nitrocellulose (another form
was
the highly explosive guncotton). The result of Parkes’s process was an
easily colored and easily moldable
substance, immediately recognizable to
a modern eye as a plastic, and, indeed, he is frequently credited as the
inventor of the first modern plastic material. This credit has to be heavily
qualified, however, since Parkes was
never able to solve technical
deficiencies that made his materials highly unstable. Factory production
began in
the mid-1860s, but soon ceased as products were returned warped
and unusable. An assistant of Parkes, Daniel
Spill, attempted to resurrect
the business, adopting the product name Xylonite, and had more success in
later
years, but by that time another nitrocellulose plastic had come to
market, carving out a distinctive niche for
itself (Friedel 1983).
Celluloid was the brainchild of an ambitious American mechanic, John
Wesley Hyatt. He reported later that he was
simply trying to find a
substitute for elephant ivory, which had already shown signs of increasing
scarcity.
Billiard balls, it was said, placed particular demands on ivory
supplies, and Hyatt was inspired to make a
material very similar to Parkes’s
to create a substitute. Hyatt’s experiments in the late 1860s resulted in a
much more stable material, so that his celluloid maintained its shape, color,
and finish. It excelled as an
imitation—at least in appearance—of ivory, and
Hyatt soon devised techniques for it to imitate coral,
tortoiseshell, mother-
of-pearl, and almost any opaque semi-precious material. In its aspirations to
beauty,
versatility, and substitution, celluloid provided the model for the
vast array of plastics that were to enter the
material lexicon in the twentieth
century. In doing so, it also anticipated many of the design challenges of the
plastics—a perception as a cheap imitation, confusion about the most
appropriate form or appearance, and the
marketing challenges posed by
novelty, ambiguity, and versatility (Friedel 1983).
These first plastics, along with the very similar rubber, raised some of the
central issues that new materials
continued to pose for designers. When a
novel substance, with a new combination of properties, appearance, and
cost, becomes available, how is a fabricator to react? By definition, a new
material is a challenge to the
experience of a craftsman or designer, not only
opening up new possibilities, but also posing new risks and
uncertainties.
Over the past century and a half, this challenge has become almost
commonplace, but in the middle
of the nineteenth century it was new and
evoked a range of responses, from enthusiasm to dismay, and even
contempt. The uncertainty that typically surrounds a new technology is
easily forgotten in the flush of eventual
success and acceptance. New
materials pose particular problems for designers, as they can upset a host of
assumptions not only about the forms of objects, but also their functions,
economies, and aesthetics. At the same
time, the makers of new materials
face similar uncertainties about what their material is actually good for. The
makers of celluloid, for example, had to struggle for years—discovering in
short order that, despite appearances,
the material made a terrible billiard
ball, and did not fit into other apparently useful niches. Only through
repeated experimentation did they determine that the imitative flexibility
and the ease of working in sheets and
similar forms readily lent the material
to use in small personal items, such as combs or collars. Further
technical
experiments yielded toys, and eventually photographic film, carving out
valuable but unexpected
markets.
At the same time that Parkes was carrying out his experiments, another
novel material entered the scene—very
different in character but displaying
many of the same challenges for design as the first plastics. The metal
aluminum is the most common metal on earth, but it is locked so tightly
into its mineral compounds that it was
not seen until the early nineteenth
century. Even after the first chemical
extraction of the metal in the 1820s
decades passed until it could be made in any quantity to fabricate. When
Parisian chemist Henri Sainte-Claire Deville announced his “silver from
clay” in 1854 he touted the promise of a
new metal that resisted corrosion
and was far lighter in weight than any of its rivals. By the Paris Exposition
of 1855, Deville had bars of aluminum to display, alongside silver for
comparison. The firm of Christofle was
able to display some small fancy
articles, and a scientific instrument maker fabricated a balance arm of the
new
metal, along with precision weights. While the fancier uses of
aluminum, in large part as a silver substitute,
were most readily displayed,
even more prominent in writings about the metal were characterizations of
it as a
gift of science. An American magazine in 1857 declared,

in this new metal, so long concealed in every hillside, and even in

the very dust of our streets, science seems
about to make over to the
arts one of her occasional bestowments, by which both the
knowledge and power of our
race are, at an instant, so widely
increased.
(National Magazine 1857: 448)

Subsequent Paris Expositions, in 1867 and 1878, were showplaces for the
progress of aluminum, but they also gave
evidence of the material’s
limitations as applications continued to be largely limited to fancy goods
(ladies’
fans, mustard spoons, opera glasses, etc.). Production, almost all of
it French, hardly exceeded five thousand
pounds per year, and the price was
never below twelve dollars per pound (about the same as silver). When it
came
time to place an apex on the Washington Monument, in 1884, it
seemed perfectly suitable to form it as a
one-hundred-ounce pyramid of
aluminum, still precious and exotic thirty years after its introduction
(Friedel
2000).
Just a few years later, the status of aluminum changed dramatically with
the discovery of electrolytic reduction,
which brought the price down in a
few years to pennies a pound. By the mid-1890s, cheap aluminum pots and
pans
began to appear, and outlets for the metal were actually difficult to
find until the emergence of aviation in the
following century. Once the
metal achieved the cheapness that had been long promised and sought, it
lost the
exoticism and preciousness that had actually sustained it for
decades. Experiments continued, exploring
aesthetic, industrial, technical,
and economic niches for the material. Architects found aluminum
conducive to
some of the unorthodox forms that twentieth-century styles
like art deco and internationalism favored. Product
designers explored a
range of uses, from very pedestrian Sears and Roebuck tea kettles, to the
streamlined
appliances of the 1930s. Rival materials like stainless steel, for
the most part, made it difficult for aluminum
to settle into any but the
cheapest rungs on the consumer ladder. With the explosion in applications
for military
aviation during the Second World War, the material truly did
become ubiquitously cheap, and that both opened up a
great range of other
uses, from architectural adornments to zippers, and made it even more
difficult for the
metal to stake out decorative rather than utilitarian territory
(Nichols 2000).
Before the nineteenth century, the selection of materials for an artifact
was generally a simple business. For
most things a small palette of
possibilities presented itself: a few fibers for clothing or furnishings; a few
different woods for a wide range of implements; an even smaller number of
metals for tools, weapons, and precious
objects; and some ceramics or glass
that had properties trumping the
brittleness that characterized those
materials. This palette varied from place to place and from culture to
culture. The economic status or prestige value of a material depended more
than anything else on location. This
was largely the result of resource
endowment, although levels of skill and different artisan traditions could
also be significant. Some societies distinguished themselves for specific
material accomplishments; think of the
porcelain or silk of China or the
steel of Damascus. The growing knowledge of these accomplishments,
combined
with an increasing mastery of navigation and military power,
consciously encouraged Europeans from the fifteenth
century onwards to
enlarge the material possibilities before them and, forcibly if need be, to
commandeer new
resources from weaker societies.
For two or three centuries, this enlargement primarily generated
European adaptations of hitherto foreign
capabilities, so that, for example,
in the seventeenth century, German and other ceramicists were able to
imitate
Chinese porcelains and supply and stoke a domestic demand for fine
“china.” Italian silk-makers similarly managed
to devise their own versions
of a once rare fabric. In the eighteenth century, English and other
metalworkers
were able to devise means of making steel that approached
the legendary qualities of oriental producers. English
and Dutch trading
companies, at the same time, broke ancient monopolies on the provision of
precious and
semi-precious goods, ranging from spices and rare woods, to
cotton and indigo. While these achievements added
greatly to European
wealth, they did not in themselves transform the European material world.
This transformation, by which the materials palette enlarged beyond all
previous imagining, was the product of
three key historic forces that began
to make themselves felt as early as the seventeenth century but which came
into full force about the middle of the nineteenth. The first was that group
of changes in technology and
economic organization that we loosely term
industrialization. The second was the ever-growing power and range of
scientific knowledge and method. And the third was the transformation of
the ways in which individuals, families,
and communities identified and
acted on the wants of daily life, what has sometimes been called the
consumer
revolution. The causes and mechanisms of each of these historic
events have consumed much scholarly effort and
ink and need not concern
us here. But of direct interest are the consequences for the relations between
materials
and design, especially as they unfolded in the years after 1851.
As suggested above, the Crystal Palace exhibition was a direct response
to the perceived challenges of
industrialization. When machines and not
men or women make things, the question emerges about who is then
responsible for design. The notion of a designer independent of a maker had
to be adapted from the world of
architects and engineers, but this realization
set off alarms among the taste-makers of the nineteenth century.
Already,
reaction had set in against the tendency of Victorian builders to use
ornament and adaptations of
historic styles (Gothic, Romanesque, etc.) to
make up for the lack of new creative directions. The Crystal Palace
itself
was filled with examples of similar decorations and imitations in every
category of manufacture, from
cloth to candlesticks. For some, the task was
to educate manufacturers to choose the best of these historic
possibilities.
For others, such as William Morris, the solution lay in recovering what they
saw as the best
values of pre-industrial craftsmen, which often meant
favoring pre-industrial materials, tools, and patterns. For
yet others, the
future lay in a new industrial aesthetic, for which the best contemporary
example might be the
Crystal Palace itself, and the machine tools and other
examples of engineering that made no pretense of pandering
to craft
sensibilities. For these, materials such as the exhibition
building’s own iron
and glass took on a new significance when treated as parts and products of
machinery.
That the study of sciences like physics or chemistry had the capacity to
give rise to new technologies was a
commonplace by the mid-nineteenth
century. The electroplated goods of Alexander Parkes, for example, were
prime
examples. Within the previous decade or so, telegraphy and
photography had emerged as spectacular products of
scientific research.
This latter was, to many observers, the clearest example of science
encroaching on the
bounds of art, posing a challenge to many assumptions
about the limitations and even the functions of art and
design. What
William Henry Fox Talbot had called “the pencil of nature” (1844–6)
evoked the barely comprehensible
power of science to shatter assumptions
about what was, or could be, art, and about what skills were most
relevant
to capturing and rendering patterns and designs. More was soon to come;
before the 1850s were out, the
first synthetic dye, aniline purple or
mauveine, emerged from a London chemistry laboratory. It was the first of
what was to become a flood of new colors, and then flavorings, perfumes,
and pharmaceuticals that originated from
academic and industrial chemical
laboratories over the following decades. More electrical marvels followed
the
telegraph: underwater cables, electric motors, electric lights, and the
telephone were all available by 1880. New
forms of iron, steel, and other
metals and alloys also showed up in these decades. While the laboratory
achievements often outran scientific theory, neither the public nor industry
had any doubt that these were
“gifts” of science.
These gifts, and the factories they fostered, would have had only a
modest influence on society were it not for
the emergence of what Colin
Campbell called “the spirit of modern consumerism” (1987). Like so much
else, the
technical foundations of this consumerism lay in the seventeenth
century, when some European metalworkers, such
as those in Birmingham,
began to turn out quantities of small articles, such as buckles, buttons,
needles, and
toys, that could be sold widely around the country. In the
eighteenth century, some of the larger possibilities,
focussed on large-scale
production and selling, were explored by Josiah Wedgwood. He
transformed the pottery
trade in which he grew up by combining technical
experimentation with a remarkable entrepreneurial flair. Over
the second
half of the eighteenth century, he devised a range of new marketing
approaches that allowed him to use
new mass production techniques to
redefine for large populations the possibilities for ownership of finer things.
He made a range of products, always staking out the high ground for luxury
consumers, but then exploiting the
potential profits of a mass market. By
the end of the century, some of the key elements of modern
consumerism—
print advertising, permanent shops and brands, regular courier and shipping
services—had begun to
transform material life in urban Europe (Campbell
1987; Trentmann 2009).
The design problems of the mid-nineteenth century were largely products
of the confluence of these three forces:
industrialization, science, and
consumerism. The emergence of new materials and their significance can
only be
understood in the context of these forces, both as sources of novelty
and as shapers of the response. The
materials that appeared at the world’s
fairs, from Goodyear’s rubber to the new cheap aluminum at the century’s
end, raised issues for designers that required an adjustment to the new
values of both production and
consumption.
Assumptions that worked in a craft-oriented world no longer held in the
world of machine production. Some
materials, such as most woods, that
were natural choices in many products made by craftsmen, no longer made
sense
where processes of casting, stamping, bending, and drawing were
favored.
Mass production also privileged the precisely reproducible, thus
some organic substances that naturally varied in
their form, hardness, or
durability had to be replaced. Even when natural materials remained, as in
much
furniture making, new processes redefined the materials in important
ways. Thus Michael Thonet’s bentwood chairs,
another important
introduction at the 1851 Crystal Palace, redefined woodwork for large-scale
production, and
showed how modified materials could lend themselves to
new kinds of design approaches (see Figure 8.1). Almost eighty years later,
the Thonet firm led the way in displaying how a classic
design could then
bring a new material to the fore as it adapted tubular steel to bentwood
forms (Ottillinger
2014).
Three key elements typically went into the choice of materials:
appearance, functionality, and cost. New
materials were always initially
judged on these three factors, always in comparison with familiar
substances.
Most often, the substitution of the new for the old was a direct
one, hence aluminum was “silver from clay,” and
celluloid was marketed as
“French ivory.” Such direct substitutions, however, rarely described the true
outcome
of a new material’s introduction. While aluminum was a precious
material, it could substitute for silver, but
this was usually not very
satisfactory, and ceased once the metal was cheapened. For celluloid the
story was more
complicated, as its role as an ivory imitation became
intimately associated with its uses and appearance, from
piano keys to
combs. Even in applications that had never been associated with true ivory,
such as advertising
cards, toys, and other novelties, products were made
with an ivory-like appearance. The ability of this early
plastic to take on a
wide range of colors and effects was initially parlayed into nearly total
dependence on
imitation, ivory being followed by coral, tortoiseshell,
amber, mother-of-pearl, and other valued natural
materials. This
dependence not only eased the way for the material to be used in a wide
range of products,
but it also threatened to trap it in the narrow perceptions
of designers,
manufacturers, and consumers.
Figure
8.1 The bentwood and laminates
used by Austrian furniture maker Gebrüder Thonet made a
traditional material—wood—into a novel one; more than a
half century after the
introduction of the classic Vienna café chair (right), the firm demonstrated the
capacity
to use its design themes with newer materials, as shown in this 1935 tubular steel chair
(left).
Photo: © MAK/Georg Mayer, MAK Austrian Museum of Applied Arts/Contemporary Art.

For the century after 1851, new materials frequently encountered the
dilemma illustrated most clearly by
celluloid: how could a novel substance
establish a role for itself in the world of design when it was largely
perceived as a substitute, often an imitative one? The most important
solution to this problem was also
illustrated by celluloid. In the 1890s,
celluloid began to be made into transparent film, first for amateur
photography and then for cinematography. While its flammability quickly
spurred a search for safer materials, it
became solidly identified with the
new technologies. When aviation began to emerge from a purely
experimental
stage in the 1910s, aluminum found its own special technical
niche, and it too was liberated from identification
as a mere substitute. A
similar pattern characterized many new materials, from synthetic polymers,
like Bakelite,
to novel alloys, like the stainless steels, both introduced in the
1910s. Important new uses often also served to
change the economic status
of a material; special uses enlarged production, typically lowering prices, in
turn
encouraging a wider range of applications. Gradually, designers and
producers alike began to perceive materials
innovations as sources for
important new combinations of functional properties, and they started to
explore more
freely the exploitation of these properties in new applications.
The sources of new materials changed during this period as well. The
pioneers of rubber and celluloid were
largely self-educated mechanics and
craftsmen, working alone to foster inventive ambitions. While as early as
the
1850s trained chemists showed they had a contribution to make as well,
it was not until the twentieth century
that the chemical laboratory became
the expected source for innovations in materials. The first completely
synthetic plastic, Bakelite, was the invention of a trained Belgian-American
chemist working largely on his own,
but subsequent polymers were largely
the product of industrial laboratories. Polyvinyl chloride (PVC), for
example, came from a number of large corporate research efforts in the
1920s. Just a bit later, the first acrylic
plastics (trademarked as Perspex,
Plexiglas, and Lucite), distinguished by their glass-like clarity, came from
still other corporate laboratories. Polystyrene, produced by chemical
companies seeking to use the by-products of
petroleum production,
expanded still further the materials palette in the late 1930s, exploiting
particularly the
possibilities of turning out masses of ever-cheaper products
in bright and distinctive colors. Far from being
bound by the expectations of
imitation, the new plastics thrived on an emerging “plastics aesthetic,”
characterized by bright colors, smooth surfaces, and light weight (Meikle
1995).
The new aesthetic and the new ease with which new materials became
part of the designed world were products of a
range of economic and
institutional forces in the twentieth century. The investment by large
companies in
materials innovation had to be supported by organized
marketing efforts, blurring the lines between material
suppliers and product
fabricators in setting the directions for product design. Such efforts also
fostered the
creation of the new profession of industrial designer, which
came to the fore in combatting the consumption
crisis of the Great
Depression in the 1930s. In turn, the new designers, given new status and
influence over
products and production, sought to exploit the potential of
new materials and new fabrication techniques to make
their creations
distinctive but affordable. Chrome, stainless steel, aluminum, and the new
plastics were put to
the service of a machine aesthetic, in which products
from pencil sharpeners, to washing machines, to railway
locomotives were
made objects with a very conscious artistic appeal. To a
degree, this was
simply an extension and intensification of efforts that dated back to Josiah
Wedgwood in the
eighteenth century, but the combination of large-scale
factory production, mass-marketing, and vastly more
materials to choose
from enlarged the scale and range of design challenges and choices far
beyond past
experience.
As the twentieth century wore on, the materials challenges for designers
took on a new character. After the novel
plastics and metals of the earlier
decades, spectacular new innovations were rarely of great or visible
significance. A few novel fibers joined the ranks of nylon, the polyesters,
and the acrylics that had shaken up
the textile world earlier in the century
but, like most new synthetics in this period, their significance was
largely
limited to the margins. A few “high tech” materials, such as carbon fiber,
were introduced in
applications that could bear high costs, but their limited
use was more striking than their novelty. Laboratories
and entrepreneurs
continued to tout new materials possibilities, but materials stability was
arguably more
characteristic of the decades leading into the twenty-first
century. The automobiles, houses, clothing, and most
other accoutrements
of daily life might look and behave somewhat differently by the century’s
end, but not
largely due to materials changes. Less visible materials
innovations tended to have more impact, so that
semiconductors
underpinning the microcomputer revolution represented perhaps the
greatest material accomplishment
of the later twentieth century. On into the
twenty-first century, the exotic substances that could be fashioned
into
small and efficient batteries, or constitute display screens, both small and
large, were of greater
significance. Biological materials also began to
emerge as an entirely new class of substance inviting
application and
manipulation, most likely in ways that conventionally trained designers
could barely begin to
fathom. Indeed, in the biological realm the very idea
of “material” might require modification, as changeability
and growth,
qualities intrinsic to the biological but very foreign to the ordinary material
world, offer the
possibilities of radical new values for future design.

References

Campbell, C. (1987) The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism, Oxford,
Basil
Blackwell.
Davis, J. (1999) The Great Exhibition, Stroud, UK, Sutton Publishers.
Ffrench, Y. (1950) The Great Exhibition, London, Harvill Press.
Fox Talbot, W. H. (1844–6) The Pencil of Nature, London, Longman, Brown, Green, &
Longmans.
Friedel, R. (1983) Pioneer Plastic: The Making and Selling of Celluloid, Madison,
University of
Wisconsin Press.
——(2000) “A New Metal! Aluminum in its 19th-Century Context,” in S. Nichols (ed.),
Aluminum
by Design, Pittsburgh, Carnegie Museum of Art.
Meikle, J. (1995) American Plastic: A Cultural History, New Brunswick, NJ, Rutgers
University
Press.
National Magazine (1857) “The New Metal Aluminum,” National Magazine 10 (29): 448.
Nichols, S. (2000) Aluminum by Design, Pittsburgh, Carnegie Museum of Art.
Ottillinger, E. (2014) “Thonet, Michael” in Grove Art Online on Oxford Art Online,
Oxford, Oxford
University Press.
Parkes, A. (1865) “On the Properties of Parkesine and its Application to the Arts and Manufactures,”
Journal Society of Arts 14 (683): 81.
Redgrave, R. (1852) “Supplemental Report on Design,” in Exhibition of the Works of Industry
of All
Nations; Reports of the Juries, London, The Royal Commission.
Reports (1852) Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations; Reports of the
Juries, London, The
Royal Commission.
Trentmann, F. (2009) “Materiality in the Future of History: Things, Practices, and Politics,” Journal
of British Studies 48 (2): 283–307.
 9

WRITING THE DESIGN HISTORY

OF COMPUTERS
Paul Atkinson
 

Introduction

To paraphrase a by now well-known story, back in 1975 on the west coast of

California, a group of hobbyists
interested in the latest developments in
electronic computers met in the garage of a suburban house to exchange
stories and information, and show each other the latest pieces of technology
they had acquired and the
adaptations they had made to the same. This was
the Homebrew Computer Club.
One of the early computers scrutinised by this congregation was a mail
order do-it-yourself kit for the Altair
8800, which had featured as the cover
story of the January issue of Popular Electronics
(see Figure 9.1). It was a
fairly basic machine – just a simple steel box with a number of
toggle
switches and LED lights which, when assembled, allowed the user to do
nothing more than use the toggle
switches to program the computer to make
the lights flash as it counted in binary and performed mathematical
calculations.
One member of the club, a certain Steve Wozniak who had been building
electronic projects of his own since
elementary school, saw this as an
unacceptable state of affairs and thought that he could build something much
better. In six months, using the cheapest microprocessor chip on the market,
Wozniak developed a computer that
used a keyboard to enable programming
and a television monitor as an output. With his friend Steve Jobs he
founded
the company Apple Computer Inc. in 1976, used Steve Jobs’s parents’
garage as the company’s headquarters,
and sold the components for around
one hundred and seventy-five Apple I computers in kit form. It was a
well-
received product, despite owners having to make wooden cases for the
computer themselves. Using the money
from selling these kits, the two
Steves went on to design and produce a more commercial and hugely
successful
machine, the Apple ][(or Apple II as it became known) in 1977,
just in time for Apple to become a major force in
the explosion of the home
computer market that occurred that year (Atkinson 2010).
Numerous detailed academic and mainstream accounts of the birth and
history of Apple Computers have been written
over the years, and whole
books have even been written about individual products, particularly the
ground-breaking Apple Macintosh of 1984 (see Figure 9.2). This level of
media attention has
accompanied every step of Apple’s progress on its route
to becoming the largest and most profitable technology
corporation the
world has ever seen. For a company that is notoriously secretive, there is a
huge amount of
information out there about every product they have ever
sold, ranging from official corporate press releases,
journalistic coverage in
newspapers and magazines, academic analyses in books and journals to user
opinion on
numerous blogs. This has been rendered possible largely because
of the unprecedented rationalisation of their
product portfolio.
Figure
9.1 The Altair 8800 on the cover
of Popular Electronics, January 1975.
Courtesy: Erik Klein, Vintage Computers.com
Figure
9.2 The Apple Macintosh,
1984.
Photo: Paul Atkinson.

As an example, let us take a particular point in time. In 2001, Apple

launched the iPod – a device which, although not employing any new
technology, nevertheless completely altered
the way vast numbers of people
engage with music. At the time of its release on 23 October, the official
Apple
website displayed the company’s complete range of hardware as: the
iPod; the iMac; the Power Mac G4; the G4
server; the iBook; the
PowerBook G4; the 22” Cinema Display monitor; the 17” and 15” Studio
Display monitors; the
Apple Pro mouse; Apple Pro keyboard; and the
Airport modem (www.Apple.com 2001). That’s it. A mere twelve products
produced and sold globally. It is a radically
minimalist approach indicative
of Apple, and one which is completely in line with the aesthetics of the
company’s
design philosophy. A highly considered output of very refined
products, each eagerly anticipated by and released
with huge fanfare to an
enormous fan base of ‘Macolytes’. And every time a product is released it is
immediately
splashed across every newspaper and magazine, dissected,
analysed and discussed at length on innumerable
websites, with every
strength and weakness highlighted through social media. It is the kind of
exposure and
reverence that has allowed every product that Apple has ever
produced to become a collectible piece of design
history, documented and
indexed to form part of a coherent, manageable timeline of production and
consumption
that could be, and indeed to a large part has been,
pragmatically displayed in a single exhibition with an
appropriately
considered catalogue.1
This is not the usual state of affairs. Compare the output of Apple with
just one of its competitors. At almost
exactly the same time Sony, a similarly
global corporation selling similarly priced high-end technology, had a
significantly larger product portfolio. On 13 December 2001 the Sony UK
website listed twenty-five different
product categories including TV, Video,
Hi-Fi, Home Entertainment, Walkman, Playstation, Portable Cassette,
Radio,
Computers, Vaio Notebooks, Clie Handheld Computers and so on
(www.sony.co.uk 2001). Within just one of these categories, Vaio
Notebooks, there were seven different
series of Notebooks listed, each
containing between one and seven products. A total of thirty-six discrete
models
of laptop – three times the number of products produced by Apple
across their complete product range. And that is
just for one of the twenty-
five product categories, each of which contained a similarly sized or larger
range of
products; and that website only covered the United Kingdom. The
global site listed fifty-five separate countries,
each of which had its own
individual website, each containing different ranges of country-specific
models of
their products. In short, and in sharp contrast to Apple, it is to all
intents and purposes impossible to compile
a complete list of technology
products emanating from a single corporation such as Sony at any particular
point
in time, let alone any kind of complete historical picture of all
technological products.
The point of this comparison is to highlight one of the main problems of
researching any aspect of the design
history of modern technology – the
sheer amount of different products produced and discarded year upon year
by
companies such as Sony, Philips, Hewlett-Packard, Fujitsu and numerous
other well-known global brands. In itself
an incalculable amount of
production, yet likely dwarfed by the combined output of an enormous
number of much
smaller, less well-known competitors producing lower
quality, cheaper, ‘me too’ products. After all, if two guys
in a garage can
change the world, surely anyone can do it?

Research methods

My interest in the history of the electronic computer emerged in the mid-

1990s during a piece of archival
research which involved a trawl through the
back issues of Design magazine. The ‘News’
sections of issues from the
1970s frequently contained images of objects referred to as ‘computers’,
designed by
prominent practitioners or consultancies of the day. It was
striking that the products in these images bore
little or no resemblance to the
products referred to as computers by users of computers in the 1990s – the
pale
grey/beige boxes under CRT monitors with keyboards and mice that
seemed to be a permanent feature on the desk of
almost everyone who
worked in an office. The more I browsed the pages of old design journals,
the more examples I
came across. Computers had evidently not always
looked the way they did, and they did not all look the same. They
had taken
a wide variety of forms, been made in different materials and had, in fact,
been brightly coloured,
fascinating objects.
My level of interest in this observation can perhaps be explained when
seen in the context of my own background
as a practising industrial designer.
I was fully aware of the designer’s desire to create original forms, and had
first-hand experience of the various, sometimes frustrating constraints that
can conspire to circumscribe these
desires. In understanding the designer’s
drive for originality, I found it quite strange on reflection that the
design of
computers had turned out to be so formulaic, repetitive and nondescript. I
wanted to understand what
constraints had prevented the variation in form
seen in earlier products.
It was perhaps obvious that early computers had looked vastly different to
those of today, as it is common
knowledge that early computers, in the late
1940s and 1950s, were large mainframe systems that took up whole
rooms.
But the objects displayed here were the developmental, often seemingly
experimental forms of computers
which appeared between those early
mainframe behemoths and the desktop PC that represented computing
technology
in the 1990s. To a designer and a design historian it was
incredible, though perhaps not surprising, to think a
whole industry could
produce so many items over such a long period that had, for whatever
reason, seemingly
disappeared from collective memory. At the time, these
were not well-known products of the past that appeared in
design history
books, not ‘design classics’ or ‘icons’ considered ‘important’ in design
historical terms, yet
they were clearly an important part of the history of one
of the most influential and important products of the
twentieth century – a
product that impacted heavily on almost everyone in developed society.
There were some very
interesting and potentially important research
questions to be explored here.
Firstly, it seemed clear from its important role in the lives of people at
work (as business equipment) and at
home (as a consumer product) that the
computer is a significant part of the social and cultural milieu, and yet
nothing seemed to be written celebrating the designed form of the computer
or positioning it firmly as a cultural
and social object. Could it be
convincingly argued that the designed form of computers has been important
and
integral to their role as a cultural artefact?
Secondly, there had clearly been a paradigm shift in the accepted
interpretation of the term ‘computer’. In
semiological terms, the object
signified by the word ‘computer’ had changed over time, and my suspicion
was that
the interpretation of the term I held was probably similar to that of
the vast majority of people who used
computers today but were not involved
in the computing industry (i.e. lay
users). Yet the word had obviously meant
something completely different in design terms in the 1940s and 1950s,
although similarly, the interpretation of the term at that time was possibly
widely held and understood. As there
were such extensive differences
between the objects the term ‘computer’ has referred to, there was likely to
be a
corresponding shift in the relationship between the object itself and the
user, even though the term used to
describe the different objects had
remained the same. How had the relationship between the computer and the
user
changed over time? In what ways has the designed form of the
computer affected this relationship?
Thirdly, there was the question of why the computer had started in one
fixed form (the
mainframe) and ended up in another fixed form (the desktop
PC), going through so many
variations that had largely vanished without
trace. It is possible to see this as a similar process to that which
occurred
with the introduction of other technologies (for example in the design of
radio sets), when a number of
manufacturers producing similar products
tried to differentiate themselves from each other to create the
archetypal
form that would define the product. The difference here, raising an
interesting question, is that the
various different forms other products have
taken are fairly well documented and known to a wide audience outside
of
design history. Taking the radio as an example, there is a huge interest in its
history; radios are collected
widely and ‘classic’ examples are selected by
connoisseurs as key points of development, which are then displayed
in
museums and reproduced in design history books. Catalogues exist
describing each model produced by different
manufacturers. There is a level
of interest in the history of the form of the radio that has preserved its
heritage on a much larger scale than for the computer. Why is this? Was the
history of the form of the computer
readily available for examination
somewhere, and if not, then why not? My consequent study confirmed that
these
questions had not been answered in the existing literature, and that
primary research was required.
At around the same time as I began my research, William Aspray, a
historian of technology, noted that three
professions had written about the
history of computers: computer professionals; historians of technology and
science; and journalists. (This was confirmation that little if anything had
been produced by design historians,
although Aspray did not mention that
much had been written about the computer industry itself by economic
historians.) In Aspray’s view, computer professionals had constructed a
rather one-dimensional account of
technical history, seemingly happy with
an unreconstructed acceptance of technological determinism. In contrast,
historians of technology and science had usefully applied a more exploratory
methodology of social
constructionism to computing but, nevertheless,
suffered from having less technical knowledge and understanding
than
computer professionals. The analysis of journalists, he continued, had added
little in the way of
scholarship, but at least had disseminated the personal
dimension of computing to a much wider audience. ‘After
all, as historians
we are ultimately interested in computing as human enterprise’ (Aspray
1994: 10). As a design
historian, I was therefore highly interested in the
possibilities afforded by this subject matter.
The focus on the computer as a technological artefact had, as Aspray had
argued, tended to limit its historical
analysis to a narrow technical rather
than social perspective. I was more interested in exploring a social and
cultural history of the electronic computer. It was not the technology per se
which was the primary source of
interest, but the presentation of that
technology to its end user in a designed form.
As a historian of design my focus is on the cultural aspects of design
meaning encapsulated in the designed form of products, in this case the
computer, that is design produced and
consumed as a social process. The
social world provides the conditions within which design operates and which
design reflects. As Clive Dilnot observed, ‘If circumstances do not coerce
form, they are certainly often
manifest in form’ (1984: 10). The position
taken here is that through form, objects themselves convey meaning.
Their
study is a study of representations, the semiotic analysis of culture, in which
objects or images are
interpreted as cultural icons. Designed artefacts, then,
are a valid source of evidence for the writing of
cultural history, as their
value lies in the status of meaning transferred to them by their consumers –
described
by Mary Douglas as an ‘anthropology of consumption’ (Douglas
and Isherwood 1980).
It seemed to me that there was a range of potential sources for exploring
this subject. Secondary research, of
course, reading what had been written
about the history of the computer (albeit within parallel disciplines
rather
than design histories), was an obvious starting point. And primary research
in the form of an analysis of
actual products, visual analysis of images of
computers in advertising and media, and interviewing the people
involved in
designing computers. Easy.
 Physical products

One might think that the proliferation of products alluded to at the start of
this chapter would mean that there
would be little problem in finding
physical examples of old computers to examine first hand. But herein lies
the
paradox of rapid technological progress – the useful lifespan of an
electronic computer is far shorter than its
physical properties could afford.
Way before circuitry fails, monitors fade or keyboard keys wear out, the
computer is rendered obsolete with alarming regularity by a faster, more
powerful version of itself. Gordon
Moore, president of Intel, accurately
predicted this fact in the mid-1960s (Moore 1965). Moore’s Law, as it
became known, states that the power of a computer will double every two
years, and it has held true now for fifty
years. As a consequence of this
phenomenon, enormous quantities of perfectly serviceable electronic
computers are
discarded every few years; a huge ecological problem in
itself, but one that also serves to reduce the exchange
and use value of old
computers to practically zero. There is nothing quite so obsolete as an
obsolete computer.
As Steven Levy eloquently put it, computers are ‘quickly
orphaned husks of sand and plastic’ (Levy 1995: 13), and
the sheer volume
(in size and quantity) of these redundant husks makes keeping them
problematic. There is a
small, emerging market for some historic computers
that appear for auction now and again, particularly items as
rare as the Apple
I,2 but the great majority of computers are consigned, literally and
figuratively, to the
scrapheap of history.
There are, of course, occasional examples of the more common computers
in various museum collections around the
world, but these tend to be limited
to, at best, a few items in each case. It is left to a few notable,
specialist
computer museums to act as a repository of this particular branch of
technological progress. Taking
into account the fact that the two leading
nations in the development of computing after the Second World War
were
the United Kingdom and the United States of America, it is perhaps fitting
that two of the best-known such
museums are the National Museum of
Computing at Bletchley Park, and the
Computer History Museum in
Mountain View, California. Both have extensive collections of computing
hardware open
to the public, along with associated archives of corporate
documentation available by appointment. Even these
institutions, though, are
limited in what pieces they can display, and what pieces they can accept
from
well-meaning donors. Smaller specialist museums have even less space
and consequently tend to concentrate on
purely national rather than global
perspectives (such as the Datamuseet IT-ceum in Linköping, Sweden), or
else
restrict themselves to addressing particular aspects of the industry, such
as computer games (for example, the
Computerspielemuseum in Berlin,
Germany).

Visual imagery

Other institutions have less space-intensive, yet significant archives of

corporate and promotional material
relating to the history of the computing
industry, although access to these archives is restricted to academic
researchers. The Charles Babbage Institute at the University of Minnesota,
and the UK National Archive for the
History of Computing at the University
of Manchester are two prime examples, the latter having an extensive
(although obviously not complete) collection of promotional brochures and
trade catalogues.
These have the advantage of clearly and accurately showing the designed
forms of the computers themselves as well
as the contexts in which it was
imagined they were likely to be employed. It must be remembered, though,
that
such brochures must not be confused in any way with documentary
evidence. Manufacturers’ brochures have a purpose
to sell the benefits of
their companies’ products, not to objectively record reality, and although the
actual
forms of the computers in the brochures can be assumed to be
accurate (although any image of a product is, in
effect, a translation placing
the form over the function [Barthes 1973: 95–7]), it cannot be assumed
unquestioningly that the context in which they are shown or described is as
veracious. The photographs of
computers in situ will almost certainly have
been taken in carefully staged sets made specifically for the
brochure, and it
is more than likely that the people shown using the computers are not actual
employees of real
companies but models engaged for the purpose, and
dressed in period fashion. As long as these facts are borne in
mind though,
the material is valid for analysis. The brochures are aiming to show the use
of the products in
real-life settings, and the marketing people, designers and
photographers involved in their creation will have
strived to represent their
interpretation of that setting, albeit a sanitized and mediated interpretation.
These
brochures are mostly aimed at corporate buyers, and in order to show
new, unfamiliar products in a familiar
setting will therefore portray
perceptions of ‘typical’ office environments and perceived stereotypical
roles of
various office workers and business managers. The manufacturers’
notions of ‘ideal users’ lead directly to a
number of gender and status issues,
and it is these perceptions of the workplace that can be semiologically
analysed. Although the information they held (and the fashions the models
were dressed in) quickly dated, it is
precisely this ephemerality that makes
such catalogues a fascinating record of the computer’s development.
Although not as convenient as having an archive of promotional material
from myriad manufacturers, surely
individual corporations retain a record of
the computers they themselves produced? Unfortunately, this is rarely
the
case. Some of the older and more established companies have corporate
archives and employ people dedicated to maintaining them, but as digital
files steadily replace physical records,
these are being reduced in scope, the
hugely helpful IBM Corporate Archives being a case in point. Even these
archives have their limitations though, as they naturally tend to have a lot of
material on the more successful
of their products, and far less, if anything,
on products that were not so successful.
Other companies have no archives. Many smaller computer
manufacturers, especially throughout the late 1960s and
1970s, either turned
out to be as ephemeral as the computers they produced and disappeared into
the mists of
time, or else were taken over by larger competitors. Many of the
more significant manufacturers of computers,
even some that are
international corporations, acquired their foothold in the industry in this way,
by taking
over medium-sized corporations, which in turn had taken over or
inherited smaller companies, amalgamating them
into new divisions of the
parent company and often losing the name of the smaller company
altogether. In the
process, and over long periods of time, the majority of
these corporations have become so convoluted, with so
many divisions, that
any records that had been held by the smaller companies have been either
unintentionally
discarded or intentionally abandoned. I have often
approached such corporations to ask their permission to
reproduce images of
computers manufactured by the companies they had taken over and
consequently become the legal
copyright holder for, only to be told that they
had no knowledge at all of the material they owned.
Another aspect of corporate publicity that came to light during my
research, and which led in turn to a book on
the subject in 2013, was that on
occasion I came across brochures for products that I knew from discussions
with
the designers or manufacturers had not actually been manufactured.
Even though they were professionally printed
brochures describing the
computer’s construction, physical dimensions, price and technical
specification in
detail (sometimes in mind-numbing detail) and bore full-
colour photographs of the computer itself, they did not,
as it turned out, offer
hard proof of its availability for purchase. This strange phenomenon
occurred from time
to time, largely, I believe, because the pace of
technological development in the computer industry is such that
by the time
a particular product was finally ready for market, more than one company
found that the technology
within that product was no longer cutting-edge or
it had even been rendered obsolete by a new product from a
competitor. Yet,
in order to meet product launch deadlines, marketing material must have
been printed and
distributed to the industry press in advance of the launch to
meet their editorial and publishing deadlines and
way before the decision not
to launch the product was made. Without the insider knowledge that the
product
depicted was in fact a piece of ‘vapourware’, it would be all too
understandable to take the beguiling brochure
as prima facie evidence of its
production.
In any case, the heydays of the trade catalogue and product brochure are
long gone. The majority of manufacturers
these days do not even
contemplate the expense of producing hard copies of promotional material,
relying instead
on the expansive reach of the Internet. While this is a great
benefit to the many people with Internet access
(and of course, the majority
of people interested in looking at new computers already have Internet
access in one
form or another), the transient nature of the corporate website
is a problem for historians. In order to remain
attractive to the viewer,
websites change with alarming regularity, as often as the company sees fit,
and a
product that has great prominence one day can be relegated or
removed completely the next. There have been
attempts to preserve some of
this evanescent landscape, the most notable perhaps being the Internet
Archive.
The Internet Archive is a non-profit online library ‘working to prevent
the
Internet – a new medium with major historical significance – and other
“born-digital” materials from
disappearing into the past’ (The Internet
Archive 2015a). It works in collaboration with a variety of
institutions,
including the Library of Congress and the Smithsonian, to preserve a
historical record of the
Internet for generations to come. There are around a
thousand librarians and archivists around the world who
identify possible
acquisitions for the Internet Archive’s subject collections, which are then
automatically
trawled, uploaded and stored in its Wayback Machine server in
San Francisco. On typing the name of a company
site, for example,
apple.com">apple.com, into the Wayback Machine
search box, one is
presented with a timeline and calendar showing different points at which that
website has been
uploaded. The apple.com site was saved 16,187 times
between 22
October 1996 and 30 January 2015, and any one of those
uploads can be recalled and put up on screen. The amount
of information
recorded is phenomenal:

As of December 1, 2014 the Internet Archive Wayback Machine

contains almost nine petabytes [nine million
Gigabytes] of data and
is currently growing at a rate of twenty terabytes [twenty thousand
Gigabytes] per week.
This eclipses the amount of text contained in
the world’s largest libraries, including the Library of Congress.
(The Internet Archive 2015b)

It is, however, nowhere near a complete record. Only publicly accessible

sites are recorded, and those at
different intervals, depending on visitor
traffic (some, such as apple.com or news sites, might be saved numerous
times a day, others once every six months or less).
Very often, only parts of a
site are saved, and links within recalled pages do not work and many images
are
missing. But it is something, and improving all the time.

Interviews

If there are no brochures, or Internet presence to access, all is still not lost.
One aspect in favour of the
historian of a technology as modern as the
electronic computer is that, as it was invented in the mid-1940s, its
history is
still (just) within living memory. As such, many of the people involved in
the design, engineering,
construction and production of the electronic
computer are still around and, if tracked down, are often very keen
to talk at
length about their role in the industry. Oral histories, though, bring with
them a different set of
pros and cons. On the one hand, they provide
information based on direct experience that is often not available
in any
other form and fill many gaps missing in published sources. They also, of
course, can provide much in the
way of describing the atmosphere of the
time, preventing the recollections from becoming pedestrian reportage. On
the downside, the ‘facts’ reported are very often not backed up by any
corroborating evidence. Start-up computer
companies were often led by
entrepreneurial individuals, busily involved in developing new products in
times of
rapid technological change. From talking to them it seems they
were far more concerned with looking forward to
their next product than
keeping accurate accounts of their last. Others involved were quite often
undertaking
numerous projects all at the same time and, because of the
fluidity of the market, often changed employers or
even started new
companies without keeping detailed records (they are,
after all, largely
engineers and businessmen not academics and historians). One is therefore
reliant on the
incertitude of human memory. It is quite common, and in the
circumstances not surprising, to obtain quite
different versions of events
when discussing the same issues of product chronology and attribution for
invention
with different people, who were involved with the same project, at
the same time, in the same place, with
absolutely no intention to deceive and
every effort to maintain accuracy. As Friedrich von Hayek said: ‘The
knowledge of the circumstances of which we must make use never exists in
concentrated or integrated form, but
solely as the dispersed bits of
incomplete and frequently contradictory knowledge which all the separate
individuals possess’ (Hayek 1945: 519).

Conclusions

Finally, one other pitfall in writing the design history of a rapidly and
continuously changing technological
artefact. Like the brochures produced
by companies before the products themselves were ever sold, the design
historian of recent technology constantly runs a risk of obsolescence when
producing any kind of concluding
remarks about a particular range of
products. There is every possibility that a seemingly fixed or resolved
situation is suddenly disrupted and changed beyond all recognition. I wrote
an article describing how the bland,
beige form of the desktop computer had
remained static for over a decade and had to rewrite the conclusions as,
just
after I submitted it, Apple introduced the iMac and completely changed the
way computers might look
(Atkinson 2000). I wrote an article explaining
how tablet computers with handwriting recognition had never taken
off as
people disliked writing on glass surfaces with pens, only for Apple to launch
the iPad and suddenly
everyone was happy using their fingers to type on
virtual keyboards (Atkinson 2008). Such is the price of
progress.

Notes

1 ‘Stylectrical: On Electro-Design That Makes History’ – a major exhibition of all Apple’s output
under the control
of Jonathan Ive’s design team from 1997 to 2011 – took place at the Museum für
Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg from 26
August 2011 to 15 January 2012. The accompanying hefty
hardback publication contains a studio photograph of every
Apple product under Ive’s control,
down to the level of individual earplugs, in chronological order (Schulze and
Grätz 2011).
2 In 2010, an Apple I sold for £133,250 at Christie’s auction house in London
(www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-11825954), and two
years later in the USA, one sold for $374,500
(http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2012/06/15/original-apple-1-computer-sells-for-374500-in-auction/),
both accessed 29 January 2015.

References

Aspray, W. (1994) ‘The History of Computing within the History of Information Technology’, History
and Technology, 11/1: 7–19.
Atkinson, P. (2000) ‘The (In)Difference Engine: Explaining the Disappearance of Diversity in the
Design of the
Personal Computer’, Journal of Design History, 13/1: 59–72.
Atkinson, P. (2008) ‘A Bitter Pill to Swallow: The Rise and Fall of the Tablet Computer’, Design
Issues, 24/4: 3–25.
Atkinson, P. (2010) Computer, London, Reaktion.
Barthes, R. (1973) Mythologies, London, Paladin.
Dilnot, C. (1984) ‘The State of Design History. Part II: Problems and Possibilities’, Design
Issues, 1/2:
3–20.
Douglas, M. and Isherwood, B. (1980) The World of Goods: Towards an Anthropology of
Consumption, London, Penguin.
Hayek, F. A. (1945) ‘The Use of Knowledge in Society’, American Economic Review 35/4:
519–30.
Levy, S. (1995) Insanely Great: The Life and Times of Macintosh, The Computer that Changed
Everything, London, Penguin.
Moore, G. E. (1965) ‘Cramming More Components onto Integrated Circuits’, Electronics,
38/8: 114–
17.
Schulze, S. and Grätz, I. (eds) (2011) Apple Design, Ostfildern, Hatje Cantz Verlag.
The Internet Archive (2015a), https://archive.org/about.
Accessed 30 January 2015.
The Internet Archive (2015b), https://archive.org/about/faqs.php#5. Accessed 30 January
2015.
www.apple.com (2001) 23 October. Internet Archive https://archive.org. Accessed 5 January 2015.
www.sony.co.uk (2001) 13 December. Internet Archive
https://archive.org. Accessed 5 January 2015.
 10

KEEPING IT ON THE SURFACE

Design, surfaces and taste
Victoria Kelley
 

Introduction

This chapter was written on an Apple Macbook Pro, the third in a succession
of Apple laptops I have owned. When I
got the first I put it in a bag with a
spiral-bound notebook, and the metal of the notebook’s binding rubbed
against the laptop’s casing, marking the computer with indelible black
scratches. My first reaction was a little
pang of grief for the loss of the
computer’s seductively perfect exterior, but I quickly accepted the scratches
as a mark of time and use, an unintentional customisation on the surface of
this precision-manufactured,
standardised product. Many of my students
have similar laptops, and quite often I’ve seen these customised much
more
boldly, with coloured stickers on the silvery-grey metal. This is not a look
that appeals to me, but I can
see how it might be satisfying to disrupt the
cool and pristine Mac aesthetic, and to distinguish your computer
from
everyone else’s.
As with its predecessors, my current laptop is a mystery. I can make it
work, but I have no idea how it does it.
I’ve never seen inside it and have
only the vaguest idea of what the sleek, brushed-aluminium case contains.
My
interaction with it is entirely through its surfaces – screen, keyboard and
outer casing. That interaction is
mostly about my use of the computer, to
write this chapter, send emails or browse the internet, but occasionally
I give
it a little maintaining attention, cleaning the fingermarks from its screen or
wiping over the aluminium
case.
This chapter is about surfaces, a subject that I have explored elsewhere
with relation to textiles, domestic
interiors and a range of theoretical
contexts (Kelley 2009; Kelley 2015; Adamson and Kelley 2013). It attempts
to
outline how surface relates to taste, and how both are important subjects
in design. Surface and taste are big
subjects that can be approached from
many angles and in the context of many different disciplinary frameworks.
Surface, for instance, as the example of the laptop suggests, involves
consideration of materials, making,
person–object interactions (including
maintenance), as well as the huge fields of colour and pattern. Taste has
an
enormous literature in both sociology and philosophy; the starting point here
is the work of French
sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. The aim is simply to
explore the smaller
field in which concern with surface, taste and design
overlap: what do designers, or others interested in
designed objects, need to
know to start thinking about this subject?

Surface and design

As the topmost or outermost layer or margin of an object, the surface is the

first thing we encounter. It is the
book’s cover, on which so many
judgements rest, or the skin that provides a first visual or tactile meeting
point, however shallow that first meeting might be. According to design
historians Nicolas Maffei and Tom Fisher,
‘it is perhaps the quality of
objects’ surfaces that most clearly establish their presence and our
relationship
to them’ (Maffei and Fisher 2013: 231).
Surfaces are boundaries, neatly indicating limits and borders, defining
what’s this and what’s that, inside and
outside, marking the transition, in the
view of historian Ulrich Lehmann, ‘between the materiality of an object
and
the empty space that surrounds it’ (Lehmann 2013: 147). Surfaces can be
very complex in formation; sometimes
what’s on the surface is simply the
outermost layer of a material that is solid and homogenous (think about
cutting into a piece of rindless cheese, or a pat of butter), but more often the
surface has some special quality
that distinguishes it as a boundary. It is
frequently made of a distinct material, and it may have several
layers. The
body has the skin as its surface, but is usually bounded too by layers of
clothing. Textiles are very
common surfaces to many objects (upholstered
furniture, for instance, as well as dressed bodies, or the curtained
windows
that form part of the boundary of the home). This is because of the planar
qualities that make them
useful for wrapping and veiling (Barnett 1999).
Other surface materials are more dependent on the object they
coat: glaze on
ceramics, or varnish, plaster or paint in some respects fulfil a similar
‘wrapping’ function to
textiles, but they cannot be removed without
destruction as they are structurally dependent on their substrate,
the object.
But even if a surface is not formed by a distinctive material wrapping or
coating, it may result from
the application of a finishing treatment. Wooden
furniture is very rarely left ‘raw’, and is almost always
assiduously smoothed
and polished, often with the addition of substances such as wax or oil that,
while less
distinct as a surface layer than varnish or paint, nevertheless
impart a particular surface character.
As the privileged site of first encounter, surfaces enjoy detailed attention
from the creators of objects. The
processes of ‘finishing’ usually concentrate
on surfaces, and aesthetic, sensory and symbolic qualities may
result from
smoothing, polishing, painting and cladding or the application of decoration
or pattern. These
processes may or may not be closely related to the object’s
form, mass, shape or function, but they are intrinsic
to its character. Surfaces
are the site of both decoration and representation. They carry colour and
pattern, two
of the most eloquent and emotive of surface characteristics
(Brett 2005; Gage 1999). And they are suitable for
inscription, so that a
three-dimensional object often has a surface that makes it a two-dimensional
canvas or a
blank page for an image or a message. Packaging takes particular
advantage of this; in consumer culture there is
nothing that wraps a product
that does not also picture, describe and promote it.
And if makers lavish attention on surfaces, then so too do the people who
own and use objects. Design theorist
Stuart Walker notes that the surface is
‘the exterior of the solid which
forms the interface between user and
product’ (1995: 23). The surface is therefore where processes of wear and
tear and dirtying are played out and, it follows, is the prime site of many
rituals of maintenance, which may
involve symbolic and emotional aspects.
A carefully pressed clean garment, for instance, is no more nor less
functional than the same object in a clean yet crumpled state, but it carries
with it a strong message of social
propriety and bodily self-discipline.
Because wear and tear are sited upon the surfaces of objects, this is also
where we look for signs of age that might be read as either decrepitude or
authenticity. Architectural theorists
Mohsen Mostafavi and David
Leatherbarrow comment upon this in relation to the weathering of buildings:

In the mathematics of the environment weathering is a power of

subtraction, a minus,
under the sign of which newly finished corners,
 surfaces and colors are ‘taken away’ by rain, wind and sun. But
is
weathering only subtraction, can it not also add and enhance?
(Mostafavi and Leatherbarrow 1993: 2)

And finally, a word about the limits of surface. In some cases, surfaces are
uncertain in definition and
formation. Does crisp linen have a surface,
formed by the assiduous processes of starching
and pressing? Or is it a
surface, when worn as covering for the body? The answer, surely,
is both.
And surfaces are vulnerable to physical breakdown that threatens their
integrity. Tattered garments,
chipped glaze, peeling paint, scratched and
tarnished silver, all have a poignancy that tells us of the symbolic
power of
surfaces – and what happens when boundaries disintegrate.
It follows from the above that for the designer, and for others interested in
designed objects, paying attention
to surface is important, above all because
surface is the site of relationships between people and things. This
attention
may include consideration of the surface qualities of specific materials
(which can be distinct from
their structural qualities) and the surface effects
of manufacturing processes (machine-made and hand-made may be
an
important distinction here). It will also be necessary to consider finishing
effects and texture, applied
decoration, colour, and the effects of light; shine
is one of the most important of
surface qualities (Maffei and Fisher 2013:
231). Yet despite this, much of the rhetoric of modern design and
material
culture, as well as broader systems of philosophical thought and language,
tend to belittle the
importance of surface – or superficiality – a word and
concept that almost always has
negative associations (Miller 1994: 71).
Surface has frequently been viewed as a problematic site, as Lehmann
explains:

As an outer layer, the surface integrates with the object through

material congruence, or, conversely, through
the ‘falsehood’ of
masking the plastic values of one material underneath another.
Historically this ‘falsehood’
has been understood as negative when
surfaces signal values that are not realized in the substance beneath
them.
(Lehmann 2013: 147)
This view has, since the nineteenth century, affected our attitudes to things
as diverse as veneered or laminated
furniture and cosmetics on skin. David
Brett cites Adolf Loos’s infamous denunciation of surface ornamentation,
‘Ornament and Crime’, noting how at times ‘decoration and visual display
have been regarded with suspicion, discouraged, or even thought to be
sinful’, with notable effects on surface
strategies in design (Brett 2005: 184).

Taste and design

In its most basic definition the idea of taste refers simply to the inclination
for certain food flavours. More
widely, it denotes a preference for certain
aesthetic qualities that extend beyond the realm of food. Since the
eighteenth
century, taste and its relationship to aesthetics have been a focus of
philosophical enquiry, with
most attention paid to the formation of taste in
the field of high culture: fine art, literature and music, and
certain modes of
appreciating the natural world. This context is still current in much
contemporary thinking on
taste, with many authors referring to the ideas of
German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) and his
distinction
between ‘the taste of sense’ and the ‘taste of reflection’, with only the
second amenable to detailed
aesthetic analysis (Gallegos and McHoul 2006;
Corrigan 1997; Leddy 2005).
In many studies of contemporary taste there is still an echo of the earlier
emphasis on examining taste in high
culture. Many writers focus on taste
and cultural consumption (of music, literature, arts and the media), however
widely this is defined. In the field of design, however, we might also
consider how taste functions in everyday situations that are not usually
encompassed in cultural consumption, and to switch focus
from
representational fields to material objects. Andrew Light and
Jonathan M.
Smith have examined how the notion of taste can be extended from art to
encompass ‘humble objects and
quotidian acts’, noting how everyday
aesthetics are found not in examining ‘the formal properties’ of objects
that
‘make them beautiful’ but rather in ‘the relation between subject and object
that makes this particular
experience of that object beautiful’ (Light and
Smith, 2005: ix–x). In emphasising experience they stress the
‘relational
basis’ of everyday aesthetics. As already discussed, relationships between
people and objects are
frequently focused on surface characteristics and the
emotive associations they provoke.
 For anyone interested in taste, the work of French sociologist Pierre
Bourdieu is unavoidable.
Distinction (1979), his monumental attempt to
dissect taste and its origins, is richly rewarding, and has
been a key text
within both sociology and design studies, periodically revisited. Bourdieu’s
work was strongly
empirical, based on interviews with research subjects in
France in the 1960s. He questioned his respondents on a
variety of taste
preferences (for food, music, literature, fine art, photography, etc.) and the
results were
presented as diagrams and tables, pinning down and laying out
the taste cultures of his subjects. Bourdieu’s key
finding was to demonstrate
how taste is formed by a combination of education and family background,
and is
closely linked to the possession of capital – not just economic capital
but social, symbolic and cultural capital
too. His analytical system was
founded upon the notion of the habitus (Bourdieu 1984:
170), the system of
taste classifications, in combination with the operation of this system in
particular
judgements. The habitus thus created largely unconscious taste
cultures or life-styles
that differentiated classes. The possession of high
economic and/or cultural capital allowed the ruling classes
to control the
hierarchy of taste, and the book’s title, Distinction, indicates how the
operation of this hierarchy involved social differentiation based upon the
exercise of taste in consumption, and judgements upon the taste of others:
‘taste classifies, and it classifies
the classifier’ (ibid.: 6). Unlike earlier
considerations of taste and aesthetics, Bourdieu allows us to see how
taste is
formed across whole cultures, offering a powerful analysis of the ways in
which taste is fundamentally
determined by, and thus reveals, intricate social
and cultural structures. Distinction is
a detailed ‘map’ of taste, what it is and
how it is formed.
Bourdieu has relatively little to say on designed objects, or their surfaces.
Material culture was not his main
focus; however, many of his insights are
very applicable to design, and a short section entitled ‘object lessons’
does
comment on ‘the ordinary choices of everyday existence, such as furniture’
(ibid.: 70). This includes
tantalising glimpses of how Bourdieu related his
ideas about classification and taste to surface qualities. It
perhaps also
demonstrates that, as well as dissecting class and taste hierarchies, Bourdieu
was prone to
reproduce their judgements in his own rhetoric:

a group’s whole lifestyle can be read off from the style it adopts in
furnishing or clothing … because the
social relationships objectified
in familiar objects, in their luxury or poverty, their ‘distinction’ or
 ‘vulgarity’, their ‘beauty’ or ‘ugliness’, impress themselves though
bodily experiences which may be as
profoundly unconscious as the
quiet caress of beige carpets or the thin clamminess of tattered,
garish,
linoleum.
(ibid.: 77)

Distinction is strongly redolent of its time and place of origin (music tastes,
for
instance, are described on a scale of preferences that sets classical music
against 1960s popular singers such as
Petula Clark and Johnny Hallyday)
(ibid.: 533). These very specific examples, and the conclusions Bourdieu
reached, can seem reductive, as can his lumping together of broad class
fractions. In tabulating his analysis,
Bourdieu stripped away qualifications
and exceptions, and seemed to distil taste into something inevitably
determined by class without space for personal preference and individual
agency. This does not undermine
Bourdieu’s usefulness (for instance, Tony
Bennett and his colleagues have made good use of his ideas as the
starting
point for their own empirical survey of ‘Australian Everyday Cultures’
(Bennett et
al. 1999)) but it is something that contemporary designers might
think about in developing a nuanced
appreciation of taste values, and the
surfaces where they often reside. As Bennett and his colleagues point out,
this aspect of Bourdieu’s analysis reflects the rigid and hierarchical 1960s
French culture that he studied, but
it may not be so accurate in the present
day when strong consumer markets and the fracturing of class hierarchies
allow more space for people to actively construct their own systems of taste
(ibid.: 13).
Bennett et al. also note Bourdieu’s ‘lack of interest in questions of gender
and of race
and ethnicity’, a point reinforced by Terry Lovell:

Women … feature in his schema of the social field, primarily as

social objects, repositories of value and of
capital, who circulate
between men and who serve certain important functions in the
capital accumulation
strategies of families and kinship groups.
While class penetrates right through his diagrammatic
representations of the social field … gender is largely invisible, as is
‘race’.
(Lovell 2000: 36)
We have already seen how the surface is a key site of taste judgements in
material objects. In fact, some of the most interesting analyses of surface and
taste result from the
consideration of those issues of gender and ethnicity
which
Bourdieu overlooks, as well as providing scope to look at the
relationship of class and
taste in more open and less deterministic ways.

Surface, taste and design

Judgements about taste are very often made on the basis of surface qualities,
which can be as simple as
dirty or clean, include all colour preferences, likes
and dislikes
around pattern and issues of texture and shininess. Surface
judgements can be about one’s own taste, and equally,
other people’s, where
it is often surface qualities that are picked out for critique; ‘loud’ colours,
‘busy’
patterns, ‘tacky’ materials or cosmetics ‘plastered on’ are all used as
evidence in judgements of ‘distinction’
or ‘vulgarity’ (to use Bourdieu’s
terms). Some surface strategies have become shorthand for the sort of taste
judgements that Bourdieu dissected so ruthlessly – pebble-dashed walls, for
instance, or the net-curtained
window, both of which became, in British
culture in the latter half of the twentieth century, examples par excellence of
the sort of suburban taste that classifies both its perpetrators and those who
judge them on the basis of their taste. If surface is the site of people/object
relationships, then these
relationships involve the meeting point of specific
surface qualities and specific taste values.
Specificity is important. The point where surface and taste interact is a
danger zone for interpretation, and
requires caution in generalisations across
space and time. Colour, for instance, has a culturally precise range
of
meanings, so that in western, Christian cultures black traditionally signifies
mourning, whereas in eastern,
Hindu cultures white is associated with
mourning through the tradition that widows should wear undyed cloth (Gage
1999: 70; Leslie 1992: 201). Many other surface qualities also have
meanings that are contingent and subject to
change.
An intriguing example is the exhibition of American sculptor Jeff Koons’s
work at the Palace of Versailles in
France in 2008. Koons is known for large-
scale reinterpretations of kitsch objects, for instance Balloon Dog, a giant
stainless steel refabrication of its small-scale throwaway inspiration,
polished to a highly reflective, brightly coloured finish. The 2008 exhibition
took some of Koons’s best-known
works (including Balloon Dog
(Magenta)) and installed them in the
historical setting of the palace built by
Louis XIV (1643–1715), a site known for its luxurious architecture and
interiors, with ‘sumptuously ornamented surfaces’ (Wood 2009: 87).
Koons’s intention was to bring his work into
dialogue with its setting,
expressing his desire to ‘really combine these two surfaces, [the] surface of
the
seventeenth and eighteenth century with the surface of today’ (ibid.: 87).
Works such as Balloon Flower (Yellow) were immediately similar in surface
and finish to the
gilded railings, balconies, roofs and interiors of Versailles;
on the face of it, there was strong aesthetic
sympathy between the twentieth-
century artworks and the seventeenth/eighteenth-century architecture, at
least in
their surface properties (see Figure 10.1). Yet the exhibition
provoked outrage in some
conservative corners of French society. One
aristocratic descendant of Louis XIV wrote an open letter to
President
Nicolas Sarkozy, demanding that the exhibition be removed. He condemned,
for instance, the eclipsing of
the sun motif of ‘Sun-King’ Louis in the Hall of
Mirrors by Koons’s Giant Moon (Light Blue), a mirror-polished stainless
steel hemisphere, more than three metres across and
crinkled around its
circumference like a helium-filled balloon (Bourbon-Parme 2008). The
apparently similar
surface strategies of the palace and of Koons’s artworks
were divided by a gulf of time during which industrial
modernity had
revolutionised both manufacturing and materials. Architecture and artworks
carried meanings
specific to their date and context, so that, as Fisher and
Maffei put it, ‘the shine of one object may strongly
connote value, while the
gloss of another may suggest cheapness and “glitz”’ (Maffei and Fisher
2013: 231). The
pre-industrial aristocratic luxury of Versailles, product of
astonishing wealth and power, was juxtaposed with
the ‘cheap’ gloss of
mass-manufactured consumer products, albeit recreated as extremely pricey
artworks, and the
juxtaposition was not to everyone’s taste.
Figure
10.1 Jeff Koons, Balloon Flower (Yellow), Château de Versailles, 2008–9.
© Henning Høholt.

There is a danger in misreading surface qualities. Condemnation of

surface strategies may say more about the
taste cultures of the observer than
they do about the material properties of the surfaces themselves or the
values
of those who make and use them. Anyone interested in design needs to make
an effort to appreciate specific
cultural contexts, as they are played out upon
the surfaces of objects. Anthropologist Daniel Miller has examined
the value
placed on showy and flamboyant surfaces in West Indian culture, and
specifically Trinidadian fashions
of the late 1980s, when an oil boom fuelled
unprecedented consumer spending in Trinidad. This was at its most
extravagant in the purchase of garments for social events: ‘clothing for such
occasions is marked by shiny
surfaces … preferences may be for silver,
gold, metallic greens, blues and reds, and shiny or slinky black, pearl
and
white’ (Miller 1994: 78). Miller notes how the surface display strategies
exhibited were criticised by contemporary commentators, following a long
(and ethnically inflected)
tradition of condemning ephemeral demonstrations
of style in Trinidad. He quotes a source from as early as 1833:
‘generally
speaking, the coloured women have an insatiable passion for showy dresses
and jewels … The highest
class of females dress more showily and far more
expensively than European ladies’. Miller notes how this is
indicative of an
‘insidious form of prejudice … where an emphasis on style is … seen as a
lack of capacity for
depth and seriousness’ (ibid.: 72). Yet Miller concludes
that the taste for expressive surface he documents makes
perfect sense in
terms of its cultural context. Trinidadian society is one in which many
relationships are
externalised and represented materially, with both the
legacy of slavery and the onset of modernity forming
conditions that
fostered ‘a kind of adaptive tendency to keep things on the surface, to refuse
any
internalization’ (ibid.: 62).
Michael Macmillan’s work on the domestic furnishings of the West Indian
diaspora in Britain adds to this picture.
Macmillan describes his own route to
understanding the West Indian front room, a space that was an ‘opulent
shrine’ of shiny and patterned ornamental objects:

I must confess, that growing up I was embarrassed about the front

room’s aesthetics, as it seemed in ‘bad
taste,’ or had no taste at all:
in other words it was ‘kitsch’… But through understanding my own
family
history, I became proud of kitsch … I became aware how
various sensorial stimuli triggered emotional responses
and
memories in a performative context. It was apparent that the
material culture of the front room raised
questions about diasporic
identities, intergenerational identifications, and disavowal; gendered
practices in
the domestic domain.
(Macmillan 2009: 137–8)

Just as taste cultures and surface strategies may interact in complex ways
with ethnicity and with colonial and
post-colonial histories, so gendered
identities require nuanced consideration. Surface tastes have long been
considered to reflect gender difference, and at times ‘excessive’ attachment
to surface complexity, to showy and
shiny qualities, has been associated with
femininity. One surface strategy in particular is representative of
this
tendency, pattern. The identification of pattern with femininity is certainly
not universal (see for
instance Graeme Were’s work (2005) on Melanesian
pattern), but in the western world it dates back at least as far
as the
nineteenth century, and is responsible for many aspects of the perception of
pattern today. The roots of
the idea can be found in attitudes to both fashion
and domesticity. In the early nineteenth century male fashion
in Europe
underwent a democratisation and simplification. Although it is not true to
say that men turned their
back on fashion (as some early commentators
claimed), men’s fashion did begin to operate within a more restrained
vocabulary of styles, colours and patterns than previously (Breward 1999:
24–6). The archetype of the plain black
suit arose, and although even a
casual glance at a mid-nineteenth-century fashion plate will reveal that men
did
not exclusively wear black unadorned garments, certainly the contrast
between men’s and women’s fashion was
accentuated, with women having a
far greater range of pattern, colour and ornamentation at their disposal than
men. At the same time, the idea of home began to change, with a greater
separation between the private and public
spheres. The task of creating a
harmonious and orderly home was allocated largely to women, and again,
pattern,
colour and ornamentation were important tools in this task. By the
mid-nineteenth century, if not earlier, ornamentation in general and pattern in
particular came to be seen as
strongly female interests. As Penny Sparke
notes, female taste came under attack from some reformers ‘who
believed
that what was perceived as the deterioration of popular taste in Britain was
rooted in the “false”
criteria followed by women in their task of embellishing
the home’ (Sparke 1995: 51). The fact that much
patterned ornamentation
was ‘applied’ decoration, considered as a surface effect that was of
secondary importance
to the structure or form of an object, accentuated the
relative marginalisation of pattern, a process that
continued with the
emergence of the modern movement in architecture and design.
Yet much recent work within textile history and theory has addressed how
‘feminine’ tastes in pattern and colour
were complex and sophisticated, so
that patterned textiles, such as quilts and embroideries, can be both eloquent
documents of taste and records of social values. Catherine Harper has
written about the contrast between her two
grandmothers’ craft skills: one
produced embroidery ‘of great technical skill, particular care, and detailed
design’; while the other made a quilt (bequeathed to Harper) that was rough
and utilitarian, yet which
nevertheless carried in its pattern, constructed from
fabric scraps, the ‘youthful histories’ of Harper’s aunts
from whose dresses
the scraps derived (Harper 2014: 32). As with ethnicity, consideration of
gender reveals
varied and competing taste cultures related to the surfaces of
designed objects. The aesthetic effects may or may
not be palatable to our
own particular tastes (formed in the specificity of our habitus,
and
influenced by individual choices), but if we are interested in design we need
to be able to understand them.
Finally we turn to class. Bourdieu’s analysis of the hierarchies of taste
identified how those who control
society control the unspoken rules of taste.
It is probably true to say that within design history and design
studies more
attention has been paid to those who command these hierarchies and their
surface tastes, than to the
alternative, subordinated, taste cultures of the
working classes. The assumption is that those who have little
economic and
cultural capital have little scope or freedom to develop tastes worthy of
investigation. We have
already seen that this is not the case in colonial or
post-colonial contexts, and there is plentiful evidence
that it is not the case in
terms of class either. Surface qualities are central to the excavation of
working-class taste cultures, partly because, in the absence of new goods, the
maintenance of old ones in
ostentatious ways was elaborated. Thus the
regular scrubbing and/or whitening of the front doorstep, and even a
portion
of the pavement beyond, was an eloquent symbol of respectability in many
working-class communities in the
early twentieth century. Assiduous
cleaning and polishing could be used to assert the surface status of valued
household objects. Monkey Brand household soap (see Figure 10.2) was one
of many branded
cleaning products which sold well to working-class
customers. Its advertising slogans emphasised, above all,
shiny surfaces,
with the soap claiming to achieve magical, almost fairy-tale,
transformations: ‘copper like
gold’; ‘tin like silver’; ‘windows like crystal’.
Figure
10.2 Advertisement for
Monkey Brand soap, The Graphic, 20 January 1900: 97.
Author’s image.

This taste for ostentatious shine also operated in the purchase of new
goods, where poor quality and lack of
durability was compensated for by
expressive surface qualities (Kelley 2015). Richard Hoggart, in The Uses of
Literacy (1957) describes eloquently the working-class milieu of his
upbringing in
Leeds. He notes how ‘the basic furnishings of the home are
surmounted by articles whose main charm is their high
colour and
suggestion of splendour’, describing wallpaper with ‘bold pattern and
colours’, ‘vivid’ rugs and
‘highly-polished and elaborate furniture’ (Hoggart
1965: 143–4). His descriptions of material objects in the home and out of it
show a sympathy for and understanding of taste
cultures that were very
different from those of the middle and upper classes, and he describes how,
in the city
centre’s shopping streets, different taste cultures were all served:

There is a working class city centre as there is one for the middle-
classes. They are geographically united,
they overlap, they have
concurrent lives; but they also have distinctive atmospheres. The
centre belongs to all
groups, and each takes what it wants and so
makes its own centre.
(ibid.: 144–5)

Conclusion

In the Venn diagram of surface, taste and design, even the area where these
three large subjects overlap is an
extensive territory. This chapter has
suggested some strategies in approaching this territory, and particularly
in
thinking in open and generous ways about taste cultures and their formation,
as articulated upon the surfaces
of designed objects.

References

Glenn Adamson and Victoria Kelley (eds) (2013). Surface Tensions: Surface Finish and the
Meaning
of Objects, Manchester University Press, Manchester.
Pennina Barnett (1999). ‘Folds, fragments, surfaces: towards a poetics of cloth’, in Pennina Barnett
and Pamela
Johnson (eds), Textures of Memory: The Poetics of Cloth, Angel Row Gallery,
Nottingham.
Tony Bennett, Michael Emmison and John Frow (1999). Accounting for Tastes: Australian
Everyday
Cultures, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
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Routledge, London
(first published in France 1979).
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Cambridge
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Christopher Breward (1999). The Hidden Consumer: Masculinities, Fashion and City Life
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London.
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Campbell’s soup … and beyond’, Senses and Society, vol. 1 no. 2: 165–81.
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Anna Moran
and Sorcha O’Brien (eds), Love Objects: Emotion, Design and Material Culture,
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and domestic textiles, c.1880–1939’, Textile: The Journal of Cloth and
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Catherine Wood (2009). ‘Property values’, Artforum International, vol. 47 no. 7: 87–90.
 11

TABLE STORIES
History, meaning and narrative in contemporary
homemaking
Trevor Keeble
 
 
 
This chapter considers the manner in which objects are remade through
design and the stories wrapped around them.
It explores my own personal
domestic context of homemaking in order to demonstrate how storytelling
and the
intentional act of design combine to form a meaningful and
performative mode of possession. The chapter takes as
its focus some
objects of ‘the other’, colonial acquisitions that were given to us by my
partner’s Great Aunt
Rose. These objects, literally out of place and time,
arguably only exist through the stories of their journey.
In this sense, the
chapter considers the ways in which the exotic becomes the everyday to
demonstrate the
transformative power of active possession through
redesign.
Beyond this, the chapter suggests that these issues are fundamental to an
understanding of contemporary
homemaking. It considers the practices and
processes of homemaking through an analysis of the acquisition and
meaning of domestic objects in order to characterise homemaking as an
expanded or narrative practice of design.
Considering the ways in which
objects are designed, redesigned, bought, given and inherited, the chapter
seeks to
uncover how the home is designed through time to constitute a
narrative of personal, marital and familial
identity. Taking the objects of our
dining table as its focus, the chapter considers the ways in which the
narrative processes of our homemaking shift and evolve over time and
across generations. In this sense it
explores the significance of biography
and storytelling to the domestic interior and its design.
 Designing narratives

In an interview published in the Guardian, the American novelist Siri

Hustvedt summarised
neatly the role of narrative in our lives. ‘Narrative’
she suggested,

is a necessary organising force in our lives, a way of making sense

of the disparate and fragmentary sensory
and cognitive material
that bombards us all the time from outside and inside our bodies.
But every story has
gaps that can never be filled, and every story is
told from a particular perspective.
(Crown 2010: 10)

Whilst this definition might constitute something of a cornerstone of

literary analysis, Hustvedt’s definition of narrative might serve equally to
explain the ways in which people
make sense of the explicitly material
world around them, and how this use of a narrated world might embody the
intentionality of a broadly experienced and expansive mode of design.
Indeed, in characterising storytelling as an artisanal practice akin to craft,
Walter Benjamin identified the
mutually constitutive relationship between
the storyteller and the story told (Benjamin [1936] 1992: 91). That he
found
analogy in the relationship between the potter and the pot acknowledges
that just as the story might be a
thing sunk into the life of the storyteller, so
too the pot, a material thing, might embody some essential part
of its maker
and carry with it a story of its own.
Paul Connerton reminds us of the deep-seated linguistic relationship
between cognitive understanding and the
sensual experience of materiality
in his study of How Modernity Forgets (2009). Arguing
that to grasp
something physically is often transformational, he offers a number of
commonplace idioms such as ‘I
cannot grasp this’ and ‘I can handle this’ to
demonstrate the implicit links between physical touch and human
understanding and intention (Connerton 2009: 124).
In her book Site-Writing, Jane Rendell explores objective and subjective
understandings,
representations and memories of a Welsh dresser and its
contents that had been part of her childhood home.
Counterposing the
supposedly objective representations of the photograph and dictionary
definition with ‘possible
narratives and extended reflections’, she suggests
‘the material of the archive rearranges childhood memories in
the present –
autobiography becomes topography; the space of a life becomes the life of a
space’ (Rendell 2010:
121). And so it is she reflects that,

The Welsh dresser gleamed through my childhood, though

Christmas dinners and Sunday lunches, through rice
pudding,
cherry corona, beetroot chutney, faggots and chips. As things fade
into the distance, they gain a
glossy sheen. The fairy lights on the
Christmas tree still twinkle. My mother’s hair always shines. The
surface, polished bright by nostalgia, provides a perfect view of the
past.
(ibid.: 123)

By drawing upon the subjective experiences of memories and narratives,

Rendell’s study gives voice to one of the
fundamental challenges of
investigating the domestic space: that it can never be reduced to an
objective account
or definable thing.
In their study Telling Stories, Maynes, Pierce and Laslett argue for the
importance of
personal narrative within history and the social sciences
because ‘motivations, predispositions, and actions’ are
too often explained
through reference to categorical affiliations such as race, gender, sexual
orientation,
social class, occupation or citizenship (Maynes et al. 2008: 16).
In the resulting
frameworks they suggest that human agency is reduced to
social position leaving the connection between the
individual and society
superficial. ‘Social actors’ they suggest ‘are treated as if they had little or
no
individual history, no feelings or ambivalences, no self-knowledge – in
short, no individuality’ (ibid.). Use of
narratives and storytelling, they
propose, reveals an understanding of ‘human agency from the inside out’,
one
that ‘can bridge the analytic gap between outside positionalities and
interior worlds, between the social and the
individual’ (ibid.).

Table Stories

Table Stories is a range of porcelain tableware designed in 2005 by the

Dutch designer
Tord Boontje. Available in four different colourways, the
plates and bowls narrate in silhouette four different
stories of animals and
birds, enchanted plants and forests. In his book Materiality and
Society,
Tim Dant uses the example of objects used for eating, such as plates and
cutlery, to demonstrate
the ways in which all objects are manifestations of
the specific material cultures in which we live. This, he
suggests, goes
beyond simply ‘the symbolic display of social status’, to testify to a broader
network of things
and technologies, such as tables and dishwashers, as well
as practies of food preparation and service. ‘What we
choose to eat our
meal off’, he argues, ‘whether it is a silver, china, glass, plastic or paper
plate depends on
the material culture we live in’ and ‘the plate that is
appropriate for the ceremonial meal or a family occasion
may well be
different from the one we feel comfortable with for a picnic or a TV dinner’
(Dant 2005: 26).
Table Stories is certainly not an everyday dinner service and is reserved
for those meals
when a cloth is put on the table. In anticipation of dinner
guests and along with the best crystal wine glasses,
the best napkins and the
silver-leaf tablemats, this dinner service is brought out from its hibernation
in a
locked cabinet that sits in the corner of the lounge. The everyday
versions of these objects are apparently far
less considered. They include
the misprinted Stars and Moons plates that my partner bought
as a student
and which are now so awful we can’t bear to get rid of them; an assortment
of different glasses that
sit like survivors in our kitchen cupboards where
once their matching siblings also sat; and some vividly printed
souvenir
placemats that feature a Mediterranean cruise ship of the 1960s called the
Reina del
Mar. These were given to us by a very close friend who happened
to know that my partner’s parents spent a
happy holiday on board the ship
shortly before his mother left his father for a woman called Marion from the
Tennis Club.
Dant uses the manner of eating food with objects to demonstrate what he
describes as ‘an idiomatic relationship
between series of objects and bodily
practices so that the practices can respond and realise the intentions in
the
objects’ (ibid.: 137). He suggests that this relationship might be constituted
in ‘table manners’ to provide
a material context for the social interaction
with others, and that to use cutlery that is different from what
you use at
home, is to be reminded that you are not at home.
Prior to purchasing Boontje’s Table Stories, our best china consisted of a
set of
mid-twentieth-century Burleigh Ware made by the Burgess and Leigh
factory in Burslem,
Stoke-on-Trent. This dinner service was given to us by
my partner’s Great Aunt Rose, who in turn had been given
it by her mother
as a wedding gift, upon her marriage to Jack in 1949. This dinner service is
just one of a
number of objects passed down from Aunt Rose. These
include cut crystal hock glasses, a silver champagne bucket
and Wedgwood
jasperware trinket pots amongst many other things which my partner spent
his childhood coveting.
Perhaps the most interesting objects that have come
to us from Aunt Rose are, however, those she acquired as the
wife of a
colonial civil servant in Nigeria during the early 1950s. Most notably these
include a pair of carved
ebony sculptures, which she subsequently
transformed into lamps, and a set of nine silver napkin rings.
Edwards, Gosden and Phillips argue for a sensual approach to colonial
objects in their collection Sensible Objects (2006). Although primarily
concerned with the anthropological collection and
presentation of colonial
material culture within museums, their arguments have a bearing on the
domestic
appropriation of colonial objects and reiterate once again the
importance of biography. They propose ‘the senses
concern bodily
engagement with the world, so that the manner in which the senses are
shaped and educated creates
a structure to the world both offering and
constraining the possibilities for the human subject’ (Edwards
et al. 2006:
23). Cutting the absolute image of the colonial wife, Rose is shown in the
photograph in Figure 11.1 in a moment of possibility as she first encounters
the ebony
sculptures, which, along with a diverse range of other
merchandise, are spread out across her lawn by a
travelling Hausa merchant
from the north of the country.
Figure
11.1 A photograph of Aunt Rose holding one of the ebony sculptures that she subsequently
turned into
lamps, c. 1950.
Author’s image.

It is, however, the napkin rings that are perhaps most pertinent to our
table stories (see Figure 11.2). Aunt Rose acquired these heavy, apparently
worthless objects in the early 1950s, at
which point she was told that they
were an old form of Nigerian currency. Whilst she spotted their potential as
decorative napkin rings, these objects had a heavily corroded surface which
she had silvered locally in order to
make them fit for her table.
In The Philosophy of Money, the German theorist of modernity Georg
Simmel argued for the
need to understand ownership as an ongoing activity
in contrast to mere passive possession. For him,

Ownership that is not to some extent activity is a mere abstraction.

Ownership as the point of indifference
between the movement that
leads towards it and the movement that leads beyond it shrinks to
zero.
(Simmel 1990: 304)

In order to understand the breadth and depth of possession he argued one

must characterise it as an active and
substantial condition, which relates to
other dynamics just as ‘being relates to becoming’ (ibid). Certainly Aunt
Rose’s appropriation and redesign of the ebony sculptures into lamps and
the silvering of currency to redesign it
as a napkin ring, represents a sense
of her taking hold of these objects and possessing them, not just as their
new owner but as a white colonial woman in Africa. The very act of
transforming the static sculptures into a
purposeful pair physically engaged
on a daily basis, or the covering of the coin rings in a high-maintenance,
conspicuous substance such as silver, suggests the very active and ongoing
form of possession that Simmel
described.
Figure
11.2 Silver napkin ring.

Author’s image.

In her essay ‘A Superficial Guide to the Meanings of Surface’ Victoria

Kelley suggests that just ‘as the effects
of time – dirt and stains, wear and
tear – are situated on the surface, so too are the techniques of maintenance
–
washing, cleaning, polishing’ (Adamson and Kelley 2013: 16). Kelley
draws upon Mary Douglas’s classic 1996
study Purity and Danger to
reiterate the creative endeavour of ordering the social sphere:

In chasing dirt, in papering, tidying, we are not governed by anxiety

to escape disease, but are positively
re-ordering our environment,
making it conform to an idea. There is nothing fearful or
unreasoning in our
dirt-avoidance: it is a creative movement, an
attempt to relate form to function, to make unity of experience.
(Douglas quoted in Adamson and Kelley 2013: 16)

This characterisation of ordering as a creative act in the pursuit of an idea is

of particular salience to the
discussion of homemaking as a meaningful,
intentional mode of design, one that seems to echo the individual
sensual
structure noted by Edwards et al. Yet it also lends itself to an understanding
of
how narrative might figure alongside this in the experience of
domesticity.
In her book Narrative Imagination and Everyday Life, Molly Andrews
proposes that ‘we must
imagine how we are imagined’ (Andrews 2014: 10).
Her work considers the role of storytelling and imagination in the
construction of personal identity. Arguing that
imagination is central to the
construction of oneself in relation to others, she suggests that ‘imagination
is
not only vital to our attempt to penetrate the meaning making system of
another, but it is employed in our
attempt to understand how we are viewed
by them’ (ibid.). Andrews offers a conception of imagination that is
grounded within everyday life, arguing that it is not something to be dusted
off like ‘a psychological tiara’ but
something that ‘is with us always, sitting
side by side with our reason and perception’ (ibid.: 11). This
characterisation of imagination as being both self- and other-directed, and
located within the realm of sensual
understanding, chimes with much that is
understood about the design, taste and consumption of domesticity. It
informs a performative understanding of homemaking as a mode of design,
like narrative that is both iterative and
constantly being reiterated: ‘Giving
accounts of ourselves is part of our everyday lives … However, the lens
from
which we view our lives and the world around is one which is not only
situated, but dynamic, that is to say, in a
constant state of being created and
recreated’ (ibid.: 8).
Yet, just as the act of silvering the heavy base metal rings might have
offered Aunt Rose new ways of both
imagining and presenting herself, this
act also embodied, quite literally, a phenomenon discussed by Tim Ingold
whereby ‘culture wraps itself around the universe of material things,
shaping and transforming their outward
surfaces without ever penetrating
their interiority’ (Ingold 2000: 53). One might argue that this transformative
act of appropriation represents a spectacular moment of containment which,
through its force of meaning, begins
fundamentally to erase all former
purpose, origin and meaning. In the particularity of its surface, Ingold
suggests, ‘every artefact participates in the impenetrable surface of
materiality itself as it is enveloped by
the cultural imagination’ (ibid.). What
is clear, however, is that if, as Dant suggests, ‘intentions are
“designed” into
objects’ (Dant 2005: 140), Aunt Rose’s acts of possession clearly
demonstrate that different
intentions redesign objects. To my partner, these
objects that we now own have always been simply the heavy shiny
Nigerian
napkin rings that his great aunt told him used to be money and which would
one day be his.
These objects, along with many others that seem to have made the
journey from Aunt Rose’s home to ours,
materialise the familial narratives
of a great aunt and her nephew. In his study of domestic material culture in
suburban Sydney, Greg Noble provides a perspective on the role of objects
in personal and familial identity. He
writes that:

our domestic objects, especially those prized possessions we

maintain for years, constitute key resources in
the ways in which
we go about objectifying the complexity and continuity of our
selfhood and its relatedness to
others, retaining these in the objects
and spaces of our everyday environments.
(Noble 2004: 238)

By suggesting a dynamic and continuous interrelation between human

subject and object, one which echoes Simmel’s
much earlier notion of
active possession, Noble makes the point that such an understanding goes
beyond the
description of objects offered by many earlier studies into the
meaning of things as simply mnemonic devices that
embody history. In
doing so he rejects a sedimentary notion of the domestic environment, in
favour of a material
cultural perspective on subjectivity that is productive
and identifies ‘participation in temporal and spatial networks of
relationships, experiences and objects
through which being is preserved and
extended’ (ibid.: 239). In this sense, Aunt Rose’s acts of homemaking,
redesign and storytelling might be understood not just as further wrapping
up the objects into new cultural
meanings but also as opening up the gaps in
narrative that Hustvedt suggested might never be filled – a gap
perhaps best
understood as existing between narrative and object.

A pre-history of napkin rings

Research into the history of Rose’s napkin rings confirmed that these
objects were indeed a form of West African
currency dating back some six
hundred or so years and that today there is quite a considerable collectors’
market
for them (in their un-silvered state, of course). These objects, known
collectively as manillas, were
traditionally made of copper or bronze and
constituted a form of barter coinage.
Long before Rose ever made it the object of her decorative ambitions, the
manilla-form manifested an interesting
design evolution in its own right.
Whilst the precise details and scale of the objects varied according to the
areas and regions in which they were used, the general horseshoe form is
thought to testify to an evolutionary
development from the precious armlets,
ankle rings and bracelets worn by earlier West Africans. These items of
jewellery were made traditionally from copper and were often decorated to
signify familial identity, wealth and
social standing. As such, the ancient
objects quite clearly constituted an intrinsic value of material and
labour,
and so their use as a bartering and trading currency, literally as a repository
of value, is
unsurprising.
Developing from such a highly specific use, determined by the physical,
cultural and social contexts of the body,
the manilla became abstracted, as
all monetary currencies must, to become a mere representation of value. It
would be wrong, however, to understand the manilla simply as providing
‘the technical possibility for the exact
equivalence of exchange values’
(Simmel 1990: 292), to use Georg Simmel’s description of money. There is
evidence
to suggest that the manilla was to some degree differentiated not
so much by fiscal value as by cultural and
social values. This is particularly
true of decorated armlets that were used as a dowry for marriages and
remained one of the principal uses of specific manilla currency until well
into the twentieth century, long after
the form had lost its association with
the body and with decoration.
This is not to suggest, however, that these objects were simply a form of
symbolic trading reserved for the
joining of two families. Evidence shows
that the scaled-down form of manilla was used widely throughout Nigeria
into the mid-twentieth century, until it was officially replaced with the
British West African currency by the
British colonial government on 1
April 1949 (Tibbles 2005), at which time, it must be assumed, a number of
these
objects made their way on to Rose and Jack’s dining table.
The passing of the manilla was celebrated in an issue of postage stamps
in 1953. Carrying the title ‘Old Manilla
Currency’, the 1/2d stamp depicts
eight manillas against a seascape featuring colonial and indigenous ships
and
palm trees, alongside a portrait in profile of the, as yet, uncrowned
Queen (see Figure
11.3). The full issue of stamps offers an explicit
representation of both the heritage and modernity of
modern Nigeria and
includes: indigenous products such as tin, groundnuts, cocoa, timber, palm
oil, hides and
skins; cultural artefacts and people such as an Ife bronze
sculpture and Bornu horsemen; and the achievements of
modern
infrastructural progress such as the Jebba Bridge over the Niger River,
Victoria Harbour, new and old
Lagos.

Figure
11.3 Nigerian stamp featuring ‘Old Manilla Currency’, 1953.

Author’s image.

Having been told by Rose that the napkin rings were simply an old form
of African currency, this more detailed
history of their origin remained
fairly obscure, possibly even just an unreliable tale of an old great aunt.
That
was, however, until a visit to the National Maritime Museum at
Greenwich brought us face-to-face with our napkin
rings in their un-
silvered form. Occupying a small wall-mounted case, two tarnished and
corroded brass rings were
presented to visitors as part of the Museum’s
display concerning the transatlantic slave trade (Object ID
AAA2820:
National Maritime Museum).
Identical in both size and form to the napkin rings, these objects were
presented as a currency very far removed
from the modern, abstract
technology for the universal equivalence of exchange values that we
understand money to
be today. These objects manifested a very specific
purpose and intention, the indigenous buying and selling of
slaves. As
might be imagined, the realisation that our napkin rings had once
represented the sum of human worth
was chilling. Known colloquially as
slave tokens or slave money, it turned out that these objects, made
originally of copper and then more commonly of brass, carried a significant
intrinsic value for the West African
traders of the late eighteenth and early
nineteenth century.
The most disconcerting revelation was, however, that these were not in
fact the exotic foreign objects we had
been led to believe. From the early
sixteenth century Portuguese and Dutch traders had recognised the manilla
as
the indigenous trading form in West and North Africa and imported
many thousands, all specifically made in their
own countries for the sole
purpose of exchange for human slaves. As colonial ambitions for Africa
grew, they were
joined by the British, French and Spanish, and the
manufacture of manillas in England began first in Bristol in
the early
eighteenth century, before moving quite fundamentally to the burgeoning
centre of European brass
manufacture, Birmingham (Tibbles 2005). The
manillas presented by the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich were
salvaged from the wreck of a Portuguese schooner that sunk in 1843 off the
Scilly Isles on a voyage from Liverpool to Oporto.
The manufacture of these curious objects constitutes the first action in
what has come to be understood as the
triangular transatlantic slave trade.
Through industrial production, Europeans reproduced objects of currency to
West and North African merchants. Then, in the first stage of the triangle,
they shipped these from Europe to
Africa. They then swapped their
industrial cargo for a human one, which in the second stage of the triangle
was
shipped in the most appalling conditions across the Atlantic to South
America, the Caribbean West Indies and
American colonies. Upon arrival in
the New World slave colonies, the African slaves were exchanged primarily
for
crops with which to fuel the industrialised consumer revolution of
Europe (Heuman and Walvin 2003: 4–10).
The implications of this shifting trade in objects and humans across three
continents is very far beyond the
scope of this chapter, but it is perhaps
significant to note that whilst the British abolished the slave trade in
1807,
the objects of its industrial economy remained instrumental to its
transatlantic continuation. Clearly
British manufacture was still servicing
and, it must be presumed, profiting from this abolished trade.
 Conclusion

In his discussion of ‘Consumption’ in the Handbook of Material Culture

(2006), Daniel
Miller summarises a perspective that seems as relevant to
the historical objects and designs of the early
nineteenth century as it
clearly is today. ‘The material culture of consumption’, he proposes,

seems to be the ideal point of reference for engaging with the

continued fetishism of the commodity, not only
at a theoretical
level but also at the practical level of trying to consider what
transformations in knowledge
and production are required to make
consumers acknowledge the products they purchase as among other
things the
embodiment of human labour.
(Miller 2006: 350)

Through their circulation the objects of a capitalist, consumer culture

undergo both theoretical and practical
transformation, and this
transformation is one of knowledge and its absence, a point taken up by
Paul Connerton
in his study How Modernity Forgets (2009). Connerton
describes the moment of
industrialisation in the nineteenth century as
initiating a contemporary cultural amnesia through the
over-abundance of
consumer goods. ‘From the standpoint of cultural memory’, he argues, ‘it is
not simply the
fecundity of consumable objects, it is their lifespan, that is
significant’ (Connerton 2009: 122). Connerton
argues that the advent of the
industrialised world saw for the first time a widespread cultural experience
of
humans outliving the objects that they possessed. The resulting
‘accelerated metabolism of objects’ (ibid.),
brought about through
industrialisation and the unknown labour of production that lies at its heart,
stands in
marked contrast to the more restricted and rarified material culture
of earlier periods when objects such as
clothing and domestic goods
endured through careful possession and repair, which as a consequence
gave them
greater financial value and cultural meaning. Whilst this
significant shift in the economy of material culture initiated by
industrialisation and the proliferation of things cannot be
questioned, this
argument fails to acknowledge that objects that live long also move and
change through
possession and design, and this, as in the case of Aunt
Rose’s napkin rings, is also a process for forgetting.
 This suggests that we have a need to narrate meaning for objects simply
because so often we have no real sense of
where they come from. So, what
then might the story of these napkin rings be? At best they might be
described as
an ongoing process of making, labour and the body: the
armlet-inspired manilla as an object of the body, as
currency being used to
represent and even exchange for the body, and as a napkin ring being used
for the social
and cultural sustenance of very different bodies. This bodily
engagement of the object, so fundamental to the
conception of taste, seems
to inform its role in both homemaking and storytelling.
In his essay on the ‘Structures of Interior Design’, Jean Baudrillard
describes taste as a ‘poetic discourse, an
evocation of self-contained objects
that respond(ed) to one another’ (Baudrillard 2002: 315). When I think
about
the objects we have inherited (and indeed those we have chosen not
to inherit) from Aunt Rose, I become aware of
how easily they seem to
have been conceived within the design of our home and how their
narratives both continue
and extend in the wilful acts of inhabitation and
design that constitute our homemaking as an expanded or
narrative mode of
design and imagination. These objects have become the intentional and
sometimes speculative
iterations and reiterations of our domesticity, and in
so doing fulfil Baudrillard’s understanding of the objects
as belonging
primordially ‘to the register of the imaginary’ (ibid.: 317).

References

Adamson, G. and Kelley, V. (eds) (2013) Surface Tensions. Surface, Finish and the Meaning of
Objects, Manchester, Manchester University Press.
Andrews, M. (2014) Narrative Imagination and Everyday Life, Oxford, Oxford University
Press.
Baudrillard, J. (2002) ‘The Structures of Interior Design’ in The System of Objects
(translated by
James Benedict, London and New York, Verso: 15–29) reprinted in Ben Highmore (ed.) The
Everyday Life Reader, London and New York, Routledge.
Benjamin, W. (1992) ‘The Storyteller’ in Illuminations, London, Fontana Press: 83–107.
Connerton, P. (2009) How Modernity Forgets, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.
Crown, S. (2010) ‘Siri Hustvedt talks to Sarah Crown’, The Guardian, G2 supplement, 6
February:
10–11.
Dant, T. (2005) Materiality and Society, Milton Keynes, Open University Press.
Edwards, E., Gosden, C. and Phillips, R. (eds) (2006) Sensible Objects: Colonialism, Museums
and
Material Culture, Oxford and New York, Berg.
Heuman, G. and Walvin, J. (eds) (2003) ‘Introduction to Part One: The Atlantic Slave Trade’, The
Slavery Reader, London and New York, Routledge.
Ingold, T. (2000) ‘Making Culture and Weaving the World’, in P. M. Graves Brown (ed.) Matter,
Materiality and Modern Culture, London, Routledge.
Maynes, M., Pierce, J. and Laslett, B. (2008) Telling Stories: The Use of Personal Narratives
in the
Social Sciences and History, Ithaca and London, Cornell University Press.
Miller, Daniel (2006) ‘Consumption’ in C. Tilley, W. Keane, S. Kuechler, M. Rowlands and P. Spyer
(eds)
Handbook of Material Culture, London, Sage.
Noble, G. (2004) ‘Accumulating Being’, International Journal of Cultural Studies, 7 (2):
233–56.
Rendell, J. (2010) Site-writing: the Architecture of Art Criticism, London and New York,
I. B. Tauris.
Simmel, G. (1990) The Philosophy of Money, London and New York, Routledge.
Tibbles, A. (2005) ‘Interpreting Transatlantic Slavery: the Role of Museums’ in A. Tibbles (ed.)
Transatlantic Slavery. Against Human Dignity, Liverpool, National Museums Liverpool/Liverpool
University Press.
 12

WALL STREET(S)
Marilyn Cohen
 
 
In 1987 Oliver Stone’s movie Wall Street opened in theaters on the heels of
the insider
trading scandals that sent several American stockbrokers to
prison. The movie introduced the fictional character
Gordon Gekko (Michael
Douglas), a Wall Street titan who became an iconic representation of greed
and power.
Twenty-three years later, in 2010, Stone made Wall Street:
Money Never Sleeps, a response
to the 2008 Wall Street debacle considered
the worst economic crisis ever.1 In Money Never Sleeps, Gekko reappears
after a stint in federal prison for insider trading, wanting to
reconnect with
his estranged daughter and to reinstate himself in the financial community.
Both Wall Street
movies tell fictionalized stories set against real historical
events, use culturally specific locations and
interiors, and involve family
relationships. Given that Stone’s father worked as a broker on Wall Street,
both
films were personally meaningful.
Oliver Stone’s movies are often critiqued for their highly opinionated
versions of history (Fridson 2000:
120–34). But whether or not one accepts
Stone’s movies as historical truth, Stone uses real locations and
interiors to
situate his audience believably within the world he represents. After brief
plot descriptions, this
chapter explores aspects of production design in
Stone’s two Wall Street movies, analyzing how furnishings,
artwork, objects,
and technology represent two different socio-economic moments. In 1995
Pat Kirkham wrote that
the mise-en-scène of a movie set has a signifying
status equal to that of a character (Kirkham and Thumim 1995:
28). More
recently, Ian Christie affirmed how “design history can add to traditional
film studies approaches,
dealing as it does with the ways that spaces,
textures and the built environment convey the non-verbal,
non-actorly
meanings of cinema” (Christie 2013). Production designers, realistically and
symbolically, embellish
character and story, writes Laurie Ede (Ede 2010: 4–
5), and the camera literally illuminates it. In both movies,
production design
weds family and the financial market within capitalist society. This analysis
incorporates my
interviews with the production designers and set decorators
of both movies.
In Wall Street (1987) the young stockbroker Bud Fox (Charlie Sheen)
rejects the life of
his working-class father, a mechanic in an aviation
company and union representative, to embrace the life of the
powerful
Gekko, including a love relationship with Gekko’s ex-girlfriend, an interior
decorator, Darien Taylor
(Daryl Hannah). Using insider information to gain
entry into Gekko’s world, including information taken from his
father, Fox
attains the life he desires but finds himself deserted by Darien when he
relinquishes his
relationship with Gekko and its attendant riches. In Wall
Street: Money Never Sleeps
(2010) Gekko’s daughter Winnie (Carey
Mulligan) works for a non-profit, environmentally concerned website, and is
engaged to a young stockbroker, Jacob Moore (Shia LaBeouf), who is
committed to “clean” energy sources and using his financial acumen to
better the world. When rumors started by
banker Bretton James (Josh Brolin)
destroy Jacob’s firm, causing the suicide of its founder—and Jacob’s mentor,
Lou Zabel (Frank Langella)—Jacob decides to avenge Lou by destroying
Bretton financially with Gekko’s help.
Pursuing a relationship with Gekko
behind Winnie’s back, Jacob convinces Winnie to sign over monies to her
father, believing they will go to Jacob’s fusion energy project. Gekko instead
absconds to London, using the
money to reestablish himself as a global
financial player. Jacob brings down the evil Bretton, but his
duplicitous
relationship with Winnie’s father causes a split between the couple. In the
end, Gekko returns money
to Winnie who contributes it to the energy
project; Winnie and Jake reunite and have a baby; in the last scene
everyone
is seen celebrating the first birthday of Gekko’s grandson at a sumptuous
party—signifying a “bond”
between family, successful finance, and
emotional happiness.
Shortly after Wall Street opened, a critic wrote that the movie was about
something the
world had never quite seen before: “not just any old greed, but
postmodern greed, nouveau greed, state-of-the-art
greed” (Gross 1988). As
much as its narrative, Wall Street’s set design spoke to greed by
making
interiors and interior design specific and expressive. In Wall Street, Stone
uses
interior design not only to define character but also to articulate the loss
of value and meaning inherent in its
particular socio-economic moment.
That Stone made his main female protagonist a decorator makes this clear, as
does a reading of the script, an original story co-written by Stone and
Stanley Weiser, in which the director
envisioned the settings in detail before
shooting ever began. Additionally, the production designer for the film,
Stephen Hendrickson, and its two set decorators, Susan Bode (now Bode-
Tyson) and Les Bloom, all recalled Stone’s
intense involvement with the sets
and requirement that most items be personally approved by the director. The
decorated interiors of Wall Street, therefore, were significant sites for Stone,
sites
within which he both implicated and explicated his narrative, one
calculated to expose the fissures that lay
within the American financial
system, and individuals perilously detached from family and moral values.
Three primary locations in Wall Street elucidate relationships between
interior design,
character, and economic power: Gekko’s Wall Street office,
his beach house in the elite community of the New York
Hamptons, and
Bud’s new condo. Hendrickson, Bode-Tyson, and Bloom all confirm Stone’s
insistence on filming the
movie on location and using real spaces and real
art to enhance
authenticity. Gekko was to be a Master of the Universe, so
they chose a building in Lower Manhattan overlooking
the East River, to
give him a “commanding view.” Gekko’s beach house, “meant to seduce
Bud,” according to
Hendrickson, was an existing one built by known
architects Gwathmey and Siegel in Bridgehampton for a Wall Street
broker
whom Stone knew. And Bud’s new apartment, once he has achieved success,
is described in the script as a
thirtieth-floor “aerie” on Manhattan’s Upper
East Side.
The production team purchased or rented much of the art, furniture, and
technology displayed throughout these
sites from the contemporary
marketplace. They all emphasized the importance of using cutting-edge art
and design
to create Gekko’s character, or, in Hendrickson’s terms, to give
him an “emotional and visual power.” They took
ideas from contemporary
shelter magazines and interior decorators, and consulted with well-known
furniture and
art galleries. According to Bode-Tyson, they went into the
marketplace to buy goods as if they were the
characters, shopping at Rich
Kaufman’s Art et Industrie Gallery in Soho
for the newly popular “art
furniture” of the 1980s and at the, then new, D&D Building in Long Island
City,
New York, for Italian-designed pieces. For the real art used, Stone
relied on his friendships with Arne Glimcher,
owner of the, then well-
known, Pace Art Gallery, and the artist Julian Schnabel. Stone also used
artwork from his
own collection. For the contemporary viewer, high-profile
works by “hot” artists such as Schnabel and Keith
Haring placed Gekko
realistically at the epicenter of the worlds of art and finance, overtly linking
those two
worlds and the ways in which they interact to reinforce and
dramatize a hegemonic economic system.
Just to reach Gekko’s office, the camera has the viewer walk down a long
corridor with Bud so that we enter the
space kinetically through his eyes.
The grand scale of everything—the
sheer amount of floor space, the view,
the multiple computer monitors, the world map, the clocks with
international
times, the slate walls, and black leather furnishings—all speaks to a
hyperbolic masculinity.
Objects in Gekko’s office are material weapons and
spoils, the trophies that mark the bloodless battles he has
fought to achieve
his empire. Stone has the camera circle the office so that it becomes a
coliseum of energy, and
the viewer is kept riveted and dominated by Gekko
and his space. In addition, Hendrickson had Gekko’s desk chair,
purchased
from the high-end Pace Collection, dyed an oxblood red, a singular
metaphor for the tycoon’s
gladiatorial style in financial negotiations;
Gekko’s language is punctuated by words and phrases that include
“terminator,” “sperm count,” and “orifices flowing red.” As Hendrickson
said, “Gekko in a white office would not
be Gekko.” Neither would he be
Gekko were he surrounded by more traditionally rich office trappings—
luxurious
fabrics, warm aged woods, or Old Master paintings.
Figure
12.1 Gekko in his office,
Wall Street (1987). Production designer, Stephen Hendrickson; set
decorators, Susan
Bode and Les Bloom.

© Photofest Inc.

Gekko did not come from old money and the production was consciously
designed not to associate him with New
York’s Park Avenue. His driven
personality, his power, and rise to success is made palpable through his need
and
ability to own or control what is happening now, or is about to happen,
in the market. The quartz halogen lamp by
the Lightolier company on
Gekko’s desk, for example, was not yet even available to the general public.
Through
such objects Gekko owns the future as well as the present. Seated
in his green and gold Napoleonic chair he
reigns like an emperor, or
pharaoh, over the past too. That the only female seen here is Gekko’s
secretary, who
otherwise sits outside the office, emphasizes the room as a
phallic precinct.
Like his office, Gekko’s beach house is a display case for high-priced art,
with works by John Chamberlain,
Georgia O’Keefe, and Jim Dine, among
others. The paintings, rugs, and artifacts there are all described
diegetically
in terms of investment value. But these objects are not shown simply as
signs of wealth or power,
they are themselves empowering. Gekko reifies his
phallic and economic power, for example, by standing in front
of his gun
collection while negotiating with an adversary. As Baudrillard wrote, the
collected object may be a
resistant material body, but it is also,
simultaneously, a mental realm over which the collector holds sway
(Baudrillard 1996 [1968]). Gekko similarly commands his physical person:
his hair is immaculately gelled into
place and he wears well-cut suits with
suspenders. This carefully manicured masculinity manifests larger
ambitions
and obsessions kept in check. Guns and skulls (the O’Keefe painting), even
when contained within cases
and frames, introduce themes of violence and
death into the mise-en-scène, making it resonate with underlying
anxieties
that threaten social hierarchies, as Gekko does.
In sum, Stone demonstrates Gekko’s seductive power through a
Veblenesque display of spaces and objects, an
economic exhibitionism that
Bud emulates as he begins to make his own ill-gotten fortune. Gekko’s
lifestyle, and
later Bud’s, is objectified through the things and people that he
owns or collects. As Gekko says, articulating
the very essence of late
capitalism, “I don’t create anything. I own.” Ownership for Gekko is not
about personal
expression; it is about consumption.
Like Gekko’s office and beach house, Bud Fox’s newly purchased
apartment is a theatrical performance. Darien’s
conceit for Bud’s apartment,
described in the script, is a maniacal mix of periods, materials, and styles,
calling for distressed “neo-classical” murals, an oversized “Gothic oak
refectory table,” a painting “of skulls
on a rough board,” a “fantail shrimp
chaise from Art Furniture’s ‘sushi collection’,” Art Deco chairs, faux
Etruscan pots, and a coffee table that looked like it came from Pompeii.
Stone’s image for what he wanted in the
condo, as told to Hendrickson, was
the crumbling walls of Pompeii. In the
movie a series of movers, painters,
and carpenters are shown working night and day to the song This Must Be
the Place (Naïve Melody) by Talking Heads, with its lyrics about
“home.”
According to the script, Bud’s “cubic white box” apartment, identical to
hundreds of others, will be
transformed by decorating. The script reads:
“The point is decorating can transform.”
The point is not just that decorating can transform, but that it can also
falsify. Purchased with funds
attributable to insider trading, Bud’s apartment
is “done” in an appropriately illicit manner. Darien calls her
conception for
Bud’s apartment “the demolished look” and wants it photographed for
“House and Garden [sic]” before it looks “lived in.” The apartment belies
any traditional definition of home as
comfortable. The Lucas Samarras
painting of ghoulish heads hung near the entryway obliterates any sense of
the
apartment as cozy or life-enhancing, as does the uninviting and
uncomfortable art furniture beneath it. For
Hendrickson, the steel coffee
table epitomizes Darien’s conceit. Made from shards, it lacks a full top so it
is
impossible to easily rest anything on it. Metonymically, it renders the
home non-functional and unlivable. The
plastic “brick” wallpaper stapled on
to the wall is another irony. Covered over and then jaggedly cut into, the
tears reveal the “original fake” brick paper beneath. All of this alludes to
Bud’s plasticity, his flawed
character, and eroded integrity. Rather than
establishing an identity through owning and decorating a home Bud,
like
Gekko, remains detached from the stuff of this purchased world. Stepping
out alone on to the terrace of the
apartment, Bud asks, “Who am I?”
Through Darien, Bud has literally embedded interior design and
decoration into his life, but it is devoid of
personal meaning. The filmic
decorating montage condenses time and space in the same way that Darien
conflates
historical periods. More than bad taste, this is a design
methodology that consumes the past and present with the
same greedy
impunity with which Gekko raids and destroys companies. This is all about
objects detached from any
subject; design elements are shifting signifiers in
a disconnected world. Distressed and demolished, Darien’s
interior design is
destabilizing in its attempt to create history and character where there is
none. It
underlines both the superficiality of Bud and Darien’s romance and
the distortions of their economic world. Not
only do these one-of-a-kind
furnishings speak to death through their themes and composition, their
shattered
surfaces and cold materiality foreground the violence, even
hysteria, wreaked by wealth and egocentricity.
Uncertainly moored
aesthetically and financially, the “demolished look” presages Bud’s
ruination. Stone uses an
interior design strategy that effectively narrates the
relationship between his characters and their world. If,
as Vivian Sobchack
writes, the cinematic exists as a visible performance of “lived-body”
experience, then the
viewer experiences interior design in Wall Street as the
dis-ease located within late
capitalism (Sobchack 2004).
In comparison with the first, the second Wall Street movie is not nearly as
self-consciously involved with art
and money as its predecessor was in the
eighties. No character is so clearly connected to design as the interior
decorator Darien. However, the strains of the same Talking Heads’ song
about home play in both movies and Gekko
is still a major character, though
now more complicated and ambiguous. The significant spaces in Money
Never Sleeps are Gekko’s Upper West Side Manhattan rented apartment,
Jacob’s loft-like
apartment in Manhattan’s Flatiron district, where Winnie
often lives with him (and which recently sold on the
real estate market for
$15 million), and Bretton James’s East 65th Street and Park
Avenue home.
As in Wall Street, production designer Kristi Zea and set decorator
Diane
Lederman confirm that the interiors in Money Never
Sleeps were important
to Stone but that he didn’t want the sets and interiors to be anything like the
earlier film. Art and furnishings would still communicate wealth,
“connectedness,” and stature, however. And in
2009 the production team
researched furnishings online, at sites catering to the international wealthy
such as
1stDibs.com.
Gekko’s apartment, says Lederman, posed an especially intriguing
problem in that it was not supposed to be his
own. Rented from a friend, the
apartment is monochromatically modern, with rectilinear furnishings set off
by
abstract metal sculptures that are cool textured silhouettes. For Lederman,
a haphazard throw on the couch
signals Gekko’s lack of care for anything he
doesn’t own. Accenting the space, an organically shaped dark blue
lounge
with slim angled wooden legs sits by the window embodying a past
modernity or former life rather than
up-to-the-minute trendiness. A framed
souvenir of Dutch “Tulipmania,” designed by the production team, hangs on
the wall, recording one of the greatest instances of economic speculation—a
sort of memento-mori for Gekko’s
1980s self. Indeed, until Gekko regains a
financial footing, he appears mostly without tie or suspenders, his
hair
notably gel-free—all of which indicates his loss of control or diminished
economic standing. A tall cactus
plant in the apartment reassures the viewer,
however, of Gekko’s still phallocentric personality.
Jacob’s brightly lit and very large loft-like duplex apartment with outside
terrace is filled with metal
shelving, storage units, and desks with computer
screens for keeping pace with breaking news and global markets,
but is more
personally expressive. Two three-dimensional artworks sit above his mantel.
Like satellite photos of
earth, these works by Darlene Charneco, says
Lederman, fit well with Jacob’s concern with new energy sources. A
human-
scaled figure of the cartoon character Betty Boop stands to the side of the
apartment entry, and playful
robot-like figures made of tin or metal sit on the
window sill. Stone had seen the Betty Boop in a store near
where they were
shooting the movie and immediately wanted it for the set; perhaps Boop’s
Depression-era roots
recalled the 1930s Wall Street crisis his own father
lived through. A pool and ping-pong table, like the humorous
art pieces,
imply Jacob’s fun-loving character; they are toys a young man can have
when he has “money to burn”,
says Lederman, like the large flat-screen TV
he’s recently purchased. The sheets on his bed, boldly red and
white, come
from the stylish Bowery Hotel in Lower Manhattan. Made by Frette, and
expensive, they too refer to
his downtown lifestyle. In short, Jacob’s
apartment is that of an attractive, successful, and likable young man.
It is a
direct contrast to the home office of Bretton James.
Bretton James is living in an older brownstone that Stone borrowed for
filming from “Baby” Jane Holzer, a society
woman who had been an
intimate member of Andy Warhol’s coterie in the 1960s and known for her
art collection.
When Bretton summons Jacob to this Park Avenue home,
Bretton is in the midst of hosting a fundraising event
there. The apartment
entryway and the event happen in an icy marble setting. Bretton sits on a
contemporary chair
upholstered in a zebra-skin fabric that sets him
immediately apart. Artworks in the entryway include a Richard
Prince
ektacolor photograph called Untitled (Cowboy) (1999), one of
an edition of
only three, and part of Prince’s Spiritual America series, an intended
reminder of Bretton’s professional rough-riding across the financial markets.
Jacob is shown into Bretton’s
office, dark and dense with wood furnishings
and covered with artworks, including mostly twentieth-century
prints,
photographs, and paintings. Among the artworks are two by Keith Haring, a
Warhol portrait of Jackie
Kennedy, another Prince that belongs to his Nurse
series, a Julie Heffernan painting, Self-Portrait as Big Idea (2008)
(stylistically akin
to work by the German Renaissance painter Lucas
Cranach), and a large-scale photograph of the open road behind
James’s
desk. A small 1948 photograph of Roland “Rollie” Free when he set a world
record for motorcycle speed
leans on a ledge. The photograph records an
event well-known to both Jacob and Bretton as both are motorcyclists
and
will later furiously compete against one another on bikes. Most prominently,
a Goya painting hangs over a
fireplace mantel.
Finding Jacob looking at the Goya when Bretton enters the office, he
describes it to Jacob using its Spanish
title, Saturno Devorando su Hijo or, as
he restates in English, Saturn
Devouring his Son (see Figure 12.2). Bretton
explains that, while Goya made fifteen
paintings late in life, and fourteen are
in the Prado, this is a sketch for a lost painting not even in the
Prado. Bretton
thus establishes himself as the owner of something singular and priceless—
an Old Master work,
Spanish and not American—and a departure from all
the other works in the office. Bretton emphasizes the monstrous
nature of the
painting’s content and, implicitly, his own predatory nature. Zea speculates
that Bretton acquired
the painting surreptitiously, providing another clue to
his nature through this design decision. Bretton rejects
Jacob’s assumption
that he might be a collector, saying “I’m not one of the obsessive compulsive
and insecurely
egotistical who feel the need to collect things.” In this he
pointedly rejects Gekko’s status in the earlier
movie—and a 1980s
sensibility that used art to signal wealth. Gekko collected art and used new
forms of
technology to enhance and empower himself. Bretton James sees
collecting as neediness. For Bretton things are
devoid of meaning in their
materiality. His power resides in his assertion that he will outride Jacob on a
motorcycle. Like Saturn Devouring his Son, Bretton can eat Jacob. In fact,
when Bretton is
finally defeated by Jacob, he destroys the Goya painting in
anger.
Lederman, describing the decoration of Bretton’s home, says that the
zebra-skin chair is meant to characterize
Bretton as a hunter. A semi-circular
chair in his office, with hard metal armrests and heavily veined leather
seat
and back, expands the hunting metaphor, as do small solid metal animals on
his desk. I read this as an ugly
space, where nothing seems to go with
anything, but the office is better
understood using Lederman’s description of
it as “unlikable.” The audience is supposed to read the financier
through this
environment as off-putting and frightening, in keeping with the theme of the
Goya. During this
scene, the camera shoots back and forth between Bretton
and Jacob as a verbal sparring match between two fighters
in the ring
preceding the battle royal. Viewers understand that Jacob wants vengeance
against Bretton for the
death of his “father,” Lou Zabel.
Figure
12.2 Office of Bretton James,
Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps (2010). Production designer,
Kristi Zea; set
decorator, Diane Lederman.

© Photofest Inc.

The theme of the Goya painting broadens, mythologizes, and

universalizes Bretton’s concerns—as well as the global
reach or stature of
the Wall Street Bretton represents in 2008. Bernard Frankel, a psychologist,
writes that both
Wall Street movies center on oedipal themes and the
betrayal of love; in Money Never
Sleeps the Goya painting says this
graphically. But Frankel describes the excesses of material wealth in
each
movie as similarly meant to enthrall and seduce the viewer with capitalist
riches (Frankel 2011). However,
interiors in Money Never Sleeps do not
entice as they do in the earlier film.
Using a cultural studies approach, in two articles, Elena Oliete-Aldea does
not discount the oedipal theme but
places Money Never Sleeps within a
discussion of late capitalism, postmodernism, and
globalization. She argues
that each movie communicates different concepts of “home” related to their
socio-economic contexts (Oliete 2012; Oliete-Aldea 2012). In Wall Street,
home and family
constituted a real place which opposed the individualistic
drives symbolized by Gekko and Fox. Bud Fox’s parents
remain devoted to
him despite criminal wrongdoing directly affecting his father. In Money
Never
Sleeps, in contrast, family is precarious, and home becomes a longed-
for ideal. Winnie has rejected her
father, her brother has died of a drug
overdose, and there is no mother present. As Oliete points out, when Gekko
is released from prison no one is there to meet him and he pointedly watches
as two other now-free prisoners of a
very different social class are greeted by
their families. Yet, once Gekko has his money he flies off to London
alone
so we are left ambivalent as to what Gekko wants more: money or family
(Oliete 2012: 114–23).
Oliete-Aldea attributes the nostalgia for home to individuals facing the
anxieties of globalization, the loss of
institutions and secure relationships
that protect them from the market (Oliete-Aldea 2012: 362). Production
design in Money Never Sleeps supports her thesis. Interiors in the first Wall
Street may be overly theatrical and underlain by falsities, but they exist in
brick and mortar
even if as ironic signifiers of money and success. In Money
Never Sleeps Gekko’s apartment
is a vacuous space. When Jacob finds it
abandoned, the viewer, like Jacob, is shocked by its emptiness. The
“Tulipmania” poster is the one item left behind; Gekko no longer needs the
“souvenir” because he can once again
actively engage in speculation. In that
filmic moment Gekko’s apartment represents a loss of ground, a
confrontation with ephemerality. Likewise Jacob’s mother, Sylvia (Susan
Sarandon), a former nurse now turned to
speculative real estate, shows an
unfinished Long Island home to Jacob and Winnie. Still under construction,
it
is insubstantial and will remain so unless Sylvia borrows money to finish
it. Finally, Jacob too is forced to
vacate his apartment. Playing the strains of
the same Talking Heads song heard in Wall
Street, with its lyrics about
home, Stone, in Money Never Sleeps as he did in
Wall Street, articulates a
narrative that integrates home with the economic culture of
capitalism. By
2008, however, homes are no longer showcases for greed; they are
commodities related to more
systemic and troublesome financial
constructions—such as subprime mortgage debt.
Michael Lewis, in his popular account of the 2008 crisis as compared with
the 1980s (about which he also wrote),
says that he could not have imagined
how two full decades after the
financial fracas of the eighties “the difference
in degree between Wall Street and ordinary economic life would
swell to a
difference in kind” (Lewis 2010). The “centrality of finance to the current
[2008] crisis,” write Jeff
Kinkle and Alberto Toscano, “poses representation
problems … namely the prohibitive mathematical and legal
complexity of
the financial instruments (derivatives, collateralized debt obligation, credit
default swaps) at
the heart of the matter” (Kinkle and Toscano 2011: 39–51).
Stone himself has said: “I don’t know how you show a
credit default swap
on screen.”
 Between Wall Street and Money Never Sleeps the markets and
instruments
of finance became increasingly abstract and out of mental reach for the
majority of Americans. A
cultural anthropologist of Wall Street, Karen Ho,
writes that theorists such as Jean Baudrillard and Guy Debord
“posit a
radical disjuncture between the fictitious economy (finance capital) and the
‘real’ economy” (Ho 2005:
69). While in the first movie the excesses of Wall
Street culture were illustrated through physical decor that
was self-
consciously, ironically, even comically horrific, by the later film decor exists
as a metaphor for more
transcendent financial speculation.
Lou Zabel, Jacob’s father-figure and mentor, commits suicide because he
no longer grasps the changing financial
market and failed his investors. And
Gekko says that he learned in prison that time, not money, is the most
important asset in life. The production team purposely chose an office for
Lou Zabel that included a huge
three-dimensional undulating clock face with
Roman numerals leaning against the wall. Its wavy (read wavering)
form
and Roman numerals suggest a melting and vanquished civilization. Simen
Johan’s Untitled
No. 153 (Buffalo) is hung alongside the clock. Johan’s work
is part of his series
Until the Kingdom Comes in which he places animals
originally photographed in their
natural settings into other digitally
photographed landscapes where they don’t belong; it all looks real but
isn’t.
Writes Johan: “I depict ‘living’ as an emotion-fueled experience engulfed in
uncertainty, desire and
illusion” (Johan 2011). It nicely fits Oliete-Aldea’s
assertion that “home” in Money Never
Sleeps only exists as an imagined or
desired place (Oliete 2012; Oliete-Aldea 2012). Johan’s Buffalo, an animal
perceived romantically as an ideological embodiment of Americana,
confounds
reality, time, and nature, and, alongside the clock, elucidates the
surrealistic American financial market on the
brink of collapse. Reality
ironically creates ambiguity.
It is tempting to read the use and placement of these improbable artworks
and the abandoned or unconstructed
“homes” in Money Never Sleeps as
metaphors for the hardly understood subprime mortgage
loans so integral to
the 2008 financial crisis—loans tied specifically to “homes” but bundled and
diced into
financial instruments that existed in the ether. For some on Wall
Street, it was only a matter of time before
they were exposed as empty
bubbles. “In conquering physical space, finance capital allows capitalism to
transcend
its ties to geography and thereby move into the realm of electronic
globalization,” writes Ho (2005: 69).
 Oliver Stone’s Wall Street films have been criticized as morality tales
rather than accurate portrayals of how
financial markets work. But Jerry Z.
Muller in The Mind and the Market, his extensive
study of capitalism and
intellectual thought over the past 300 years, confirms that capitalism has
always been a
complex and ambiguous entity interrogated for its “cultural,
moral and political effects” on society. And part of
the “moral effects” have
to do with the way that capitalism invaded “the familial hearth” and affected
the
family. Intellectuals always worried, writes Muller, that the calculation of
costs and benefits seen as characteristic of the market would spill over into
the family (Muller 2002:
ix–xvii). Wall Street and Money Never Sleeps
dramatize perennial
concerns. If, as Muller begins his book, “We live in a
world shaped by capitalism,” production design in Stone’s
two Wall Street(s)
gives literal shape to its sometimes corrosive effects.

Notes

Wall Street, DVD, directed by Oliver Stone (1987); Wall Street: Money
Never Sleeps, DVD, directed
by Oliver Stone (2010). I have previously published on design in Wall Street (1987) in Design and
Culture 1:2 (July 2009). All quotes from
production designers and set decorators on the two movies
derive from my own interviews with them: for Wall Street (1987) Stephen Hendrickson, production
designer; Susan Bode and Les Bloom, set
decorators; and for Money Never Sleeps (2010) Kristi Zea,
production designer; Diane
Lederman, set decorator.

1 Former Federal Reserve chairman Alan

Greenspan and, more recently, Ben Bernanke describe the
2008 crisis as the worst ever. See, for example, http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2014/08/26/2008-
meltdown-was-worse-than-great-depression-bernanke-says,
accessed 8/2/16.

References

Baudrillard, J. (1996), Le systeme des objects [1968], trans. James Benedict, London,
Verso.
Christie, I. (2013), Review of L. Ede’s British Film Design, in Journal of Design History 26:3: 337–9.
Ede, L. (2010), British Film Design: A History, London, I. B. Tauris.
Frankel, B. (2011), “Two Films Called Wall Street,” in Group 35:2: 179–81.
Fridson, M. (2000), “Wall Street,” in B. Toplin (ed.), Oliver Stone’s USA: Film, History and
Controversy, Lawrence, KS, University of Kansas Press.
Gross, J. (1988), “The New Greed Takes Center Stage,” The New York Times, January 3.
Ho, K. (2005), “Situating Global Capitalism: A View from Wall Street Investment Banks,” in Cultural
Anthropology 20:1: 68–96.
Johan, S. (2011), Review of exhibition (contemporary with filming of Money Never
Sleeps),
www.dailyartfixx.com/2011/11/11/simen-johan-photography/, accessed 23/3/16.
Kinkle, J. and Toscano, A. (2011), “Filming the Crisis: A Survey,” in Film Quarterly
65:1: 39–51.
Kirkham, P. and Thumim, J., (eds) (1995), Me Jane: Masculinity, Movies and Women,
London,
Lawrence & Wishart.
Lewis, M. (2010), The Big Short, New York and London, W.W. Norton.
Muller, J. Z. (2002), The Mind and the Market, New York, Anchor.
Oliete, E. (2012), “Images of Love and Money in Hollywood Cinema: Changing Patterns in the Last
Decades,” in
The International Journal of the Image 2:2: 113–26.
Oliete-Aldea, E. (2012), “Fear and Nostalgia in Times of Crisis: The Paradoxes of Globalization in
Oliver
Stone’s Money Never Sleeps (2010),” in Culture Unbound: Journal of
Current Cultural
Research 4:3: 347–66.
Sobchack, V. (2004), Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture, Berkeley,
University
of California Press.
 13

BEYOND PERFECTION
Object and process in twenty-first-century design
and
material culture
Viviana Narotzky
 
 
 

Some kind of revolution

Since the late 1990s digital technologies and social media have reached a
point of maturity from which a new
industrial culture is emerging. This
networked information economy is having a huge impact on the creative
fields, transforming fundamental aspects of the processes of creation,
mediation, distribution, and consumption.
Historically speaking, this is all
extremely recent. Nevertheless, the first generation of digital natives is
already starting to leave its mark on the creative industries. The pace of
change is absolutely furious. Every
single day, somewhere, someone is
discovering a completely new way of doing something—and telling the
world about
it right away through a host of digital social networks, from
Twitter and Facebook, to Reddit, GitHub, and
innumerable blogs and
specialist platforms. Indeed, many believe that the best way to ride this wave
of
transformation is to share the ride—and that openness, transparency, and
collaboration are what will turn a
technological capability into a social asset.
In design, as in other creative fields, there is now an emerging landscape
of practices and exchanges that
incorporate approaches such as open code,
the digital commons, co-creation, sharing, re-mixing, and collaborative
working. It is clearly more than technological change, however, that drives
these ways of doing things: there is
a strong cultural shift underpinning these
practices, a shift that moves away from design staples, such as clear
individual authorship, mass-production, standardization, and proprietary
licensing, towards collaborative
processes, open and Creative Commons
licenses, and a more fluid, less professionalized understanding of
authorship.
These changes are no doubt profound, and they are being widely recognized
as such. Many have written
of a new industrial revolution, or more
specifically a Third Industrial Revolution (Markillie 2012; Rifkin 2011).
Others focus less on industry and technological might, and more on the deep
cultural shifts they are bringing,
emphasizing their social underpinnings and
talking rather of a new cultural revolution:

Openness is not merely a technical attribute that conveys flow or

lack thereof; it is an embedded trait that
pervades the structure of a
thriving civil society. From a social
perspective, openness is a core
characteristic of an infrastructure that conveys and reinforces
sharing,
reciprocity, collaboration, tolerance, equity, justice and
freedom.
(Avital 2011: 72)

Whatever type of revolution it might be, it certainly raises some important

questions about the nature of
long-established relationships in the field of
design, and feeds the tensions between community and
individuality,
producing and consuming, professionals and amateurs, testing the limits of
control, ownership and
authorship, and redefining the very nature of our
relationship with technology and material culture.
Design has always been involved, through both theory and practice, in the
construction of utopian definitions of
modernity. In doing so, it has given
physical shape to the hopes and anxieties characteristic of each historical
moment and geographical setting. In particular, given its industrial nature,
design has always been involved in
the expression and exploration of the
potential afforded by new technological contexts. The nineteenth century
was thrilled by the seemingly limitless possibilities of a perfectly mechanical
future; the early twentieth
century further polished and adjusted the gears in
search of an optimal efficiency of mechanization, projecting a
future that
idealized the relationship between form, function, and mass industrial
production. At the end of that
century, the development of electronic tools
allowed further refinement and greater precision in this
relationship with
machines.
 In the early twenty-first century, it is becoming increasingly clear that the
new digital era heralds much more
than a simple improvement of existing
capabilities. Over two hundred years ago, the Industrial Revolution set out
to
achieve standardization and rationalization through mass production, seeking
to generate objects that promised
mechanized perfection in form and
function. The ensuing modernist ideals of lasting perfection, a “closed” or
“finished” object ready for consumption, universal solutions for universal
needs, or a standardized and
controlled range of options, have been an
enduring backbone of design practice throughout the twentieth century.
The
design process, by its very nature, was originally expected to eliminate
diversity and standardize outcomes
to enable greater ease of manufacture,
creating a steady-state, unalterable final product. Although increasingly
challenged by alternative approaches since the 1960s, these ideas still
pervade not just professional
understandings of “good design”, but also
mainstream popular perceptions of the world of goods. These include,
for
instance: the idea that industrial objects are meant to be stable through time
and that any physical change
over the course of their use is equivalent to a
degradation; the confidence that the same mass-produced object
can meet
the needs of hundreds of thousands of different individuals; that all its
desirable or best
characteristics have been carefully considered beforehand,
definitively integrated into the final result during
the design process and are
closed at the time of manufacture. These expectations as to the nature and
behavior of
objects have proven to be problematic in the long term. They
were a promise of universal, lasting perfection that
is as utopian now as it
was a century ago, a promise that objects consistently fail to fulfill when
faced with
the ever shifting reality of life, the decay brought about by
physical entropy and the nature of social change.
Consequently, it is not just
the mediated pressure of contemporary consumer culture that has fostered a
lack of
endurance in our dealings with things. It is also the ideological
constructs that underpin our unfulfilled
expectations about the very nature of
the things themselves, which in turn
have fed back into unsustainable
practices of consumption and use.
Spurred by rapidly expanding technological capabilities, design is now
leaving behind the premises inherited from
modernity’s utopian take on
mechanized industrial production, and embracing both the exhilarating
flexibility
afforded by new technologies and the postmodern understanding
of fleeting, ever changing identities, contexts,
and needs. Designers and
consumers are repositioning their relationship to the objects around them,
and to each
other.
Industrial mass manufacturing and mechanization once relocated
production away from the crafts and trades
workshops, and from the
domestic environment, on to the factory floor. Paradoxically, we are now
seeing how the
site where the things that we use every day are being made
might shift once more, this time from the factory back
to the workshop, and
even the home. But it is the digital network, and the communal hubs that it
enables
(crowdfunding platforms, support forums, instructional portals, file
sharing nodes, peer to peer exchange
communities, and so on), that are the
new infrastructure of production for a growing ecosystem of material goods.
At the same time, the onslaught of the digital, with its attendant
dematerialization, has also caused a reaction
among millennials, a generation
that has come to perceive the analogue world as something uniquely worthy,
or at
the very least intriguing and inherently meaningful. From vintage
clothing to mid-century modern furniture, craft
beer and craftivism, to the
revival of Polaroid photography, turn-of-the-century urban subcultures have
rediscovered patina and the handmade (Greif et al. 2010). Hence the
growing crossover
between digital and analogue design and production
processes, low-tech craft approaches and high-tech
capabilities. For as much
as it celebrates industry and industrial processes, contemporary design also
celebrates
making and makers, and designers are increasingly drawn to
being personally involved with creating objects from
scratch.

The end of perfection

Throughout its relatively short history, the design profession has often seen
itself as being in conflict with
the very thing that defines it: the mass
production of consumer goods. Designers have regularly been faced with
ethical dilemmas that arise from the intimate articulation of their practice
with business, capital, and
industry. These range from late nineteenth-
century concerns with professional honesty and the search for truth to
materials and functionality that led to the design reform movement and the
premises of “good design”, through
mid-twentieth-century counter-cultural
revolts against the instrumentalization of design practice in the
interests of
capital and big business, to more recent anxieties about the participation in
unsustainable
processes of unfettered conspicuous consumption.
 This unease is not limited to designers, however, and it is often artists who
have best been able to express the
internal contradictions inherent in our
everyday relationship with a (first) world of seemingly unlimited
material
abundance. Photographer Andreas Gursky’s spectacular depictions of the
aesthetics of consumer capitalism
have juxtaposed the hallucinogenic,
repetitive rhythm of endless rows of worthless stuff in his diptych 99c (1999)
with the exquisitely curated shrines to shoes of his Prada
shop displays
series of 1996–8. Similarly, in his 2001 installation
Breakdown, Michael
Landy made an inventory of everything he owned, then effectively
destroyed
every single one of his material possessions over the course of a fortnight,
making them circulate in a
simulacrum of a factory floor conveyor belt in a
temporarily vacant C&A shop on London’s Oxford Street, en
route to their
ultimate annihilation. This conflation of production, consumption, and
destruction sought to
achieve a new beginning, a tabula rasa in which
objects had disappeared, leaving nothing
but their emotional trace.
It was this emotional trace, or at the very least the search for it, that started
to appear in the work of
conceptual designers in the 1990s. One of the more
striking statements came from Dutch designer Tejo Remy,
associated with
the Droog Design collective. His 1991 chest of drawers, appropriately
named You
Can’t Lay Down Your Memories, was constructed out of an
accretion of reclaimed found drawers fitted with new
enclosures and loosely
held together by a jute strap. It is a limited edition of prohibitively expensive
one-off
pieces, a critique of consumerism that explores themes such as time,
improvisation, patina, and accumulation, not
only of memories, as the
piece’s name suggests, but of elements, objects, things. Its hands-on
approach heralded
the rise of “making” as a process that is in no way
incompatible with design, and not circumscribed to craft or
art—a
conviction that has become increasingly mainstream in the new century. It
also showcased the acceptance of
imperfection, not as a failure in the
integrity of an object, but rather as a unique characteristic that enhances
its
value and fills it with meaning.
Sixteen years later, Martino Gamper’s 2007 project, 100 Chairs in 100
Days, in which new
chairs were made by combining previously discarded
ones, similarly celebrated the singularity of the found object
and
juxtaposition (of styles, materials, colors, and techniques) as a creative
process. It was also a strong,
explicit statement against the idea that the
search for perfection in design should be seen as a positive
achievement.
Gamper set himself strict time and material restrictions in order to
necessarily engage with
imperfect outcomes: “The motivation was the
methodology: the process of making, of producing and absolutely not
striving for the perfect one. This kind of making was very much about
restrictions rather than freedom” (Gamper
2012). That same year, and
celebrating a different aspect of imperfection, Bethan Laura Wood’s Stain
collection of teacups mobilized patina as a creative tool, examining the long-
held assumption
that sustained use was damaging to products. These were
objects designed to improve with use; the inside of the
teacups was only
partially glazed, revealing a decorative pattern that slowly appeared and
deepened as tea
repeatedly stained the unprotected ceramic surface.
But engaging with imperfection, as a designer, can mean far more than
just the acceptance of a not-perfect
outcome as part of a carefully
conceptualized process. It can also mean being willing to accept imperfect
control
of both the outcome and the process itself, or in other words,
relinquishing a degree of authorship. The
consolidation of new technological
capabilities has been underpinning new design proposals, truly opening up
mass
production to immediate user inputs, and reclaiming uniqueness and
collaboration as part of the industrial
process. Web-based design software
that can be easily manipulated without previous technical knowledge allows
ordinary computer users to make functional design decisions, automatically
generating blueprints for local
execution in various materials. This can be
combined with distributed manufacturing processes, through 3D
printing,
laser cutting, and computerized numerical control (CNC) milling, or more
traditional craft production, either at local FabLabs and workshops, or
through
online-based supply platforms that receive a digital file and send
back a physical object.
Designs can thus be presented as an open-ended range of possibilities,
templates which the end user defines at
the moment of purchase, therefore
walking away with an object that is, in effect, the result of a creative
partnership between the designer and the individual consumer. The exact
way in which this can be made to work
successfully, both in terms of its
business model and its creative inputs, is still unresolved. Possibly the most
considered attempt to implement it was Droog Design’s 2011 project, Design
for Download,
which was launched at that year’s Milan Furniture Fair. It set
out to create a platform for the design, retail,
and distribution of projects
(furniture and small products) that could be modified online, downloaded,
and then
manufactured locally, ideally through a network of recommended
collaborators. Its initial offering was structured
around a carefully curated
set of projects from young designers, such as Minale-Maeda and
EventArchitectuur,
which would eventually co-exist alongside an open
platform where anyone could upload their work. Unfortunately,
this
ambitious project was soon abandoned. One significant problem it
encountered had to do with the difficulties
in being able to ensure true
quality control of the final product, and the designers’ reluctance to accept
such a
degree of quality variation in outcome. The search for a successful
business model that could ensure appropriate
remuneration for all parties
was also elusive. Nevertheless, Design for Download brought
together, and
visibly pioneered, a whole range of experimental approaches that took
advantage of web-based
infrastructures and the potential of distributed
manufacturing to open up the design process and its whole system
of
provision. As one of the designers involved, Tal Erez of EventArchitectuur,
explained at the time:

Ultimately the customer makes the design decisions. We wanted to

make a framework and not to define the final
design. We made
building blocks and the interface so that people can add or transform
the design. That gives a
lot of freedom … Our designs offer endless
possibilities within very simple boundaries … And this process
gives
people programmatic choices: functional choices which will
eventually determine the design, rather than just
decorative options.
(Droog 2011)

Creating a system that offers seemingly endless possibilities within a set of

previously established boundaries
is what is known as parametric or
algorithmic design. Rather than
defining a single preferred outcome, the
designer defines certain parameters, or variables, that configure a
given
universe of possible outcomes. These approaches imply that the whole
system of provision for a designed
object (its creation, manufacture,
mediation, distribution, retail, use) is inextricably linked and is, in fact,
incomplete until that object has actually found a buyer. It is only then that it
will be formally finalized, that
its site of production will be chosen, at which
point it might be hand-built at the local joinery, laser-cut at a
CNC
manufacturing workshop, or 3D-printed at a nearby fabrication lab.
 One of the first examples of this approach was Ron Arad’s ground-
breaking Bouncing Vases
collection, part of the 2000 project Not Made by
Hand, Not Made in China, whose name
already suggested an ambivalence
between crafts and mass production. The design itself consisted of a short
digital animation film with images of vases in motion, bouncing up and
down and constantly changing shape. When
the animation was paused and
set in a single frame, a vase with the
selected shape was digitized as a 3D
printing file, and went from being virtual to being materialized in
polyamide
by selective laser sintering, “grown” in a vat by computer-controlled laser
beams, emerging, unique and
special like a first-born, out of the generative
power of digital technology. The chosen frame was then deleted
from the
original animation, ensuring that particular vase could not be reproduced
again and therefore making it
unique. At the time, 3D printing was still
known as rapid prototyping, as it was a technology that was used by
designers, architects, and engineers to generate models and prototypes for
objects that would then be
manufactured using traditional methods such as
casting or milling, but not to create final products.
In a similar vein but with a mix of high- and low-tech inputs, Tord
Boontje’s 2002 light Garland consisted of a mass-produced laser-cut metal
sheet. However, for the design to be functional
and complete, it required
each end user to turn their purchase from thin apparently two-dimensional
metal into a
one-off three-dimensional lampshade, by twisting and shaping
the material by hand according to their own personal
preferences. In 1998,
Tord Boontje had developed the Rough and Ready collection, a
furniture
series that could be constructed out of salvaged material, or material that was
cheap and readily
accessible to anyone, such as bits of wood, a blanket, and
some tape or string:

The pieces, as their title suggests, appear rough and ready. They
have a sense of incompleteness, a feeling
that things might change.
They are utilitarian works, which acknowledge the beauty of
imperfection and offer an
alternative to slick objects.
(Boontje 1999)

The items were intentionally kept very simple, the idea being that they could
be built by the end user by
following a basic set of instructions. The Rough
and Ready Chair (see Figure 13.1) was one of the earliest instances of a
downloadable open design, with the designer
freely offering the information
needed to make a piece, rather than producing a finished three-dimensional
object.
Designers are well aware that in this brave new world of the digitally
generated multiple one-off, the boundaries
that once clearly separated design
from craft are more blurred than ever, technologically at least, if not
conceptually. In their 2010 performative installation L’Artisan Électronique
(The
Electronic Artisan), Belgian designers Unfold and Tim Knapen
combined pottery, one of the earliest ways of making
useful objects, with
new digital technologies. Using open-source software and hardware, they
created a virtual
pottery wheel, which included a set of sensors that reacted
to movement and allowed visitors to “turn” vases. By
pressing a button,
users saved their vase design to disk and an image of it was displayed on the
gallery wall. A
selection of these were then printed daily in layers of clay
with a modified RepRap machine, an open-source
additive 3D printer.
These projects suggest that designers have been reassessing the nature of
industrial production, and of
industrially produced objects, moving away
from the premise that the task of design is to facilitate the serial
reproduction
of identical goods that have been perfectly predetermined to their very last
detail. These practices
are pushing the boundaries of what David Pye, in his
1968 book The Nature and Art of
Workmanship, defined as “the
workmanship of certainty” (Pye 1968), that characterizes the controlling
standpoint of industrial production. They are incorporating into mechanized
processes, the “workmanship of risk”,
which Pye defined as being
characteristic of more open-ended craft
processes. Moreover, many of the
outcomes that result from these emerging approaches to design do not fit
Jean
Baudrillard’s framework of a “system of objects” constituted through
the design of a “model” and the mass
production of a “series” derived from
it (Baudrillard 1996). The model/series paradigm, which has applied to
industrial mass-produced objects for over a century, fails to describe the
serial distributed production of
unique objects through 3D printing and
digital fabrication, and the design of parametric systems rather than
specific
material outcomes, or, as noted below, the existence of freely shared
production templates and evolving
“open” objects that might never be
complete at any one point in time. It is also difficult to locate the exact
site
of authorship in many of these projects. While conceptually designers are
clearly not relinquishing that
role, the objects themselves that emerge out of
these processes embody new forms of collective authorship, often
accruing
over years:
Figure
13.1 Downloadable blueprint for the Rough and Ready Chair. Tord Boontje,
1998.
Courtesy: Tord Boontje.

In all of these, the point is not that authorship no longer exists, or

that it is without value—it has simply
shifted in definition. There is
a form of authorship in all of these projects, but the relationship
between the
author and the user is no longer structured around the
logic of an inviolable sacrality of the author.
(Grima 2012)

Opening up and fixing

The struggle for openness has also been fought on other battlegrounds, far
from the realms of conceptual
high-design production. Strictly speaking it
has been initially a call for accessibility, a demand that
industrial products be
more transparent and that their internal structure be made available to users,
so that
consumers can take charge of “their” objects and repair them as
needed, therefore extending their usability and
contributing to a more
sustainable life cycle.
These calls have strong social and political underpinnings. They emerged
out of the grassroots anti-capitalist
movements of the turn of the twentieth
century and were exacerbated by the post-2008 banking and economic crisis.
More specifically, they came out of the rise of hacker culture, the open
software movement and the maker movement
in the mid-to late 1990s.
These new creative communities, while often virtual and connected through
various
digital means, also led to the appearance of hackerspaces or
makerspaces. These were community-run physical
workspaces that extended
the ethos of open software into hardware, where anyone with interests at the
crossroads
between science and digital technology, computers, art and
design, craft and do-it-yourself (DIY) could work and
socialize.
Hackerspaces had a strong ethical foundation, with an emphasis on
grassroots activism, cooperation and
peer-to-peer learning, free access to
information, distrust of authority, and open knowledge transfer (Kostakis
et
al. 2014). Arising in Europe in the mid-1990s, hackerspaces soon became a
global
phenomenon. They offer accessible local manufacturing through their
infrastructure of CNC laser cutters, 3D
printers, and open-source electronic
boards such as Arduino (a micro-controller) and Raspberry Pi (a single-
board
computer). Two decades after they first emerged as sites of limited
workshop-based production linked to making
practices, hackerspaces are
now also increasingly sites of manufacturing, “accompanied by new
partnerships
between makers, manufacturers, VCs, as well as educational
and state-run
initiatives [becoming] hardware incubators that seed and
support the growth of startups, bringing maker ideas to
the market”
(Lindtner et al. 2014).
In 2006 Make Magazine, which had been founded in the United States a
year earlier and had
quickly become the main mouthpiece for the DIY
electronic hobbyist and maker community, published an article with
the title
“If you can’t open it, you don’t own it: a Maker’s Bill of Rights to
accessible, extensive, and
repairable hardware.” Its author argued that
product manufacturers restrict access to hardware in the same way
that
digital publishers in the music industry lock up free access to data through
Digital Rights Management
(DRM): “If you can’t open it, you don’t own it.
You bought the hardware but, like DRM, the manufacturer restricts
your use
by controlling access, replacement parts, and information. It’s yours and
usable only as long as the
manufacturer chooses to support and repair it”
(Jalopy 2006: 154–7).
The Maker’s Bill of Rights listed things such as “Cases shall be easy to
open”,
“Components … shall be replaceable,” and “Screws better than
glues.” But its demands went beyond strictly
ensuring physical access to the
insides of objects. Crucially, it also asked for access to the information
necessary to make those objects’ working structures easily understandable:
“Circuit boards shall be commented”
and “Schematics shall be included.” In
other words, a complete object is not only its materiality, it is also the
information that explains how it works; in the age of the digital black box
and the circuit board, where it is
impossible to understand the workings of a
system by simply looking at its parts and how they fit together,
information
has become a necessary component of the physical world. It is this idea of
knowledge transfer being
an integral part of the object itself that was
explored in 2014 by the Viennese design studio mischer’traxler in
their
project knowledge-tools-memory. It consists of two objects, a sketchbook
and a
blanket, both of which incorporate into their design a set of graphic
vignettes that explain the process to
follow so that they can be made by
hand. As well as the information, the objects include the tools necessary to
follow those instructions and replicate the piece (see Figure 13.2). The
project therefore
addresses the making and the reproduction of objects, and
highlights that the transmission of skills and the
basic knowledge about how
things are made should not be neglected. In fact, it proposes that the
information can
be embedded into the object itself, alongside the tools that
we might need to reproduce it.
In 2009, three years after the Makers’ Bill of Rights was published, the
Dutch group
Platform21 issued its own Repair Manifesto. With a greater
focus on the creative and
cultural aspects of repairing, and with a strong link
to industrial design, Platform21’s manifesto was the first
to be directly aimed
at the design profession:

Product designers: Make your products repairable. Share clear,

understandable information about DIY repairs …
Repairing is a
creative challenge. Making repairs is good for the imagination.
Using new techniques, tools and
materials ushers in possibility
rather than dead ends.
(Platform21 2009)

The call for action was accompanied by workshops, an exhibition, a lecture

series and open calls for
contributions, under the title “Platform21 =
Repairing. Stop recycling, start repairing!” The tag line aimed to
leave
behind recycling as the cornerstone of sustainable practice, by focusing
instead on truly expanding the
usable lifespan of objects and therefore
significantly reducing waste. One of the associated projects, which gave
public visibility to the idea of repair as an everyday, ubiquitous gesture, was
a workshop run in Amsterdam by
artist Jan Vormann, whose ongoing
collaborative project, Dispatchwork, encourages people
from cities across
the world to use colorful Lego plastic bricks to repair cracks and holes in
walls and
pavements: “Dispatchwork does not defy deterioration. Rather, it
aims to emphasize transitoriness as a chance for
the construction and
reconstruction of our environments” (Vormann 2010).
Figure
13.2 Knowledge-tools-memory: blanket, by studio mischer’traxler, 2013.
Blanket: wool, cotton
threads, various materials for tools. Dimensions: 120cm × 205cm.
Graphics: Brigitte Höfler. Courtesy studio mischer’traxler.

One of the more recent iterations of a manifesto that champions the repair
ethos has been The
Fixer’s Manifesto of 2012. It was published by the team
that developed Sugru, a new material invented by Jane Ní Dhulchaointigh as
part of her degree work at the Royal College
of Art in 2004. Sugru is a self-
curing rubber that can be easily used to repair or improve everyday objects,
to
implement practical hardware “hacks,” and adapt things to personal needs
and preferences. The
Fixer’s Manifesto celebrates practical problem-solving,
the beauty of repaired objects, and their narrative
content: “Every fix,
whether skillful or improvised, holds a story.” It also marks the end of the
modernist ethos
of mass-produced objects as ideal vehicles of perfect form
and functionality, impervious to entropy and decay:
“Fixing means freedom
and independence. As a fixer, you don’t need to worry about wear and tear.
Nothing stays
new, so forget perfection” (Ní Dhulchaointigh 2012).
This is also an explicitly “open” manifesto, initially presented as Version
1.0 of the text. As is the case with
open software, it is not proprietary or
closed, encouraging others to build on its content, and improve or change
the
existing version according to personal preferences. It is an ongoing,
collective project, and credits its
predecessors, among them Platform21’s
Repair Manifesto, for inspiration.
Once the ideal of achieving perfection is left behind, the design process
can truly open up and aim to
incorporate universal participation, not only in
the development of a particular project, but also through
establishing online
communities that work within a given set of formal rules or templates, to
both benefit from
and contribute to a growing body of work. One such case
is OpenStructures, a collaborative online platform that
proposes a modular
construction system for objects that can be used as a starting point to build
just about
anything. Ignoring pre-existing demarcation lines between
professionals and amateurs, the platform welcomes
everybody’s contribution
to a growing library of parts, instructions, and construction templates; the
modular
grid is a simple standard that makes it easy to design for.
OpenStructures aims to be an open modular system,
like Wikipedia or the
Linux operating system, but for hardware, where “everyone designs for
everyone” (Lommée
2006). Similarly, but with an architectural background,
the WikiHouse project proposes an open-source building
system, “a
commons for high-performance, low-energy homes that can be customised
to you, digitally manufactured
and self-assembled. We are collaborating to
put sustainable design tools and knowledge into the hands of
everyone”
(Parvin 2011).
In that context, what becomes important is not so much the outcome, as
the whole system that enables
collaboration, endless iteration, delocalization,
and adaptation. The exhibition Adhocracy, curated by Joseph Grima together
with an international curatorial team and held during
the Istanbul Design
Biennial in Autumn of 2012, set out to showcase precisely that kind of work:
 Adhocracy … surveys the contemporary design scene in the wake of
a wave of social and
technological revolutions that have transformed
the realm of design in recent years. The exhibition argues that
rather
than in finished products, the maximum expression of design today
is to be found in processes—systems,
tools, networks and platforms
that involve users in the process of definition of the end product.
(İKSV 2012)

Indeed, design work that seeks to explore the world of open process,
unfinished projects, and shared authorship
has a powerful new technological
infrastructure to enable it. Supported by social media, new creative
communities
often overlap previous boundaries of practice: designers,
makers, hackers,
craftspeople, entrepreneurs, social activists. Online-based
platforms are channels for a wide variety of open and
collaborative practices,
grassroots innovation, and new business models. They offer novel solutions
for specific
issues such as investment, production, distribution, research, or
creative networking.
In fact, grassroots online collaboration has become a powerful source of
entrepreneurial capital, often replacing
the dot.com era model of venture
capital as the main source of
financing for small startups. Founded in 2009,
the US website Kickstarter.com, which focuses on creative
projects, is
currently the world’s most successful and best-known crowdfunding site, a
peer-to-peer platform
through which individuals provide direct financing for
other people’s personal or business projects. In 2012,
Kickstarter funded
some 324 million dollars’ worth of art-related projects. This included all
design and
video-related projects, which made up 200 million dollars of that
total. At the time of writing in March 2015,
Kickstarter had provided a total
funding of 1.5 billion dollars, and funded nearly eighty thousand projects
(Kickstarter 2015). The most successful crowdfunded product to date, the
Pebble
smartwatch, was the first to receive pledges in excess of 10 million
dollars (Brian 2012).
Most of these crowdfunded projects, however—as is the case with much
of what is being enabled by this global
networked digital infrastructure—are
not necessarily “open”, “shared,” or “collective” in the ways that have been
discussed here. More often than not, new technological capabilities enable
pre-existing approaches, practices,
and business models, giving them greater
reach, speed, and flexibility but without transforming their nature. At
the
same time, the groundswell of creative practices that do share a strong
commitment to this social contract
and focus on new cultures of sharing, the
creation of a digital commons, and non-proprietary outcomes is
undeniable.
The intangible world of open software is now connected to a growing and
very material open hardware
movement, supported by a powerful
infrastructure of communication hubs and a global network of
manufacturing
sites, from FabLabs, to hackerspaces, to local trade
workshops. And in its interface with the field of design, it
is fostering a new
community of practice that is uniquely comfortable with outcomes that may
be imperfect,
unfinished, changeable, improved, modified by strangers, and
owned by no one.

References

Avital M. (2011) The generative bedrock of open design. Open Design Now. Amsterdam:
Premsela.
Baudrillard J. (1996) The System of Objects. London: Verso.
Boontje T. (1999) Rough and Ready Collection. Available at:
http://tordboontje.com/projects/furniture/rough-and-ready/, accessed March 23,
2016.
Brian M. (2012) Pebble Smartwatch tops $10 million in Kickstarter Pledges, sells all 85,000
Watches.
Available at: http://thenextweb.com/gadgets/2012/05/10/pebble-smartwatch-tops-10-million-in-
pledges-sells-all-85000-watches/#!rNcfx,
accessed April 23, 2016.
Droog (2011) Designers for Download: Interview with EventArchitectuur. Available at:
www.droog.com/news/2011/04/designers-dowload-interview-eventarchitectuur, accessed April,
2011.
Gamper M. (2012) 100 Chairs in 100 Days. London: Dent-De-Leone.
Greif M., Ross K. and Tortorici D. (2010) What Was the Hipster?: A Sociological
Investigation, New
York: n+1 Foundation.
Grima J. (2012) Adhocracy. Available at: www.mplusmatters.hk/asiandesign/paper_topic3.php?
l#x003D;en., accessed April
23, 2016.
İKSV (2012) Adhocracy Exhibition. Available at: http://1tb.iksv.org/adhocracy-exhibition/, accessed
February 2, 2016.
Jalopy M. (2006) If you can’t open it, you don’t own it: a Maker’s Bill of Rights to accessible,
extensive, and
repairable hardware. Make. 154–7.
Kickstarter. (2015) Stats. Available at: www.kickstarter.com/help/stats February 2, 2016.
Kostakis V., Niaros V. and Giotitsas C. (2014) Production and governance in hackerspaces: A
manifestation of
Commons-based peer production in the physical realm? International Journal of
Cultural
Studies, 18: 555–73.
Lindtner, S., Hertz G. and Dourish P. (2014) Emerging sites of HCI innovation: hackerspaces,
hardware startups
and incubators. Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in
Computing Systems. Toronto, ON: ACM.
Lommée T. (2006) OpenStructures. Available at: http://openstructures.net/ February 2, 2016.
Markillie P. (2012) A third industrial revolution. Available at: www.economist.com/node/21552901
February 2, 2016.
Ní Dhulchaointigh J. (2012) The fixer’s manifesto: why fixing is the unsung hero of
creativity.
Available at: http://magazine.good.is/articles/the-fixer-s-manifesto-why-fixing-is-the-unsung-hero-
 of-creativity
February 2, 2016.
Parvin A. (2011) WikiHouse. Available at: www.wikihouse.cc/ February 2, 2016.
Platform21 (2009) Repair Manifesto. Available at: www.platform21.nl/page/4360/en February 2,
2016.
Pye D.W. (1968) The Nature and Art of Workmanship. Cambridge: Cambridge University
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Rifkin J. (2011) The Third Industrial Revolution: How Lateral Power Is Transforming Energy,
the
Economy, and the World. New York: Palgrave MacMillan.
Vormann J. (2010) Dispatchwork Manifesto. Available at: www.dispatchwork.info/manifesto/
February 2, 2016.
 Part III

DESIGNING IDENTITIES:
GENDER, SEXUALITY, AGE,
NATION
 14

MODERN DRESSING
The suit as practice and symbol
Christopher Breward
 
 
 
The Viennese architect Adolf Loos, father of Modernism and occasional
fashion journalist, authored an influential
series of short articles in the years
around 1900 that positioned the bespoke and everyday objects of the
contemporary gentleman’s wardrobe as archetypes of progressive design.
Hats, shoes, underwear and accessories
were scrutinized for the qualities
that set them in competition with the inferior output of more ‘vulgar’
industrial sectors (women’s dress) and nations (Germany). The idea of the
Englishman’s suit, in particular, was
held up as evidence of humanity’s
transformative search for perfection. Through its fitness for purpose, its
sleek elegance and its social grace it offered a perfect example of
evolutionary theory and democratic utopianism
made material:

I have only praise for my clothes. They actually are the earliest
human outfit. The materials are the same as
the cloak that Wodin,
the mythical Norse leader of the ‘wild hunt’ wore … It is
mankind’s primeval dress … [It]
can, regardless of the era and the
area of the globe, cover the nakedness of the pauper without adding
a
foreign note to the time or the landscape … It has always been
with us … It is the dress of those rich in
spirit. It is the dress of the
self-reliant. It is the attire of people whose individuality is so strong
they
cannot bring themselves to express it with the aid of garish
colours, plumes or elaborate modes of dress. Woe
to the painter
expressing his individuality with a satin frock, for the artist in him
has resigned in despair.
(Loos [1908] 2001: 14–15)
The earnest consideration of clothing by literary and artistic Vienna a
century ago operated in an intellectual
context far removed from the more
superficial concerns of much early twenty-first-century celebrity and
brand-
focused fashion discourse. The social, economic and spatial circumstances
in which clothes are made, sold,
promoted and worn have also developed in
myriad ways. But the suit itself survives in barely modified form as an
item
of everyday and formal wear in most regions of the world. Its apparent
demise as a relevant component of
work, leisured and ceremonial dress has
been trumpeted by successive pundits, though still its unobtrusive and
ubiquitous contours furnish the bodies of men and women in all walks of
life, from politicians to estate agents,
bankers to rabbis, court-room
defendants to wedding grooms.
This chapter, in its tracing of the suit’s all-pervasive iconography in
modern cultures, will attempt to do justice to Adolf Loos’s faith in his
clothes; to show how the suit’s simple
solutions have emerged and how its
original meanings persist and adapt to denote truths that are greater than the
basic meeting of cloth, scissors and thread. In order to do so it will be
necessary to start with the
fundamentals, with the form of the suit itself.
Bespoke (fitted to the customer’s precise measurements and hand-made
locally by master-craftsmen), or
ready-to-wear (pre-sized and mass-
manufactured across a network of often distant factories by hand and
machine),
the suit as we know it now conforms to a basic two- or three-
piece structure, generally made in finely woven wool
or wool-mix with a
canvas, horsehair and cotton (or synthetic cotton) interlining to provide
structure, and a
silk or viscose lining. Its fabrics have always been an
integral element of the suit’s appeal and an important
marker of its quality.
The selection of smooth worsteds, soft saxonies and rough cheviots, divided
into standard
baratheas, military bedford cords, glossy broadcloths, sporting
cavalry twills, workaday corduroys, elegant
flannels, strong serges, hardy
tweeds and homespuns, and dressy velvets, dictates the colour, texture, fit,
handle and longevity of a suit and is often the first consideration in the
process of selection. The choice of
weave and design: plain or panama,
hopsack or celtic, diagonal, Mayo, Campbell or Russian twill, Bannockburn
or
pepper and salt, pinhead, birdseye, Eton stripe, barleycorn, herringbone,
dogtooth, Glenurquhart or Prince of
Wales check, pin or chalkstripe
becoming the key to a customer’s character (Ostick c.
1950).
 In made-up form, the suit is usually characterized by: a long-sleeved,
buttoned jacket with lapels and pockets; a
sleeveless waistcoat or vest worn
underneath the jacket (if three piece); and full-length trousers. The
simplicity of its appearance is belied by the complexity of its construction.
As a comparative study of
ready-made suit manufacture commissioned by
the British Government Department of Trade and Industry in 2003
demonstrated:

A tailored jacket has an intricate structure, composed of as many as

40–50 components … Its manufacture may
involve up to 75
separate operations. The first step in the production process is the
‘marker’ – a pattern
according to which the many components …
are cut from the material. The experienced marker maker tries to
configure these so as to waste as little of the cloth as possible …
The material is then layered, perhaps with
as many as 40 plies at a
time, and then cut … The production sequence is, in principle,
similar to making cars.
The various parts are made first, they are
then assembled into sub-assemblies, which are progressively
brought
together for final assembly. Smaller items are made first or
in parallel with the body fronts – interlinings,
back sections,
pockets, collars, sleeves, and sleeve linings. Pockets and
interlinings are attached to the body
front. Back sections are joined
to the fronts, then collars. Sleeves are lined and then joined to the
body.
Buttonholes and buttons are added. Sewing operations
involve a range … of stitches (chain, lock, overedge,
blind,
buttonhole) … Under pressing is carried out at various stages of the
assembly, by ironing (as in the
domestic sense), to make sewing
easier or more accurate … A range of mechanical presses, each
with a moulded
shape, are used for top pressing the completed
garment.
(Owen and Cannon Jones 2003)

The analogy with the automated production-line processes of car

manufacturing is, however, misleading. As the authors of the report go on
to explain, the sensile, embodied
nature of the product entails an attention
to the idiosyncrasies of the individual suit style, impossible to
achieve
through total mechanization, but attainable in batch-production and
relatively easy to suggest through
marketing and retail strategies:

The favoured approach is the ‘progressive bundle’ system, whereby

all the parts needed to make a suit are
bundled together, and are
progressively assembled. Operators are grouped according to the
section of the
garment on which they work and the work is passed
between them. The system has the flexibility to cope with
variations between one suit and another, with training and
absenteeism.
(ibid.: 39)

The contemporary ready-made suit, then, is the product of a widely

recognized and well-ordered system of
manufacture, refined and
democratized through the twentieth-century by high-street pioneers and
international
conglomerates, and present in the wardrobes of many. Its
bespoke variation continues to be manufactured on
traditional lines, for an
elite minority in the west and a wider audience in Asia and the developing
world. Both
options conform to an accepted set of parameters that produce
a fairly standardized notion of what a suit should
be – how it should look
and feel. It was not always thus. When the proposition of a ‘suit’ of clothing
(a
well-fitted set of garments to be worn at the same time, though not
necessarily of matching cloth) emerged in
Europe’s cities and royal courts
during the fourteenth century, its construction was more likely to constitute
a
complex negotiation between the skills of the tailor and other craftsmen
and women, and the tastes and desires of
the client. The possibilities for
variation were endless.
Intriguingly, while the skill of the tailor and the pressures of commodity
culture have produced a material and
stylistic history of the modern suit
marked by subtle variation and an obsession with the details, many
observers
and critics have instead chosen to damn it for its association with
a stifling conformity. The suit has most
often been dismissed as a mere
uniform, regulating difference through disciplining appearance, keeping
men in
their place. The progressive late nineteenth-century writer on social
struggle and sexual freedom, Edward
Carpenter, railed, characteristically,
against the prison of its heavy seams and drapes:
 The truth is that one might almost as well be in one’s coffin as in
the stiff layers of buckram-like clothing
commonly worn nowadays.
No genial influence from air or sky can pierce this dead hide.
Eleven layers between
him and God! No wonder the Arabian has
the advantage over us. Who could be inspired under all this weight
of
tailordom.
(Carpenter [1886] 1995: 275)

Carpenter’s lament is an interesting one, not least in its evocation of the

comparative freedoms of Arabian
dress. For if we take Charles II’s
introduction of the Ottoman-inspired vest into English court dress in the
autumn of 1666 as the pivotal moment in the birth of the modern three-
piece English suit, then we can see, as
John Evelyn, Andrew Marvell and
other contemporaries did, that Orientalism was, in fact, amongst several
influences that actually inspired the look of the suit’s original genesis
(hardly the marker of a stifling conformity) (Kuchta 2002: 80). Stylistic
genealogies aside, it is also clear
that the new costume adopted by Charles’s
courtiers achieved an unprecedented and welcomed uniformity amongst
elite and middling civilian ranks, that in its earliest iterations was
revolutionary and invigorating rather than
constraining. Samuel Pepys
recorded the effects with typical acuity:

This day [October 15, 1666] the King begins to put on his vest, and
I did see several persons of the House of
Lords, and Commons too,
great courtiers, who are in it – being a long cassock close to the
body, of black cloth
and pinked with white silk under it, and a coat
over it, and the legs ruffled with black ribbon like a pigeon’s
leg –
and upon the whole, I wish the King may keep it, for it is a very
fine and handsome garment.
(ibid.: 82)

Fine and handsome it may have been, but the new suit also owed a debt to
the military uniforms that had preceded
it, and were being reformed at the
same time. In response to the increasing introduction of firearms on the
battlefields of Europe in the sixteenth and early seventeenth century,
military theorists and commanders had come
to the conclusion that greater
co-ordination and co-operation of troops (within and between, for example
musketeers using gunpowder and pike-men with their steel) was necessary
in order to gain martial advantage. A
concurrent gradual shift from the use
of private feudal armies, mercenaries and conscripted civilians towards the
establishment of permanent salaried regiments of volunteers was also a pre-
condition for the manufacture,
provisioning and development of uniform
military dress across all ranks (aided by new possibilities for the
standardization and mass-production of dress made possible by advances in
tailoring systems and dispersed
manufacturing chains). By the beginning of
the eighteenth century a striking and polychromatic uniformity of
battle-
zone and ceremonial dress, often informed and embellished by aspects of
local, or hinterland costume (from
plumes to leopard skins), had become the
norm (Abler 1999: 11–13).
In Bourbon France, with its spectacular fetishism of hierarchical and
bureaucratic order, the military uniform
was a potent agent of court and
state control – and thus a source of much debate. This continued through
the
French Revolution and into the Napoleonic Wars. The material and
economic costs and rewards that the uniform
business generated were huge.
As the historian of clothing and appearances Daniel Roche estimates, in the
middle
of the eighteenth century (approximately 1726–60), in order to
clothe the necessary number of recruits to keep
regiments fully manned, the
French Army’s suppliers had to provide twenty thousand outfits a year. For
foot
soldiers alone this would have accounted for a theoretical thirty
thousand metres of broadcloth for coats, three
thousand metres of coloured
cloth for facings, one hundred thousand metres of serge for linings, and
further
thousands of meters of various textiles for breeches, waistcoats,
shirts, underwear, stockings and neck stocks
(Roche 1994: 237). But what
was more important than the scale of the project, in France and elsewhere,
was the
disciplinary challenge that the idea of uniform set down, both for
civil society in general and for concepts of
respectable, fashionable and
modern masculinity in particular. As Roche proclaims, drawing on the
philosophy of
the time:

The need to shape minds and bodies finds in uniform a valuable

aid: it is a training, an element in the
education of controlled
individual power … It is an instrument in a
process designed to
shape the physique and the bearing of a combative individual,
whose autonomy conditions his
docility and whose obedience
 transforms individual strength into collective power. Uniform is at
the heart of
the military logic … when war is a necessary
continuation of politics. Uniform constructs the fighting man for
mortal combat. It imposes control, a source of efficiency in battle
and means to social power … It creates
through education, realizes
a personage and affirms a political project by demonstrating
omnipotence … Uniform
is central to a utopian and voluntarist
vision of the social which reconciles the conflict between automatic
docility ‘and the concrete economy of the individual liberty in
which the autonomy of each constitutes the
measure of his
obedience’. It impregnates the whole of society.
(ibid.: 229)

Roche’s oblique reference to the central tenets of Rousseau’s Social

Contract reminds us that a relegation of the
suit to the status of ‘mere
uniform’ provides an insufficient and un-nuanced account of its central
importance in
the story of European modernization. Like military uniform
itself, with which it shares a common history, ‘it was
part of a new
delineation of public space, it established distances, a code of human and
social relations, and
was all the more persuasive in that it developed an
aesthetic’ (ibid.: 231).
But perhaps the smart flashiness of the soldier’s get-up takes us only so
far in understanding the evolution of
the modern suit. Whilst there is
certainly a degree of tangible synergy between the military impulse to
discipline, the practical affordances of uniformity and the development of a
costume best suited to the new
social and political contract, the showy
ceremonial qualities of battlefield dress really represent a genre of
clothing
whose meanings were essentially martial in focus. Other forms of
occupational uniform enjoyed a much
closer relationship with the values
embedded in Charles II’s original invention.
John Styles and other historians have been persuasive in their suggestion
that seventeenth- and
eighteenth-century non-conformist religious ideas and
practices relating to plain dressing were more influential
still on the greater
prominence given to the simple suit in the masculine wardrobe at all levels
of society.
Quakers, who ‘were required to avoid ornament and
extravagance in dress’ and ‘placed a … stress on plainness and
simplicity’,
issued the most ‘thorough and precise’ of sartorial regulations, informing
their followers what was
acceptable, demarcating ‘the functional from the
decorative, the necessary from the superfluous’. And Quaker
meetings were
marked by discussions of troubling lapses into selfish fashionability by
wayward members. However,
their numbers in the general British
population were relatively small and their deliberately unadorned, outdated
wardrobes, combined with their eccentrically egalitarian social habits, often
made them figures of scorn or
humour rather than emulation (Styles 2012:
202–5).
The Methodists, led by John Wesley, enjoyed a much larger following,
especially amongst working people, and their
ideas on appearance adapted
and popularized those of the Quakers. Wesley’s ‘Advice to the People
Called
Methodists, with Regard to Dress’ of 1760 offered specific
guidelines for appropriate dressing:

Buy no velvets, no silks, no fine linen, no superfluities, no mere

ornaments, though ever so much in fashion.
Wear nothing, though
you have it already, which is of a glaring colour, or which is in any
kind gay,
glistering, showy; nothing made in the very height of
fashion, nothing
to attract the eyes of the bystanders … Neither do I
advise men, to wear coloured waistcoats, shining
stockings,
glittering or costly buckles or buttons, either on their coats or on
their sleeves.
(Styles 2012: 206)

Wesley’s advice was grounded in biblical direction and an anti-

materialist world view. Its words were intended to
focus the observer’s
attention towards charity and away from the distractions of worldly
temptation. Importantly,
it also provided a broader lexicon for interpreting
the dangerous terrain of sartorial manners that was decorous
and ‘proper’,
rather than ostentatious and vain. In that sense, though the homely virtues
of plain dressing were
perhaps taken up more avidly in the non-conformist
haven of North America (where they still thrive), in Britain,
Europe and
elsewhere Wesley’s model provided a perfected context in which suit-
wearing could develop and prosper.
It was not only the uniform cut and style of the developing European suit
that lent its form so readily to
military culture and non-conformist religion
(and vice versa), and thence to the values of society at large; it
was also, at
least in respect to non-conformism, the suit’s dark and sober colouring that
increased its longevity
and made it so appropriate as a symbol for the
dominant concerns of the nineteenth-century moral, philosophical
and
economic life that would follow. In his reflections on the persistence of
black in the idealized male
wardrobe from the Renaissance to the present,
literary historian John Harvey pays special attention to its
importance as a
marker of character and mood in the novels of Charles Dickens:

The whole picture Dickens paints is of an England that has risen to

massive wealth and international power,
which is nonetheless a
somber place, run by men, and sometimes by women, who wear
black often, and who … are
frequently reserved, nervous and
oppressed, however rich and powerful they may personally be.
(Harvey 1995: 158)

In the darkness of the industrial English city, Dickens’s heroes and anti-
heroes variously adopted the colour of
death and seemed to impose, on both
contemporary readers and subsequent generations, a terrible sartorial and
psychological burden:

Dickens belonged to the world he described – a world he more and

more depicted as inflicting on itself intimate
injuries … he was not
only the recorder but also a representative of a period when if black
had the values of
smartness, decency and respectability, it also had
the values of oppressiveness and grief – of the mourning for
something missing from the heart of man, of men – and beyond that
again had also the darkness of impulses, from
sociability to sexual
love, constricted, distorted, and ready to rise in murder. Which
again is to say that
black in the nineteenth century has its affinity
with ancient black, and not only with mourning black, but that
it
also has some tincture of a black fatality, of a black that is of the
Furies.
(ibid.: 193)

All that darkness inevitably rubbed off on the man’s suit and its status in
everyday life. In European cities,
and in London in particular, tailors and
their clients worked hard to identify an appropriate costume for the new
professions thrown up by empire, industry and
commerce, one that
communicated an appropriate sense of respectability and responsibility.
From the 1860s onwards
a combination of black morning and frock coats
reaching to the knee and worn with straight wool trousers and silk
top hat,
striped in black and grey, was the favoured business costume of members of
both houses of Parliament,
city bankers and stockbrokers, judges, barristers
and medical doctors. The fashion continued well into the
twentieth century
until it ossified into a form of formal livery worn at court presentations,
fashionable race
meetings and society weddings and funerals from the
1930s.
At a lower rung on the social and professional ladder, the dress of the
office clerk presented alternative
templates. Edgar Allan Poe captured the
clerk’s presence on the streets of London in his story The Man of the Crowd
of 1840. Older, senior clerks from established businesses carried with them
something of the austere character of non-conformist dressing from a
generation before:

‘They were known by their coats and pantaloons of black or brown,

made to sit comfortably, with white cravats
and waistcoats, broad
solid-looking shoes, and thick hose or gaiters … I observed that
they always removed or
settled their hats with both hands, and wore
watches with short gold chains of a substantial and ancient
pattern.
Theirs was the affectation of respectability’. Junior clerks from ‘the
flash houses’ were recognizable
by their ‘tight coats, bright boots,
well oiled hair and supercilious lips’. Setting aside a certain
dapperness
of carriage, which may be termed ‘deskism’ for want of
a better word, the manner of these persons seemed to me
an exact
facsimile of what had been the perfection of bon-ton about twelve
… months before. They wore the cast
off graces of the gentry.
(Breward 1997: 112)

By the 1880s the jauntier costume of Poe’s junior clerks had prevailed and
the simple combination of short
jacket, high vest and tapered trousers, all in
one textile pattern and worn with a bowler hat, constituted what
was now
commonly known as the lounge suit. In its more relaxed sense of
modernity, the lounge found both a wider
market and a more varied set of
social connotations than morning dress. Worn by everyone from tradesmen
and
clerks to clergymen, teachers and journalists, its neat smartness enjoyed
a much longer historical trajectory,
bequeathing subsequent generations the
ubiquitous business suit of today. However, for some, its associations,
like
those of the frock coat, still evoked a mournful and monotonous drabness
that damned the materialistic
impulses of an epoch. The lounge was a fitting
costume for a creature that even the President of the National
Union of
Clerks caricatured as:

a docile being, chiefly noticeable as the first hope of suburbia at

any time, and the last hope of the master
class during strikes. If he
has given the world any other impression than that of a professional
Judas for
capitalism it is the vague idea that he has created the
demand for five a penny cigarettes … and guinea
macintoshes.
(ibid.: 111)

In nineteenth-century North America, the status of the newly minted

businessman’s suit enjoyed rather more
optimistic associations as a signifier
of snappy progress. Yet even in the new world the rapid changes that
sharply pressed, ready-made clothes, polished shoes and bright
white
detachable collars symbolized also brought a sense of ambivalence. The
rush to profit, the rapid shift from
rural to urban values, the erosion of
social and sexual differentiation, the decline of meaningful physical
labour
and the reification of materialistic novelty favoured by the likes of clerks,
administrators, retail
workers and financiers caused mixed emotions.
Michael Zakim, historian of New York’s ready-made men’s clothing
industry in the period, captures the productive tensions embedded in this
new form of dressing very well:

No more tangible expression could be found of the regularity – and

notion of equivalence – these broker
citizens sought to bring to the
industrializing market and to the social relations growing up around
it than
the uniformity of their ‘well broad-clothed’ appearance. The
monochromaticity of the dark suits and white linen
of their single-
priced ‘business attire’ constituted a capitalist aesthetic. It helped
these individuals to
recognize each other’s ‘utilitarian’ fit as their
own, and made every body a reproduction of the next one …
They
 constituted an industrial spectacle that brought social order to an
otherwise disordered situation … It
was indeed a ready-made age.
(Zakim 2003: 126)

If the nineteenth-century clerk in his off-the-peg clothing was an

unashamed neophiliac and a harbinger of
modernity, the working man in his
sturdy fustian offered a more timeless stereotype, but one that is
nevertheless
important in any consideration of the developing material and
symbolic meanings of the suit. In many ways the
manual labourer’s rough
attire has always stood in symbolic opposition to the ephemeral
fashionability of
metropolitan life – and not always in a positive sense.
Polemical writers on morality and poverty were drawn to
the rags of the
‘unwashed’ as evidence of the supposed fecklessness and wasted lives of
their wearers. Samuel
Pearson noted the tendency to slovenliness amongst
working-class Englishmen in his prescriptive guide to manners
of 1882,
stating that:

The working classes of England are far behind those of France in

the matter of dress. In Normandy you meet with
the neat, white,
well starched cap; in Lancashire with a tawdry shawl … The men
are worse. They never seem to
change their working clothes when
the day’s work is over. Those who go to chapel and church have a
black or
dark suit for Sunday wear, generally creased and often ill-
fitting, but on other days it is seldom that you
meet with a nicely
dressed working man or working woman. I have seen political
meetings attended by men who had
taken no trouble to wash off the
dirt of the day either from their faces or their clothes.
(Pearson 1882: 139)

Neglectfulness towards sartorial appearances was for many but a symptom

of moral laziness and even criminality,
and poverty was seen as no excuse
for untidiness. But at the other extreme, the hard-wearing, functional suit of
the working man also achieved a degree of rugged romanticism. In the
context of an expanded trade-union and
labour movement, fustian and
moleskin could also suggest an anarchic and
muscular authenticity
thoroughly lacking from polished aristocratic styles or emulative clerk-class
dandyism. In
a description of the attire of a working-class philosopher
encountered one Whitsun holiday in the 1880s on
London’s Hampstead
Heath, the journalist James Greenwood produces a subversive vision that
would have delighted
even Edward Carpenter:

He was a broad shouldered individual, attired in a moleskin suit

such as is commonly worn by men engaged in the
iron making line
of business, and to judge from his general aspect he might that
morning have walked straight
from the workshop to the spot where
I discovered him. There was a slovenliness about his dress that
suggested a
studied contempt for appearances, rather than a
constitutional disregard for tidiness. His boots were unlaced,
his
waistcoat buttoned awry, and his black neckerchief a mere whisp
tied with a knot, was under his ear … ‘You
might think, seeing me
as I am in my working clothes, that I haven’t got any others to
wear. You’d think wrong.
I’ve got as good a suit of clothes as any
working man could wish to put on his back – not slop things, but
made
to measure. You won’t catch me encouraging the ready made
merchant tailors … who grind the flesh off the bones
of the sons
and daughters of toil, so that they may go rollicking about in scarlet
and fine linen … I’ve got a
good West of England coat and westkit,
and I’ve got a pair of tweeds that would stand alone almost on the
score
of quality; but I’d scorn to wear ’em on a Bank holiday …
I’m dead against the whole thing, from the sole of my
foot to the
crown of my head, and if I wore a tall hat, instead of a cap, blessed
if I wouldn’t brush it the
wrong way’.
(Greenwood 1883: 82–3)

Whatever their distinct political positions, melton-clad plutocrats, clerks in

broadcloth and working-class
revolutionaries in moleskin alike found their
sartorial allegiances fundamentally challenged through the second
decade
of the twentieth century. During the First World War men’s bodies were
subject once again to the
regulatory discipline of military outfitters, often
with the explicit intention of demarcating social rank,
whilst also seeming
to subsume difference through the visual and psychological effects of
uniformity. As design
historian Jane Tynan has argued, ‘in wartime, army
clothing distinguished soldier from civilian, but also ranked
recruits
according to their social background. Those on the home front, however,
without the knowledge to read
uniform codes, only saw khaki. Mass
mobilization meant that khaki itself became the symbol of military
participation’ (Tynan 2011: 140).
At the outset of war, officers recruited from the aristocracy and upper
classes adopted tailored khaki, cut by
their bespoke tailors according to the
1911 Dress Regulations for the Army ‘as a lounge coat to the waist, very
loose at the chest and shoulders, but fitted at the waist’. Within such
regulations, subtle time-honoured
understandings around taste, utility and
personality, shared between tailor and client, continued to be
understood,
such that Siegfried Sassoon could record that ‘ordering my uniform from
Craven & Sons was quite
enjoyable – almost like getting hunting clothes’
(ibid.: 141). Private volunteers from the lower-middle and
working classes,
however, were issued with much looser, standardized tunics of poor
manufacture and quality.
This social divide crumbled as the war continued and casualties rose
inexorably, also creating a new terrain in
which the language of men’s
clothing developed. The necessity of commissioning officers from outside
the ‘traditional’ class of ‘gentleman’ and the increasing
use of civilian
volunteers and mass conscription led to a greater sense of social mobility
within the military,
even while symbolic codes of gentlemanly distinction
continued to inform martial practices, appearances and
behaviours. The
elite perfection of Savile Row standard bespoke uniforms remained for
those who could afford and
appreciate them, but a more democratic
understanding of military distinction was necessary for a new kind of
modern army, and for the civilian contexts in which men continued to live
their lives. In this way, elements of a
new ‘democratic’ and ‘modern’
uniform permeated the promotion of masculine fashionability and sartorial
goods
during and after the war, ensuring that practical, well-designed items,
such as the Burberry trench coat, entered
into the everyday wardrobe and
the popular imagination, breaking the elitist monopoly of the officer’s tailor.
On the high streets of Britain in particular, the resulting transformation,
pioneered by menswear magnates,
including Austin Reed and Montague
Burton, produced a consensual understanding of the suit as the defining
badge
of respectable masculinity that survived almost intact from the 1920s
to the 1960s. In terms of scale and
influence, Burton’s were perhaps the
most effective in pulling together military precision, moral rectitude and
subtle taste in the manufacture of suits and social attitudes; it was what
cultural historian Frank Mort has
described as a ‘reassuring image of
collective cultural conformity – of a shared masculine culture fixed by
retailing’ (Mort 1996: 135). It was, through the middle years of the
twentieth century, the biggest producer and
seller of menswear in the
United Kingdom, and its clothing lines and advertising imagery, together
with the
atmosphere of its shops, promoted a gentlemanly ideal of
extraordinary power:

Burton’s gentleman … acquired status by being absolutely normal.

Neither spectacular nor bizarre, not a
‘clothes crank’ or an
eccentric, he was secure in his personality … Burton’s urged their
salesmen to avoid
dangerous items such as loud colours, ‘sporty or
semi-neglige attire’, even soft collars … Burton’s manly ideal
was
summed up in the company’s famous memorandum to staff. All
excess was to be avoided through restraint and
quiet dignity:
‘Avoid the severe style of the income-tax collector and the smooth
tongue of the fortune teller.
Cultivate the dignified style of the
“Quaker tea blender”, which is a happy medium’.
(ibid.: 138–9)

These were widely shared sentiments that inspired at least two generations
of British men to dress in a manner
that upheld the discipline associated
with military uniform and religious observation. The moral and material
traditions linked to the development of the suit seemed to have survived
two world wars almost intact. Such
reassurances encouraged English
couturier Hardy Amies (who was also an influential designer of menswear
lines for
tailoring chain Hepworths) to wax lyrical on the enduring romance
of the suit in his 1954 autobiography:

It seems to me that the basic principles of our way of life have not
changed much. We still like to be ladies
and gentlemen and if fewer
succeed in so doing then at least more attempt it than would ever
have dared to
before. But all are fighting to preserve something
they believe in. The young man who has just left his public
school
or University dresses, when in London, in a neat dark suit, with
well pressed narrow trousers, cuffs to
the sleeves of his jacket and
possibly lapels to his waistcoat. Even if
he doesn’t indulge in such
 fashionable details, he would feel uncomfortable in anything other
than a hard
collar and a bowler hat. His more daring companions
may flourish a flowered waistcoat and a velvet-collared
coat, but if
I mention too eccentric examples I may frighten the reader out of
my argument. Let us agree,
however, that the average young man of
position tries to give an air of substance without being stodgy: of
having time for the niceties of life. His appearance may be only
demonstrating wishful thinking: that he has
several thousand a year
in the funds, and that income tax is only a shilling in the pound:
that he is prepared
to be a good father to a large family. But I think
the wish is there alright.
(Amies 1954: 245)

Amies’ passionate wish for the preservation of sartorial traditions was in

some ways answered, for though the
social revolutions and style
innovations of the 1960s and 1970s threatened the hegemony of the
respectable suit,
its symbolic associations continued to reverberate through
the streets of both British and North American cities.
In America, the
business suit enjoyed a revival buoyed by the success of John T. Molloy’s
famous books,
Dress for Success of 1975 and The Woman’s Dress for
Success Book of
1977. Molloy had worked as an image-consultant for
major US companies and published a column on office style in
the Los
Angeles Times. In an era of cold war paranoia and economic uncertainty, his
mantra
was essentially conservative, working against the freedoms of the
counter-culture in favour of ‘scientific’
market and situational research in
‘real business situations’, which revealed that men knew what was best for
themselves in the choice of clothing and that the ‘classic’ suit and tie were
the ultimate in authority, or what
would become known as ‘power dressing’.
For Molloy, men in smart suits achieved the competitive edge and gained
all the prizes (Cunningham 2005: 191–208).
In London, writing in the society journal Harpers and Queen in March
1977 during the year
of Punk and the Royal Silver Jubilee, the style
journalist Peter York also reprised Amies’ paean to the
aspirational young
man of the 1950s with his description of ‘Sloane Ranger Man’, that upper
middle-class
reactionary whose confident self-presentation would set the
tone for City dressing for the remainder of the
twentieth century. But the
individualist verve of his style could not have been further from that of
Molloy’s
results-driven clones:

I am in the San Martino in Walton Street with a woman dress

designer. Opposite us is a table of eight very big
boys. They all
wear pin-striped navy-blue suits, the trousers with turn-ups, narrow
at the ankle but loose
around the seat, and Bengal-striped red or
blue and white shirts. Two of the striped shirts have detachable
white collars. The plumper, blander four wear black Oxfords. These
have specs and look like lawyers. The other
four wear Gucci loafers
– the plain kind, without the red and green ribbon. They march
across the floor, snap
to attention, slap each other, horse around.
(York 1980: 61)

York’s Sloane Rangers are indeed in a direct line of descent from the
military dandies of the Napoleonic Wars and
Edgar Allan Poe’s men-about-
town of the 1840s – all of them identifiable from the military tenor of their
bearing, their scrupulous attention to the details of the male wardrobe and
their devotion to prankish horseplay.
And if their showy demeanour lacked
a little of the Methodist’s reticence,
it was nevertheless finely tuned to the
religion of making money. Monetarism and financial deregulation, the
neo-
liberal dogma that would define the acquisitive tenor of political and fiscal
discourse in Threadneedle and
Wall Streets during the 1980s and 1990s,
were less visible concepts in the mid-1970s, but the Sloane Rangers were
in
the vanguard of change, even if their fogeyism seemed to suggest the
opposite. As York suggested, they:

talk about money all the time (but call other people who do vulgar).
It’s an orgasmic macho subject with them.
However, they’re shy of
taking jobs in commerce … or in Industry … They go, above all
into the City. The magic
words are Lloyds or a merchant bank …
But the City is that much more competitive now than when their
fathers
went into it … Rangers now have problems with the job
market. Their style works against them.
(York 1980: 65)
It would be another eight years before Big Bang opened up the City to all
comers in 1986, but already its
complacent inhabitants were beginning to
feel the heat of competition. Family connections and membership of the
right club or regiment were no longer enough to guarantee a place on the
board or the trading floor and incomers
to lucrative City jobs achieved them
on the basis of skill in the context of a rapidly globalizing knowledge
economy, where strategic and technological brilliance were at a premium
rather than the correct accent. The suit,
however, remained a key indicator
of the ability to ‘fit in’. A City headhunter of the mid-1980s could claim
that
‘I’m not recruiting people who’ve merely got the taste to buy the right
sort of stripey suit. They’ve got to be
able to make money – a lot of money’
(Kynaston 2001: 716). But nobody yet denied that the stripey suit was itself
in decline. On the contrary, through the instability of the Lawson Boom of
the late 1980s, the ERM debacle of
1992 and the Barings scandal of 1994,
the authority of good tailoring seemed to increase in value. Interviewed by
The Financial Times in March 1993 the 43-year-old British Director of a
major European
bank betrayed an acute self-consciousness and attention to
form in his account of his consumption habits:

On the whole, as I seem to be a standard size and I don’t like

spending a lot of money on what are, after all,
my working overalls
[I am keen on off-the-peg suits]. I travel a lot and generally buy my
suits at Brooks
Brothers in New York where I pay somewhere
between £300 and £350 a time. But I do own a couple of Hackett’s
ones which cost rather more but which I particularly like to wear
when I want to look very English. I’m more
particular about my
shirts and ties. I buy my shirts from Crichton in Elizabeth Street –
their shirts are very
like pukka Jermyn Street ones … and if I want
to look colourful [I wear] my Garrick Club tie … We have to be
fairly sober-suited here so there isn’t much room for flamboyance
or innovation.
(13 March 1993: xix)

However, all would seem to change again by the turn of the century when,
informed by American management
philosophy and the more laissez-faire
non-hierarchical structures of a then booming dot.com sector, many blue-
chip companies appeared to relax their dress codes and encourage the
adoption of ‘smart-casual’ outfits, while sponsoring such infamous schemes
as ‘dress-down Fridays’. A Second Leader in The Times of September 2000
blustered
characteristically about the effects of such sartorial casualization:

The order of the suit has been given the order of the boot.
According to a survey conducted by the London
Chamber of
Commerce, ‘dress-down Friday’ has triumphed, with nearly half
Britain’s workers marking the day by
downing suits and slipping
into something more comfortable instead. The Long Island look has
crossed the
Atlantic and is now as familiar to accountants on the
Tyne as merchant bankers near the Thames … Dress down
proponents contrast the freedom of casual clothes with the stuffy
hierarchical reactionism of suit-wearing …
Yet most dress-down
directives offer no such licence. They carefully endorse the playing
field look that is
appropriate rather than the football ground attire
that is not. If sartorial snobbery has really been cast
aside why is it
acceptable for a businessman to wear a polo shirt … but not a shiny
football shirt … ? The only
difference is that a chukka is pukka,
while business and football are supposed to mix only when
confined to the
hospitality lounge of the ‘directors’ box’ (where
surprise, surprise, a suit is the order of the day).
(11 September 2000: 17)

The Times need not have worried. Chinos and polo shirts faced their own
challenge eight
years later when, on the cataclysmic bankruptcy of financial
services giant Lehman Brothers in September 2008,
employees made
suddenly redundant from their lucrative City jobs were shown on the
television news programmes
exiting the firm’s headquarters with the
ubiquitous cardboard boxes of personal possessions and overwhelmingly
dressed in the familiar pastel colours of expensive sportswear. Nothing
could have symbolized better a collapse
in public trust of the private
institutions in which they placed their mortgages, savings and pensions,
than the
lack of a well-cut suit. For all its uniform conformity, that was an
outfit expressly developed over centuries to
inspire confidence. Its apparent
neglect had clearly been a short-sighted move and its prospects seemed
bleak.
 Yet the suit endures. In 2003 the British Government industrial report,
cited towards the opening of this
chapter, posed a number of questions to a
hypothetical British suit manufacturer set on commercial success. These
long-rehearsed arguments around fit, embodiment, style, skill, efficiency
and consumer understanding seem to get
to the nub of the matter so far as
the suit’s physical and metaphysical history and future are concerned:

The producer would have to ask himself whether he has the

designers who understand how to construct a better
suit – one
which feels and looks good because it has the three-dimensionality
to adapt itself to the human
body, ‘breathes’ and is pleasant to
handle? Could he find technicians who understand how to translate
that
design into a sequence of manageable cutting and sewing
operations? Could he train and retain the employees
capable of
carrying out these more intricate operations, accurately and to time?
Is he prepared to invest in
the necessary equipment … ? And is he
able to communicate the refinements of a better suit to a market
that
does not understand many [of] the subtleties of such a suit,
either by developing a powerful brand name, or by
selling to
exclusive retailers?
(Owen and Cannon Jones 2003: 52)

In 2015, millions of manufacturers across the world persist in tailoring

the
basic two-piece for a global market. From San Francisco to Shanghai,
through successive financial crises,
political and ecological instability and
social churn, men still turn to the suit for its assurances, even as its
authority appears to atrophy further. When the art historian Anne Hollander
wrote her own influential reflection
in 1995 on the cultural importance of
the suit in modernity, she too expressed a simultaneous sense of
frustration
and fascination at its confounding and self-contradictory symbolism. Her
opening observations offer
an apposite summation of the suit’s enduring
status as a perfectly designed barometer of certain forms of power
which
still rings true, twenty years later. For the twenty-first-century design
historian the man’s suit
continues to embody those same evolutionary
possibilities that drew the attention of Adolf Loos a century
earlier:
 Although male heads of state wear suits at summit meetings, male
job applicants wear them to interviews, and
men accused of …
murder wear them in court … the pants-jacket-shirt and tie
costume, formal or informal, is
often called boring or worse. Like
other excellent and simple things we cannot do without, men’s suits
have
lately acquired an irksome aesthetic flavor, I would say an
irritating perfection. Their integrated subtle
beauty is often an
affront to post-modern sensibilities, to eyes and minds attuned to
the jagged and turbulent
climate of the late twentieth century.
Current millennial impulses tend towards disintegration, in style as
in
politics; but men’s suits are neither post-modern nor minimalist,
multi-cultural nor confessional – they are
relentlessly modern, in
the best classic sense. They seem moreover to be surviving.
(Hollander 1995: 3)

References

Abler, T. S. (1999) Hinterland Warriors and Military Dress: European Empires and Exotic
Uniforms,
Oxford, Berg.
Amies, H. (1954) Just So Far, London, Collins.
Breward, C. (1997) ‘On the Bank’s Threshold: Administrative Revolutions and the Fashioning of
Masculine
Identities’, Parallax 5: 109–23.
Carpenter, E. [1886] ‘Simplification of Life’ in Burman, B. (1995) ‘Better and Brighter Clothes: The
Men’s
Dress Reform Party, 1929–1940’, Journal of Design History, 8/4: 275.
Cunningham, P. A. (2005) ‘Dressing for Success: The Re-suiting of Corporate America in the
1970s’, in L.
Welters and P. A. Cunningham (eds), Twentieth-Century American Fashion, Oxford,
Berg:
191–208.
Financial Times Weekend (1993) 13 March: xix.
Greenwood, J. (1883) Odd People in Odd Places, or The Great Residuum, London, F. Warne.
Harvey, J. (1995) Men in Black, London, Reaktion.
Hollander, A. (1995) Sex and Suits, New York, Kodansha.
Kuchta, K. (2002) The Three-Piece Suit and Modern Masculinity: England 1550–1850,
Berkeley,
University of California Press.
Kynaston, D. (2001) The City of London, Vol IV: A Club No More 1945–2000, London, Chatto
and
Windus.
Loos, A. [1908] (2011) ‘Praise for the Present’, in Adolf Loos: Why a Man Should be Well
Dressed,
trans. M. E. Troy, Vienna, Metro Verlag.
Mort, F. (1996) Cultures of Consumption: Masculinities and Social Space in Late Twentieth
Century
Britain, London, Routledge.
Ostick, E. (c. 1950) Textiles for Tailors, London, The Tailor and
Cutter.
Owen, N. and Cannon Jones, A. (2003) ‘A comparative study of the British and Italian textile
and
clothing industries’, DTI Economics Paper, 2.
Pearson, S. (1882) Week Day Living: A Book for Young Men and Women, London, Kegan Paul,
Trench.
Roche, D. (1994) The Culture of Clothing: Dress and Fashion in the Ancien Regime,
Cambridge,
Cambridge University Press.
Styles, J. (2012) Dress of the People: Everyday Fashion in Eighteenth-Century England,
New
Haven, Yale University Press.
The Times (2000) 11 September: 17.
Tynan, J. (2011) ‘Military Dress and Men’s Outdoor Leisurewear: Burberry’s Trench Coat in First
World War
Britain’, Journal of Design History 24/2: 139–56.
York, P. (1980) Style Wars, London, Sidgwick and Jackson.
Zakim, M. (2003) Ready-Made Democracy: A History of Men’s Dress in the American Republic
1760–1860, Chicago, University of Chicago Press.
 15

ARRANGING THE ASPIDISTRAS

Nature, culture and the design of the feminine
sphere
in the nineteenth century
Penny Sparke
 
 

Introduction

In any study of designed images, artifacts, spaces, or environments, the

existence of cultural stereotypes and
the ways in which they come into
being need to be taken into account. They inform both the values embedded
into
them at the designing stage, and their meanings in the context of
mediation, consumption, and use. The
relationships that existed in the past
between design, gender, and identity, and the stereotypes that emanated
from them have implications, therefore, for the study of design in the
present and future. This chapter offers an
example of such a relationship;
specifically, the strong association that existed between feminine culture
and
identity, and the middle-class domestic interior as it emerged in the
western industrialized world in the
nineteenth century. Arguably, the
stereotype that resulted from that association—that is, the feminization of
the
home, and of its visual, material, and spatial culture—needs to be taken
into account in analyses of the design
of the contemporary domestic
interior.
In addition to providing an overview of the scholarship of the recent past
relating to its subject, this chapter
also offers, as a case study, an account of
the role of tamed nature (plants and flowers in particular) in the
designed
spaces of the nineteenth-century home, and its contribution at that time to
the feminization of the
home, of home-making and decoration, and, as a
consequence, to the identities of home-makers and decorators.
 Feminine culture and the nineteenth-century domestic interior
in context

Since the 1980s the relationship of the nineteenth-century domestic interior

with feminine culture has been
extensively documented and discussed. The
work in question represents one face of a significant shift in feminist
thinking that occurred in the last decades of the twentieth century. Whereas
1970s feminism had focused on the
need for women to enter the paid public
workplace (or be paid for their work in the home), from the following
decade onwards a re-evaluation of the importance of women’s role in the
domestic context took place. Rooted in feminist social historical work the
discussion surfaced in studies of the
separation of the spheres, that
phenomenon which occurred in the first half of the nineteenth century when
middle-class men began to earn money outside the home while women
remained within it in the role of unpaid
home-makers and nurturers. Among
the first to chart the emergence of this separation and its effects were
Leonore
Davidoff and Catherine Hall in their 1987 book, Family Fortunes:
Men and Women of the English
Middle Class, 1780–1850.
The idea that, in reality, all nineteenth-century middle-class women
stayed in the home has been rightly
challenged by the historian Amanda
Vickery (Vickery 1993: 383–414). However, on the level of the idealization
of
the housewife’s role as it was represented in much nineteenth-century
advice literature, separate spheres was
undoubtedly a widespread myth that
colored middle-class values and beliefs, and helped create a cultural
gendering of everyday life as it was lived both within and outside the home.
Domestic advice literature produced
in the period under review has
underpinned a considerable amount of the work undertaken on the
nineteenth-century
middle-class home, and design historians have been
working with it as a source since the publication of Adrian
Forty’s Objects
of Desire of 1986 first brought it to their notice (Forty 1986). While a
few
scholars have tended to assume that the advice was actually followed
(among others: Gere and Hoskins 2000;
Logan 2001), others, including
Emma Ferry in her three articles on the subject of the Art at
Home series of
publications, have approached advice writing as a literary genre in its own
right, complete
with its own internal workings, suggesting that it had little
to do with actual homes (Ferry 2003; 2006; 2008).
The 2011 exhibition Cult
of Beauty: The Aesthetic Movement, 1860–1900, at the Victoria
& Albert
Museum in London, included a range of advice books displayed as material
artifacts, while, in the
accompanying catalogue, I emphasized the fact that
many of them were written, and most of them read, by women
(Calloway
2011: 128).
This chapter depends significantly on information provided by advice
books and the assumptions made by their
authors. While recognizing that
they did not necessarily determine the appearance of actual interiors, and
they
only embraced the concept of the separate spheres as a (powerful)
myth, the decision of their authors to overtly
address audiences in terms of
their gender is deemed to be significant.

Feminist design history

Paralleling the social historical work on women’s role in the home, from the
mid-1980s a number of feminist
design historians began to address the
gendered nature of their subject, including the design of the domestic
interior and its material components. In 1984 Isabelle Anscombe published
her seminal text, A
Woman’s Touch: Women in Design from 1860 to the
Present Day, in which she outlined
what she believed to be a strong link
between women and the domestic sphere, and stressed the importance of
interior decoration in that context. That premise was picked up and
extended three years later by a number of the
essays in Judy Attfield and
Pat Kirkham’s edited volume A View from the Interior (Attfield
and
Kirkham 1989). My own 1995 publication, As Long as It’s Pink: The Sexual
Politics of
Taste, went as far as to claim the existence of a specifically
feminine taste, culturally defined, in that
context, that, arguably, continued
to exist (albeit unacknowledged for the
most part) through the twentieth
century, alongside mainstream modernist taste. In terms of design agency it
questioned the idea of an amateur/professional divide and claimed that, in
the context of the separate spheres,
that distinction was redundant. In a
follow-up study of 2005 I focused on the way in which the pioneer
American
interior decorator, Elsie de Wolfe, negotiated a path from
amateurism to professionalism, blurring the boundary
between them in the
process.

Studies of the nineteenth-century domestic interior

A number of cultural studies of the nineteenth-century domestic interior
appeared in the early 2000s. While some
emphasized its gendered nature,
others underplayed it. In her 2006 book, Household Gods: The
British and
their Possessions—a study of British taste—the historian Deborah Cohen
defined her task as
explaining why, in the nineteenth century, men
transferred their responsibility for home decoration to women,
thereby
contributing to what she described as “a crucial episode in the making of
modern gender stereotypes”
(Cohen 2006: xv). The art historian Judith A.
Neiswander’s The Cosmopolitan Interior of
2008 included a chapter on
“The Cosmopolitan Interior and the Empowerment of Women,” in which
she joined the body
of historians who believe that “Many of the books and
articles on decoration were written by women and were
intended for a
female audience.” She went as far as to suggest that women “discovered
that they could exercise a
degree of self-determination in the area of home
decoration without fear that their femininity would be
criticized”
(Neiswander 2008: 84).
Texts with a basis in literary studies include Thad Logan’s The Victorian
Parlour: A Cultural
Study of 2001, which, from the outset, assumed its
subject to be a “feminized space” (Logan 2001: xiii);
Diana Fuss’s 2004
Sense of an Interior: Four Rooms and the Writers that Shaped Them, which
addressed the domestic spaces of two women (Emily Dickinson and Helen
Keller) and two men (Sigmund Freud and
Marcel Proust); and Victoria
Rosner’s Modernism and the Architecture of Private Life of
2008, in which
the author examined the role of domestic interiors in a number of seminal
modernist writings,
including those of Virginia Woolf. Domestic Space:
Reading the Nineteenth-Century Interior
of 1999, a book of essays edited
by Inga Bryden and Janet Floyd, drew on economic history and literary
criticism,
and argued that the boundary between the separate spheres should
not be seen as impermeable or static; while,
published thirteen years later,
Chiara Briganti and Kathy Meizi’s The Domestic Space
Reader (Briganti
and Meizi 2012) dedicated one of its seven chapters to “Gendered Spaces,”
indicating the
continuing importance of the theme to the larger subject. A
handful of books have focused exclusively on
decoration, design, and
material culture (among them Gere and Hoskins 2000 and Gere 2010);
these have tended to
play down the housewife’s role in their creation while
nonetheless depicting women as symbols of the beauty
pursued by the male
creative protagonists who were their main subjects.
 Feminine accomplishments

Rooted as it was within the idea of the separate spheres, and emanating as it
did from the core feminist debates
about the value and meaning of women’s
work in the home, the idea of the
professional/amateur divide constantly re-
emerged as a recurrent theme within the above studies. A tension
existed
between, on the one hand, the idea that women could take their home-
making skills into the public arena
and compete with men in the workplace
and, on the other, a re-assessment of, so-called, amateur domestic
work—
embroidery, knitting, shell-work, hair-work, leather-work, work with moss
and pine cones, Berlin wool work,
crochet, and embroidery, as well as, in
the context of the next section of this chapter, arranging plants and
flowers
in the home, making floral wreaths, bouquets, and table decorations, and
pressing and mounting ferns and
flowers—as worthy of being valued in its
own right and on its own terms. An extensive literature emerged from
both
directions, on the one hand, on the subject of the “Lady Decorators”—from
Elsie de Wolfe, to Syrie Maugham,
to Dorothy Draper—as a key
component of the story of professional interior decoration and design in the
twentieth
century, and, on the other, on that of “amateur” domestic
handicrafts and, in that latter context, on women’s
creative deployment of
consumed goods in the domestic setting.

Window gardening advice books

In the nineteenth-century middle-class home, arranging plants and flowers

was considered part of the activity of
interior decoration and was therefore
widely aligned with feminine culture. Advice writers on the subject
(Hibberd [1856] 1987; Randolph 1861; Maling 1862; March 1862; Rand
1863; Williams 1873; Burbridge 1874; Hassard
1875; and Mollinson 1877,
among them) gave the activity the generic title of window gardening, or
more commonly
in the US, parlor gardening (see Figures
15.1 and 15.2).
The gendering of plants
and flowers within the walls of the home (including
those of domestic conservatories that were attached to the
house) was a
logical extension of the values that had already been attached to them in the
garden outside, where
the nurturing of flowers had already been seen as
natural work for women. This had been made clear in the
writings of Jane
Loudon, including Gardening for Ladies of 1840 and The
Ladies’
Companion to the Flower Garden of 1840–4. As the concept of the winter
garden—whether provided by a
grand conservatory or by a more modest
Wardian case in the parlor—became increasingly popular, women were able
to
continue their summer work during the winter months. What were
perceived as their dainty hands came to be seen as
more appropriate than
men’s for potting and transplanting plants and arranging them in the home.
The idea also
became widespread that window gardening kept idle women
busy and out of harm’s way.
An analysis of these window gardening advice books, however, reveals a
shift in the gendering of the activity
from the 1850s through to the 1890s.
The early publications suggested that, following on from the role of the
gardener in the aristocratic home, men were expected to undertake the
propagation, potting, and maintenance of
the plants and flowers destined for
the home, while women’s responsibility was to integrate them into its
interior decor. As the century progressed, however, the books indicated that
women were increasingly expected to
undertake the whole process of
window gardening, that is, not only to include them within their decorative
schemes, but also to know how to undertake the necessary horticultural
tasks required to grow and maintain them.
Figure
15.1 Arrangement of plants and hanging baskets in window, from John R. Mollinson’s The
New Practical Window Gardener, 1894, London: Henry J. Drane, p. 24

Window gardening and feminine culture in the domestic interior

By the end of the century, window gardening was seen, at least by advice
book authors, as an almost exclusively
feminine pursuit, and had become a
defining element of nineteenth-century domesticity, firmly aligned with the
feminine art of interior decoration. Indeed, arguably, domesticated plants
and flowers served to affirm the
presence of feminine culture within the
home. Given the movement of nature from outside the domestic sphere to
inside it, this aspect of decoration blurred the physical boundaries between
the spheres, while, inasmuch as it
became women’s role to undertake it,
simultaneously reinforcing them ideologically.

Figure
15.2 Ornamental plant case with fountain and hanging basket, from John R. Mollinson’s The
New Practical Window Gardener, 1894, London: Henry J. Drane, p. 155

In his 1856 book, Rustic Adornments for Homes of Taste, James Shirley
Hibberd outlined
what he believed to be the benefits of window gardening,
explaining that:

The pleasures of the garden, the tending and taming of household

pets, the culture of choice plants in the
greenhouse and the window,
seem to me more remunerative, both intellectually and morally,
than even the study
of the higher departments of art, because of
their suitability to all tastes, and means, and their directly
educative
power, for they keep us near to nature and compel us to be students
 of the out-door world, whence
many noble inspirations and
devotional impulses are drawn.
(Hibberd 1856: 4)

These words were uttered at a moment when, in the form of plants and
flowers (not to mention shells, aquaria full
of fish, caged birds, and snakes
in terraria), the presence of nature inside the middle-class British home was
becoming more widespread than ever. In the conservatory (or, in less well-
off households, the Wardian case in the
parlor), in the window (in hanging
baskets, pots on window sills, enclosed cases attached to the outside of sash
windows, or jardinières on stands in window bays), in a bowl on the table,
or in a corner of the room,
domesticated plants and flowers reflected the
dominant anxieties, values, beliefs, needs, and aspirations of the
era.
Placing a dracaena in a ceramic pot on a stand in the bay window of a
Victorian parlor, a potted Kentia palm
in the corner of a dining room filled
with dark wooden furniture, arranging ferns in a summertime fireplace,
trailing ivy around a door frame, or positioning a basket of
chrysanthemums
on the dining table, constituted highly significant creative interventions.
They played a part in
interior decorative schemes which, in turn, helped to
define the identities of the women who created them; it was
the female
home-maker’s responsibility to ensure that values and beliefs were
adequately expressed. This
phenomenon coincided with the moment at
which the home ceased to be a mere shelter and became both a sanctuary
and a repository of its inhabitants’ private lives and identities. It also
coincided with the growing importance
and impact of the ideology of the
separate spheres.
Hibberd fully understood the extent of the repayment that came from the
labor involved in nurturing and
displaying plants and flowers in the home.
In a single concise paragraph he was able to summarize the multiple
and
profound benefits to be reaped from bringing nature into the home. An early
proponent of window gardening he
not only addressed his horticultural
advice to men but also directed many of his words towards women, in
particular when he was discussing the arrangement of plants and flowers in
the home, emphasizing to them that
they would benefit enormously from
both nurturing plants and flowers, and including them in their decorative
schemes. The benefits he outlined highlighted the themes explored below.
 Continuity with the past

One of the clear benefits of window gardening outlined by Hibberd and

others was its capacity to maintain
continuity with the pre-industrial past.
So significant was the loss of living with nature to the newly urbanized
and
industrialized population that the introduction of plants and flowers into the
home represented an important
form of compensation. As Hibberd again
explained,

The “Home of Taste” is one of the latest fruits of the high tone to
which social life has attained in this
country of later years, and its
complete development may not be far off, but that the present
generation may
witness the union of Nature and Art in happy
ministration to human sympathies within doors … Therefore we
build
up Homes of Taste wherein to find epitomes of the natural
world and where, secure from the commotion and dust
that prevail
without, we may cherish the affections that lie deepest in our
nature, and from which spring the
noblest and most enduring
results in the exaltation of our intellectual and spiritual faculties.
(Hibberd 1856: 2–3)

For Hibberd the world of nature, in the form of domesticated plants and
flowers, provided a metaphor for the
highest achievements of human nature
itself and bringing nature into the mid-nineteenth-century home reflected a
need for continuity at a time of dramatic and all-encompassing change, one
which offset “the commotion and dust”
that he saw outside. Others also
suggested that embracing nature in the home was a means of minimizing
the
trauma, stress, and anxiety that resulted from living through the process
and effects of rapid industrialization
and urbanization. Leaving nature
behind in its wild state and bringing it into the domestic sphere represented
a
symbolic act of taming—whether consciously perpetrated or not—that
protected people against alienation and a
sense of loss. Through their
domesticating activities in the home, which
included window gardening,
therefore, women were responsible for ensuring a level of continuity with
the
pre-industrial past while simultaneously embracing the demands of
domestic life in an industrialized modern
world.
 Embracing exoticism

Window gardening also served to bring into the Victorian home a taste of
the exotic lands where many of the
plants and flowers had originated.
Although domesticated plants and flowers served as calming stabilizers for
the
socially mobile nineteenth-century population, metaphorically allowing
it to put down new roots, they also
provided an opportunity for excitement
and stimulation. Following the extensive importation of exotic plants and
flowers, such as camellias and fuschias, which had taken place over the two
previous centuries—a side effect of
the colonization of distant lands—and
the expansion of the activity of plant collecting, many new species
continued to arrive in Britain through the nineteenth century. As a result
significant businesses were built up
to sell and distribute them to the new
middle classes. Palms became especially popular and were considered to be
simultaneously graceful, tasteful, and mysterious. The elegant Kentia palm,
for example, brought over in ships
from Lord Howe Island, northeast of
Australia, had, by the second half of the century, become a firm favorite in
the middle-class parlor and was seen as the most exotic domestic palm of
all. In addition to the indigenous
species gathered by the less wealthy from
local woods, other ferns arrived in Britain from New Zealand, India,
Mexico, and Japan, among other places, adding a high level of exoticism to
the suburban villa. Cacti, natives of
the hot dry deserts of America, arrived
in Europe in the 1830s. Rubber plants, dracaenas, and aspidistras (all of
them good at surviving in gas lighting) also graced many interiors, adding
the new levels of exoticism that
quickly became a required component of
the fashionable domestic interior.

Education and morality

Plants and flowers also provided an important source of education in the

home. When children were taught about
the natural world they were not
only being offered a spiritual and a moral education but also, importantly, a
scientific training that introduced them to, among others, the disciplines of
botany and biology. As well as
bringing them nearer to God, the fact that
homes were frequently filled with plants and flowers, and very often
with
fish, birds, and insects, and sometimes live snakes, served as a means of
introducing children to
post-Enlightenment rational thought. One writer
went as far as to claim that the introduction of plants into
schoolrooms
helped calm children (Williams 1873: 7).
In her book The Cosmopolitan Interior Judith Neiswander explains that
Victorian Britain
was dominated by the notion of home as a site that
focused on the self-improvement of its inhabitants. Through
education and
the acquisition of new skills people could, the Victorians believed, gain
social advancement. Much
of that aspiration was expressed through the
visual and material culture of the home, within which plants and
flowers
played a significant part.
The presence of plants and flowers in the home also performed an
important
moral role, especially in the middle years of the nineteenth
century when, within Christian thought, nature was
seen as a gift of God,
providing a spiritual link between the divine and the human.

Social status

Perhaps the primary benefit of window gardening to the population of the

second half of the nineteenth century,
however, was its ability to
demonstrate upward social mobility, another responsibility that fell to the
housewife. Before the middle years of the nineteenth century indoor
gardening had been restricted to the
aristocratic and the wealthy. At
Stourhead House in Wiltshire, for example, Thomas Chippendale junior had
created
a set of jardinières in the shape of sarcophagi to hold the indoor
plants and flowers that were displayed in the
main living room. Prior to
being taken over by the home-maker, the task of arranging the plants and
flowers had
typically been undertaken by head gardeners. Embracing plants
and flowers in their homes therefore represented
one of the ways in which
the new middle- and working-class populations could emulate their social
superiors.
By the later nineteenth century the idea of women embellishing the home
as a means of displaying newly acquired
wealth, social status, and taste had
become an option for increasingly large numbers of people. Bringing plants
and flowers into the home was not limited to the nouveau riche middle
classes but was also available to people of
humbler means, who had a
variety of options available to them including the ability to substitute a
Wardian case,
or a window box, for a conservatory, or to include indigenous
ferns, rather than the more expensive exotic palms,
in their parlors.
 Creating a home of taste

Window gardening’s capacity to express social mobility derived from the

role it played within the artistic
activity of interior decorating. From the
middle years of the nineteenth century onwards, the most powerful
marker
of social distinction was the possession of taste, a concept linked to the
possession and display of
artistic knowledge. Taste was a social
phenomenon manifested through artistic arrangement; the possession of the
right components for a decorative scheme (including the right plants
properly nurtured); the ability to see what
fashion was round the corner; and
the capacity to interpret it in a timely manner.
Much has been written about the subtle language of the interiors of the
nineteenth-century middle-class home
(e.g. Logan 2001), emphasizing the
way in which its very fabric and decor demonstrated the desire of its
inhabitants to better themselves through upward emulation and adherence to
the fast-moving fashion system.
Although originating in the untamed world
of nature, plants and flowers were rapidly attuned to the culture of
domesticity in the home, becoming an extension of the furniture and the
furnishings within it, and significant as
markers of the exercising of
aesthetic knowledge or taste in that setting.
Plants and flowers contributed to interior decoration in a number of
different ways, and the possibility of
including plants and flowers in
decorative schemes varied across levels of wealth and access to advice. At
the
most affluent end of the spectrum, the presence of a conservatory
attached
to a house offered inhabitants the opportunity to bring together a
vast number of plants, many of them exotic,
into a dedicated space that
performed the function of an extra room, a form of extended parlor. In some
instances, conservatories succeeded in bringing more light into what were
otherwise fairly gloomy parlors,
although, in others, so dense was the
vegetation in the glass house that they were as dark as the rooms to which
they were joined.
The fashion for domestic conservatories derived from the emergence of
public examples, from the Crystal Palace
constructed in Hyde Park in 1851
onwards. They captured the public’s imagination and inspired them to
emulate
them in their own homes. However, if a family was unable to
afford a conservatory, other ways of displaying
plants and flowers in the
home were available to them. These included the use of boxes attached to
the outside of
their windows (such as the one still visible today in Linley
Sambourne’s house in London’s Kensington), hanging
baskets on porches,
balconies, and verandas, and the positioning of potted plants in the fireplace
during the
summer months. Wardian cases, first utilized by Robert Fortune
in 1848 for transporting tea plants to India from
China (Williams 1873:
159), were also good substitutes, especially for ferns. Indeed the fern
became a leading
motif in decoration at that time, reaching a fashionable
peak in the 1870s and appearing on the surfaces of glass
and china artifacts
and wallpaper, among other domestic items.
Plants and flowers served multiple visual, material, and spatial functions
in domestic interiors. These included
lightening the effect of heavy
furniture; softening the hard geometry of the architectural frames of rooms;
providing a form of elegant ornamentation; acting as screens (ivy in
particular); and providing color, texture,
and smell in varying degrees.
Female home-makers became increasingly skilled at exploiting these
aesthetic
possibilities and at nurturing the plants and flowers themselves.

Conclusion

Forming, as it did, part of the activity of interior decoration, the

introduction of plants and flowers into the
nineteenth-century home was
considered to fall within the definition of a female accomplishment. In turn,
interior decoration was the medium through which the values and beliefs
embraced in the domestic sphere were
expressed. As it was the home-
maker’s responsibility to express them, although several writers claimed she
was
born with them, she needed to acquire the artistic skills necessary for
that task. That also involved learning
some of the principles of botany,
biology, and horticulture as the century progressed. Through that learning
process, and the activity that it facilitated, the feminization of the domestic
interior took place, and the
stereotypical idea of a close association between
femininity and the home was formed.

References

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 16

FROM BRIGHT YOUNG THING TO

VILE BODY TO POSTHUMOUS
RELIQUARY
Stephen Tennant, queer excess and the decadent
interior
John Potvin
 
 
 
This chapter explores Wilsford Manor, Wiltshire, near Stonehenge, as a site
of the accumulated excess and
degenerative eccentricity of celebrity
aristocrat Stephen Tennant (1906–87) (see Figure
16.1).
Diagnosed with tuberculosis in 1924, Tennant travelled to Switzerland,
Bavaria and Italy on several occasions and
for protracted periods to help
cure his ailing body. However, Wilsford was for him his true fantasy
playground, a
safe haven that, as time passed, served to attenuate his
continued depression, ill health and disassociation with
the outside world.
Photographed numerous times by friend and fellow ‘Bright Young Thing’
Cecil Beaton (1904–80),
Tennant’s incessant (re)decorating of his beloved
family manor became an all-consuming passion that at once
materialized
his ill health, insatiable patterns of consuming and idiosyncratic design
vision. Inspired by, and
an avid collector of, the modernist bleached,
pickled and stained furnishings of Syrie Maugham, amongst the work
of
other famed decorators, Tennant undertook his first major redecoration of
the manor in the early 1930s, a
project that extended over several years.
Here I use biographies, an estate auction catalogue and press coverage
to
attempt a queer cultural biography of Tennant’s things (Kopytoff 1986: 64–
91) and interiors by exploring the
intersections of mental health, perception,
consumer culture, celebrity, the modern interior and queer
aesthetics. The
complicated, but much neglected, legacy left behind by the Hon. Stephen
James Napier Tennant
provides a unique and rich queer case that troubles
normative understandings of the function, histories and
celebrity of modern
interior design.
In the decades following the war, with ever-shrinking financial support,
coupled with protracted bouts of
depression and isolationism on the part of
its owner, Wilsford Manor and its purported eccentric resident fell
into
neglect. Increasingly, Tennant’s eccentricity became unsupported by friends
and society as his interiors
grew more overburdened by the chaos wrought
by a disregard for an ever-expanding array of objets d’art that populated
what became, in later decades, claustrophobic interiors. Here I am
concerned not only with how the interiors were transformed into a site of
queer celebrity, through what appeared
as an endless cycle of decorating,
but also with how, following his death in 1987, the Sotheby’s auction
reified
Tennant’s, so-called, eccentric interiors and objects as a spectacle of
queer excess premised exclusively on his
decorative persona. The auction,
as reported on by the press, reinforced how biography and the interior as
specular image colluded to portray Tennant’s queer identity in purely
spectacularized, and hence superficial,
terms.
Figure
16.1 Stephen Tennant by Foulsham & Banfield. © National Portrait Gallery, London.
© National Portrait Gallery, London.

Seashells: illness and the interior

Tennant’s first foray into interior design came early when, in 1926, he
began to decorate his bedroom in his
family’s Mulberry House in Smith
Square, Westminster, transforming it into the Silver Room. With the use of
sheets of silver foil, the lustre walls shimmered with an otherworldly
glitter,
the effect of which was aided by the silver table-tops and large silver,
brocade-covered bed. Tuberoses
and white lilies, a polar bear skin, a bust of
Tennant by Jacob Epstein (which he cherished) and a sapphire-blue
ceiling
dazzled against the metallic atmospheric sheen of the room. The Sunday
Express
commented on this unusual room, ‘where his originality has
expressed itself in a Silver Room’ (Anon. 1927). On
the occasion of his
twenty-first birthday, Tennant commissioned his good friend Cecil Beaton
to take a series of
photographs to commemorate his newly designed interior,
providing a visual record of his (queer) coming of age.
Set against myriad
fabricated backdrops, and variously attired, the effete aesthete was
immortalized by Beaton,
elegantly posing, equally proud of his interior and
wasp-thin waist. These photographs prove slightly less
effective as sources
of documentation of a historical interior than as a visual statement of
Tennant’s and
Beaton’s queer aesthetic, which was to become the hallmark
of the Bright Young Things throughout their heyday in
the early 1920s. Set
on turning their backs on the devastation of the First World War, those
aristocratic,
bohemian decadents, which Evelyn Waugh famously satirized
as vile bodies, were driven by
an insatiable revelry and debauchery (Waugh
1996 [1930]). For Waugh, among others, they were nothing more than a
social experimentation in extreme ostentation and perversion whose
inevitable outcome was an incurable
existential malaise, a sort of
decoration-induced madness. Indeed, Tennant’s Silver Room served as a
sort of
reliquary to this priestly figure of decadence, a resting place for a
body plagued by consumption, which had been
diagnosed three years
earlier. Susan Sontag makes an important claim for how ‘through fantasies
… TB was thought
of – as a decorative, often lyrical death’ (Sontag 1978:
20). The supposed decorative nature of the disease,
which stemmed from
nineteenth-century aristocratic ideals, suggested it ‘was glamorous to look
sickly … it came
to be considered a mark of distinction, of breeding’ (ibid.:
28–9). Indeed, Tennant spent hours on his toilette each and every day, a
ritual that drained him of vital energy.
Around the same time that Beaton shot those now iconic photographs,
Tennant met, and soon fell in love with, the
soldier-cum-poet Siegfried
Sassoon (1886–1967). Their relationship was never an easy one.
Nevertheless, Sassoon
was very protective, even at times overly so,
especially when it concerned Tennant’s health. He took his young
charge on
a number of protracted stays on the Continent, spending long periods of
time in Switzerland, with short
excursions to Italy and Bavaria. The
seashells he began to collect in earnest in 1928, when on a particularly
joyous holiday with Sassoon in southern Italy, would not only become a
hallmark of his decorating scheme at
Wilsford, but would forever serve to
conjure memories of happier times with his long-lost lover.
Sassoon’s various attempts to win Tennant’s affection would gradually
have to compete not only with his erratic
moods and behaviour, due largely
to his illness, but also with his beloved family home. Designed in 1906 by
Detmar Blow (1867–1936) for Edward, 1st Baron Glenconner, and Pamela
Tennant, it was in keeping with their
mutually preferred Arts and Crafts
style. After the passing of his mother in 1929, nine years after the death of
Edward, Tennant took possession of the manor, in addition to an annual
income of £15,000. Tennant adored the
gardens and grounds of the estate
where, as a boy, he had slept many nights. Now he was a convalescing
young man
of means, a loggia attached to the house was constructed in the
garden, a perfect way to combine the best of both
spaces. Here he could be
near the fresh air, flowers and sunlight and plan his decorative renovation
schemes.
Surrounded by tall, fresh-cut lilies, Tennant’s preferred flower,
Sassoon would care for and read to him. In
August 1932 the tuberculosis
was diagnosed as completely gone and many
were charging Tennant with
feigning illness. Amongst these was Dr Riddoch who diagnosed his illness
as ‘nervous’
and recommended a stay at Cassel Hospital for Functional
Nervous Disorders in Penshurst, Kent (founded in 1919).
Following
Tennant’s stay there, his relationship with Sassoon, now forbidden to visit
him at Wilsford, completely
disintegrated under the strain of his various
conditions.
With his large income and domestic freedom, the young bachelor
continued to embark on a protracted decorating
project, setting out to
redesign the interior of his manor with the goal of brightening it up,
removing almost
entirely any decorative associations with his beloved, if
domineering, mother and her foreboding style. As part
of the extensive
redesign, Tennant went on a buying spree over the course of several years.
Away from the
glamorous hubbub of London society, he spent the 1930s
decorating the manor interspersed with periods of
convalescence. Beaton
introduced him to interior decorator Syrie Maugham’s fashionable all-white
designs, taking
him to her shop in Duke Street where his first of numerous
purchases was a set of tall lamps. From Denham
McLaren’s London
showroom, he acquired the seating for his newly christened Pink Room;
McLaren was also invited
to Wilsford to consult on various design
directions Tennant was taking. Sibyl Colefax’s shop and numerous other
design firms were the recipients of Tennant’s patronage. Silver, white and
an expansive palette of pink were his
preferred choice for most furniture
and furnishings. Pieces from the Baroque, Louis XVI and even the newly
fashionable Art Deco style resided side by side, sharing in common a lustre
and brightness he once sought for his
first decorating scheme at Mulberry
House. By October 1933 Beaton noted how the ‘walls of books’ in the
library
at Wilsford were now ‘covered, as is the floor, with ice-cream pink –
the chairs & furniture white, flowers
abounding’ (Hoare 1990: 181). Over
the decades, Tennant was the subject of a number of less than flattering
characterizations, serving as semi-fictional characters for many authors. In
his niece’s semi-autobiographical
novel, Strangers, Maugham’s and
Tennant’s penchant for white served as a backdrop to
further enhance her
uncle’s eccentricities, for which Emma had little sympathy or apparent
tolerance. Of his use
of white, she writes:

Everything for Stephen must be white – as it had been for Pamela –

but his white, unlike hers, is Syrie Maugham
white: a white that
suggests no deeper meaning within, no spirituality, purity or love.
Stephen’s white,
reflected in the perfect face with its high
cheekbones, magenta lips and great mascaraed eyes, is, like his art
and his protestations of affection, only skin deep.
(Tennant 1998: 67)

Although Tennant claimed to be responsible for introducing Maugham to

colour – even if only pastels – the
decorator’s use of pink and blue hues
harmonized perfectly with her signature all-white schemes.
The supposed superficiality of the white Tennant used to decorate his
interiors was, nevertheless, personalized
with the significant population of
seashells that took up residence in various guises throughout the manor. In
the seemingly natural environment of the bathroom, for example, he placed
his shells in the bathtub, leaving them
soaking in water that was tinted pink
and blue. He felt this semi-artificial aquatic environment best displayed
his
precious marine jewels, something he was proud to show Gertrude Stein
when she visited Wilsford in 1937
(Hoare 1990: 391). The seashell motif
was not restricted to actual shells, but could also be found in the
decorative
flourishes of some of the furniture, such as the Gesso Grotto
armchairs (c.
1910), or in decorative details, such as the scalloped cornices of the
dining
and drawing rooms. Huge shells served as flowerpots, while others,
strategically placed, concealed light
fixtures. Shells were also an important
motif integrated in Maugham’s own designs and in 1935 she proudly
declared: ‘I am specializing in everything to do with shells – shell printed
fabrics, shells for table
decorations, shells as flower vases’ (ibid.: 222). One
of these pieces was a large plaster and wooden Nautilus
shell, supported by
stylized dolphins, which formed the centrepiece of Tennant’s pink-infused
library.
By the mid-1930s, entirely consumed by his project and surrounded by
countless specially commissioned pieces by
many of London’s finest
decorators, Tennant was beginning to doubt his style and taste, as he
revealed in a
letter to Beaton: ‘I’m making Wilsford hideous … I’ve no
taste suddenly & a pit of doubt in my stomach about
every colour & now I
am so ill & apathetic’ (ibid.: 156). Here, illness and the interior came
together
for Tennant, hinging on the precarious edge of good taste.
However, in 1937 Beaton admired Maugham and Tennant’s
work, the
‘effect’ of which he characterized as ‘very gay. Lots of pale colours against
white walls, flights of
fancy that are very typical & often entirely successful
– Huge tubs of rare flowers – the whole atmosphere
very fleuri, perfumé –
very Stephenish’ (ibid.: 225). Tennant arranged with Beaton to have
a large-
scale photo session centred on Wilsford’s spectacular and continued
redecoration project; every nook and
cranny was photographed. By the time
‘Beaton came to the house for the last weekend in April 1938, it was
resplendent with new furnishing and fittings’ (Sotheby’s 1987: 17–18).
Rumours of his beautifully decorated home
circulated in London, largely
thanks to Beaton, and reached the offices of House &
Garden whose editors
contacted Tennant in July 1939 expressing their desire to feature Wilsford
in their
magazine. Although photographs were taken the following month,
the story was never published due to wartime
restrictions (ibid.: 18).
Despite their longstanding friendship and mutual interest in all things
aesthetic, Tennant would remain a paradox
for Beaton, interestingly defined
along a private/public line. He noted how ‘[i]n his own home he is utterly
delightful. At the Ritz or in a train he is shaming and ridiculous – He is the
greatest paradox of heart and
heartlessness – sensibility and cruelty – taste
and vulgarity’ (Hoare 1990: 247). However, Beaton would later
conclude
that ‘so many of Stephen’s eccentricities and poses were a part of his
illness’, that is, his acute
depression which was diagnosed in 1953 by Dr
Tony Davis (ibid.: 286). Wilsford has often been described as a
fairyland,
presided over by a man out of touch with the world outside the estate’s
walls. While the war raged on,
Tennant was oblivious to its effects. ‘One
young man who came to work at the manor in 1940 was amazed that Mr
Tennant was ordering the moving of garden statuary while everyone else
was sand-bagging’ (ibid.: 254). However,
in July 1942 Tennant’s beloved
sanctuary was catapulted into the thick of the war effort when the Red
Cross
requisitioned Wilsford, transforming it into a convalescent hospital.
With most of the furniture, unfit for
ailing soldiers’ needs, moved to nearby
Lake House, Tennant was sequestered to a set of rooms in the thatched
wing
of the manor. The adjustment was rather difficult but, as always, a
decorative response was just the thing
to set things right. As part of his
unusual and scaled-down decorating project, he painted a muscular Nubian
acrobat in the newly constructed private entrance and a crinoline lady on
one of the panelled walls. The small
decorative pleasures he maintained
provided great joy for him during the war. In April 1943 he wrote how,
‘[n]o
one will ever know what the pleasure, the beauty of the pure cold
white velvet curtains in this room mean to me.
They hang so well, and now,
in the twilight, an arctic prismatic shadow invades them’ (ibid.: 258).
Secluded in what he called ‘my elegant room, my boudoir’, Tennant
suffered a major
nervous breakdown in 1944 and spent the summer
recovering.
The war had ended, bringing with it social change for Britain and a
significantly dwindled income for Tennant. By
the 1960s Beaton noticed
how the various ‘improvements’ to Wilsford’s decor, which Tennant had
affected since the
1940s, ‘had become overblown, without the spareness of
a Syrie Maugham to moderate his exuberance, and in
consequence the
result was a crazy mixture made yet more extraordinary by the further
embellishments Stephen had
devised’ (ibid.: 342). There are many accounts
of how, when guests came to visit him in his cluttered bedroom, he
would
simply take a pile of photographs, or a handful of valuable drawings by
artists like Tchelitchew, and throw
them into the air, giving no regard for
how and where they landed. The house’s upkeep had already become a
growing concern by the 1960s: ‘The contents of a hundred desk drawers
and chests, filled with letters, postcards,
photographs, magazines, jewellery,
trinkets, shells and empty scent bottles, were tipped out on the floors, beds,
sofas, tables, chairs, stairs’ (ibid.: 353). Wilsford had begun its slow descent
into a state more shabby than
chic.
On 28 February 1987 Tennant died at home, intestate, surrounded by his,
so-called, clutter and the objects he
cherished most, a landscape whose
sedimentation was the result of decades-worth of accumulation, numerous
decorating ventures and countless memories, both joyful and painful. As
Tennant’s niece wrote in her
fictionalized memoir-cum-novel ‘[e]verything
[in Wilsford] is devoted to murdering memory and keeping it intact
at the
same time’ (Tennant 1998: 170).

‘An English eccentric’s dream house’ at auction

According to Tennant’s nurse and housekeeper, Mrs Sylvia Blandford, the

mass auctioning off of the contents of
his beloved Wilsford in October 1987
‘would have caused him to turn in his grave’ (Blandford and Culme 1987).
Sotheby’s representative, John Culme, disagreed with Blandford’s
assessment, pointing out that no other outcome
could have been expected
given Tennant left behind no will. Culme’s claim that ‘[t]he fact we are
breaking up the
house was entirely his own fault’ (Blandford and Culme
1987), underscores the perils of queer legacies. Culme’s
remarks are a
testament to the posthumous legacy of innumerable queers whose
dismantled interiors are reduced, if
lucky enough, to photographic
impressions or even, in the case of celebrity, auction catalogues. While the
photographs of historical interiors that have long ceased to function as
habitable accommodations are countless,
the language used to describe,
analyse, honour and memorialize queer interiors is, I argue, remarkably
different
from those untainted by connotations long-held as pejorative. In
his discussion of a spate of queer celebrity
estate auctions, critic Michael
Duncan asserts that,

[i]n an auction, anyone who has the cash can ‘inherit’ something
from an estate, with no ungrateful heirs
standing in the way. This
free market primogeniture suits these self-made iconoclasts [in
which he includes
Tennant] whose rarefied tastes forced them to
seek out the like-minded as substitute family members. Carrying
 this tradition further, it is up to their spiritual heirs to discern the
true value of the objects found on the
auction block.
(Duncan 1995: n.p.)

In the construction of what is tantamount to a gay hagiography, objects of

consumption, purchased through the auspices of market capitalism, provide
the means by which to conjure, venerate
and honour the relics ripped from
the domestic interior-cum-reliquary. Dismissively reduced to ‘style
groupies’
by Duncan, those ‘without means’ are at least able to purchase the
accompanying glossy catalogue. We would do
well to consider that queer
extra-familial kinship systems, achieved through alternative forms and
modes of
bonding, affiliation and identification, are all too often
memorialized and honoured not through traditional
means of bequest, but
circumstantially through capitalist acts of consumption.
Indeed if, as Duncan asserts, ‘[c]elebrity auctions open closet doors’ only
to sell off objects ‘with a kind of
bland indifference’ (ibid.), the original
sexual, intimate and even sensual properties of these objects are
transformed, layered by a hagiographic aura; the saintliness of honour,
virtue and a virginal resignation to
God’s divine plan are replaced by the
effects of a celebrity-crazed, secularized culture wherein cultural
perceptions and social stigma cross-pollinate with sexual decadence and
dissidence to lend an interior or object
its auratic gravitas. Although
Tennant’s interiors and objects might seem nothing more than a capitalist
stockpiling of worthless things over time, I argue that the auction itself
unwittingly provides us with something
much more profound, namely the
interpolation of the maligned queer subject into the narration of cultural
history. Like the celebrity, only in death can the deeds of saints be
valorized, whereby their acts and miracles
move from the private to the
public, wherein their true value and subsequent canonization is bestowed.
Only upon
canonization, an act of social recognition and institutional
sanction, are the limited extant material or
corporeal remains imbued with
other-worldly potency.
Here, I wish to pay particular attention to a series of brief articles written
by the critic for the Financial Times, Anthony Thorncroft, in the days
leading up to the sale and the dismissive, though
highly revelatory,
language he used to characterize Tennant’s interiors and the objects up for
sale. Thorncroft
makes clear in his critical appraisal that the ‘only real
works of art’ to be found amongst the content of
Wilsford are the
photographs taken by Beaton and the Tennant bust by sculptor Jacob
Epstein (Thorncroft 1987a).
Thorncroft’s assessment is invariably borne out
of the periodical’s interest in investment and resale value.
At the auction, the best prices achieved were for a pair of late eighteenth-
century porphyry columns for £33,000,
which were estimated at between
£2,500 and £4,000, and a gilt screen for £27,400, a full £10,000 higher than
originally predicted. The sale for the first day alone reached £1.5 million, a
far cry from the conservative
estimation of £700,000 expected for both days
of the sale. It might be worth noting that the house itself was
sold for £1.2
million, far above the initial asking price of £750,000. Taking into account
the art and estate
markets’ steep, and until then unprecedented, increase in
value in the late 1980s, buoyed by the stock market
boom, which ironically
crashed in Britain in October 1987, the unexpected sales numbers
associated with Tennant
speak loudly, in my estimation, to his true cultural
merit. That is, they speak to an archaeologically dense
cultural production
of multiple meanings wherein the totality of the objects and interiors expose
the sediments
of pleasure, contestation, originality, contradiction and
conflict.
Through this layered social life of objects ‘regimes of value’ are
constructed, largely provided in the case of
Tennant through the powerful
reliquary function of the interior itself, made possible at the moment of the
auction (Appadurai 1986). While Wilsford began to descend into disrepair,
Tennant’s purchases throughout the
1930s and well into the 1960s were
made with a discerning eye, a fact that is all too easily dismissed when
viewed through a prism of disarray. He placed enormous value on the
aesthetic potential of each object he purchased, which in turn would
function to create interiors of beauty. His
initial wealth enabled him to
purchase the best. However, Thorncroft took every opportunity in his
assessment of
the auction to point out that,

[t]here was nothing of any real value at Wilsford. For all his
aestheticism, Tennant seems to have had pretty
dreadful taste and
the furniture and pictures will be of interest only to interior
decorators who, after a
little restoration, will be able to ask inflated
prices for something with an exotic provenance.
(1987b)
Here ‘regimes of value’ are set into conflict, with supposed good taste
deployed by Thorncroft as the measure of
true merit and worth. The
dismissive relegation of Tennant’s objects to the custodians of presumably
bad taste,
opportunist interior decorators, coupled with the suggestive and
historically burdened designators of ‘exotic
provenance’ and ‘aestheticism’,
is here employed as an index of effeminacy and sexual decadence, long
(and
erroneously) collapsed into the figure of the male homosexual.
However, Tennant’s protracted and varied bouts of
illness form an
important part of his perceived persona and domestic performances.
Thorncroft’s derision must
also be seen against this backdrop. For, as
Sontag reminds us:

Early capitalism assumed the necessity of regulated spending,

saving, accounting, discipline – an economy that
depends on the
rational limitation of desire. TB is described in images that sum up
the negative behavior of
nineteenth-century homo economicus:
consumption; wasting; squandering of vitality.
Advanced capitalism
requires expansion, speculation, the creation of new needs (the
problem of satisfaction and
dissatisfaction), buying on credit,
mobility – an economy that depends on the irrational indulgence of
desire.
(Sontag 1978: 63).

Thorncroft further reveals his own design leanings which are suffused, I
would contend, with a masculinist
perspective on interior decoration, as
when he designates Maugham’s designs in the 1930s as rooms decorated
well,
whereas those from the equally legendary firm of Colefax & Fowler
from the 1940s were disregarded as badly
conceived; the latter firm was
characterized by a more traditional take on English interiors with its use of
floral furnishings and chintz in a style more akin to country living. Colefax
& Fowler are remarkably set in
stark opposition to Maugham’s
whitewashed and pickled schemes which share more in common with
(masculine)
modernist interest in a reduction of the frivolous, the excesses
of the decorative and the femininity ascribed to
floral patterns and bright,
cheerful colours.

Queer excess: ‘the decorative recluse’

 Whether it is worth spending time and money commemorating a
man who never escaped boyhood,
and who frittered away any
talent with which he might have been graced lying in bed, toying
with worthless
jewels, while writing in multi-coloured inks to fellow
devotees of the cult of decadence, is an open
question.
(Thorncroft 1987b)

Tennant seems to have been tolerated throughout his life precisely because
of his unusual beauty and exceptional wit. Artist William Henderson
recalled how when dining at the fashionable
Restaurant Boulestin, upon
seeing a young Stephen Tennant his mesmerized uncle, Admiral Sir Lewis
Clinton-Baker,
exclaimed: ‘I don’t know if that’s a man or woman, but it’s
the most beautiful creature I’ve ever seen’ (Hoare
1990: 81). Tennant’s
celebrity and legendary appeal was premised solely on his youthful status as
a Bright Young
Thing and his unrivalled beauty. Writer Osbert Sitwell, for
example, referred to him as ‘the last professional
beauty’ (ibid.: 337).
However, not all appreciated his beauty: poet and novelist Robert Graves
saw him as ‘an
appallingly artificial young man’ (Egremont 2005: 305);
Lady Menuhin remarked how ‘he was rather pathetic, really
… I think
truthfully that he was in the wrong sexual envelope – he wasn’t effeminate
so much as feminine’; while
Susan Lowndes Marques claimed ‘he was an
hermaphrodite. Perhaps not in the physical sense, but certainly in every
other’ (Hoare 1990: 340). Finally, poet and novelist Stephen Spender noted
it was impossible to sustain a loving
relationship with Tennant as
‘[e]verything was an externalization of his own decorative desires, so you
become
part of the décor’ (ibid.: 260). As the, so-called, ‘decorative
recluse’ Tennant’s dubious celebrity carries with
it clear pejorative
connotations. The pithy epithet at once conjures the man sequestered to the
decorative
landscape of his own devising, while also equating him with the
other (decorative) bric-a-brac that populated his
interiors, reducing him to a
mere hermetic ornament.
Elsewhere I have identified what I believe to be the seven deadly sins of
the modern bachelor (queerness,
idolatry, askesis, decadence, decoration,
glamour and artifice), all of which I posit were characteristics of the
Wilsford Manor bachelor (Potvin 2014). However, in the case of Tennant
these have largely been reduced to his
vanity and acquisitiveness, markers
of his queer excess, which are in turn understood as a product of his
effeminacy and his ill-health, which caused a descent into a fantasy world
of his own making. It has been all too
easy to cast Tennant and his interiors
as the progeny of British aristocratic eccentricity. However, without
throwing the proverbial baby out with the bath water, queers, of any class,
have all too often been reduced to a
singular, univocal and uni-dimensional
characterization. As I have also argued, queer excess is often designated
through the discursive preface of ‘too’, a brief but highly effective
attribution to denominate the extremes long
held to be the make-up of the
homosexual male (ibid.: 256). Through his vain pursuit of beauty and his
acquisitiveness, Tennant simply consumed too much, evinced by the too
much time he spent in the domestic interior. Beaton’s later photographs
from the 1960s, for
example, provide shaming evidence of mere
‘accumulation’ set against the background of disarray, decadence,
disrepair
and even perhaps disintegration. Yet, it is precisely this consumer-led
accumulation suspended in a
perpetual state of perceived decadence, both
during and after his lifetime, that helps to provide a partial
explanation for
the frenzy at the Wilsford auction at which no object was left unsold.
Tennant was not unlike his famous friend Beaton, who saw in the interior
a space in which to stage unforeseen
fantastical schemes and host gay
soirées (ibid.: 256–88). Their unique interiors not only bore their deft
decorating, they revealed the very stuff of subjectivity itself. The acts and
processes of auto/biography for
these men invested in interior design were
to be found not in the words of any manuscript, though both relished
any
attention paid them, but in the accumulated syntax and morphology of
individual objects, which together
formed a complete interior picture. Like
all prose, well edited or otherwise, these objects ripped from their
original
environment lose the sheen of glamour their interiors bestowed on
them,
altering and expanding anew the cultural biography of these queer little
things.

References

Anon. (1927) The Sunday Express, 6 February, n.p.

Appadurai, A. (ed.) (1986) The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural
Perspective,
Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.
Blandford, S. and Culme, J. (1987) in S. J. Checkland, ‘Final glorious days of eccentric’s dream
house’,
The Times, 8 October, n.p.
Duncan, M. (1995) ‘Saints’ Blood and Pale Ice Pink’, Frieze, Issue 21 (March–April),
n.p.
Egremont, M. (2005) Siegfried Sassoon: A Biography, London, Picador.
Hoare, P. (1990) Serious Pleasures: The Life of Stephen Tennant, New York, Penguin
Books.
Kopytoff, I. (1986) ‘The cultural biography of things: commoditization as process’ in A. Appadurai
(ed.)
The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, Cambridge, Cambridge
University Press.
Potvin, J. (2014) Bachelors of a Different Sort: Queer Aesthetics, Material Culture and the
Modern
Interior in Britain, Manchester and New York, Manchester University Press.
Sontag, S. (1978) Illness as a Metaphor, New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Sotheby’s (1987) The Contents of Wilsford Manor, Wiltshire, Home of the Honourable Stephen
Tennant, 14th–15th October, Sotheby’s Auction Sale Catalogue.
Tennant, E. (1998) Strangers, London, Vintage.
Thorncroft, A. (1987a) ‘ARTS: Nostalgia and Snuff/Saleroom report’, Financial Times, 12
October:
21.
Thorncroft, A. (1987b) ‘The Cult of Decadence/Saleroom Report’, Financial Times, 10
October:
xvii.
Waugh, E. (1996 [1930]) Vile Bodies, London, Penguin Books.
 17

DESIGNING CHILDHOOD
Amy F. Ogata
 
 
Design for children encompasses a broad variety of serially manufactured
and handmade things from the most elite
embroidered receiving blanket,
engraved silver cup, and architect-designed treehouse to the common plastic
sippy
cup, safety seat, play clothes, action figure toys, and Happy Meal.
Human beings have probably always made things
for children’s use and thus
the objects and spaces designed for childhood are potentially vast in number,
and
have long had very little prestige. Most often neither the designer nor the
manufacturer is known. Yet, as the
social value placed on children rose in
the modern era, the goods and things that formed their world also gained
significance, and design for children became charged with social
importance. As children became the “priceless”
figures, not just of their
parents’ world but also in culture and society generally, the types of goods
and the
market for things designed for them grew exponentially (Zelizer
1985).
I argue that the things and spaces designed for children from the
eighteenth century to the present constitute
specific visions of childhood.
While images of children are readily understood as representations of
childhood
(rather than children as individuals), tangible objects have been
perceived as material truth and evidence of how
children lived.1 Things,
however, are equally freighted with the
ideals of society and the potential to
mold or determine a child’s experience of maturation. This includes the
everyday spaces of children’s lives, such as houses, bedrooms, schools,
daycare centers, and parks and
playgrounds, which all indicate a particular
kind of childhood in spatial and material terms. Following literary
scholars
who have suggested that children’s fiction anticipates and desires a fictional
child, I suggest that
design for children likewise envisions a fictional child
(Rose 1984). By “fictional” I mean that the implied
childhood is devised in
the image of adult expectations and that it is not only represented, but also
figured in
things. Design then, like the notion of childhood, reveals the
values we favor as well as those we ignore.

Design for children, design for childhood

The words children and childhood, while not interchangeable, are

inextricably interrelated terms. If children are the human figures who are
born, grow, and eventually age into
adults, childhood is the idea of that
experience. This set of beliefs constitutes the definitions, social
expectations,
and assumptions adults make of children’s lives. The scholar Elizabeth
Goodenough has observed that
childhood is “both a chronological stage and
a mental construct, an existential fact and a locus of desire, a
mythological
country continuously mapped by grown-ups in search of their
subjectivity in
another time and place” (Goodenough 2003: 5). As I suggest, design for
childhood anticipates and
imagines a particular kind of child and childhood.
The things that have been created for children show that
design is never
neutral, that it is always embedded in a wider set of values and expectations.
And because design
has so long been imbued with a discourse of social or
moral improvement, it is historically invested in acting as
an agent to train,
reform, or stimulate a particular behavior.
The dominant model in the historiography of design is that adults design
things for
children. Children, of course, have always designed and made
their own things. Few of these objects survive and
thus we are left with a
largely one-sided version of the history of design for children,
instead of
design by children (Schlereth 1985). Real children often confound or disrupt
the neatly designed childhoods that have been arranged for them. Although
this perspective is difficult to
historicize, it should be clear that children
transform their environments, playthings, and belongings in ways
that depart
from the scripts and expectations of adult designers or commercial
manufacturers. The child’s own
perspective is often amiss in the history of
design for children, in part because capturing the voices and
perspectives of
historical children assumes literacy and visibility.
The historical study of children and childhood emerged in the 1960s. The
French scholar Philippe Ariès’s
L’enfant et la vie familiale sous l’ancien
régime (1960) (Centuries of
Childhood, 1962) focused attention upon the
notion of childhood as a historical invention. His argument
provoked a
strong response from scholars who provided evidence for medieval and early
modern notions of children
and childhood and rejected the paradigm that
modernization gave rise to childhood (Pollock 1984). The tide of
interdisciplinary scholarship since the 1960s has helped to encourage the
study of the history of children’s
things, including children’s toys, schooling
materials, and children’s own games, language, and folklore, giving
weight
to continuity rather than abrupt change in the modern era (Orme 2001). The
concept of childhood is now
understood as a discourse, one that
encompasses a network of ideas, things, and people who are continually
acting
to produce what we generally understand as “childhood” (Turmel
2008).

Designing for protection and improvement

Childhood has long been understood as an opportunity in which to train the

body and the mind. Prescriptive texts
on raising children show not only that
children were believed to be intrinsically malleable, but also that
objects
were essential to their development. The seventeenth-century philosopher
John Locke advocated for
discipline, regularity in meals, and outdoor
activities for the son of a gentleman. He also specified particular
goods for
children’s use, which included soft, thin shoes so children could experience
cold and warmth, and the
physical presence of the ground. Furthermore, he
devised a set of blocks on which he affixed printed letters to
create a tool for
learning to recognize letterforms.
The desire for children to live into adulthood inspired most design for
children. Throughout the early modern
era, elite children had access to
objects designed primarily to protect and improve, and secondarily to amuse.
The social belief that crawling on the floor was unsavory and animal-like
hastened a variety of objects that
encouraged an upright posture. At a young
age children of relatively
wealthy families were placed in wooden walking
frames with turned spindles enabling them to maneuver around an
indoor
space without harm. Similarly, thickly padded caps, called puddings, were
given to children to warm their
heads and to protect against sudden falls or
collisions with household furniture. For rich children, the silver
rattle with a
small bell and a bit of red coral was an amusement and a teething stick
(other children had rattles
produced from embossed leather, plaited wicker,
and even iron). Coral was believed to have beneficial and
protective qualities
and even after the child outgrew the rattle a necklace of small red coral
beads persisted,
as an agent of preservation as much as adornment.
The variety of objects designed for children grew in the eighteenth
century and ideals of improvement encompassed
the practices of refined
sociability and consumption. Toy tea sets were manufactured in a variety of
ceramic
bodies, turned wood, and also in metal. Aside from the evident
emphasis on learning the rituals of polite adult
society at the table, tea sets
instilled knowledge of the variety of forms (teapot, cups, saucers, caddy,
sugar
pot, creamer, bowls, etc.) that comprised the material wealth of the
period. The same emphasis on variety and
specificity is evident in the well-
equipped Nuremberg toy kitchens that were popular from the late eighteenth
century through to the end of the nineteenth. These elaborate three-sided
boxes housed play cooking spaces that
were usually outfitted with a replica
hearth, and diminutive versions of household objects, including shiny pots
and pans, serving, cooking, and eating utensils, furniture, baskets, and toy
food. The toy shop, a related and
slightly later genre, provided a view into
butcher’s shops with precise cuts of meat, millinery shops with
trimmed
hats, mirrors, and long counters, and general stores with cupboards replete
with everyday goods in
miniature. These objects implied a bourgeois
childhood of endless abundance and consumer variety, and they
offered up
adult rituals of consumption as an amusement.
Designs for displaying the child in furniture suited to the child’s size grew
in variety and quantity, but they
remained fundamentally tied to a discourse
of protection and improvement. The box-like seventeenth-century
kinderstoel were cupboard-shaped chairs devised by Dutch burghers to
accommodate a chamber
pot and provided a surface for eating or playing in
the corner of the kitchen. The child’s high chair, an older
form that became
widely used in nineteenth-century households (Calvert 1992: 127–130),
brought the child to the
height of the table for feeding or was employed to
keep the child secure in ways not dissimilar from the
kinderstoel (Ottillinger
2006: 25). Some late nineteenth-century high chairs had casters
and could be
moved around the room or transformed into a rocking seat, making them
amusements as much as
restraints. Transforming the body and the will of the
child to obey and meet the expectations of adults was the
role of other
goods, such as the Astley Cooper chair, which had a straight high back,
small seat, and elongated
legs, to enhance a child’s posture at the table
(Loudon 1970: 1087). This popular design, which was widely
reproduced in
Britain throughout the early nineteenth century, was also adapted for
punishment in the classroom
and nursery. By the early twentieth century,
designs for training were transformed by a discourse of liberation.
Playpens,
for example, still enclosed the child in a fence-like apparatus to protect him
or her from harm, and
they also implied that self-amusement and individual
discovery were lessons that could be learned from isolation
(Ogata 2008–9:
126–42). The role of design to encourage behavioral norms has not ceased,
yet the childhoods that
designed goods embodied were ruled less and less by
stern training and more and more by gentle
guidance.

Childhood and the growth of sentiment

During the eighteenth century, childhood expanded and softened in contrast

to a widespread understanding among
early modern Christians that the child
was born innately sinful. After the eighteenth century, this pliant figure
whose behavior might be transformed with correct training was also now
understood to be naturally innocent. The
designs that followed were strongly
tied to education and reform, heightening the contrast between an idle child
and one who worked. For both, however, design proposed a transformative
physical and tactile experience.
This shifting concept of childhood is often associated with the social and
political changes of the
Enlightenment, and specifically with the ideas of
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whose fictional character, Emile, was
raised
according to the laws of nature. In the course of the book, Rousseau (1979)
eschews the expectations of
society and recounts his design for a “natural”
upbringing of physical experience, sensation, and consequence
that
transforms the child into a healthy adult. In the wake of this influential text,
debates around the means of
educating children developed apace. The Swiss
pedagogue Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi, who admired Rousseau to the
extent
that he named his son Emile, ventured that children could learn more readily
from physical and visual
stimulation, that is from the engagement of the
senses. Pestalozzi’s concept of Anschauung
expressed his belief in the power
of sensory impressions to awaken attention and thought. Maria Edgeworth
was
another adapter of Rousseau’s ideas. Writing in Britain in 1798, she
argued that children could learn from play
and prescribed practical, didactic
rather than showy, amusements that would instruct children about their
world.
Observation, experimentation, and invention were the activities she
favored and the designs she recommended were
carts, small-scale tools, such
as gardening implements or wheelbarrows scaled for a child’s use,
microscopes,
carpentry tools, and ordinary materials such as wire,
cardboard, scissors, glue, and model building sets
(Edgeworth and
Edgeworth 1798: 10–39).
The engagement of the child’s senses through practical tasks has persisted
in educational theories and in design
for childhood. Friedrich Fröbel’s
graduated tasks, which he called gifts and occupations, were developed in
the
1830s and 1840s. They asked the child to manipulate objects and
materials to create specific designs in order to
gain an understanding of the
natural world and of his or her relationship to the divine. The thematic forms
of
the sphere, cube, and line were associated with both a specific set of tasks
and a universalizing vision of
harmony. These objects, neat woollen balls,
sets of cubes, paper, or sticks, which came in fitted boxes, required
the child
to perform tasks according to a set of directions led by a teacher. Fröbel’s
objects envisioned an
early childhood of patient inquiry and internal
awakening. He aimed to nurture children’s spirits like plants and
thus he
named his program Kindergarten, or garden of children.
A broad market for goods and programs such as Fröbel’s, designed
explicitly for children, helped to encourage the
notion of the separateness of
children from the world of adults, and the specialness of childhood in the
course
of the nineteenth century. This, and a desire for differentiation, led to
greater numbers of objects designed
intentionally for children’s use (Forty
1992: 67–72). Toys and amusements proliferated for children in the second
half of the nineteenth century. Like the Kindergarten occupations, indoor
toys presumed a patient, often solitary
and idle child (Sutton-Smith 1986:
119).
The rich variety of construction toys that flourished during the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries cast the
child as a designer, scientist, or engineer.
Construction toys and games
aimed to teach children about the design and
the mechanics of building and material properties, to assemble
pleasing
patterns, and learn about the cultural significance of architectural forms and
style. The elaborate
nineteenth-century building kits, such as the Anker
Steinbaukasten (Anchor Stone blocks),
envisioned a literate child who could
follow complex instructions to reproduce elaborate forms and patterns using
the heavy stone-like colored blocks.
 The idle child in need of amusement and instruction stood in stark contrast
to the growing number of working
children who labored in mines, textile
factories, selling goods, and working in agriculture and toy production.
Their
childhoods were designed to enhance revenue. The smallness of their bodies,
cheapness of their labor, and
the need to contribute to the family income
gave them specialized work pushing wagons, opening trap doors in
mines,
gathering materials (whether coal, fibers, or cotton), and carving, pasting,
and painting. The deep
inequality between poor and middle-class childhoods
became starkly apparent and, by the end of the nineteenth
century, led to
legislation in Europe and the United States on restricting child labor and
establishing basic
educational opportunities. As state-sponsored schooling
grew in the nineteenth century, the schoolhouse emerged
as a type that was
continually redesigned according to shifting notions of health and hygiene,
building
standards, learning aptitude, and future-oriented predictions (Lawn
and Grosvenor 2005). The size and shape of
classrooms, seats, desks,
lighting, and play areas all figured a schooled child in the changing image of
an
educated populace.

Designers and childhood

At the turn of the century in Europe, the professional designer became a

recognized occupation and some
celebrated international figures, who
created interiors for private dwellings, department store goods, and luxury
shops, also turned their attention to things for children. Designers created
toys, furniture, books, and clothes
to embellish daily life, to teach moral,
cultural, and political lessons, and to cultivate children’s tastes.
These
objects and interiors also show how the designer increasingly embraced the
child as an artistic model.
This shift coincided with a belief that children needed large spaces apart
from adults. The rooms given over to
children shifted from leftover areas in
attics and corridors to purpose-built, well-ventilated rooms and
cohesively
designed nurseries (Ottillinger 2006; White 1984). Lavish designs, such as
William Burges’s day
nursery for the Third Marquess of Bute’s Cardiff
Castle (1871–81), included elaborate friezes illustrating fables
and stories.
Middle-class versions also abounded at the end of the nineteenth century.
The French designer André
Hellé produced coordinated interior schemes,
including sturdy suites of juvenile furniture without sharp edges,
matching
friezes, and decorative textiles, such as curtains and hangings, along with
carved and turned toys (see
Figure 17.1). His wooden Noah’s Ark toy
produced in 1910 was an approved amusement for
Sabbath day observance,
and a French version of one of the most common German toys.
As the social importance of children’s things and spaces grew, they were
also adapted for persuasive means.
Hellé, for example, illustrated patriotic
children’s books during and after the First World War. A 1915 picture
book
showing ordinary playthings encouraged the revival of home-made French
toys in response to the embargo on
German playthings. During the war,
Hellé created elaborate dioramas of more than one hundred turned wooden
toy
soldiers, arranged on battlefields, and exhibited at the Paris department
store Printemps, which also produced
his furniture designs. In another book,
the Alphabet de la grande guerre (c. 1917) he repurposed the established
genre of teaching literacy to enhance the larger lesson of a
nationalistic
military purpose (see Figure 17.2).

Figure
17.1 “Chambre d’enfant” [Child’s
Room], designed by André Hellé (French, 1871–1935),
from Art et Decoration, vol. 30,
1911. Librairie Centrale des Beaux-Arts, Paris, publisher.
11¾ × 8½ inches (29.8 × 21.6 centimeters). The
Wolfsonian–Florida International
University, Miami Beach, Florida, The Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection,
XB1991.296.
Photo: David Almeida.
 In the aftermath of the First World War, modernist artists, architects, and
designers devised special goods for
children, which were both idealized and
practical attempts to build a new world. Avant-garde designers—including
Bruno Taut, J. J. P. Oud, Gerrit Rietveld, and El Lissitzky—created sets of
blocks, furniture, amusements, and
books to enhance children’s daily life, to
liberate their play, and to inculcate values of creativity and
discovery.
Beyond the embellishment of children’s spaces, modernists established
discovery and artistic insight
as the “natural” domain of childhood (Fineberg
1998). Alma Siedhoff-Buscher’s changing tables, beds, cupboards,
and toys
created at the Weimar Bauhaus envisioned a childhood of personal discovery
through things. She argued
that “Whenever possible, children should have a
room of their own where they can be whatever they wish to be, in
which
they rule. Every object in it should belong to them and their fantasy will give
it shape” (Siedhoff-Buscher
1926: 156). This investment of objects with
tangible agency in the life of the child was a central theme for
others who
understood the mission of design not just as the creation of utilitarian
products, but also to awaken
a child’s cognitive and artistic development.
Figure
17.2 Book, Alphabet de la Grande Guerre 1914–1916 [Alphabet of the Great War], c.
1917,
designed by André Hellé (French, 1871–1935). Berger–Levrault, Paris and Nancy,
publisher. 125/8 × 10¼
inches (32.1 × 26.0 centimeters). The Wolfsonian–Florida
 International University, Miami Beach, Florida, The
Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection,
XC1993.597.
Photo: David Almeida.

Stimulating a child’s creativity was increasingly the aim of a genre of

toys, furniture, playgrounds, and even museums, produced after the Second
World War in Europe and the US. The
plywood furniture, hanging
equipment, and toys designed by Charles and Ray Eames were all devised to
give agency
to the child using them. Their plywood toys and stools were
light enough that a child could rearrange them. The
paper toy kits
manufactured by Tigrett came packaged with instructions for assembling
specific forms, but they
encouraged children to experiment. The toys
themselves, with their colorful patterns, shapes, and modular form
were
designed to spur new combinations and compositions. The American firm
Creative Playthings manufactured toys,
playgrounds, and school furniture
that also envisioned childhood as a liberating aesthetic experience. By
aligning itself with a notable group of international artists, craftsmen, and
designers, and through associations
with both educational and psychological
experts and art museums, Creative Playthings designs intended a childhood
that was developmentally correct and aesthetically adventurous (Ogata
2013). Other designers and retailers were
equally invested in this model. The
transformable plywood furniture of the Danish designer Christian Vedel
could
be made into a seat, table, baby cradle, or tunnel. This genre of toys
and furniture gained attention not only
for its design, but also for its moral
claim to improve and stimulate the child through “good” design.

“Good” and “bad” design

The notion of “goodness” in children’s playthings flourished along with the

Good Design programs popular in the
US and Europe after the Second
World War. In the US, the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the
Walker Art
Center in Minneapolis launched consumer-awareness exhibitions
that promoted inexpensive manufactured goods
selected for their quality and
aesthetics, including children’s toys and furniture. The Design Centre in
London
also developed a post-war seal for products that met its criteria of
solid craftsmanship and aesthetic
sophistication. The Spiel-Gut (Good Play)
award was begun in Germany in 1954 specifically
to recognize “good” toys.
This stamp of approval came from developmental scientists, consumer
groups that
approved of solid construction, value, safety, and design.
Materials themselves also signified “goodness” in children’s things.
Although most toys were made of wood up
until the twentieth century,
wood’s ordinariness gave it an allure of endurance, especially as plastic
began to
take hold. In Sweden in the 1960s, the manufacturer BRIO™ began
promoting toys under the träleksaker (wooden toys) banner, even though it
had been producing and selling a wide variety of
wooden furniture and
playthings since the late nineteenth century. Wood seemed to preserve not
only cultural
heritage, but also childhood itself. The French critic Roland
Barthes observed in the 1950s that, “Wood does not
wound or break down; it
does not shatter, it wears out, it can last a long time, live with the child, alter
little by little the relations between the object and the hand” (Barthes 1972:
54–5).
Even before plastic was a viable material for manufacture, other materials
and toy types were scorned for their
appeal to a mass audience by the
discerning elite, who believed toys should have an educational mandate.
Louis
Marx’s lithographed tin wind-up toys produced from the 1930s
onward were inexpensive metal objects that were
often modeled on familiar
cartoon characters, or designed to entertain
with lively mechanical
movements (Cross 1997). The moral judgments that preferred one material
or type of design
over another came largely from class-based values and
taste, but these appraisals were also harnessed to the
industry of “experts” in
education, psychology, and child rearing that dominated the good parenting
and
consumer-choice discourse in the post-war era. If good toys were
sophisticated and
relatively expensive wooden objects that nodded to
traditional methods of manufacture, then bad toys were based on popular
cultural or fantasy references.
The design of firearms or war toys fueled considerable moral debate in the
twentieth century. The toy bayonet,
cork pistol, or air rifle, lead soldiers,
miniature cannons, and submarine games are longstanding toy types, but
their updated counterparts were widely criticized during and after the
Vietnam War for encouraging a culture of
violence (Goldberg 2011). A
rising critique around the design of toy firearms in the US in the late 1980s
led to
federal legislation that ordered toy guns to be brightly painted or have
an orange-colored tip to distinguish
them from real weapons. This
government-mandated adjustment to the design of toy guns has proved
tragically
insufficient to the task. The notion of design for children conjures
a history of beneficence and protection, and
in this sense it is aligned with
goodness. But these and other examples show how design has also failed
childhood.
Judgments about “appropriate” design for children are also bound up with
questions of consumption, another
contentious subject. From toys, food,
collections, computer applications, to reading material, the child consumer
has polarized parents, cultural critics, and watchdog groups on the subject of
children’s agency, envy, consumer
desire, and branding (Buckingham 2011;
Pugh 2009). The marketing strategies developed to harness a child’s
attention have perhaps privileged advertising over product design, but the
design of the objects themselves has
fueled larger debates about the kind of
childhood adults desire for children. Popular Barbie and Bratz dolls, and
other characters such as Strawberry Shortcake, are formed around a narrow
image of femininity, and Ken and G.I.
Joe a conventional brand of
masculinity. As scholars have observed, the design of these toys—from the
number of
moving joints (Attfield 1996: 80–9) to their smells (Hendershot
1996: 90–102)—reinforces reductive cultural
stereotypes. Even the
American Girl dolls, girl-rather than adult-shaped playthings, that are
modeled on
historical figures gained a following that embraced their
wholesome image, and an equal amount of scorn for their
high price and
(like Barbie) lavish sets of clothes and accessories that seemed to inculcate
consumer desire over
historical knowledge. The debate on goodness and
badness in children’s design has become contentious because of
the popular
belief that objects and their design have the capability to affect the outcome
of childhood.

Digital childhoods

Electronic visual entertainment, which emerged in the 1980s, is now firmly

part of the culture of childhood
around the world. The design of these digital
environments, which include stand-alone games and applications,
online
multi-user platforms, educational videos, and movies, has become big
business. Children’s media
consumption has risen dramatically in the
twenty-first century, with one 2013 study claiming that nearly
seventy-five
percent of American children aged eight and under have access to a smart
phone or tablet device
for entertainment (Rideout 2013). The ubiquity of
digital entertainment
for children has stimulated some inventive responses,
even in traditional objects. In 2006, BRIO™ developed a toy
to teach pre-
school-age children about the Internet. Designed by Isak Åkerlund, the
Network toy returned to the
company’s long-established magnet-linked
wooden railway, but it asked children to create and ponder the computer
system, to visualize moving email and data, which could be disrupted by
rogue viruses and pop-ups that travel on
a tracker. Network was a short-
lived example of using toy design to make tangible the
abstract systems of
the computer age for young children. In this case, designers envisioned
childhood as a
sanctified state to be protected with gentle instruction in good
and bad behavior.
Another and more common approach casts the child in the role of the
designer. The Scratch platform, developed by
the MIT Media Lab in 2007, is
a free programing language that uses block-like snap-together units that give
children the opportunity to create animations and share them in a worldwide
online community, without previously
knowing how to code (for those who
wish to see it, the computer script can be revealed with a click). Scratch has
been widely adopted to encourage children’s use of computers and
ultimately to understand coding as a design and
learning tool. The Media
Lab has also collaborated with the LEGO™ company to create an online
version of the
snap-together plastic brick to create and control robots and
was the point of origin for the One Laptop Per Child
project that seeks to
bring low-cost computers to children in the developing world.
The ideal of giving children the tools to become designers, to make things
and places of their own devising,
returns to the creative construction toy
image of childhood enshrined in Anchor blocks, LEGO™, and other
pre-
digital playthings. One of the most popular design games for adults and
children which does not have an
outwardly stated educational mission is
Minecraft, an online and stand-alone game first released in 2009.
Minecraft
also uses a block-like system of different materials and tools that enable the
user to fabricate and
explore three-dimensional environments in a non-linear
way.

Conclusion

The contemporary cultural investment in the concept of childhood might be

succinctly evoked in the child’s safety
seat. From the 1930s through the
1960s, harnesses and lightweight seats were installed in automobiles to keep
children in place. Although one automaker invented built-in rear-facing child
seats in 1967, the now ubiquitous
molded plastic and foam car seat that is
installed securely with seat belts only emerged in the 1970s and 1980s,
following consumer safety legislation in the US and other countries around
the world.2 As an emblem of the preoccupation with goodness, reform, and
protection of childhood, the car
safety seat also shows how designers,
manufacturers, parents, legislators, and public opinion collectively
produce
design for childhood.
Nonetheless, a designer-determined childhood persists. Graphic designers
Steven Heller and Steven Guarnaccia
claim,

the designer has become ever more critical, for as the conceiver or
interpreter of ideas, he or she is the link
between the adult’s and
child’s imagination, and perhaps one of the most significant
influences on children’s
lives after parents and teachers.
(Heller and Guarnaccia 1994: 8)

In the age of genomics, the designer may be invested with powers even
greater than the emotional or cognitive link between children and parents.
Mitochondrial manipulation
technologies can now genetically modify
human beings who may be screened for disease and hereditary problems, as
well as for non-medical traits such as sex, height, eye or hair color. As the
idea of childhood becomes ever more
precious and narrow, this frontier may
prove just how potent a force the designer is in shaping the concept not
just
of childhood, but of children themselves.

Notes

1 The Encyclopedia of Children and Childhood in

History and Society (Fass 2004) understands
representational media as apart from material culture or design.
2 The Volvo safety seat (1967) was contoured to fit the child’s
body and faced away from the
windshield. See Century of the Child: Nordic Design for Children
1900 to Today (2014).

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 18

FUTURES FAIRS
Industrial exhibitions in New Zealand, 1865 to
1925
Noel Waite
 
 
Peter Hoffenberg’s 2001 book An Empire on Display: English, Indian and
Australian Exhibitions
from the Crystal Palace to the Great War, posits a
tripartite imperial world of imperial center, subject,
and settler colonies.
These are represented by England, India, and Australia respectively, which
function to
promote an external commonwealth and internal nationalism.
According to Hoffenberg (2001: i), “Exhibitions
represented the idealized
relationships between groups within the nation and empire” and, in this way,
were
powerful aids to the formation of emergent nation states, in line with
Benedict Anderson’s (2006) definition of
nations as “imagined
communities.” Hoffenberg argued that “Exhibitions were at the heart of
imperial and
national, social and commercial enterprises during the Victorian
and Edwardian eras. They were spectacles of
tangible fantasy, in which
participants forged nations and the Empire, both imaginary and material”
(Hoffenberg
2001: xv). In this way, Hoffenberg demonstrates the imperial
turn in historiography by returning to reassess
imperial networks to counter
the exceptionalism of nationalist master narratives. This is valuable insofar
as it
revises Paul Greenhalgh’s (1988) sociological view about the
ephemerality of such exhibitions. Hoffenberg (2001:
12) argues that,
“Exhibitions produced not only momentary results, but also long-term
legacies at the personal
and collective levels,” which affected how material
culture was organized and studied, as well as social and
political
relationships.
Hoffenberg’s book mentions only one exhibition in New Zealand—the
first one in 1865, due to a tangential
Anglo-Indian connection—when, in
fact, twenty-six took place in New Zealand between 1865 and 1925. While
only
five can be characterized as international in scope, a further five were
explicitly national, and the remainder
regional. The implicit hegemony of a
center/periphery model clearly limits our understanding of a truly global
design history. It is by beginning with this national gap—New Zealand—in
the design history of industrial
exhibitions that we can begin to assess the
impact and effectiveness of industrial exhibitions at regional,
national, and
international levels. New Zealand also provides a useful case study in that it
was an English
colony from 1840, and therefore part of an imperial network,
but, with the discovery of gold in 1861, a
commercial, technological, and
artisan circuit was opened up with Australia and the United States. The
culmination of the Industrial Revolution also coincided almost identically
with the colonial settlement of New
Zealand, and so many of the
technological developments were adopted and implemented rapidly in
support of
developing primary industries for both domestic consumption and
export.
Industrial exhibitions in New Zealand can best be understood as exercises
in design science, in that they comprised periodic audits of developing
material and human resources that enabled
national scenario-building
exercises. They drew upon international comparative analysis in the first
fifty years
to develop critical debate and benchmarking and to foster
industrial design education; and then drew upon
combined regional and
national exhibitions to develop a more coherent and plausible identity as a
nation state.
While they initially served commercial and imperial aims, they
ultimately served to strengthen a national social
welfare state.

Competing visions: golden vulcan or tourist mecca?

The first New Zealand Exhibition took place in Dunedin in 1865, and the
choice of this southernmost city was
embodied in the twenty-one-foot tall
classical gold-painted obelisk located in the central courtyard of an
exhibition building, which was the largest brick building in New Zealand
(see Figure 18.1). The obelisk represented the total of
all gold extracted from
the Otago region (1,691,526 oz, valued at £6,250,000, and 93 percent of the
national
output) since the discovery of gold in 1861, and the construction of
the exhibition building that housed it was
only made possible by the
international capital that resulted from that
commodity. While all New
Zealand provinces were represented at the exhibition, Otago dominated the
gallery plan,
with a separate furniture and museum gallery, and provided 562
of the 3,150 exhibits on display. Australia
(Tasmania having its own separate
section), England, India, Canada, France, Germany, Austria, and Holland
were
also represented, but this was essentially a stage for New Zealand to
reflect on its nascent presence as an
industrial economy to the 31,250
visitors who attended over the 102 days it was open.

Figure
18.1 Exterior of the 1865 New
Zealand Industrial Exhibition building, which served as
Dunedin’s hospital for 70 years.
Hocken Collections Uare Taoka o Hākena, University of Otago. 1865 New Zealand exhibition
building, J.W. Allen,
P2011-021/3 02

The exhibition was divided into three sections—Raw Materials,

Machinery, and Manufactures—each of which was
further sub-divided into
ten classes. The first section was dominant, with minerals—“those natural
elements which
are necessary for the support of commercial and
manufacturing prosperity” (Anon. 1866: vi)—and the development of
agricultural resources, in particular wool, being described in the concluding
report as “the most satisfactory
proofs that can be afforded of [the country’s]
prosperity” (ibid.: 68). A major weakness was identified in
manufacturing.
While machines and tools had been adopted in agriculture they were largely
imported. The jurors
concluded: “The desirability of … introducing those
branches of manufacturing industry the materials necessary
for which can be
produced in New Zealand, cannot be questioned” (ibid.: 226). Furniture and
native timbers showed
considerable promise, but the industrial art and
science of design was necessary to improve their quality and
make them
competitive with imported products.
Just what role New Zealand would take was unclear, as evidenced in the
tentative assessment by the jurors of the
mineral resources of the country,
which were still being discovered and analyzed:

The day may be distant when the forests and fertile plains of New
Zealand will resound with the clang of the
forge or the hum of the
factory, and the midnight glare of the furnace illumine the surface of
her lakes and
rivers, but it is no mean thing for us to know that we
have at our hands the elements which will set it in
motion and feed
those great engines of progress.”
(ibid.: 2)

When it came to assessing manufacturing, a clearer, if somewhat tentative

scenario, was articulated that clearly
drew its inspiration from industrial
developments in the northern hemisphere:

It may be that in some future day, when the development of those

great agents of civilisation which at present
lie latent in her
mountains and scattered on the sea-shores, takes place—when the
coal-pit and the foundry mark
the advance of industry—New
Zealand may become the Vulcan of the South hemisphere, forging
with her coal, her
iron and steel-sands, a prosperity, perhaps more
enduring, if less attractive, than that produced by the labors
of gold-
seekers.
(ibid.: 295)

In a pattern following London’s Great Exhibition of 1851, the lack of

scientific knowledge was addressed by the
establishment of the Otago
Museum in 1868, which differed from the South Kensington Museum,
however, by focusing
on natural science rather than applied arts. The Otago
School of Art and
Design, headed by South Kensington graduate David Con
Hutton, was also established in 1870 to address the design
deficiencies
identified in local manufacturing by the exhibition jurors. However, a
significant point of
difference was embedded in the design brief for the
building competition, which required that it serve a
long-term public
function after the conclusion of the exhibition. Despite the recent influx of
capital, there was
still a considerable shortage of public infrastructure, and
the building remained in service as the public
hospital for seventy years,
until 1936. Far from being “ephemeral vistas,” industrial exhibitions in New
Zealand
tended towards making substantive productive contributions to
urban landscapes.
The Canterbury Industrial Association held a small provincial exhibition
in Christchurch in 1880, which provided
encouragement for two Australian
professional exhibition entrepreneurs, Jules Joubert and R.E.N. Twopenny,
to
stage the Christchurch International Exhibition in 1882, following a
similar private venture in Adelaide the
previous year. They sought to
professionally manage exhibitions, which as Hoffenberg (2001: 35) points
out,
“required the organisational techniques and expertise found in other
large scale Victorian-era collective
projects, such as manufacturing or the
state.” These skills were put to the test at the Christchurch
International
Exhibition, which attracted over 225,000 visitors but which also made a
substantial financial loss.
Undeterred, Twopenny, a journalist, wrote A
Proposal for Holding an Australasian Exhibition in
London in 1883 and
became the New Zealand Commissioner to Melbourne in 1888, while
Joubert went on to be
Executive Commissioner for the Calcutta International
Exhibition before returning to Dunedin with his business
partner in 1888.
The second New Zealand Industrial Exhibition took place in Wellington in
1885, but this time was organized by
Julius Vogel as a central government
initiative to lift the country out of the depression by encouraging foreign
investment. Vogel also suggested holding industrial exhibitions biennially in
the North and South Islands
alternately to promote high standards in existing
industries and encourage the formation of new industries to
provide
employment, although this never came to pass. However, a more localized
form of international exhibition
was developed in Dunedin with the New
Zealand and South Seas Exhibition of 1889–90. Inspired by an awareness of
the Adelaide Jubilee Exhibition of 1888, and mindful of the close of the
Melbourne Centennial Exhibition which
could provide exhibits, a second
international exhibition was proposed in Dunedin to celebrate the jubilee of
New
Zealand as a British colony. It was a bold move given that the country
was experiencing a long economic
depression, but support from the local
Chamber of Commerce and provision and subscription of a private guarantee
scheme eventually saw the government support it with a subsidy of £10,000.
As its name suggested, the main aim
was to develop closer trade and cultural
relations with Australia and the Pacific Islands.
The Harbour Board made a vacant area of recently reclaimed land
available free of charge (see Figure 18.2), and R.E.N. Twopenny and Jules
Joubert
were contracted to manage the exhibition. The site comprised twelve
and a half acres and the buildings covered
ten acres. Rather than the
imposing scale and solidity of the 1865 building, the exhibition buildings
were built
to the strictest economy. The only concession to theatrical
architecture was the northern entrance facade, which
featured four turrets
flanking a domed entrance eighty feet high and fifty feet in diameter.
According to one
historian, “the whole looked something like a cross
between St. Peters and the Taj Mahal” (McDonald 1965: 189).
Figure
18.2 Map of Dunedin with the
recent reclaimed land, at left, which became the site of the 1889
New Zealand and South Seas Exhibition.
Pelichet Bay, at right, was reclaimed for the
1925 New Zealand and South Seas Exhibition.
Hocken Collections Uare Taoka o Hākena, University of Otago. Map of Dunedin with reclaimed land.
Dunedin,
Fergusson & Mitchell, 1881. 885 1881 a.

All New Zealand provinces were represented—but again Otago and

Southland dominated with a floor area similar to
Britain and twice the size
of the New Zealand government—as well as the Australian states of New
South Wales,
Victoria and South Australia, South Africa, Fiji, and the
Republic of Costa Rica, and a large number of private
exhibits from India,
America, Austria, Belgium, England, France, Germany, Italy, Japan,
Mauritius, Samoa, and
Tonga. The main courts featured Fisheries, Minerals,
Education, and an Art Gallery. The Natural History Court was
organized by
Dr. Hocken and featured a large display of the country’s flora and fauna, and
there was also a
fernery and gardens. The Early History, Maˉori, and South
Seas Courts presented an anthropological view of Maˉori
and Pacific Island
life. A new addition was a Tourist Court, which encouraged the Governor-
General to suggest
that New Zealand could become the Switzerland of the
South Seas.
The exhibition ran for 125 days from November 1889 to April 1890 with
625,478 paying to attend. With returns from
entrance fees fifteen percent
higher than anticipated, the exhibition made a small profit—the only New
Zealand
international exhibition to do so. As the Minister of Education
concluded at the closing ceremony:

I think you will agree enterprise of the kind, undertaken at a time

when the sun of prosperity is shining,
betokens a certain amount of
boldness, but when it is entered upon under
a black cloud of
depression it betokens a faith in the future which is indicative of the
building-up of a great
nation.
(Hislop 1891: 339)

Jules Joubert (1890: 23–4), spurred by his part in the success, lobbied the
government to send “a collection of
the very best samples of the very
products that are to make New Zealand so well known” to London as a
colossal
advertising scheme for the colony, but it seemed that one exhibition
was enough for them to invest in. However,
while the buildings were all
dismantled, the reclaimed harbourside area that the exhibition previously
occupied
soon filled permanently with the warehouses of industrial
producers the exhibition sought to promote.
The President of the Exhibition concluded in the Official Record:

As an advertisement it seems to me that exhibitions are very good

indeed. Our Exhibition has been the means of
drawing to our shores
from the other colonies and from abroad a very large number of
people who have come to
see and then gone away delighted.
(Hastings 1891: 344)

This was a marked shift away from the 1865 vision of New Zealand as a
southern factory of furnaces and coal-pits,
and suggested a more attractive
and sustainable future for the country’s diverse natural beauty. The
promotion of
New Zealand as a scenic wonderland took hold, and by 1901
the New Zealand government had established the
Department of Tourist and
Health Resorts.
 Christchurch International 1906–7: looking backwards

The New Zealand International Exhibition of 1906–7 was again initiated by

Premier Richard Seddon, after having
authorized a New Zealand display for
the St. Louis Exhibition in 1903. For Seddon, its aim was to promote trade
and tourism and be “a milestone on the way pointing out the colony’s
prosperity” (Alexander 1906: 67). More
pragmatically, the official historian
described it as “a solid advertisement for New Zealand products and
manufacture” (Cowan 1910: 84). The Superintendent of the Tourist
Department was at the St. Louis Expo and was
instructed to generate interest
from the United States and England. Other European countries, South
Africa, the
Straits settlements, Canada, Fiji, and three Australian states also
contributed, although it was more imperial
than international in nature.
Seddon’s plan was to provide government assistance of £20,000. Initially
conceived
to be run locally, the government took over to guarantee against
losses—which turned out to be substantial,
totaling £81,000. As a result,
New Zealand government departments were well represented, including
Education,
Agriculture, Labour, Mines, and Tourist and Health Resorts. The
Labour Department exhibit showed New Zealand
workers and their
conditions, and compared them with those outlined in the 1906 London
English Sweated Industries
Exhibition, which shocked locals and grew
support for New Zealand’s innovative labor laws and arbitration system
developed by the 1892 Industrial Conciliation and Arbitration Act. An
accompanying booklet outlined the measures
taken by the government to
prevent such exploitative industrial practices
in New Zealand, providing a
measure of comparative social, rather than material, progress.
A large temporary building was constructed in the French Renaissance
style, its elegant front facade stretching
for a quarter of a mile, and the whole
building covered fourteen acres of North Hagley Park. Twin towers and a
dome again adorned the entrance, with the words Haere mai (Welcome)
written above the
entrance. The products of industry, agriculture, and
commerce filled its halls, coordinated by the newly formed
Department of
Industries and Commerce (set up in 1901). Around the back, by Lake
Victoria, was Wonderland, a
privately operated amusement park on twelve
acres. Alongside was Araitearu, a model pa, a concept imported from
the
1904 St. Louis Fair (where Native American tribal groups were grouped in
villages as part of an ethnographic
display), and an artificial Rotorua “Scenic
Wonderland,” complete with mechanical steam-powered geysers. Almost
two million people attended the exhibition over six months, and along with
the fun of the fair and a mass of
souvenirs, they were exposed to a greater
quality and range of local manufactures, where advances in design
education
were evident. In addition, during the six months the exhibition was open, the
country's annual beef
and mutton exports increased by more than £20
million. However, the government ensured the focus remained on
social
progress, and the development of a less provincial national identity.

Legacies of leisure 1925

The last and most successful international industrial exhibition in New

Zealand again fell to Dunedin. In the
official introductory catalogue, it
promised a “new world”: “the mechanical revolution has been accompanied
by
social and mental revolutions which has made the world of 1925 a new
world. It is this new world that is on view
at the New Zealand & South Seas
International Exhibition” (Thompson 1925: 31). A large mural telling this
visual narrative of the “new world–1925” featured in the Industries and
Commerce section of the New Zealand
Government Pavilion. This was a
considerably expanded expression of the emergent nation state, and featured
elaborate and extensive departmental displays for Agriculture, Census and
Statistics, Defence, Education,
External Affairs, Forest Service, Health,
Industries and Commerce, Internal Affairs, Labour, Lands and Survey,
Mines, Navy, Post and Telegraph, Printing and Stationery, Prisons, Public
Trust, Railways, and Tourist and Health
Resorts.
The exhibition was undoubtedly a resounding popular success. It opened
on November 11, 1925 and closed six months
later, having been attended by
3,200,498 people at a time when the national population totaled only 1.3
million.
Many, of course, were repeat visits, but even the 45,786 who
attended on the first day and the record crowd of
83,935 on the last dwarfed
the total attendance of 31,250 over 102 days at the originating 1865
exhibition. As
one Dunedin historian concluded, “For the months during
which it was open Dunedin focused the attention of the
whole country”
(McDonald 1965: 324). The exhibition covered sixty-five acres with seven
main pavilions: British,
Machinery, Provincial Courts, British Dominions,
New Zealand Government, New Zealand Secondary Industries, and a
Motor
Pavilion. There was international representation from the United States,
France, Switzerland, Italy,
Belgium, Finland, and Denmark, but the
prominence given to Britain and its Dominions meant that it was, again,
imperial in nature rather than truly international.
The story of Dunedin’s second New Zealand and South Seas Exhibition of
1924–5 cannot be told without reference to its architect, Edmund Anscombe.
At the age of fourteen, he attended
his first exhibition, the Melbourne
Centennial International Exhibition, in 1888, returning for the 1889
exhibition in Dunedin with the start of a lifelong passion for industrial
exhibition design. In 1901 Anscombe
moved to America to study
architecture. In order to support himself he worked as a builder, including
for the
1904 St. Louis Exhibition, which was to influence his designs on, and
for, Dunedin. He travelled across the USA
and Canada and added to his
already extensive collection of exhibition literature, begun in 1888. As
David Brain
has argued:

The success of the [1893] Fair brought public recognition to the

architect as the guiding intelligence in a
division of labor among
experts concerned with the urban environment, and established a
place for the expert
practice of design near the center of Progressive-
era urban reform.
(Brain 1989: 808)

A position ardently held by Anscombe himself.

Returning to Dunedin in 1907, Anscombe was appointed University
Architect for Otago after winning an
architectural competition to design the
new School of Mines. In 1922, he travelled to fifty cities in Canada and
the
United States of America to research gallery and exhibition design. He
returned, convinced that an industrial
exhibition would bring people looking
for work and that many would choose to stay afterwards, reversing the
city’s
decline. He also saw an important role for such exhibitions in promoting
New Zealand-made goods. Using a
combination of a pragmatic argument
that an exhibition would attract capital into Dunedin’s economy, and boost
production of buildings and industry after the exhibition was completed, and
an appeal to national pride—“Let it
be the symbol of New Zealand’s
Spirit”— Anscombe wrote an open letter to the Evening Star
in 1923. In
January the following year he was appointed official architect to the New
Zealand and South Seas
Exhibition.
 Anscombe designed the layout and supervised the construction of all the
pavilions, which occupied fifteen of the
sixty-five acres of the site. The
building construction was standardized along Fordist lines, as he had
witnessed
in the United States, and this, by his own estimate, achieved
savings of £26,000. Also, by using standardized
timber sizes and stock
materials, the buildings were not only cheap to assemble, but easier to
dismantle at the
exhibition’s conclusion. To counter an appearance of
sameness that had dogged earlier exhibitions, he assembled
each of the
pavilions differently to ensure they retained some architectural individuality.
Other buildings, such
as the Festival Hall, made strong references to the
Beaux Art style that he had researched and worked on in the
United States
on his first trip. That and the Art Gallery (which stands today) were designed
to create an
experience of “wonder,” externally in the case of the domed
Festival Hall and water feature, and internally in
the Art Gallery.
From his extensive research trip, and having recently supervised the
construction of the Wanganui Art Gallery in
the North Island, Anscombe had
identified two critical features of art galleries, lighting and flow. He had been
frustrated by disconnected rooms in galleries where the visitor had to
continually back track, so the Art Gallery
was designed so visitors entered to
the left or right from the foyer, and circulated the galleries clockwise or
anti-
clockwise. To ensure natural lighting for the artworks, he developed
his own
system of skylights, which directed light on to reflective baffles mounted
beneath them. It was this
latter feature that attracted much praise from art
critics, as well as one of New Zealand’s most influential Arts
and Crafts
architects, Samuel Hurst Seager, who pronounced that it was “one of the
best-lighted galleries I have
seen anywhere” (Thompson 1927: 105). This
was confirmed by a less eminent architectural critic, the Duke of York,
who
stated at its opening, “for its size it is one of the best in the world in respect
to [these] two essentials
of design (for galleries)” (Anon. 1927: 3).
Anscombe also applied another important lesson from his close study of,
and experience with, exhibitions: that
the Big Exhibition could not possibly
be a success without its modern amusement zone and, as he put it, “this
important phase of the undertaking must be made so complete and so
attractive that it cannot fail to pull the
people through the exhibition gates
day in, day out” (Anon. 1925: 4). It wasn't until March 24 (two months
after
the beginning of construction) that Anscombe was told by the directors to
organize the work of setting up
the amusement park after the appointed
committee had failed to make any headway. Anscombe had taken previous
measures and set up relationships with manufacturers of America’s leading
amusement devices and, by the next day,
he had notified the manufacturers
to send the materials to the site. The seven main rides—a Scenic Railway,
Water
Ride, the Caterpillar, the Whip, the Merry Mix-up, dodgem cars and a
Fun Factory—were hugely popular and 2.4
million tickets for the rides were
issued in six months. The complement of interactive entertainment, where
visitors actively engaged with technology in a less socially restrictive way,
provided a popular counterbalance
to some of the weightier moral and
educational claims made for the exhibition. Perhaps more important than its
popular success was its contribution to the commercial viability of the
exhibition, as the amusement park
delivered a net profit of over £7,000.
There is also one other important local legacy of this exhibition that
marked the Diamond Jubilee of New
Zealand’s and Dunedin’s first industrial
exhibition, and owed almost nothing to Edmund Anscombe’s diligence and
foresight, national ambition, or imperial power. The “land” on which the
exhibition was built was, in fact,
reclaimed, and had been better known
locally as Lake Logan. Reclamation had been begun sporadically and
desultorily by the Harbour Board in 1913, but there was a prominent view
that it should be developed as a
much-needed sports ground. The City
Council also wanted land for a new public park, the Education Board wanted
several acres for a proposed new primary school, the University Council
wanted to extend the university cricket
oval, and the Hanover Tennis Club
needed a new playing area.
When the decision to host the exhibition was finalized, Lake Logan was
chosen as the exhibition site, and the
reclamation took on new speed and
efficiency, and so Dunedin devoted a large part of the workforce to the
massive
task. A total of 800,000 cubic meters of spoil was deposited and this
raised the original level of the lake by
3.1 meters. The cooperation of the
Harbour Board, City Council, and exhibition company resulted in the
reclamation being completed ahead of schedule. As one historian noted, “the
accomplishment of the reclamation was
one of the wonders of the
exhibition” (McDonald 1965: 127). Beyond the exhibition, the Otago
Daily
Times commended and predicted that “Dunedin … [has] secured a fresh
asset that will be a source of
great civic pride in the future” (Anon. 1924a:
6).
 The Otago Harbour Board originally owned the Lake Logan area but an
agreement was negotiated between it and the
City Council in which the
Harbour Board would lease the lake to the
council at a peppercorn rental at
the close of the exhibition. One condition of this agreement was that the
council would build a new highway from the railway station to the park,
providing direct access to the
exhibition, and, later, the Logan Park sports
grounds, as well as opening up this valuable portion of land. The
1925 New
Zealand and South Seas Exhibition meant Lake Logan was reclaimed years
ahead of the time anticipated and
was quickly developed, so that by 1930 it
had five rugby grounds, two soccer grounds, five hockey grounds, one
rugby
league ground, thirteen cricket wickets, fourteen tennis courts, and a croquet
lawn. In 2003, a sports
commentator noted that, with the impressive array of
sporting facilities and associations, from athletics to
yachting, and the fact
that some of the facilities are suitable for international fixtures, Logan Park
is
arguably the most diverse sporting complex in New Zealand (Heslop
2003: 18).
Edmund Anscombe merely took advantage of this opportunity and
incorporated it within his grand plan, but he was
well aware of its long-term
possibilities. He had written to the Evening Star in 1924,
that the sports
grounds “can undoubtedly be made the finest and most completely equipped
athletic arena in the
Dominion that could be made available for all big
sporting and athletic events” (Anon. 1924b: 4). Anscombe
respected the
history of the lake as a recreation area and even suggested (as it turned out,
predicted) that the
Art Gallery building and sports stands be kept for use
after the demolition of the exhibition and that the
gallery building be used as
a gymnasium and dressing rooms. McCarthy and Findlay (2000) argued that
Anscombe
viewed exhibitions not as ephemeral vistas, but as “urban
redevelopment schemes which would impact on each city
long after,”
ensuring that temporary projects served longer-term ends. Due to the quality
of his design the 1925
Exhibition Art Gallery remained in use for its original
purpose until 1996, far beyond what he, or anyone, had
envisioned.
By the 1930s, the educational function of international exhibitions had
been overtaken by the mass media, and
cheaper and more accessible
international travel meant competition had overtaken cooperation as an
international
meeting ground for prosperity. There was also recognition of
the limits of natural resources. In terms of the
human and financial costs of
such spectacles, an international convention was drawn up in 1928 to govern
the
running of international exhibitions, as their frequency, variable
standards, and substantial cost made them
difficult to plan. Despite its initial
successes, New Zealand never subscribed to the convention. Nevertheless,
industrial exhibitions had played an important role as a testing ground for
new ideas about the nation’s
representation on the world stage, and the long-
term legacies were not only personal and collective, but tangible
and
productive in terms of shaping the urban landscape of Dunedin in particular
to provide health infrastructure,
land for industrial development, leisure, and
art. These initiatives proved more enduring, attractive, and
sustainable, to
local residents and tourists alike, than the initial promise of extractive
industries.

References

Alexander, W. (1906) Official Catalogue and Souvenir of the New Zealand International
Exhibition,
Christchurch, Christchurch Press.
Anderson, B. (2006) Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of
Nationalism,
London, Verso.
Anon. (1866) New Zealand Exhibition, 1865: Reports and Awards of the Jurors. Dunedin:
Printed for
the Commissioners by Mills Dick.
Anon. (1924a) “Logan Park,” Otago Daily Times, February 15.
Anon. (1924b) “The Exhibition,” Evening Star, February 26.
Anon. (1925) “Exhibition Amusement Park: A Creditable Achievement,” Evening Star, July
18.
Anon. (1927) “Gallery Opening,” Evening Star, March 18.
Anscombe, E. (1923) Letter to the editor, January 26. Evening Star, January 27.
Brain, D. (1989) “Discipline and Style: The École des Beaux-Arts and the Social Production of an
American
Architecture,” Theory and Society 18(1989): 807–68.
Cowan, J. (1910) Official Record of the New Zealand International Exhibition of Arts and
Industries
Held at Christchurch, 1906–07: A Descriptive and Historical Account, Wellington, John Mackay,
Government Printer.
Greenhalgh, P. (1988) Ephemeral Vistas: The Expositions Universelles, Great Exhibitions, and
World’s
Fairs, 1851–1939, Manchester, Manchester University Press.
Hastings, D. (ed.) (1891) Official Record of the New Zealand and South Seas Exhibition Held
at
Dunedin 1889–90, Wellington, Government Printer.
Heslop, J. (ed.) (2003) The History of Logan Park: The Evolution of a Sporting Complex,
Dunedin,
J.H. Heslop on behalf of the University Oval Development Trust.
Hislop, T. (1891) quoted in Official Record of the New Zealand and South Seas Exhibition Held
at
Dunedin 1889–90, D. Harris Hastings (comp.), Wellington, Government Printer.
Hoffenberg, P. (2001) An Empire on Display: English, Indian and Australian Exhibitions from
the
Crystal Palace to the Great War, Berkeley, University of California Press.
Joubert, J. (1890) The Proposed New Zealand Exhibition in London, Dunedin, Caxton
Printing Co.
McCarthy, C. and Findlay, M. (2000) Make No Little Plans: The Architecture of Edmund
Anscombe,
Hocken Library, University of Otago.
McDonald, K.C. (1965) City of Dunedin: A Century of Civic Enterprise, Dunedin, Dunedin
City
Council.
Thompson, G. (1925) “A Record of Progress: Previous Exhibitions in New Zealand,” Official
Catalogue: New Zealand and South Seas International Exhibition, Dunedin, 1925–26, Dunedin,
NZ & South
Seas Exhibition Co. Ltd.
——. (1927) Official Record of the New Zealand and South Seas International Exhibition,
Dunedin—
1925–26, Dunedin, Coulls Somerville Wilkie, for Otago Master Printers Association.
 19

A DIFFICULT ROAD
Designing a post-colonial car for Africa
Paul Hazell
 
 
In developed western markets the car has many characteristics beyond its
utilitarian function. These relate to
the values projected by a manufacturer’s
branding, reputation, and heritage. However, for many markets in the
world
a car’s desirability remains dominated by its utility and reliability—both of
these traits, one would
think, are on the list of desirable attributes for a
western car buyer also—but they are by no means the primary
influence on
purchase. Yet it is often vehicles designed for a western market, with very
different value
complexes centered on aspiration, fashion, and “life style”,
which ultimately become the means of transport in
the continent of Africa.
Their suitability (or otherwise) in terms of utility, engineering, and
economics reveals
much about western-centric notions of design. Car
owners in Europe may be unaware that their family hatchback or
saloon may
find its way to Africa in ten to fifteen years’ time, soldiering on in conditions
for which it was
never designed.
While personal, private transport has mushroomed in the industrialized
western world, it has remained out of
reach for most in Africa. Cars are, of
course, widespread in all regions of the continent but, despite various
attempts and a growing demand for personal transport, there are as yet
virtually no indigenously designed and
manufactured cars addressing the
continent’s rural needs. The motor vehicle for use in the bush (i.e. rural areas
of Africa) is distinct in important ways from those used elsewhere.
Increasingly, personal transport in urban
areas of Africa resembles that in
western cities. With many surfaced roads and greater concentrations of
economic
activity, cars originally designed for western markets are far more
suitable for the cities than the rural
regions.
 The car in Africa has a long history and embraces many of the colonial
interests in the region, but surprisingly
has remained a topic neglected by
design historians and those working in related disciplines (Gewald 2005:
12–
22). This limited historical and social research contrasts significantly with
research carried out on African
railways where both anthropologists and
transport historians have written much (Due 1978/9: 375–93; Moriarty and
Beed 1989: 125–32). However the car, and road transport on the continent
more broadly, has remained largely
ignored despite it being a key means of
the former colonial powers exerting their control and undertaking
economic
exploitation. Furthermore, in the relatively recent history of post-colonial
Africa, which this chapter
focuses on, road transport has remained an under-
researched topic, despite the lack of access to personal
transport remaining
an inhibiter to small-scale economic development, along with access to
capital, and, frequently, systemic corruption (Ngorora and Mago 2013).
These factors are
historically rooted and, according to Gore and Fal (2014),
“Africa’s sub-optimal transport infrastructure
[continues to] impair the
culture [of] entrepreneurship.”
Outside academia there are many published accounts of the motor car in
the African bush but these comprise mainly
stories of westerners
“overlanding” through the desert or savannah. However, for the historian,
these accounts
are of limited use as they usually rely on the journey as a
narrative structure in which to place the many
experiences, mishaps,
challenges, personal encounters, and adventures of the traveler. Although
these accounts
may make such travel seem appealing, they reveal little or
nothing (with the possible exception of road
conditions and driving
standards) about the realities of car use by residents of the bush.
Africa first saw widespread use of the car after the Second World War
with vehicles such as the Land Rover, and
later the Toyota Land Cruiser,
being imported there. Although rugged and eminently suitable for many of
Africa’s
rural roads, their use was generally restricted to the police and
armed forces, international companies and
non-governmental organizations
(NGOs), such as charities, with their purchase prices far exceeding the
budgets of
the majority of rural Africans. However, these four-wheel drive
vehicles, when sold or disposed of, would often
eventually end up in the
ownership of individuals such as farmers, being used for rural load-carrying
duties and
as informal buses. By this stage the vehicles were usually elderly
and frequently in poor mechanical condition
due to a lack of spares or funds
to purchase the required parts.
Private personal transport in rural Africa has traditionally taken the form
of walking, ox or donkey carts,
mopeds/motorbikes, or cars imported as
insurance “write-offs” from Europe, such as the older robust and
mechanically simple models from Renault, Peugeot, Citroën, and Fiat. Many
of these companies also either
manufactured or licensed the building of their
most robust models in Africa, making vehicles such as the Peugeot
504 and
the Land Rover archetypes of rural transport on the African continent during
the height of this activity
in the 1960s and 1970s. This has often been
supplemented by a long tradition of local “upcycling” by mixing
components from scrapped or crashed vehicles to create new transport
solutions (Wired Magazine 2009). In recent
years pickups, usually Toyotas,
imported in large numbers from the Middle East to Central Africa, have also
gone
some way to filling the transport needs of the region at more affordable
prices. This influx of vehicles
simultaneously demonstrates the demand for
simple and robust transport while highlighting the lack of an
indigenous car
industry.
Western car manufacturers could be accused of looking at Africa as
simply one market, as opposed to many with
varying needs. For most
western car makers the African market has, at best, broadly split into two
groups: urban
South Africa and developing rural Africa. South Africa is a
similar market to that in many western countries, as
it is characterized by
significant economic activity, relatively stable governance, and a growing
middle class
able to buy new cars to drive on its many surfaced roads. These
are key factors for western car makers. As one
senior employee at a large
manufacturer put it, “we are in business to make money, not cars” (author’s
interview
with Roger Crathorne, Head of Technical Communications at
Land Rover and an engineer at the company since 1964).
Although the
continent has regions of considerable wealth, where the sale of prestigious
vehicles has long been
possible, car manufacturers exporting to Africa have
generally restricted their interests to urban areas. For the
bush market,
rugged 4×4s were sold to the state, multinational companies,
or NGOs,
leaving private personal transport for the masses to local ingenuity.
This led to a transport vacuum for ordinary Africans who live in areas
away from rail routes, or places where bus
services were either not possible
due to the prevailing conditions or were economically unviable. This
transport
vacuum has, to a great extent, been filled by the ubiquitous
“motatus” taxi-van, usually of Asian manufacture or
origin. However, these
vehicles are often grossly overloaded with both people and goods, driven at
speed over
long distances on poor roads, and are not adequately engineered
for the task being demanded of them. There have,
however, been attempts
made to develop and build cars and light commercial vehicles specifically
for the “bush”
regions of the continent, but factors ranging from post-
colonial external interests and lack of investment, to
affordability and
suitability have so far prevented their success. These issues are examined
through an account
of four examples from the past three decades.

The Africar

In the early 1980s Tony Howarth, an English journalist and photographer

with a background in engineering,
attempted to address these issues by
designing a vehicle he christened the Africar. It was a vehicle intended
specifically for the bush and was to be built in the region. After traveling
widely in Africa during the 1960s
and 1970s in vehicles ranging from Land
Rovers to an Austin Maxi, he began to consider how personal transport
could be improved and locally built (Howarth 1987). He aimed not only to
provide affordable personal transport,
but also to prevent limited funds
leaving African nations through the regular importation of vehicles.
Howarth’s
Africar project set out to provide a light all-wheel-drive vehicle,
robust enough to be reliable in the rough
terrain of the bush, while at the
same time being sufficiently inexpensive for the African mass-market. The
Africar prototypes were designed to use mechanical components from other
manufacturers, such as engines and
drive-trains taken from the Citroën 2CV,
which were both air-cooled and rugged thanks to its agricultural
origins. The
intention was to later develop these mechanical components specifically for
the production of the
Africar (see Figure 19.1).
The proposed vehicle was innovative in many ways, having a very wide
track to cope with the ruts left by heavy
trucks, and “hydrolastic” suspension
based on a system developed by the British Motor Corporation to cope with
corrugated surfaces, an idea adopted from Howarth’s use of the Austin Maxi
on Africa’s poor roads (New Scientist
1962). The bodywork of the prototype
Africar was constructed using epoxy-coated bonded plywood, which could
be
repaired with local labor and without specialist equipment and materials.
The unconventional wooden construction,
it was argued, would also
facilitate the establishment of small factories of relatively low output in the
regions
where there was demand for the car. Howarth has since stated that
this style of construction was only meant as a
proof of concept. However, the
later vehicles were intended to have a tubular space frame chassis, with a
covering of stainless steel flat panels (email exchange between Howarth and
the author, June 16, 2013). In April
1986 Howarth formed Africar
International Limited (AIL) and rented a small factory in Lancaster, in the
northeast
of England, as a base for developing and building the car.
The prototypes received considerable attention, not least in the UK, after
the airing of a four-part television
documentary series A Car for Africa
(Channel 4 Television 1984). The series allowed
Howarth to challenge
conventional thinking on transport needs in the developing world and
discuss the development
of the three Africar prototypes. The documentary
covered a successful journey from the Arctic Circle in Norway,
through
Europe and North Africa to the equator to test the vehicles and create an
engaging structure for the
program. The series was written, filmed, and
directed by Howarth himself, with help from a small team. A book,
also
written by Howarth, which briefly appeared on the UK bestseller list,
accompanied it (Howarth 1987).
Figure
19.1 On display at the Lakeland
Motor Museum, UK, one of the believed two surviving
Africars. By kind permission of Chris Lowe, the Lakeland
Motor Museum, UK.
© Lakeland Motor Museum 2012.

In an article published in Engineering and Technology Magazine, a review

of the Africar
thirty years on stated: “With publicity this good, Africar’s
success seemed guaranteed” (Smith 2013). To provide
funding Howarth
capitalized on the television series, launched an investor’s scheme, and
began to take deposits
for vehicles. Potential customers were informed that
cars would be delivered to them, but it is unclear if a
timescale was given.
However, the car was still very much a prototype, with the funds received
used to secure
further investment and as capital to develop the Africar’s
engine and drive-train. As a result, the delivery
dates for customers’ Africars
were delayed as the cost of developing a drive-train specifically for the
vehicle
spiraled upwards. This, and the inability to float AIL as a public
company, was to lead to a collapse of the
business and the abandonment of
the project before a single vehicle had been sold to an African customer. A
Serious Fraud Office report of 1996–7 stated:

In February 1988, Howarth attempted to raise approximately £5

million of funds by converting Africar UK Limited
into a public
limited company and offering shares to the public. The flotation did
not proceed because the
company’s accountants refused to certify in
the prospectus that the licence to manufacture Africars, which was
the only asset the plc. owned, was worth £8 million. By July 1988
new
investments had all but dried up. AIL could not pay its staff
their wages.

It continued:

On 18 July officers from the Lancashire Constabulary Commerce

Branch seized the company’s documents and the
landlord recovered
possession of the factory. Howarth at the time was in the USA trying
to raise further
investment. He remained outside the UK’s
jurisdiction until he was arrested and charged on his return in
October 1994.
(Serious Fraud Office Annual Report 1996/7)
The trial judge told Howarth, when he was finally tried in 1994 after
returning from the US: “You were seduced by your inability to face facts”
(ibid.). Howarth was sentenced to fourteen months
in prison.
The Africar’s demise seems partially the result of an unrealistic timescale
for the vehicle’s development due to
the surge of interest generated in the
UK by the television documentary. Howarth, understandably it could be
argued, felt unable to turn down the offer of such publicity for a project that
was driven not by economics but
by a mixture of idealism and well-meaning
social conscience. The ignominious end of the project for Howarth,
however,
was also the end of the Africar with its laudable ultimate intention of making
Africa less reliant on
imported vehicles.

The Uri

A more successful car for the African bush emerged in the 1990s with the
Uri (Namibian for jump), initially
developed by a Kalahari farmer, Ewert
Smith, as a simple and robust 4×4. Smith ran a 4×4 touring business as a
sideline to agriculture and, due to the cost of vehicles and spares, began
exploring alternatives to mainstream
vehicles. Using Toyota running gear,
combined with a chassis and bodywork of his own design, he developed
what
became the Uri. When compared with the Africar a marked difference
was that this concept was homegrown, with
Smith developing the vehicle
purely for his own requirements, rather than what one might describe as
emerging
from the benevolent neo-colonialism demonstrated by the Africar
project. However, in the late 1990s Adriaan
Booyse, an IT entrepreneur,
spotted the vehicle on Smith’s farm and saw commercial potential in the
design. He
subsequently bought the concept, patented it, and developed the
prototype.
Booyse’s company initially built fifteen to twenty vehicles a month, but
the target market soon moved away from
rural personal transport to vehicles
for the mining industry, as well as police vehicles, game-viewing vehicles,
and general utility vehicles (see Figure
19.2). Booyse stated in an interview
with the South African Financial Mail (2004): “We
researched this market
thoroughly, and found there was a gap. Industry wants a low-maintenance,
rugged and
economical vehicle without the frills—a mechanical mule, not an
over-engineered vehicle. That is what we
designed.” The talk of industry
rather than private buyers as the market for the vehicle
reveals that, despite
the Uri emerging as the only African-designed motor vehicle built in the
region for African
customers, it did not evolve into a vehicle for personal
private transport or for small-scale entrepreneurialism.

Figure
19.2 The Uri pickup truck: the
only indigenously designed and produced car for the African
bush. By kind permission of Carola Röhrich, Jan
Oelofse Hunting Safaris, Namibia.
© Jan Oelofse Hunting Safaris 2015.

In an email exchange in 2015 between the author and Carola Röhrich of

Namibian-based Jan Oelofse Hunting Safaris,
who operate five Uris, she
described the car’s benefits in the following way:

We chose the Uri because they were (relatively) cheap and had
[tough] bodywork, perfect for driving in the
bush. Once something
breaks, you can fix it yourself [and] not much electrical work [is]
involved, unlike many
other cars today. They have served us well
over the past 20 years of daily hard work.

The Uri concept was later to run into financial difficulty, however, and was
sold in 2006 to the Ngwane Defence
group in South Africa (Uri Motors
2012). The company continued to market the vehicle as a specialist
industrial
pickup but also, increasingly, as a military utility vehicle. Though
far less expensive than imported 4×4s it has
remained out of reach for the
majority of the population. Produced in relatively small volumes of several
hundred
a year until production ceased in 2014, it remains the only
indigenous vehicle for the bush produced by an
African company.

Recent examples: the Mobius and the OX

More recently, two further attempts at addressing Africa’s personal transport

needs were developed to the
prototype stage. The Mobius, an inexpensive
yet rugged two-wheel drive vehicle, is in development in Kenya (see
Figure
19.3). An echo of the Africar of
thirty years earlier, this is again intended as
a simple, robust car that could be locally produced. It is the
brainchild of
Englishman Joel Jackson, who has been described as a “social entrepreneur”
(Wired Magazine 2012).
Nairobi-based Mobius Motors was founded in 2010
with Jackson quoted as saying in an interview with Wired magazine in 2008:

Figure
19.3 The prototype Mobius: a
proposed design for an inexpensive and robust vehicle for rural
central Africa. By kind permission of Aman
Ghai, Mobius Motors, Kenya.
© Mobius Motors 2015.

[I] saw a market opportunity for the vehicle. I thought it could be

game-changing if we could provide a
platform for mobility that
would bring out latent entrepreneurialism across Africa. We want to
 enable people to
innovate, by doing that; we can unlock huge
growth in transport-related services. We believe what we’re doing
will create huge social change.
(Wired Magazine 2012)

The flagging up of the Mobius as potentially being a catalyst for

entrepreneurialism by its users represented a
significant shift, as it linked the
vehicle to ideas of economic development at citizen level. As a marketing
technique, this represented an altogether more nuanced approach. It aligned
the brand with economic aspiration in
the region rather than being driven by
the neo-colonialism that was perpetuated by the importation of western
automotive products. Mobius Motors began asking for deposits in 2010
having announced that production was planned
to start in 2012. However, at
this point (March 2015), no production cars have yet been built and it seems
that
many of the problems that faced Howarth’s Africar remain.
More recently still, a vehicle designed in Britain, and named the OX, was
announced in early 2013 by the newly
formed Global Vehicle Trust (GVT).
Simplicity was again a key element, along with innovative construction so
that
the vehicle could be manufactured in the UK and then be shipped as a
“flat-pack,” with six to a forty-foot
shipping container. Final assembly would
then take place at its
destination with no special skills or equipment being
required. A press release in May 2013 stated, “In addition,
assembly labor is
transferred to the importing country, where local professional companies will
be found to
assemble and maintain the finished vehicles” (Automotive
World 2013).
The OX resembled a light commercial vehicle with its forward-control
layout (see Figure 19.4). This was intended to allow for greater
load capacity
for passengers or freight. The vehicle was, however, only designed with two-
wheel drive to the
front axle, meaning it remained simple, relatively
inexpensive, and robust, but with limited ability away from
graded roads.
A former pilot and toy manufacturer, Sir Torquil Norman, was behind
GVT and the OX. He stated in 2013, “My
inspiration for the OX goes back
to the ‘Africar’ project of the 1980s” and continued:

Our sole objective at GVT is to help people in the developing world.

As part of an aid program, the OX could
provide an essential
element of infrastructure to enable the local population to raise the
 community’s standard
of living and to assert its independence by
gaining control of its transportation needs and costs.
(Global Vehicle Trust 2014)

For a brief period, the OX received much attention in the British press, with
Norman’s not-for-profit Global
Vehicle Trust hoping to raise £3 million from
philanthropic donations to take the project through to production.
At the time
of writing (March 2015) one basic and two advanced prototypes
have been
built. However, with no specific market in Africa yet identified, the CEO of
GVT, Barry Coleman stated:

Figure
19.4 Sir Torquil Norman’s
prototype ‘OX’, a proposed light commercial vehicle design for
developing countries. By kind permission of
Barry Coleman, Global Vehicle Trust, UK.
© GVT.

We are nearing the point of production but there are still some key
decisions to be made about precisely where
the first production site
will be and which version of OX will be produced … There are still
too many variables
surrounding our possible partnerships, but all
being well it will be [going into production] soon. We certainly
want
people to know all about OX and to know that it is coming along but
 we want to avoid the mistake of saying
we have something ready to
sell when in fact it is far from being in production.
(email to the author, March 5, 2015)

This final point may be a veiled reference to the difficulties faced by AIL
and the Africar in the 1980s created
by premature launch. If the OX is to
succeed, like any other motor vehicle, the engineering will need to be fully
developed.

Center–periphery

These vehicles not only share a similar faceted aesthetic, but also
demonstrate the difficulties of successfully
producing a post-colonial car for
Africa. Although these examples are not the only attempts to build cars for
the
African bush, they highlight the many parallel difficulties of developing
and building an affordable car for the
continent’s rural needs. As we have
seen in the case of the Africar, Mobius, and the OX, westerners visiting
rural
Africa have identified the lack of suitable personal transport and attempted
to address it. However, market
forces, and, by extension, western interests,
have repeatedly impacted on attempts to build a car for the bush.
Major car
manufacturers increasingly favor high value designs that disenfranchise rural
Africans further due to
these vehicles’ unsuitability for the continent’s needs.
The center–periphery model may go some way to explaining
this situation
but there are also other economic factors at play (Uduku and Zack-Williams
2004).
The relationship between developing countries (the periphery) and
developed western economies (the center) can be
characterized as the export
of capital from the former to the latter in exchange for goods and services
(Marshall
1998). In the case of the motor car this is demonstrated by the
continued reliance on imported vehicles from the
developed world and the
failure of an indigenous car industry to develop in Africa. This neo-colonial
model
suggests a continuing reliance on imported manufactured goods and
services to the economic periphery, which, in
turn, thwarts indigenous
development efforts and perpetuates the processes of cultural westernization
in the
developing world. This further secures the west’s market outlets and
therefore the cycle continues. A similar
schism exists between the rural
regions of Africa and the metropolitan centers where a country’s prosperity
and
financial liquidity is usually focused. Intra-African tensions have created
still further barriers to rural
transport solutions, with conflicts and political
instability creating unstable markets. These are then
unattractive to
investors, particularly for the long-term development of complex products,
such as motor
vehicles. However, industries such as those extracting raw
materials have often still prospered in these
circumstances, as the returns are
larger and the exploitation more rapid.
The center–periphery model could also be applied to the development of
three of the four example vehicles described: the Africar, the Mobius, and
the OX. All three have been proposed
by apparently well-intentioned
Europeans, suggesting that although the motives may have been good, the
thinking
has remained, once again, from the western “center” rather than
from the African “periphery”. It is noticeable
that the Uri, the one African-
designed light vehicle specifically created for use in the African bush, was,
until
production ceased, by far the most successful vehicle of the four
described, but only by making sales to industry
as a way of securing capital,
not to ordinary citizens. This suggests a need for further “Africanization” of
design thinking. There is, after all, no lack of engineering creativity on the
continent, as has been
demonstrated repeatedly by the level of repair, up-
cycle, and innovation that goes on with whatever materials are
to hand.
However, lack of investment and the often poor governance in much of the
continent continues to thwart
the stability required for the development of an
indigenous motor industry.
Persuasive as a center–periphery model is as a way of explaining the lack
of an indigenous car industry, it is
not the whole story, however.
Increasingly, western car makers, in their own saturated markets with
increasing
environmental demands, have moved ever further from simple,
basic vehicles, to vehicles that maximize profits by
increased margins. A
large luxury car intended for Europe may be marketed at three or four times
the price of a
small car, but this luxury model may only cost twice the
amount to manufacture. The value complexes, in this case
the brand values,
are used to justify this much higher retail price and are seen as key to
western car makers’
continued profitability in a saturated market.
Constructing inexpensive vehicles in large numbers to achieve
economies of
scale may seem attractive and a model that would suit rural Africa as it did
rural America one
hundred years ago with the Ford Model T (Hazell 2014).
However, though it is an approach that is likely to keep a
factory busy, from
a western manufacturer’s perspective it does not produce the same level of
profitability
compared with selling cars as objects of desire and aspiration at
higher margins. This has meant small profits,
made on large numbers of
vehicles, are no longer an attractive proposition for most volume car makers.
This has
recently been demonstrated in India with the relatively poor sales of
the Tata Nano, the first sub-$2,000 new car
(BBC News online, August 22,
2013). This move to increased margins by western car makers has meant that
cars
produced in the west are becoming even less appropriate to rural
African needs as vehicles become more complex,
costly, and difficult to
maintain.
With the increasing investment from China in Africa’s infrastructure the
automotive market throughout the
continent may be about to change again.
As new roads are built using Chinese finance, as a means of transporting
extracted raw materials, so China is starting to manufacture cars for Africa
which were first intended for the
rural home market but which now have
reduced sales since the economic downturn. While the long-predicted
Chinese
“invasion” of the European and American car markets may not have
materialized, Chinese manufacturers have been
working to secure less-
developed markets that have the potential to form the bulk of the global car
sales growth
over the next two decades (China Daily online, November 1,
2013). These Chinese vehicles, often virtual copies of
Japanese pickups and
saloon cars, are finding a ready market in Africa due to their relatively low
cost, kept low
by local manufacture and increasing use of locally sourced
raw materials. This partial filling of both the urban
and rural transport
vacuum in Africa by Chinese-designed vehicles, built
in Africa, may be the
next stage in supplying the rural transport needs of the continent, but may
also represent
a further iteration of neo-colonialism. Furthermore, with
factors ranging from post-colonial external interests,
economic instability,
affordability, and suitability remaining problematic, the challenge facing the
development
of an indigenous affordable car for rural Africa remains much
as it did a generation ago.

References

Automotive World (2013) The OX—the world’s first ‘flat-pack’ truck, set to bring aid to
remote parts
of Africa [Online] Available from: www.automotiveworld.com/news-releases/the-ox-the-worlds-
first-flat-pack-truck-set-to-bring-aid-to-remote-parts-of-africa,
accessed January 8, 2014.
BBC News. (2013) Tata Nano: World’s cheapest car gets image makeover [Online] Available
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www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-23792196, accessed September 28, 2013.
Channel 4 Television (1984) A Car for Africa. Television series. Directed by Tony
Howarth, UK.
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November 1,
2013.
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Developing Areas,
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socio-historical case study,” ASC working paper, vol. 61: 12–22.
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accessed January 2, 2014.
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Africa,”
Gordon Institute of Business Science, University of Pretoria: 6–7.
Hazell, P. (2014) “Ford Model T,” in G. Lees-Maffei (ed.) Iconic Designs: 50 Stories About 50
Objects, London, Bloomsbury Academic.
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November 5, 2013.
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African
Studies, 27(1): 125–32.
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August 10, 2013.
South African Financial Mail (2004) Local 4×4 aims to outdo rugged
rivals [Online] Available from:
www.financialmail.co.za/fm/2004/06/02/local-4×4-aims-to-outdo-rugged-rivals, accessed
February
6, 2004.
Uduku, O. and Zack-Williams, A. (2004) Africa Beyond the Post-colonial: Political and
Socio-
Cultural Identities, Burlington, Ashgate.
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Africa [Online]
Available from: www.wired.co.uk/magazine/archive/2012/10/start/off-road-entrepreneur, accessed
December
19, 2012.
 20

THE CULTURAL REPRESENTATION

OF GRAPHIC DESIGN IN EAST
AND WEST GERMANY, 1949 TO
1970
Jeremy Aynsley
 

Introduction

Graphic design in the two Germanys has an uneven historiography which

suggests a firm and continuing separation
between respective accounts of its
development in East and West during the period of the country’s division
between 1949 and 1989. As is well known, in the Federal Republic of
Germany the post-war ‘triumph’ of modern
design at the Ulm Hochschule
für Gestaltung (1953–68) and other prominent design schools, along with its
promotion in the pages of magazines such as Form, are seen as a
culmination of the
legacies of Bauhaus functionalism and Modernism, to
which design during the Weimar period made a vital
contribution (Müller
2014). By contrast, interpretations of graphic design in the German
Democratic Republic have
tended to stress the role played by publicity and
advertising in forming a distinctive visual and material
culture as an
instrument of a political system. This has meant overlooking the criteria by
which, so-called,
western design has most often been judged, such as the
development of the profession, aesthetic or stylistic
qualities attributable to
the autonomy of the designer, or the application of design theory. Such an
imbalance in
historical writing and exhibition has inevitably reinforced the
overriding sense of division and difference
between the two Germanys.
Without underestimating the significance of political division and the
enforced
separation of the Cold War, this chapter seeks to identify parallels
or similarities, as well as differences,
between the graphic design cultures of
the two Germanys. It asks, what were the shared ambitions for graphic
design between East and West Germany in the years 1949 to 1970?
If the West German literature has been dominated by pursuing the
trajectory of Modernism and functional design,
important correctives and
critical re-interpretation have also taken place in recent histories,
significantly,
often by cultural historians from beyond Germany (Betts 2004;
Castillo
2010; Saletnik and Schuldenfrei 2009). These have collectively
questioned how the lens of a Cold War agenda can
facilitate readings of the
assumed neutrality of modern western design by investigating a more
inclusive
definition of design beyond the bounds of Gute Form (good
design) and in so doing,
acknowledge everyday consumption practices. Such
revision has also opened up opportunities to expose the myth of
Functionalism, revealing the ambiguous reception of Modernism by West
German intellectuals, who participated in
its critique in the events of May
1968 and developed alternative design cultures as correctives to the
teleology
of Modernist interpretation.
In the case of East Germany, the most important recent re-evaluation and
assertion of the significance of GDR
graphic design came in a project led by
art historian Sylke Wunderlich, Überklebt: Plakate aus
der DDR (translated
as Pasted over: Posters from the German Democratic Republic),
which
culminated in a book and exhibition, shown in Schwerin and Berlin in 2007.
Wunderlich chose the term pasted
over to refer to the inbuilt ephemerality of
graphic design. The title also alluded to the risk that GDR design
will be
pasted over, lost from history through lack of design historical attention and
not helped by the fragile
ecology of its archive (Wunderlich 2007).
Informed, in part, by sharing her parents’ (both prominent graphic
designers
in Leipzig before and after the Wende) experience of the peaceful transition
of Germany towards
re-unification in 1990, Wunderlich realised a long-
standing commitment to archive and present a history of the
full scale of the
GDR graphic design profession, and interpret it for artistic as well as
political criteria.
However, this project also retained a focus on only one part
of Germany, the East. In 2009, the issue of
German-German histories of
design was addressed by Günter Höhne in Die geteilte Form.
Deutsch-
deutsche Designaffären 1949–1989, laying down important foundations for
an understanding of
different but shared experiences, with contributions
from design historians and designers from both ‘East’ and
‘West’. The
emphasis was on industrial design and design education (Höhne 2009).
Looking further back, that the two Germanys were unevenly represented
in English-speaking literature is most
clearly illustrated by entries in the
international compendium Who’s Who in Graphic Art.
In the first edition
from 1962, of the thirty-six individual entries in the section entitled
Germany, only four
were from East Germany, the designers John Heartfield,
Josef Hegenbarth, Albert Kapr and Werner Klemke. When the
extended
volume was published in 1982, separate sections for East and West Germany
showed a continuing imbalance
between nine GDR and fifty-two BRD
designer profiles. Even accounting for the difference in size of population
(which stood at sixty-three million in the FRG as compared with sixteen
million in the GDR in 1990), this showed
disproportionate attention given to
the West (Amstutz and Herdeg 1962; 1982).

Structures and institutions in East and West Germany

It is important to stress that graphic design was not a fixed entity, practice or
profession at the point that
the division of Germany was confirmed by the
establishment of the two republics in 1949. It would therefore be
mistaken to
suggest that West German graphic design consistently formed the
progressive benchmark by which East
German design measured itself,
although this model of relationship is
often implied in the histories. Instead, I
would argue, graphic design was an evolving practice at a time when
the
dual priorities of establishing both national design cultures and
internationalising connectedness were
prevalent tendencies across the world
(Aynsley 2009). The 1950s were years when graphic design was defined
internationally and became more distinguishable from earlier categories,
such as commercial or graphic art.
Shedding its roots in printing, advertising
and commercial art, graphic design of the period witnessed moves to
establish codes of practice and theories of visual communication and
introduce or strengthen university-level
curricula in the schools of art and
design. In both East and West it was therefore a case of advocacy towards
building recognition for the profession and many of the steps the advocates
took to establish design cultures
were similar in developed nations, whether
under capitalism or communism.
 The process of professionalisation of the graphics industry to elevate it
from being regarded as a trade had
already started earlier in the century in
Germany when the central organ for the representation of graphic
design, the
Bund Deutscher Gebrauchsgraphiker (BDG, Association of German
Commercial Graphic Artists), was
founded in 1919.1 This led to the
organisation of annual national
conferences, exhibitions and competitions,
along with larger international events and, most significantly for the
international reputation of Germany as a leader in the field, a highly
regarded publication. The monthly
periodical Gebrauchsgraphik:
Monatsschrift zur Foerderung künstlerischer Reklame (later,
and in English,
International Advertising Art) was founded in 1924, under the initial
editorship of H. K. Frenzel from Berlin (Aynsley 2000). In 1938, the first
change in editor occurred when
Eberhard Hölscher took up the reins.
Hölscher was to maintain this role, with a break between 1944 and 1950
when
the journal ceased publication, until his death in 1969. He was thereby
an important figure of continuity (see
Gebrauchsgraphik 1969).
When Gebrauchsgraphik was re-launched in 1950, it was significantly
from Munich, not
politically divided Berlin, where it was taken on by the
renowned art publishing house of Bruckmann. Hölscher was
also President
of the Bund Deutscher Gebrauchsgraphiker, giving him a national and
international profile. Among
his activities, for instance, he visited East
Germany in 1956 as a member of the jury to select the poster for
the Leipzig
Fair, along with several members of the GDR and BRD design
establishments. The competition was open
to designers from both East and
West and the jury was equally weighted between the two. As the
commentary
suggests, it was intended to be the start of collaboration across
the borders in a growing, but eventually
unrealised, series. For German-
speaking design the years of the Third Reich and World War Two were an
important
hiatus and this period is recognised for the ascendancy of Swiss
graphic design as an internationally significant
development (Hollis 2006).
In 1944, the magazine Graphis was launched in Zurich, filling
the vacuum
left by the cessation of Gebrauchsgraphik. Published tri-lingually in
German,
French and English, during these years the Swiss journal
established many of the editorial conventions which were
paradigmatic of
post-war graphic design journals. On its launch, editors Walter Amstutz and
Walter Herdeg,
seizing the moment, commented:
 Lying at the meeting point of several cultures and itself a synthesis
of three of them, Switzerland is ideally
placed for the
encouragement of that atmosphere which is salutary, if not
indispensable, for intellectual
discussion and the exchange of
cultural and artistic ideas.
(Amstutz and Herdeg 1944: 3)

In design and editorial terms, Graphis cast an

international eye over modern
graphics, profiling individuals while also offering thematic visual essays on
exhibition design, emergent company identity schemes, postage stamp
design, historical articles on prints, music
publishing and book-cover art –
all areas subsequently taken on by the German magazines. Swiss graphic
design,
too, would become an essential benchmark and reference point for
East and West German designers alike in the
1950s and 1960s, as reflected
in the attention paid to it in their respective design journalism.
A typical issue of Gebrauchsgraphik in the early years of the re-launch
suggested that the
editorial policy was striving for stability and continuity
with pre-1944, to avoid the sense of a radical break
with the past. The
magazine’s profiles of individual graphic designers and illustrators, book
artists, stage and
exhibition designers continued. Design for business and
industry sat alongside coverage of high-profile
international cultural events,
such as the Milan Biennale, symptomatic of the efforts made towards West
European
reconstruction and a re-assertion of key cultural values, notably
under the influence of the United States’
Marshall Plan. In this respect, the
magazine was eclectic and pluralist rather than prescriptive and doctrinaire
in the kind of graphic design it featured. West German designers were
profiled alongside leading international
figures, for example, Americans Ben
Shahn in January 1956 and Saul Bass in November 1956 (Gebrauchsgraphik
1956a; 1956b). As a stabilising measure in the period of de-nazification,
articles
on humanist subjects of printing, graphics and the book arts from the
German Renaissance onwards, written from
scholarly and bibliophile
perspectives, alluded to the longue durée of civilisation to
which the German
lands had contributed.
In terms of German-German relations, there is little evidence that East
German design was given much coverage in
the pages of Gebrauchsgraphik.
This absence, it could be argued, was in itself
significant. Among the few
examples, an article in 1956 profiled Werner Klemke, the leading illustrator,
book
designer and poster artist, who later became Professor für Graphik at
the Hochschule für bildende und angewandte
Kunst, Berlin-Weissensee in
East Berlin. The text compared the situation of West and East, suggesting:

When seven years ago the ‘Gebrauchsgraphik’ began to publish

foreign graphic art we enthusiastically felt the
breath of the big
world. The walls of isolation were broken down and we saw what
was happening and had been
happening for many years out there. In
the meantime our eyes for the West have become clear and critical,
(but
in the meantime) too, a new wall has been erected which makes
it hard to see what the Germans beyond it are
doing. They, too, have
lost the happy feeling of forming the centre and their eyes, too, are
directed toward
the outside.
(Gebrauchsgraphik 1956c)

Such comments constructed a narrative about East German graphic design

which was defined by ideas of separation,
isolation and, most prophetically,
a wall. Another article that proved the exception was ‘Plakate hinter dem
Vorhang’ (Posters behind the Curtain) in March 1961, which under its
punning title considered theatre posters
from the GDR, with selections of
work by leading poster artists Roman Weyl, Paul Rosié, Hans Baltzer,
Werner
Klemke, Peter Palitzsch and Max Schwimmer. Poster design for
cultural events was a recognised strength in the GDR
(see Figure 20.1) and
the article, a rare exception, duly acknowledged the quality of
designs from
the ‘other’ Germany.2
Figure
20.1 Helmut Jürgens (1902–63)
cover design for Gebrauchsgraphik showing a selection of
more than sixty abstract
posters he produced for Musica Viva at State Opera House,
Munich. Gebrauchsgraphik,
September 1961.
Author’s collection.

Over the years Gebrauchsgraphik tended to repeat

its formula of covering
various aspects of graphic design in a single issue. For example, an article on
a current
West German designer could be complemented by a profile of a
genre, whether book illustration, film advertising,
font design or poster art in
Switzerland, the Netherlands, Italy, France, Brazil, Israel, Czechoslovakia,
Yugoslavia, Britain or the US. Emphasis was primarily on Western Europe
and North America. From the Eastern bloc,
Polish posters in particular were
regularly featured. It is clear that these magazines travelled between eastern
and western sectors, and copies of Gebrauchsgraphik, for example, were
sent by friends and
colleagues to the GDR. Such access meant that stylistic
influences could be transferred or competitive
comparisons drawn.3 The
libraries of central art and design
institutions and organisations in both
Germanys were likely to subscribe to their counterpart’s journals and,
through this, a familiarity with graphic design cultures was possible for those
wishing to engage with it,
including, importantly, future generations of
graphic designers.
By way of summary of the achievements of West German design,
Eberhard Hölscher’s compendium Deutsche Gebrauchsgrafik, published by
Bruckmann in 1967, offered an overview of the modern graphic
design he
had sought to promote through his journal, in a slim, square-format volume
on art paper with many
colour illustrations typical of modern art publishing
of the day (Hölscher 1967). It covered all areas of graphic
design, from
posters, book covers, record covers and corporate identity to menus and
television graphics. His
concise essay gave an uncontroversial account of
design, charting how the post-war West German economic recovery
had
encouraged the revival of industrial knowledge in new printing inks,
specialist research into paper
manufacture and new techniques of image
reproduction, all an impetus to the examples of creative design assembled
in
the book. As an internationally oriented design publication, both
contributing to and commenting on the steady
drive towards an
internationally understood design language, the book fittingly looked the
part.
 On the ‘other side’ of the curtain

One important over-arching question for graphic design in the GDR is the
extent to which it came under the same
heightened level of ideological
discourse as other areas of design, fine art and architecture. That it possibly
escaped such pressures was a view articulated by Axel Bertram, the
renowned East Berlin graphic designer, who
commented in interview that
once appointed to the Dewag, the state organisation for advertising and the
graphic
industries, designers could be given relative autonomy to produce
designs as they wished (cited in Jenkins 2014).
Developing the theme of German-German relations, it is now instructive
to turn to developments for the
institutionalisation of graphic design in East
Germany. After political division in 1949, the need to form
cultural
organisations to support the various fields of art, design and architecture led
the GDR state to
establish its own official structures, which included the
Verband Bildender Künstler Deutschlands (VBKD, the
Association of Visual
Artists of Germany), formed in 1952. In the following year, the specialist
Section
Gebrauchsgraphik was founded, initially with twenty-two designers
registering (Tippach-Schneider 2004: 352–3).
The VBKD graphic section
had a similar remit to the BDG, including the promotion of the professional
field
through publications, conferences, prizes and exhibitions. In the case of
the GDR, however, an essential requirement was to communicate report
directives from the Socialist Unity Party
(Sozialistische Einheitspartei
Deutschlands, SED) and its actions for successive five- and seven-year
plans,
policies for the political education of designers and updates on the
state’s approach to centralised needs for
market development, most crucially
for export industrial goods. The magazine Neue Werbung,
the official organ
for the Section Gebrauchsgraphik, first appeared in April 1954. As its
inaugural issue
revealed, it set out an inclusive definition of graphic design
which invites comparison with Gebrauchsgraphik. The cover design listed
its fields of interest, ‘posters, advertisements, trade
fairs and exhibitions,
catalogues, trade brochures, window display, fashion publicity, packaging,
slides, and
advertising films’. The magazine was published by Verlag Die
Wirtschaft under a subheading ‘theory and practice
of publicity’, which by
1959 evolved into Fachzeitschrift für Theorie und Praxis der
Sozialistischen
Wirtschaftswerbung (Professional Journal for the Theory and Practice of
Socialist Commercial
Advertising).
 An indication of how party policies could be disseminated through the
magazine is given in an article from an
early issue, ‘The High Quality
Workmanship of Nationally Owned Factories Necessitates Socialist
Advertising
Means’ (Neue Werbung 1959). The text examined how
advertising design for Zeiss optical
instruments could be adjusted to signal
the move from private to state ownership of major industrial
manufacturers.
In 1956, the periodical led with the editorial commentary that ‘a theory of
publicity is necessary
but lacking’ (Dietrich 1956). In 1959, following the
international formula set by Graphis
to reach a wider readership through
translation, texts in Neue Werbung appeared in Russian
in résumé or in their
entirety, and the contents list was also given in English. By 1970, the print
run had risen
to seventeen thousand with the majority, twelve thousand,
exported to the Soviet Union (Tinnach-Schneider 2004:
352–3).
In similar fashion to many graphics magazines, each cover of Neue
Werbung was designed by
a selected graphic designer, lending it a striking
and varied character which, it could be argued, was as
individualistic as its
counterparts Graphis and Gebrauchsgraphik.
During the first ten years, the
editorial approach to Neue Werbung was to publish thematic
titles around
special issues. The range of topics revealed the priorities of the state,
including subjects such
as Trademarks (June 1954), Satire (June 1955),
Industrial Design (April 1955), Graphics for the Engineering
Industry
(October 1955), Graphics for the Glass Industry (February 1956),
Streamlining (June 1956), Design of
Currency (August 1956), Illuminated
Advertising (December 1956), Catalogue Shopping (July 1957) and Self-
service
Shopping (September 1961). In a few instances, individual designers
became the major theme of a particular issue.
For instance, the highly
regarded stage designer turned poster artist Roman Weyl’s work for the East
Berlin
Volksbühne and other prominent theatres was featured in May 1961.
During 1963, the editorial policy turned from
special issues to more general
coverage of graphic design in mixed numbers, akin to Gebrauchsgraphik at
that time.
GDR graphic designers were largely graduates from the controlled
number of specialist courses at the
Kunsthochschule Berlin-Weissensee,
Halle Burg Giebichenstein and the Leipzig Hochschule für Graphik und
Buchkunst. As members of the Verband Bildender Künstler, their fees for
services were strictly protected. Dewag
was a major employer as the only
state ‘advertising agency’, but designers additionally worked for state-run
institutions and organisations or as in-house designers for state-owned firms
(VEB, Volkseigener Betriebe, publicly owned operations). The
majority of
the magazine was dedicated to profiles of these designers’ work and these
were prefaced by detailed
articles on market analysis and the need for
publicity in a socialist economy.4

Parallels and contrasts

Significant parallels between East and West Germany can be detected in

design publishing through an analysis of
the specialist graphic design
magazines Gebrauchsgraphik and Neue
Werbung. Both championed home-
grown designers while profiling the graphic design of other nations within
their sphere of influence and across different political geographies. Each
promoted the profession while
monitoring laws regulating design. Both
espoused Modernism, but not to the exclusion of other visual languages.
They each featured student works from their leading graphic design schools,
such as at Offenbach am Main in the
case of Gebrauchsgraphik and Leipzig
in the case of Neue Werbung.
In both, articles discussed the connections
between graphic and industrial design, revealing general sympathy for
Gute
Form and design prescription. On a practical level, each also carried job
advertisements for positions for graphic designers.
Yet, important differences also emerge between the magazines.
Gebrauchsgraphik was the
better-produced publication, with higher
production values, a greater number of colour illustrations, no doubt
made
possible through the higher revenue received from commercial advertising
by companies announcing specialist
services for graphic design. Neue
Werbung was under a directive to report frequently on
the economic impact
of graphic design. A standing preoccupation, for instance, was perceived
weaknesses and
failures. How to improve the design of shop window
displays in the GDR, under the heading ‘Auf
dem Wege zu besseren
Schaufenster’, was a regular feature. Shortcomings were covered by
‘constructively
critical’ articles in the spirit of GDR policy, among them the
lack of maintenance of illuminated advertising in
cities and risks of
plagiarism of West German design. An important distinction between East
and West was the
earlier acknowledgement of women’s participation in the
field of graphic design and publicity in Neue Werbung, in tune with the
generally wider recognition of women in the GDR workforce in all
spheres.
In March 1961, for example, a special issue of the magazine profiled the
career biographies of fashion
illustrator Edith Frank, advertising manager
Dorothea Freund of the state department store Konsum in Frankfurt an
der
Oder, and Eva Feigolva-Prag, poster designer and illustrator (Neue Werbung
1961).
State-sponsored exhibitions, festivals and commemorative days were
also consistently covered (see Figure 20.2), including May Day parades,
Women’s Day, Party Day, the memorial of the 1917 October
Revolution, and
anniversaries of the births of the founders of socialism, Marx, Engels, Lenin,
Luxemburg and
Liebknecht, and later in the period, international issues such
as the Vietnam war, the Chile Solidarity campaign
and the anti-apartheid
movement.

Other publishing on German graphic design

Beyond magazines, the growth in the publication of books on graphic design

in East and West Germany developed in
an asymmetrical fashion. In the
1950s and 1960s, East German books on any
kind of design were
comparatively rare when compared with those on fine art and architecture.
The first dedicated
study of the history of the poster appeared in 1965, Das
Deutsche Plakat: von den Anfängen zur
Gegenwart (The German Poster
from the Beginning to the Present Day). Tracing the history of the form
since
the emergence of the art poster in the Jugendstil period,
controversially, the book went on to include both East
and West German
posters in its coverage of the previous twenty years (Rademacher 1965). The
author, Hellmut
Rademacher, was the main commentator on posters and
graphic design in East Germany. He had trained as a historian
at the
Humboldt University in East Berlin before his appointment as a curator at
the Museum für Deutsche
Geschichte, shortly after its foundation in 1952.
The book’s influence spread when an English-language edition
followed in
1966, published as Masters of German Poster Art. Significantly, this edition
avoided the question of how to interpret recent political events for a foreign
readership by taking 1933 as its
end date (Rademacher 1966). In an
interview conducted by Bernhard Denscher in Berlin in 2011, Rademacher
reflected on his research for this work and the difficulties of negotiating the
need for sources in the
Kunstbibliothek in the western sector of the city,
especially after the building of the Wall in 1961. He
emphasised the absolute
priority to use historical materialist method, commenting, ‘ich habe das
Plakat immer als
Geschichtsquelle betrachtet!’ (‘I have always regarded the
poster as a source of history!’) While indicating a
critical distance, he
maintained he was personally committed to using print culture as a central
exhibitionary
tool to interpret the Marxist-Leninist history of the conditions
of the working classes.
Figure
20.2 Axel Bertram (b. 1936),
member of Gruppe 4, cover design for Neue Werbung, East
Berlin, commemorating the 25th
anniversary of the ‘liberation of Germany from Fascism’
on 8 May 1945. Neue Werbung, May
1970.
Author’s collection.

By the mid-1970s, as part of the tendency in various fields of GDR

cultural history towards historical
re-orientation, the first fully
comprehensive account of graphic design was published, Gebrauchsgrafik in
der DDR. The author was again Hellmut Rademacher (Rademacher 1975).
An equivalent
study of industrial design, Heinz Hirdina’s Gestalten für die
Serie, would appear in 1988
(Hirdina 1988). Rademacher’s long
introductory essay entitled ‘Gesellschaftliche Funktion und ästhetische
Prinzipien der Gebrauchsgrafik in der sozialistischen Gesellschaft’ (Societal
Function and
Aesthetic Principles of Graphic Design for a Socialist Society)
formed a major document in GDR graphic design
historiography
(Rademacher 1975: 5–49).
Rademacher organised the subject thematically and by medium, with
sections prioritising the cultural and
political significance of graphic design.
The first illustration in the volume was a poster for the Berliner
Ensemble’s
1951 production of Die Mutter, featuring the pre-eminent actor Helene
Weigel
and designed by the Heartfield/Herzfelde brothers, no doubt intended
to represent a symbolic peak of GDR design
and culture. Sections on
‘Industry and Commerce’ and ‘Societal Propaganda’ followed, covering
information posters
for health and transport, anti-fascist and SED party
posters, memorial coinage and stamp designs, while design
for book covers
and magazines earned separate sections.
In contrast to the situation in East Germany, by the early 1960s books on
West German graphic designers were
appearing with increasing regularity in
tune with publishing trends in the West more generally and the growth in
cultural leisure. Graphic design as a profession in the Federal Republic could
be located internationally on the
broader cultural axis between Switzerland
and the United States. Graphic designers were becoming internationally
recognised names, among them Max Bill, Anton Stankowski, Herbert
Kapitzki, Helmut Lortz and Hans Hillmann. To
strengthen this perception,
West German designer membership of the Alliance Graphique
Internationale, starting in
1952, provided a further mechanism through
which to garner attention. The
first GDR designer to become a member of
the AGI, by contrast, was Volker Pfüller in 1997 (Bos and Bos 2007:
429).
For political reasons it was rare to focus on an individual designer within
East German publishing as it smacked
of bourgeois individualism. An early
exception was Werner Klemke, who was the subject of a modest 1962
monograph
by the main art publishing house, Verlag der Kunst in Dresden
(Nowak 1963). Klemke, as we have already seen, held
an important place as
a figurehead for graphic design education and the wider profession as
recognised by
Neue Werbung, and was also a familiar household name
through his illustrations for the
popular entertainment monthly, Das
Magazin. Then, in 1979, one of the GDR’s most prominent
and highly
regarded graphic designers, Klaus Wittkugel, was given equivalent
recognition by the publication of a
substantial monograph from the Verlag
der Kunst in Dresden, which bears comparison with accepted ideas of
western
design publishing in style and format (Frommhold 1979). Wittkugel
had studied with Max Burchartz at
Folkwangschule Essen in the late 1920s
and early 1930s and was as much indebted to Weimar Modernism as his
many
West German counterparts. In the early years of the GDR, 1949–52,
Wittkugel was chief designer at the Amt für
Information (Office for
Information), where he adapted his approach to photomontage for graphic
communication in
what might be considered a pioneering variant of socialist
modernity. He taught at the Hochschule für bildende
und angewandte Kunst
(am Weissensee) Berlin for a large part of his career, was awarded the
Nationalpreis for his
designs in 1958 and elected a member of the Deutsche
Akademie der Künste in 1961.
Wittkugel’s prominence led to his election as the first President for the
GDR branch of Icograda, the
International Council of Graphic Design
Associations. Formed in 1963, Icograda, like AGI, was an international
initiative to foster professional standards in graphic design across borders. In
a move to guarantee the
political neutrality of the Council, both Germanys
were invited in 1966 to share membership and joined the
Icograda second
assembly in Bled, Yugoslavia. Wittkugel was accompanied by Peterpaul
Weiss and Hans Baltzer, both
established designers and teachers, for the
GDR (Frommhold 1979). The president for West Germany, representing
the
Bund Deutscher Gebrauchsgraphiker, was Harald Gutschow and the more
recognised designer, Anton Stankowski,
was a second representative.
Stankowski was renowned for bridging Swiss and German design cultures
through his
work on trademarks and corporate identity schemes – and like
Wittkugel, he had also studied at the Folkwangschule
with Max Burchartz in
the same years.5
 Only formal comments from Stankowski and Wittkugel are minuted in the
records of the Icograda assemblies,
attended by some of the world’s leading
graphic designers. They tell us little by way of nuancing the picture of
German-German relations and whether or how East and West German
designers made exchanges on an interpersonal
level beyond formal
situations. Many questions remain concerning evident parallels between
graphic designers who
were negotiating the complex legacy of modern
design in the two Germanys.

Notes

1 The Bund Deutscher Gebrauchsgraphiker changed its name to Bund

Deutscher Grafik-Designer in
1968 and Berufsverband der Deutschen Kommunikationsdesigner in 2009, www.bdg-
designer.de/der-berufsverband,
accessed 13 April 2014.
2 The Museum für Deutsche
Geschichte, East Berlin inaugurated the annual exhibition ‘Beste
Plakate des Jahres’ in 1965 as a means to build
its collections. See Stephan Conrad, Anja
Kuhrmann, and Andreas Ludwig, Im Blick der Massen.
Plakate in der DDR. – Eine Ausstellung
des Dokumentationszentrum Alltagskultur der DDR vom 3. November 2002 bis
9. Februar 2003,
www.alltagskultur-ddr.de/fileadmin/data/sonderausstellungen/plakate_Lehrerinformation.pdf,
accessed 13 April 2014.
3 This was the opinion of the graphic designer Axel Bertram when
interviewed in Berlin in 2012
(Jenkins 2014).
4 Deutsche Werbe-und Anzeigengesellschaft (DEWAG) began in 1946
after the establishment of the
SED and became a GmbH in 1949, moving from Dresden to Berlin. It also oversaw the
Institut für
Werbemethodik and all areas of print and environmental advertising and publicity.
5 Icograda archives are held in the Design Archives, Brighton
University,
http://arts.brighton.ac.uk/collections/design-archives/archives/icograda-archive,
accessed 25 April
2015.

References

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Advertising Art
1(1) October.
Amstutz, W. and Herdeg, W. (1962) Who’s Who in Graphic Art, Zurich, Graphis Press.
Amstutz, W. and Herdeg, W. (1982) Who’s Who in Graphic Art, Dübendorf, De Clivo Press.
Aynsley, J. (2000) Graphic Design in Germany, 1890–1945, London and New York, Thames and
Hudson.
Aynsley, J. (2009) Designing Modern Germany, London, Reaktion.
Betts, P. (2004) The Authority of Everyday Objects, a Cultural History of West German
Industrial
Design, Berkeley, London and Los Angeles, University of California Press.
Bos, B. and Bos, E. (2007) AGI. Graphic Design since 1950, London and New York, Thames
and
Hudson.
Castillo, G. (2010) Cold War on the Home Front: The Soft Power of Midcentury Design,
Minneapolis,
University of Minnesota Press.
Denscher, B. (2011) ‘Hellmut Rademacher’,
www.austrianposters.at/pages/interviews/hellmut_rademacher.html, accessed 12/2/16.
Dietrich, G. (1956) ‘Agitation, Propaganda, Reklame und Werbung sind ungleiche Geschwister’, Neue
Werbung 3(1) January.
Frommhold, E. (1979) Klaus Wittkugel. Fotografie, Gebrauchsgraphik, Plakat, Akademie der
Künste
der DDR, Dresden, VEB Verlag der Kunst.
Gebrauchsgraphik (1956a) ‘Ben Shahn’, 27(1).
Gebrauchsgraphik (1956b) ‘Saul Bass’, 27(11).
Gebrauchsgraphik (1956c) ‘Werner Klemke’, 27(12).
Gebrauchsgraphik (1969) ‘Eberhard Hölscher’, 40(10).
Hirdina, H. (1988) Gestalten für die Serie, Design in der DDR, 1949–1985, Dresden:
Verlag der
Kunst.
Höhne, G. (ed.) (2009) Die geteilte Form. Deutsch-deutsch Designaffären 1949–1989,
Cologne,
Fackelträger.
Hollis, R. (2006) Swiss Graphic Design. The Origins and Growth of an International Style,
1920–
1965, London and New Haven, Yale University Press.
Hölscher, E. (1967) Deutsche Gebrauchsgrafik, Munich, Bruckmann Verlag.
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Republic: formal,
theoretical and functional change, 1949–1989’, PhD thesis, Royal College of Art,
London (unpublished).
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Neue Werbung (1959) ‘The High Quality Workmanship of Nationally Owned Factories
Necessitates
Socialist Advertising Means’, 6(1) January: 24–25.
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Nowak, B. (1963) Werner Klemke, mit einem Beitrag des Künstlers und einer Einleitung von
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Verlag der Kunst.
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Schwerin.
 21

A MATCH MADE IN UTOPIA?

The uneasy love affair of art and industry in
Scandinavia
 
Kjetil Fallan
 
 
When the English term industrial design was introduced into Scandinavian
design discourse after World War II,
with the ensuing emergence of
industrial design as a profession in its own right, distinct from other spheres
of
design practice, the longstanding but uneasy love affair between art and
industry took center stage.
Materials—their physical properties, their place
in manufacture, their artistic potential, their cultural
meanings, and the
skills required to manipulate them—were at the heart of this discourse. A
pre-eminent example
of this union of cultures can be found in an intriguing
proclamation by the cultural historian and president of
the Norwegian
Applied Art Association, Knut Greve:

The most interesting and intriguing experiments in the field of

applied art today are related to completely new
materials … Such
experiments can only be carried out in the laboratories of large-
scale industry and backed by
the large-scale industry’s mighty
economic resources … Hand a Norwegian designer a lump of
plastic, a glass
fiber mat, a rubber sponge. He will make better use
of a rock. But it is these experiments that primarily are
“modern
art” today. It is these which will revolutionize our ways of living
and our design.
(Greve 1950: 17)
The incomprehension and incompatibility looming large in this imaginary
encounter with that mysterious
material—or rather, group of materials—
known as plastic, whose importance to design skyrocketed in those very
days (Weium 2001; Lindblad 2008), is highly instructive when
contemplating the relationship between art and
industry and how materials
matter in this love affair. That Greve severely underestimated the
competence of
Norwegian designers shall become clear below—but that
does not detract from the significance of his statement.
Greve appreciated the large investment required in advanced industrial
mass-production. He did not dismiss the
system as such—his concern was
one of scale; that the mere size of the public, markets, and industry in
Norway
and Scandinavia did not allow for the type of industrial mass-
production usually associated with the USA and
colloquially known as
Fordism.
Greve’s article, titled “Eksperiment eller tradisjon [Experiment or
Tradition],” was written as a reflection upon the reactions following a
recent (1948) visit to the Nordic
countries by Edgar Kaufmann, Jr., the
director of the Industrial Design Department at New York’s Museum of
Modern
Art (MoMA) and one of the most influential American
missionaries of “good design.” He had been invited by the
four national
applied art associations to visit Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and Finland to
assess the countries’
production in the field of design and, hopefully, take
both favorable impressions and plenty of objects back to
MoMA. The
initiative was based on the associations’ firm belief that the Nordic
countries were world leaders in
this field, and that an exhibition of Nordic
design at MoMA would open the doors to the vast and highly lucrative
American market. Kaufmann, however, was not impressed, and the
Scandinavians’ dream of being showcased in his
cathedral of high-end
modernism fell apart. It is quite remarkable how a single incident could
have such a
profound impact and instill such a grave feeling of betrayal and
disappointment (Fallan 2015). The editor of the
Swedish design magazine
Form, Arthur Hald, saw the incident as indicating “that it is now
America’s
turn to act as a creator of design and culture.” He painted a bleak picture of
the Nordic countries’
position in that “brave, new world” of industrial
design spearheaded by the USA: “We have seen how we have fallen
by the
wayside and have been regarded as plucking flowers along the
Scandinavian roadside while development has
whizzed past us” (Hald
1953: 221). One of the co-editors of the Norwegian design magazine Bonytt
characterized the event simply as a “defeat” (Stenstadvold 1949: 55).
In making sense of these reactions, and relating them to our topic, it is
essential to recognize that Greve and
his fellow partisans were firmly rooted
in the Scandinavian applied art movement with its close relations to
artistic
culture and craft-based production systems, and that their romance with
industry, which had long been
chiefly of a rhetorical nature, was now being
put to the test. I shall have more to say of these developments in
mid-
twentieth-century Scandinavia, as I believe they offer valuable insights into
some of the many problems
arising in the history of the uneasy love affair
between art and industry—but first, a brief genealogy of the
relationship is
required.

Matchmaking in manufacture

The two lovers, art and industry, started dating in another place at another
time. For the sake of argument, we
can employ the working hypothesis that
the wedding took place at The Great Exhibition of the
Works of Industry of
all Nations, organized in London in 1851. If so, then the first official date
must have
been the Select Committee of the House of Commons on Arts
and Manufactures, appointed in 1835 to improve the
design quality of
British industrial goods. In fact, the entire design reform movement that
followed can be
considered a series of efforts at liaising between art and
industry. Well-known milestones are the establishment
in 1837 of the
Government Normal School of Design, The Journal of Design in 1849 and
the
Museum of Manufactures in 1857 (renamed the South Kensington
Museum in 1857 and the Victoria and Albert Museum in
1899) (for an
institutional history, see Burton 1999). This inspired a wide range of similar
initiatives across
Europe, resulting for example in the many decorative arts
museums—including those in Helsinki, Oslo, Bergen,
Copenhagen,
Trondheim, and Gothenburg. But although all these museums have
been
influential contributors to design discourse ever since, their domain
diminished rather quickly. What can
only be described as a major blow to
the universalist ambitions of joining art and industry in holy matrimony
occurred in 1893 when the Science Museum was allowed to leave the fold
after a lengthy process of drifting apart.
In its early days, the South
Kensington Museum exhibited tank engines and scientific equipment next
to paintings
and sculpture. Letting go of the Science Museum thus turned
Exhibition Road, which runs between them, into a
barrier which has
symbolized the rupture that has affected design discourse and design history
ever since (Fallan
2010: 56–7; Heskett 1987: 126).
In general, the internal power balance has been the bone of contention in
most of the relationship problems art
and industry have experienced. If we
leave Victorian Britain behind and join a certain German architect on his
journey home upon leaving his post at the German embassy in London in
1903, we find another telling example.
Hermann Muthesius had been sent
to England in 1896 as cultural attaché with the mandate to study British
design
and assess the value to German industry of British experiences in the
field of design reform (Aynsley 2009: 25).
In publications and lectures he
made it clear that he sympathized with many of the efforts at design reform
he
had studied in Britain, such as the Arts and Crafts Movement, but
concluded that utopian ideals often
overshadowed pragmatic concerns.
German design, Muthesius argued, had to be developed along the terms of
what he
deemed to be “the children of the new age”: the engineer and the
industrialist. Four years after his
repatriation, in 1907, he was instrumental
in setting up the Deutsche Werkbund, an organization formed with the
explicit aim of improving the quality of German industrial goods by
implementing better design principles. In
other words, an arranged marriage
of art and industry.
Concern about the internal power balance between art and industry is
precisely what characterized the most
infamous instance in the history of
the Deutsche Werkbund: the so-called typisierung—or
standardization—
debate at the congress in Cologne in 1914. Here, Muthesius rehearsed his
gospel of
standardization and design for mass-production as the only road
to redemption for the material culture of the
modern world. Amongst his
followers were Peter Behrens, who in his work for AEG perhaps more than
anyone at the
time embodied the professional identity of the industrial
designer as a union of art and industry, having trained
in the fine arts but
working in the service of a big industrial corporation. Muthesius’s chief
adversary in
Cologne was Henri van de Velde, the Belgian architect famous
for his Art Nouveau buildings and furnishings. To
van de Velde,
standardization represented a massive threat to the designer’s autonomy and
artistic integrity
(Schwartz 1996: 121–46). Again, it all boiled down to a
question of power: who was wearing the trousers in this
relationship?
 Suiting in Scandinavia

The Werkbund ideas, and especially the ambition of bringing artistic—or at

least artistically based—expertise to
the service of modern mass-
manufacturing industry, were to prove highly influential in the design
discourse of
the twentieth century. One indication of their impact can be
gauged from the fact that they migrated back across
the Channel when a
Deutsche Werkbund exhibition in London in 1914 was the direct occasion
for the establishment
of the British Design and Industries Association,
although this organization would prove less effective than the German
model. Perhaps less surprisingly, sister
organizations were set up in Austria
and Switzerland. More relevant in the present context is the influence that
the Deutsche Werkbund had in Scandinavia. Muthesius was invited to
Stockholm by the Svenska Slöjdföreningen, the
Swedish Applied Art
Association, in 1909 and was subsequently made an honorary member.
Central figures such as
Axel Lindgren, Erik Wettergren, Elsa Gullberg, and
Gregor Paulsson were all closely linked to the Werkbund and
reformed the
Svenska Slöjdföreningen in the image of the German organization and its
ideals. Wettergren was
present at the Werkbund congress in Cologne in
1914 and even gave a lecture there on the topic of “Der
Werkbund-
Gedanke” (The Werkbund Idea) in Scandinavia (Ivanov 2004: 98–9).
Gregor Paulsson’s Vackrare vardagsvara, published in 1919 as the Svenska
Slöjdföreningen’s “first propaganda
publication” and arguably the single
most influential text in twentieth-century Scandinavian design discourse,
was permeated with Werkbund ideas (Paulsson 1919).
Werkbund views on the necessity of forging strong bonds between art
and industry soon took hold in Norway, partly
by way of Sweden, partly
directly from Germany. When the Norwegian Applied Art Association
(Foreningen
Brukskunst) was formed in 1918, the statutes stated explicitly
that the new organization was to be modeled upon
the Swedish one. A more
direct link is that the deputy board member of the association, Harry Fett,
an art
historian and the Director General for Cultural Heritage
(Riksantikvar), was the first Scandinavian member of the
Deutsche
Werkbund and was present at its famous meeting in Cologne in 1914
(Gaustad 1973: 10–13). In addition,
Muthesius’s book Stilarchitektur und
Baukunst (1902) had been translated into Norwegian by
the director of the
Oslo Museum of Decorative Art, Henrik Grosch, in 1909, just as it was
translated into Swedish
by Axel Lindgren a year later.
An essential trait of these organizations, both in Germany, Sweden,
Norway, and elsewhere, was that they were not
trade unions for artists and
craftsmen, but interest groups or organizations intended to develop and
promote the
field of applied art and design (brukskunst). This trait was
reflected also in the
organizational form. The statutes declared that the
board should consist of seven members, plus a secretary, from
the following
trades/positions: an art historian, a museum representative, an architect, a
craftsman, a
decorative artist, a painter or sculptor, and an industry
representative (Aars 1920: 51).
Just as Muthesius had done in Germany, the leading figures of the
Swedish and Norwegian Applied Art Associations
argued for the need to
employ artists in industry and develop type-products for machine
production. Board member
and art historian, Carl W. Schnitler, wrote in
1920 that “The modern form is at its core created by engineers and
technicians.” He ridiculed the “machine-hating” attitude of Ruskin and
Morris, who he called “idealist romantics”
and likened to Don Quixote. The
industrial era was here to stay, he claimed, and “machines, with the help of
the
artist, can become creators of beauty” (Schnitler 1921: 6–10). This
peculiar way of simultaneously hailing and
belittling the qualities of
industry and the engineer was even more evident in the words of the
Norwegian’s
association’s second and long-standing chairman (1920–39),
the goldsmith Jacob Prytz, who declared that
industrial goods “must result,
partly as engineering products, carefully harmonized in line and form, but
in
order for them to be good, the designer must also be an artist in his
treatment of form” (Prytz 1921: 74). So the
prominence of industrial
production and the skills of engineers were definitely appreciated, even
admired, but
artists, with their aesthetic expertise, were portrayed as knights
in shining armor coming to the rescue of the
aesthetically illiterate
engineers.
A measure planned as the key tool in this rescue operation was the
establishment of a liaison office intended to function as an intermediary
between artists and industry. Of
course, artists had been employed in
industry long before this time. Iron foundries, for example, had made
extensive use of artists to design decorative reliefs for their cast-iron stoves
from the eighteenth century,
often forming intra-Scandinavian
collaborations in which Danish artists, such as Henrich Bech, worked for
Norwegian foundries, among them Fritzøe, Moss and Bærum (Hamran
1989). However, this kind of design practice,
just like later examples such
as Thorvald Bindesbøll’s 1904 label for the Carlsberg Pilsner beer bottle,
remained
applied art in the most literal sense: the (reproduced) artwork was
applied to an
industrially manufactured product that was not designed by an
artist. What the applied art movement of the early
twentieth century added
to this established practice was a desire to better integrate the aesthetic and
constructional aspects, as well as insisting on the “duty to be modern”
(Michl 1988); the artist in industry
should be a guarantor for appropriate
rather than merely fashionable forms of industrial products.
Not surprisingly, the idea of a liaison office was also derived from the
Werkbund. Starting in 1917 Elsa Gullberg
was in charge of this function in
the Swedish association. Her most famous results were the placement of
Wilhelm
Kåge as artistic director at Gustavsberg, Edward Hald and Simon
Gate at Orrefors, and Edvin Ollers at Kosta
(Brunnström 2010: 77). Such
matchmaking also occurred in Norway, but it was never implemented on a
permanent and
official basis as it had been in Germany and Sweden, rather
carried out on an ad hoc basis
and resulting from the networks of personal
relations, established mainly by Thor Kielland and Jacob Prytz. The
most
notable achievements were the placements of Nora Gulbrandsen at
Porsgrund Porselænsfabrik, Sverre Pettersen
at Christiania Glasmagasin,
and Ragnar Grimsrud at Graverens Keramikk (Bøe 1983: 362–71). In
Denmark, radical
architects and cultural critics such as Poul Henningsen
and Edvard Heiberg, in their roles as editors and writers
for the magazine
Kritisk Revy, discarded the applied art movement as irrelevant, and
hailed
instead the anonymous factory technicians and engineers as the true heroes
of the day and harbingers of
genuinely modern design (Dybdahl 2004: 10–
11). The more moderate majority of the Scandinavian design community,
however, remained convinced that industry needed art to fulfill its potential
as the provider of well-designed
products.

Artful and industrious

Despite these individual cases, during the inter-war period the chiefly
academic circles of the applied art
community were not very successful in
translating their theories into action, or rather, into products of
industrial
design as a genuine symbiosis of art and industry accessible, and desirable,
to a broad segment of the
population. This situation was, however, also
dependent on issues such as production technology, industrial
organization,
knowledge distribution, and so on. Although the associations invited
industry representatives into
their organizations and sought a dialogue, they
never succeeded in attracting a membership and audience in the
realm of
industry. Apart from a few managers from industrial art companies with a
personal interest in design,
the membership would largely remain designers
of various kinds, plus a body of interested architects and art
historians.
To be fair, the manufactured goods industry in Scandinavia at the time
was
small, and outside the applied art sector there was limited potential for
viable romances between art and
industry. Taking a closer look at one such
brief fling could be instructive, though, in better understanding the
uneasy
nature of the relationship between art and industry en route to the
consolidation
of industrial design as a profession in its own right in the mid-
twentieth century, as mentioned in the
introduction.
The example chosen is the pioneering telephone developed at Elektrisk
Bureau in Oslo in the early 1930s, known as
model EB-32 (see Figure
21.1). This was the world’s first telephone with a Bakelite casing
molded in
one piece with an integrated cradle for the handset. The major
characteristics of this design—the basic
concept, the choice of material, the
layout of the components, the geometry of the shell—were all devised by
the
company’s chief design engineer, Johan Christian Bjerknes, and his staff
of draftsmen. When Bjerknes presented
the project to his boss, the director
Albert Kvaal, it was met with enthusiasm and support, but the interesting
thing, in this context, is that Kvaal insisted on bringing external aesthetic
expertise into the design process,
and, via personal relations, commissioned
the painter Jean Heiberg to provide the finishing touches to Bjerknes’s
concept for the shape of the telephone casing. Elektrisk Bureau’s own
workshop was not equipped with Bakelite presses and other machinery
required to manufacture the new design, and
it was decided that it would be
manufactured in the Swedish Bakelite factory, AB Alpha, which had been
recently
taken over by Elektrisk Bureau’s parent company, L.M. Ericsson.
Bjerknes went to the Swedish factory in the fall
of 1930, bringing with him
the model he and Heiberg had designed, only to learn from the production
engineers
that it was useless; their design was impossible to manufacture
with the factory’s equipment. This sent Bjerknes
and Heiberg back to their
separate drawing boards to thoroughly revise the design, finally producing a
model that
was in fact manufacturable (Brunnström 2006: 177–86;
Wildhagen 2012 [1988]: 197–202).

Figure 21.1 Promotional

photograph of telephone Model EB-32 designed by Johan
Christian Bjerknes and Jean Heiberg in 1932.
Developed by Elektrisk Bureau in Oslo,
manufactured by AB Alpha in Stockholm for L.M. Ericsson.
Courtesy: Ericsson Archives/Centre for Business History, Stockholm.

Both in terms of how art was solicited, and in terms of how art was left
on the margins of a design process that
proceeded completely on industry’s
terms, this project offers an object lesson; as the manufactured goods
industry grew ever more complex, and design expertise was required far
beyond the familiar purview of the applied
art movement, the Werkbund
ideal of creating a sphere in which art and industry could meet on an equal
footing
proved more and more inadequate. And material matters are crucial
in understanding why designers who served the
applied art industry were
trained to work in specific media and with specific materials. They were
painters,
ceramicists, textile artists, and goldsmiths, not industrial designers
versed in the ways of new materials such
as plastics—a point made
abundantly clear in the introductory quotation by Knut Greve, who claimed
that Norwegian
designers would make better use of a rock than of plastics.
Specialized industrial design education would be a
long time coming, but
designated professionals would emerge sooner than that, gaining—as I
began by saying—some
sort of critical mass in the 1950s.
In this respect, and given the tenacity of the outmoded working principles
just described, the telephone example
has an interesting coda. More than
twenty years down the line, in 1953, Elektrisk Bureau launched a telephone
that would supersede the 1932 Bakelite model. A pioneering concept was
brought forth by Johan Christian Bjerknes,
again based on the creative
exploitation of a new material, this time designing the world’s first
telephone with
casing and handset made entirely from thermoplastics;
external aesthetic expertise was again solicited to help
with the finishing
touches. This time the company called upon Arne E. Holm, a jack of all
trades, architect,
painter, and professor of form and color studies at the
Norwegian Institute of Technology. And again, the role of
the external
consultant remained just that: external, marginal, superficial, subservient
(Ellefsen et al. 2000: 72–3).

Progeny and patricide

If we stick with the metaphor of art as the wife in this relationship, it seems
clear that, by now, she was stuck
in a conservative marriage in which
industry, the husband, deeply entrenched in a patriarchal society, supplied
the conditions and made the decisions. If so, her fate was fully in line with
that of her real-life
equivalent—the housewife—who experienced severe
regressions in terms of equal opportunities in the 1950s.
Likening industrial
designers to feminists might be a bit of a stretch, but when thirteen
practitioners—all
men—in 1955 founded the trade union ID, Norsk Gruppe
for Industriell Formgivning (now: Norwegian Industrial
Designers) with
Thorbjørn Rygh as its first president, it was motivated
precisely by the
desire to empower designers—here also known as art, the wife—and
enlighten industry, that is,
the patriarch.
The previous year, in 1954, a similar association had been established in
Denmark under the name Selskab for
Industriel Formgivning (now: Danish
Designers). Returning to our recurring theme of plastics and how materials
matter, it should be mentioned that founding member Erik Herløw, who
became Denmark’s first professor of
industrial design in 1957, became an
expert in designing products in Bakelite and melamine, and would go on to
establish a comprehensive collaboration with Tupperware (Dybdahl 2006:
18–19). Herløw was adamant that design was
not a beautification exercise,
and that the designer therefore had to be involved from the conception of
the
project. This desire to move beyond the kind of formal adjustment
processes described in the telephone examples
above became perhaps the
most important reason for the emerging profession of industrial designer
across
Scandinavia from the mid-1950s.
The Swedish equivalent, Föreningen Svenska Industridesigner (now: The
Swedish Association of Designers), was
founded in 1957 with Rune Monö
as its first president (Brunnström 1997: 32). Like Herløw and many other
Danish
and Norwegian colleagues, Monö and several of his companions in
the Swedish association were deeply involved in
the booming plastics
industry. That industry was dominated by small, young companies run by
entrepreneurs, and
therefore not set in their ways (Johnsen 1995: 40;
Lindblad 2008: 38). Crucially, with plastic products, form and
structure are
co-produced, necessitating the designer’s early involvement. Also, the new
generation of plastics
that became commercialized in that period lent
themselves to novel products not burdened by aesthetic precedents
(see
Figure 21.2). As in the rest of the manufactured goods industry, many
products were
designed by in-house technicians and engineers, but the
plastics industry in Scandinavia became an important
environment for the
emerging industrial design profession, providing a new arena in which its
members could
demonstrate their skills efficiently. In an article called
“Plastics and Industrial Design,” published in the
Swedish Applied Art
Association’s magazine Form in 1958, Monö and his colleague Hugo
Lindström—both engineers by training—described the designer’s job as
one of “improving the mass-produced
product’s functionality and
saleability” by co-ordinating aesthetic,
technical and commercial thinking
—a competence that “is particularly befitting when it comes to plastics
design”
(Lindström and Monö 1958: 131–5). So, despite Knut Greve’s
dismissal of their understanding of plastics a few
years earlier, it was
precisely this material that, more than any other, allowed the new
Scandinavian industrial
designers to push the alliance of art and industry
further than their predecessors ever managed to.

Figure 21.2 “Speed Bob,”

the first plastic toboggan made in Norway, designed by the
ceramicist Richard Duborgh and manufactured by
Plast & Form A/S from 1965.
Courtesy of the Norwegian Centre for Design and Architecture (Licenced under Creative Commons
3.0).

The establishment of the industrial designers’ associations marked the

beginning of a process that lasted more
than two decades, in which the
movement, terms, and professions associated with applied art (brukskunst)
were fragmented, specialized, and challenged from two sides: industrial
design and
handicrafts. Studio-based craft artists slowly abandoned the
project that had united them with those who designed
for industry, that is,
making vackrare vardagsvara1 (more beautiful everyday things) in favor of
exploring the artistic potential of craft by
eventually disregarding the
question of function in search of “free form” (Robach 2010). In Norway,
this process
might be said to have culminated in 1974 when Norske
Brukskunstnere (Norwegian Applied Artists) participated in
the so-called
Artists’ Action (Kunstneraksjonen), and that organization’s subsequent
change of name to Norske Kunsthåndverkere (Norwegian Craft Artists) in
1975, through which they defined
themselves and their activity as art, and
disowned any links to the world of industry and commercial business
(Fallan 2007).
In retrospect, this now familiar story seems inevitable but, as the rupture
was forming, some of the most ardent
proponents of the holistic ideals of
the applied art movement did their best to close their ranks and bridge the
divide. The Bonytt editors, Arne Remlov and Liv Schjødt, simply asked
themselves: “Can all
this, the handicraft and the beautifully and
appropriately formed industrial product, be put in one big bag:
applied art?”
(Remlov and Schjødt 1963: 253). It is interesting to note here that Remlov
and Schjødt could only
accept industrial products as belonging to the field
of applied art if they were beautiful. A merely appropriate
design would not
do. No such specification was made regarding handicraft. It seems therefore
as though handicraft
was implicitly considered to have sufficient aesthetic
or artistic value, whereas only some industrial products
possessed that
essential virtue.
Alf Bøe made the same distinction in a Bonytt article in a tribute to the
tenth
anniversary of Norwegian Industrial Designers in 1965. To him,
applied art included any kind of handicraft
product, “say, an embroidery or
a manually turned jar,” and he made no mention of any standards, qualities,
or
aspirations to which the handicraft product had to conform in order to be
deemed a work of applied art. The other
extreme of the field, on the other
hand, consisted of “mass-produced goods with aesthetic pretensions”—and
Bøe
quickly added that “yes, a tractor may have an aesthetic attitude [sic!]
making it applied
art as good as any” (Bøe 1965: 105). So, according to
Bøe, highly prosaic products—his article was illustrated
by, for example, a
Brøyt X3 excavator manufactured by Brødrene Søyland and designed by
Thorbjørn Rygh—could be considered industrial design and thus, by
implication, also applied art, but only if they
had “aesthetic pretensions”
and attitudes.

Conclusion

What we see in these latter examples is that artistic intention and quality
were chosen as the defining
principles in the heated negotiations on internal
unification and external demarcation of the design field. And although the
unionists were fighting a losing battle, their arguments
show that the ideals
that once comprised the wedding vows of art and industry lived on, perhaps
most poignantly
through their offspring, the figure of the industrial
designer. An interesting development in recent years is
that some craft
artists are taking a renewed interest in industry, serial production, and
objects for use. The
Swedish ceramicist, Kjell Rylander, for instance, is
using discarded mass-produced porcelain tableware as a raw
material in
creating artistic work (Veiteberg 2011). A very different approach is taken
by Norwegian ceramicist
Sara Skotte, whose porcelain tableware may be
handmade, but is manufactured in series and intended for use, as an
alternative to industrially mass-produced goods. Perhaps these practices
reflect the fact that in Scandinavia the
consumer goods industry has been in
decline—often with the actual manufacturing outsourced to low-cost
countries—and has thus become more distant and exotic, and is art,
therefore, rekindling its infatuation with
industry?

Note

1. Greor Paulsson’s extremely influential 1919 pamphlet

Vackrare vardagsvara has been formally
translated as Better things for
everyday life, but because vackrare means more beautiful
(comparative adjective), and not better, I’ve opted for an alternative translation. For
the English
translation of the essay, see Paulsson (2008).

References

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Brukskunst & Kirstes boktrykkeri.
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Norges
kunsthistorie vol. 7, Oslo, Gyldendal.
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Brunnström, Lasse (2010) Svensk designhistoria, Stockholm, Raster.
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V & A Publications.
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Ellefsen, Terje, Anne Solberg and Cato Normann (2000) Telephones: Telephones in Norway
1880–
2000, Oslo, Norwegian Telecom Museum.
Fallan, Kjetil (2007) “How an Excavator Got Aesthetic Pretensions: Negotiating Design in 1960s’
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Fallan, Kjetil (2015) “Love and Hate in Industrial Design: Europe’s Design Professionals and
America in the
1950s” in Per Lundin and Thomas Kaiserfeld (eds) The Making of European
Consumption: Facing
the American Challenge, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Gaustad, Randi (1973) “Foreningen Brukskunst 1918–1930: Program, utstillinger og kritikk,” Master
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1915–1925,” Doctoral thesis, Umeå University.
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Bare plast? Revolusjon i design, Oslo, Messel.
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 PART IV

DESIGNING SOCIETY:
EMPATHY, RESPONSIBILITY,
CONSUMPTION, THE
EVERYDAY
 22

FROM ERGONOMICS TO
EMPATHY
Herman Miller and MetaForm
 
Barbara Penner
 
 
 
Since the Arts and Crafts movement, and certainly since the Bauhaus, the
designer has often been popularly
represented as a mythic figure, a creator
with almost godlike powers to improve environments, beautify homes, and
make people happier. In short, designers have been represented as forces for
social good. This reputation,
however, came under attack from the 1950s
onwards, when those in the emergent consumer rights and environmental
movements charged designers with being in thrall to market researchers and
advertisers, and of fueling wanton
consumerism and waste (Penner 2013;
Twemlow 2009). And faced with the rise of the “designer-celebrity” in the
1980s, design historians, influenced by theories of feminism and Marxism,
sought to stress the strict social and
material limits within which designers
operated and to which they were also subject (Sparke 2014: 211).1
Yet today the idea of the designer as a powerful agent of social good has
roared back to life in certain
quarters, if anything stronger than ever. Within
management and business circles and in the works of popular
writers like
Malcolm Gladwell and Warren Berger, the designer has become the main
proponent of what is called
“design thinking”—a problem-solver par
excellence who can provide solutions to any knotty
dilemma, including the
world’s most urgent social issues. As Berger argues in his book Glimmer:
How Design Can Transform Your Business, Your Life, and Maybe Even the
World, “design is really a way of
looking at the world with an eye towards
changing it” (Berger 2009: 3). He calls designers like Bruce Mau and
Yves
Béhar, two of the main examples in his book, “fix-the-world” designers,
spearheading “a new way of thinking
about design” (ibid.: 3–4).
This chapter does not aim to knock these designers off their pedestals. It
certainly does not question the value
of socially engaged design. Rather, it
makes the point that the “new” design culture praised by Berger and others
actually emerges from a distinct user-centered strand of design practice,
with its own history, methods, and
evolution. This overlooked model of
practice dates back to the late nineteenth century but it came most sharply
into focus in the post-war period with the rise of ergonomics. It is defined
by its multidisciplinary, team-based
nature, and its use of techniques drawn
from the social sciences such as surveys, focus groups, and prototype
testing. And it has usually been university-based, funded by the
government, non-profit bodies, and (occasionally) corporations with the
aim of serving the wider
social good. This model of design practice became
an important means by which architects and designers sought to
preserve
the social value and integrity of their work, especially from the 1960s
onwards, when, as Patricia
Conway notes, their discipline stood accused of
“an almost criminal exercise in greed, negligence and willful
destruction of
the environment” (Conway 1973: 5).
This chapter traces this strand of user-centered design practice from the
post-war period onwards. The first part considers several multidisciplinary
ergonomic
research projects undertaken at Cornell University in the 1950s
and 1960s that focused on home environments and
embraced user-centered
design. Most radically, researchers in these projects decisively rejected the
idea of the
normative user (usually young and male) which had long been
dominant in modernist design; rather, they considered
the impact of the
environment on typically marginalized social groups, such as the elderly,
women, children, etc.
The second half of this chapter considers an example
of design research from a later period, run by Herman Miller
Research
Corporation between 1986 and 1988. This project commissioned teams of
designers to study every aspect of
domestic life to consider how it could
accommodate aging. The results of this groundbreaking research never
made
it into full-scale production, but Bill Stumpf and Don Chadwick’s
work on seating helped lay the ground for the
later iconic Aeron Chair
(incidentally, a key exhibit in Gladwell’s Blink) (Gladwell 2005:
167–76).
While the chosen design teams deployed many of the same working
methods as earlier ergonomic research projects,
they also modified them in
ways that are significant. These modifications can be traced specifically
through the
work of Continuum, founded by Gianfranco Zaccai in 1983,
which was given the task of redesigning personal hygiene
equipment for
aging users. In developing MetaForm (the name eventually given to
Continuum’s system), Zaccai
openly questioned the determinism of the
ergonomic approach to problem-solving, and championed empathy in the
design process instead. In this sense, MetaForm can be seen as a bridge
between the more technocratic ergonomic
design culture of the 1950s and
today’s “fix-the-world” design, with its focus on the deep observation of
human
behavior and the designer’s intuition, and can help to explain how
the one evolved and paved the way for the
other.2

The expanded field of ergonomic design

When ergonomics is invoked today, it is most immediately associated with

one thing and one thing only: the task
chair. This is in part due to the
phenomenal success of chairs like Aeron, but it is reductive. The primary
aim
of ergonomics since the post-war period has been to improve human
environments, from homes to workplaces to
farms, by studying a wide
range of factors that influence use. These broad-ranging and ambitious
studies, which
covered anatomical (objective) and psychological
(subjective) factors, could only be
realized by bringing together large
multidisciplinary research teams. In these post-war examples we consider
how
engineers, architects, planners, medics, home economists,
psychologists, sociologists, and occasionally even
historians were gathered
together, each bringing a particular set of skills, methods, and perspectives
to the
table.
Ergonomics was first widely embraced in the post-war period in
America; the influential architectural critic
Reyner Banham described it as
“the most important branch of design science
by the end of the 1950s”
(Banham 1961: 48). This felt like a genuinely exciting moment in the
design sciences and
nowhere was this mode of working adopted with more
enthusiasm than at Cornell University. Two research projects
will be
mentioned that exemplify the ergonomic turn in this period and which
helped set the scene for MetaForm:
The Cornell Kitchen (1947–53) and The
Bathroom (1958–65) (Beyer
1952; Kira 1966). Both programs were
directed by Glenn H. Beyer, Director of the Cornell University Housing
Research Center (later renamed Center for Housing and Environmental
Studies). They could not have been carried
out, however, without the
support and expertise of Cornell’s College of Home Economics and its
Agricultural
Experiment Station.
The Cornell Kitchen came first and served as a template for the later
projects. The Cornell Kitchen established criteria for kitchen cabinet design
through the study of both the
anatomical and psychological factors that
shape human use (usually referred to generically as human factors).
Research activity was divided into three distinct parts: historical research;
field surveys; and laboratory
studies. Preliminary research findings were
then used to create prototype designs. The Cornell
Kitchen team produced
five working kitchen modules—Sink, Mix, Range, Oven-and-Refrigerator,
and Serve
Centers—and then studied these prototypes in use, deploying
techniques honed by home engineers, such as
memomotion studies and
energy indexes based on oxygen consumption, to appraise factors such as
strain and
floor-travel distance.
Beyer and his colleague from the Center for Housing and Environmental
Studies, Alexander Kira, next deployed the
same set of tools and techniques
in their research study on the bathroom, carried out between 1958 and 1965
and
largely paid for by American Radiator and Standard Sanitary
Corporation. Like The Cornell
Kitchen, The Bathroom research consisted of
three distinct parts: the first was an
extensive multidisciplinary literature
search; the second was a field survey of “current attitudes, practices,
and
problems” amongst one thousand middle-class households (published
separately in 1965 by Center Associate
Professor Marilyn Langford); and
the third was laboratory research to identify practical design issues
associated
with personal hygiene activities. As with The Cornell Kitchen,
lab research determined
basic parameters for essential hygiene activities,
hypotheses were developed about how best to meet them, and
working
models were designed based on these hypotheses.
Finally, though it does not perfectly fit the ergonomic template of The
Cornell Kitchen
and Bathroom, one last Cornell research program deserves
mention here. Carried out over
several years in the early 1960s, it studied
the problems of housing the aged, and was mainly financed by the
Ford
Foundation. It appears to have been the biggest and most ambitious of all
the programs being carried out by
the Center for Housing and
Environmental Studies in these years. It drew on 5,202 personal interviews
with
individuals aged sixty-five years and older, and aimed to provide a
national picture of the “total housing
problem” (Beyer 1961: iii, 1). Due to
its size and scale, the results of this research program were documented in
multiple research bulletins. The first of these, Housing Requirements of the
Aged: A Study of
Design Criteria, gave an overview of existing literature
and housing practices. Five subsequent bulletins
considered a distinct facet
of the housing problem from the economic position of respondents to their
interactions with their community to their typical living and activity
patterns. The way in which European
countries dealt with elderly shelter
and care was also comprehensively reviewed.
Insofar as the program had a specific agenda, it was to help support the
government’s new preference for independent versus institutional housing
for the elderly, as articulated in the
Federal Housing Act of 1956. With this
shift, the report’s authors stated, “it becomes important to gain a better
understanding concerning the ability of older people to look after
themselves” as well as
to know their own preferences and attitudes (Beyer
and Woods 1963: 1). Not surprisingly, the findings of the
Cornell study
strongly affirmed the benefits of and the preference for independent living
amongst its
interviewees. Unlike The Cornell Kitchen and Bathroom, the
housing-the-aged study did not aim to generate a new set of design criteria,
but it did fully acknowledge the way
that living environments impacted
upon elderly lives and how domestic arrangements could support
independent
living.
In sum, apart from their team-based nature, the thing that characterized
the Cornell projects—certainly the first
two—was their empirically based
and iterative mode of working; they used the results of their research to
guide
the design and construction of prototypes, which were then tested
with live models in full-scale settings, and
further honed on this basis,
setting up a feedback loop. In so doing, they attempted to respond to real-
life
conditions and user preferences and make environments more suitable
for human use. In terms of design, they
tended to advocate modular
approaches that allowed individual households a greater degree of
customization. This
approach was fundamentally different from prevailing
top-down, standardized modes of design. Kira described it as
“fitting the
activity, or the equipment, to the man, rather than vice versa” (Kira 1966:
iii), though instead of
“man,” he might have said “men and women
regardless of size, age or physical ability.” The way these projects
acknowledged the complexity and variety of users still feels exciting today.
But these projects were also deterministic. They deployed a technocratic
visual language that emphasized data and
dimensions and had an air of
scientific neutrality, even when the subject in question was not necessarily
neutral. They were value-laden and had obvious biases; they were anti-
fashion, anti-ornament, anti-conspicuous
consumption. Even when Beyer
and Kira drilled down into surveys to discuss what users wanted, their
designs
tended to mainly accommodate desires that were deemed rational,
an inbuilt moralism that led the writer J. G.
Ballard to disparage ergonomics
as “The Protestant work ethic disguised as a kinesthetic language” (Ballard
1992:
277) Kira was too sharp and knowing to deny that he was in a
paradoxical position. He understood full well that
where bathrooms were
concerned non-functional factors were extremely powerful and that his
failure to adequately
take them into account might obstruct his work’s
success. Indeed, in the decade between the original and revised
edition of
his book in 1976, he appeared to question the purity of his technocratic
approach and made a more
concerted effort to appeal to consumers. This
more flexible, user-friendly approach was closer to the one later
adopted by
Gianfranco Zaccai.

Can you take a nap in your office without embarrassment?

As with the Cornell examples, the majority of major post-war ergonomic

research projects were undertaken in
universities or in non-profit
organizations. Influential exceptions to this rule, however, were the research
projects undertaken by Herman Miller. Herman Miller, of course, was no
ordinary furniture design company. It was
then—as now—at the cutting-
edge of modern design in America, introducing not only new styles but new
materials,
manufacturing processes, and ways of living. It was also deeply
committed to research and development. In 1960, the company’s research
arm, the Herman Miller Research Corporation
(HMRC), was set up under
the direction of inventor Robert Propst, with headquarters in Ann Arbor,
Michigan.
HMRC’s mandate was, in the words of Herman Miller’s
President Hugh De Pree, “to find problems outside of the
furniture industry
and to conceive solutions for them” (Berry 2004: 117).
 An early innovation of HMRC was the Action Office, launched in 1964,
one of the first modular office systems.
Propst’s attempts to adjust to his
new role at Herman Miller had left him dissatisfied with the inflexible
office
furniture available and the dearth of studies on white-collar working
patterns. He set about to fill that void
through a research program that
followed a similar model to the Cornell projects: it was team-based,
user-
centered, and iterative. Propst began by consulting a variety of experts from
the social sciences, not least
anthropologist and champion of proxemics,
Edward T. Hall.3 His team also sent out a ten-page survey to office workers
with a
hundred and five questions, such as “What percentage of your
working day is spent … sitting, standing, walking,
perching, supine,
sleeping, other?” and “Can you take a nap in your office without
embarrassment?” On this basis,
Propst reached certain conclusions about
how the organization of an office could enhance white-collar work; for
instance, that workers should be encouraged to move in order to maintain
alertness and improve interaction—the
Action in Action Office—and that
they should use wall space for visual communications and
display
(Abercombie 1995: 210–20).
Propst made drawings and models of the kinds of furniture he
envisioned, but in order to give specific shape and
form to his ideas, he
turned to designer George Nelson, whose relationship to Herman Miller
went back to 1945.
Under the direction of designer Ronald Beckman the
modular units of Action Office took shape, including
innovations like a
stand-up desk, an acoustically insulated communications workstation for
telephone and
Dictaphone use, and a low desk with flip-down display.
Propst subsequently reproduced photographs of himself
using a variety of
these units in a vector-oriented arrangement in The Office, the stylish
publication that introduced Action Office 2 in 1968 (Propst 1968: 52–3).
While the first Action Office had been
greatly admired, in terms of sales,
Action Office 2 was the breakthrough because it added wall panels that
allowed for open plan spaces to be configured flexibly (Conway 1973: 36).
In 1986 HMRC, still under Propst’s leadership, identified a new subject
for investigation, how domestic spaces
and furnishings could be redesigned
so that the aged could live in their homes independently for longer, picking
up precisely where the Cornell study on aging had left off. As with the
Action Office project, the project sprang
from a perceived gap in the market
where, despite an aging population, there were few purpose-designed
ergonomic
furnishings available for elderly care. Rather, in homes and even
in healthcare facilities, existing furniture
was being adapted to
accommodate their needs (often badly). Bill Stumpf and Don Chadwick
were fascinated by the
way the La-Z-Boy recliners were reportedly being
used in many settings—for instance, in hospitals they were used
to give the
elderly dialysis in a semi-reclined position (Kuang 2013). On the basis of its
initial research, HMRC
identified particular activities within the home that
would benefit from study: long-term sitting; personal
hygiene; sleeping;
food preparation; and labor efficiency. Different design teams were brought
in to study these
elements, including: Bill Stumpf and Don Chadwick (to
look at sitting); Alan Tye (to look at food preparation);
and
Zaccai/Continuum (to look at personal hygiene). Of these, however, only
Continuum’s designs were ever
developed into working models.
Broadly speaking, Continuum followed the by-now familiar model for
ergonomic projects, with a research phase and a prototyping phase, where
products were modeled at full scale and
then refined. (Zaccai confirms that
he and his team—three engineers, two industrial designers, and model
makers—were given more or less a free hand in directing their own
research, testing, and design, though Herman
Miller did check in and did
costings regularly.) But there were important differences in how Zaccai and
Continuum
were operating. Even though they still gathered quantitative
data and drew on expert knowledge, for instance,
they took a less
reverential and more critical approach to them. Based on his previous
experience working for a
medical instrumentation company, Zaccai had
developed a healthy degree of skepticism about the way design briefs
were
formulated, and the level of involvement of experts and market researchers.
He also believed (and continues
to believe) that if the formative design
process is directed by focus groups, designers will be condemned to
reproduce the status quo without real innovation. In his words: “focus
groups don’t really tell you anything
other than what people know” (Zaccai
1995).
Zaccai was hardly the only designer to express doubts about the efficacy
of focus groups. In a dedicated issue of
Design Quarterly from 1973, which
highlighted issues of concern to contemporary designers,
many
interviewees questioned their value. For instance, the industrial designer
Gene Tepper argued that rather
than extracting “intelligence” from users,
interviews were more akin to “tapping here and there with a little
rubber
hammer to elicit reflexes.” He elaborated: “People will very often describe
‘problems’ that are really
only symptoms of the problems.” In the same
issue, Propst expressed caution about letting users completely steer
the
outcomes of projects, noting that “artists and designers must function as
innovators … in stimulating and
responding to changes” (Conway 1973: 33,
37). And interestingly, when first approached about working on Action
Office, George Nelson had expressed reservations about the way in which
Propst was obtaining his data, noting “My own experience with surveys is
that they often get all the information except
the essentials” (Abercrombie
1995: 211).
At first glance, it might appear odd that these important proponents of
user-centered design were resistant to
asking users directly what they
wanted. But the issue was largely a methodological one. None of these
designers
disputed the need for user input, or the benefits of live testing per
se; they were objecting to the way in which
user opinion was solicited
(focus groups and surveys were particularly disliked) and, crucially, the
way in which
designers were being then forced to respond to these findings
by corporate clients and marketing teams. By
refusing to be subject to focus
groups and surveys, these designers were insisting upon, if not their
autonomy,
then their authority to make decisions based upon their own
skills, experience, and insight. They saw themselves
as mediators and
coordinators—“visionary generalists,” in Zaccai’s words—who could sift
through the often
contradictory views of users, marketers, and experts to
define human problems and work out solutions (Zaccai
1995: 6). Only then,
they believed, could innovative and truly useful products be created.

In situ observation and deep empathy

The refusal of these designers to be subject to focus groups and surveys was
important in that it allowed them to
retain their relevance to the design
process and to assert the integrity
of design itself. But methodologically it
posed a challenge. If people do not reliably express their preferences
in
surveys, then what kinds of research can be used to provide evidence of
human needs? One response amongst
these designers was to insist upon in
situ observation, essentially an ethnographic exercise, as people are
observed in their homes, going about their daily routines, and interacting
with their surroundings. This
technique had long been in use by home
economists and is humorously captured in the Swedish film Kitchen Stories
(Bent Hamer 2003). But in contrast to Kitchen Stories, which
depicts
trained domestic observers entering people’s homes, Zaccai and others
believed that designers themselves
should also be the observers. For
MetaForm, Herman Miller facilitated access to one hundred local families,
members of their extended families, and care-givers, allowing Zaccai and
his team to observe their behavior, look
for cues in their surroundings, and
conduct in-depth interviews.
As well as in situ observation, a new emphasis on empathy can also be
seen as a response to the challenge of
identifying human needs. Zaccai
refers repeatedly to empathy as being essential in the design process. “The
designer’s role,” he states, “is to deeply empathize with and give a voice to
all of the diverse people we need
to design for,” and “The Continuum
design process is really about … developing deep empathy for all of its
stakeholders” (Zaccai 1995). Zaccai’s definition of empathy here is broad.
On one level he is using the term in
quite a commonsense way, to refer to a
capacity for identification through personal experience; for instance, he
talks very movingly about how his work with MetaForm coincided with his
own father’s decline, an experience which
fed into and fundamentally
shaped his understanding of the design problem. Specifically, he began to
realize that
purpose-built designs for the elderly were typically shunned,
even by those they were meant to serve, due to
their association with aging
and poor health. To increase levels of acceptance, designs had to
accommodate the
widest possible range of users. As Zaccai observes, “it
wasn’t about ergonomics or making nice forms … we needed
to look at the
points of commonality between the very old and the very, very young”
(Core, Jr. 2001). Producing
transgenerational designs also resulted in a
sounder business model, as by-passing the stigma attached to
geriatric
products increased their market potential.
But, on another level, for Zaccai empathy is clearly also something less
personal and more empirical; it is a
form of research where designers try to
inhabit the physical condition of someone else and, by this means,
understand the emotional, economic, and physiological challenges they
face. This radical inside-out design
approach is exemplified by the research
of the industrial designer Patricia Moore, whom Zaccai enthusiastically
cites. From 1979, for her Masters thesis, Moore, with the help of a make-up
artist and her grandmother’s
wardrobe, dressed up as nine different elderly
women, and traveled throughout the USA and Canada to explore how
the
elderly cope in their daily lives (Moore with Conn 1986). An essential part
of Moore’s three-year project was
the use of binding and prosthetics, which
forced her to take on the physical constraints of the elderly, such as
limited
mobility and blurred vision. While Moore’s was an extreme example, her
technique of inhabiting a user’s
point of view did represent a distinct line of
design thinking in the 1970s. For instance, in an influential 1978
issue of
Progressive Architecture devoted to barrier-free design, one article
reminded
designers that the world looks, sounds, and smells very different
to the elderly, and reproduced a photo that
simulated the deteriorated vision
of an elderly user—literally showing readers how the world looks through
someone else’s eyes (Stephens 1978: 97).
Zaccai’s design for MetaForm ended up as a cross between Cornell’s
more
technocratic approach and the empathic one. To outline the key points
of his design, rather than redesigning
individual fittings or a complete
facility, Zaccai, like Kira, went for a modular approach, designing bathroom
“nodes,” each of which incorporated all the equipment needed to perform a
particular hygiene activity for users
of all ages and abilities. So, the shower
node, for instance, came with a floor drain, support bar/accessory
rail, and
water/ventilation/light column (see Figure 22.1). All nodes were wheelchair
accessible and threshold-free. Most strikingly, sink and
toilet nodes were
height adjustable. The toilet could be raised from nine to twenty-four inches
(approximately
twenty-three to sixty-one centimeters) to accommodate all
sizes of person; a wheelchair user could transfer on to
the toilet at the most
“decorous” height (between nineteen and twenty-one inches; approximately
forty-eight to
fifty-three centimeters) and ride down to a semi-squat
position (see Figure 22.2). After use, the toilet could be rotated
into a wall
cavity where it would be automatically washed and sanitized because,
Zaccai wryly notes, “we didn’t
find anybody of any age that enjoyed
cleaning the toilet” (Zaccai 1995)
Figure
22.1 Working model of MetaForm
shower node, 1988.

Courtesy: Gianfranco Zaccai/Continuum.

Figure
22.2 Working model of MetaForm
toilet node, 1988.

Courtesy: Gianfranco Zaccai/Continuum.

On one level, these designs responded to a close study of physiology.

Consider, for instance, innovations like
the slightly rounded square support
bar which Continuum found accommodated severe arthritis better than a
rounded
bar. In the pursuit of safer and more comfortable products, no
aspect of use was exempt from testing. Rather than
relying on the word of
experts—even those, like Kira, whose work Zaccai admired—or getting
others to act as
guinea pigs, the designers often experimented on
themselves, going to obsessive lengths to pin down some crucial
fact. In
order to test Kira’s assertion that the optimal height for defecation was nine
to eleven inches off the
floor (approximately twenty-three to twenty-eight
centimeters—a low squat), a platform was installed in
Continuum’s
handicapped washroom stall to raise staff to the position he specified. After
trying out the toilet
at its usual and its modified heights, the Continuum
team agreed that Kira’s assertion was correct; they then
turned to a height-
adjustable model to help users obtain the optimal height while still
accommodating the western
preference for sitting. The Continuum team
also fabricated a toilet seat
which supported the ischial tuberosities, as Kira
recommended in The Bathroom, but found
it painful to use and designed a
v-shaped, chamfered model instead.
The centrality of the designer’s own body, experience, and observations
clearly gave him or her more control when
it came to identifying problems
and setting the parameters of the design. Of course, MetaForm did
accommodate
many existing bathroom behaviors, often in inventive and
crowd-pleasing ways. (My favourite feature is the
water/ventilation/light
column that projected light downwards—a sensible way to save women
from half-blindly
shaving their legs.) But, as the example of the toilet
highlights, Zaccai and Continuum refused to be limited to
what was already
known and were prepared to nudge user behavior in different directions if
research suggested it
would benefit health. In keeping with the consumer-
friendly ethos of Herman Miller, however, they were careful
not to be
dogmatic about it and went with designs that allowed an element of choice.
The height-adjustable
toilet, for instance, meant that users did not have to
modify their normal practice in any way if it did not suit
them.
Consumers may have found it harder to ignore another MetaForm toilet
feature, the bidet wand for perineal
cleansing. Would America’s notoriously
bidet-shy users be willing to accept it? Would it sell? It was at this
stage,
once initial concepts were well worked out and full-scale prototypes were
fabricated, that Zaccai let in
the focus groups. This was done for
“corroboration” and to confirm MetaForm’s viability to a potential licensee
from a business perspective. The MetaForm focus groups consisted of
architects, care-givers, elderly people, and
planners developing residential
communities, who not surprisingly appreciated different aspects of the
design.
For instance, the architects and planners were reportedly won over
by the fact that MetaForm allowed existing
spaces to be retrofitted easily
(sadly, their views on the bidet wand are not known). Despite generally rave
responses, however, MetaForm fell down at the last hurdle; although largely
positive, Herman Miller came to the
conclusion that the system was too
ambitious to manufacture and distribute to the plumbing industry, a totally
different market from that of furniture. Thus, one of the most exciting and
comprehensive bathroom redesigns of
the twentieth century was shelved.

Empathy triumphant

The empathic model that began to emerge in the 1970s and 1980s is
intriguing because it was integrally connected
to the desire to create a safer,
healthier, and more inclusive environment—a desire which emerged from
the civil
rights movements and the consumer rights movement spear-headed
by Ralph Nader. The turn to empathy also emerged
as a powerful strategy
for critiquing the dominant architectural and design culture. Pat Moore’s
radical
experiment has been attributed to her frustration with being one of
the only female designers at Raymond Loewy’s
office and always being
shushed when she tried to raise safety issues (Westbrook 2010). In Moore’s
case, empathic
research, which resulted in empirical evidence about the
impact of aging, was a way of countering a patriarchal
work culture and of
legitimizing her own user-centered approach.4
In its important issue on barrier-free design, Progressive Architecture
also explicitly
linked empathic models to postmodern efforts to overcome
the “dehumanizing effects” of modernism (Stephens 1978: 95). To drive
home this link, the editors published significant
examples of postmodern
designs for people with disabilities. These included Stanley Tigerman’s
Illinois Regional
Library for the Blind and Physically Handicapped in
Chicago, and a house designed by Charles Moore and Richard B.
Oliver for
a partially sighted client. While these designs were no less formalist than
their modernist forebears,
the need to accommodate non-standard users
resulted in more complex and sensorially rich spaces, something that
these
architects embraced as a virtue. And seeing how these enfants terribles of
postmodern architecture engaged with accessible design also undermines
the idea that postmodern architecture’s
defining characteristics were always
ambivalence, surface irony, and formal game-playing.
 The empathic design model continues to thrive today, not least in the
work of Tigerman who now runs Archeworks in
Chicago, a group devoted
to exploring issues of aging and disability. It is also evident in the work of
Michael
Graves, whose designs for homes for injured soldiers were
informed by his personal experience of paralysis.
Graves also insisted that
any of his employees who were working on healthcare problems spend
several weeks in a
wheelchair to develop a Moore-like inside-out
understanding of the challenges facing people with disabilities
(Dobson
2012). Even if one questions how deep the resulting insight into disability
goes, it is hard to object to
this sort of exercise, which is unlikely to do
harm and may actually do good. It has certainly done the design
profession
good; apart from anything else, empathy has been very effective at restoring
relevance, authority, and
prestige to design, and to the figure of the designer
especially. For, in a scenario where it is accepted that
users do not reliably
articulate their wants, empathy has ensured that designers become extra
significant as
mediators and interpreters, their observations and flashes of
insight essential to deciphering and responding to
human needs in a
complex world.

Notes

 
I would like to most sincerely thank Gianfranco Zaccai, Founder, President and Chief Design Officer
of Continuum,
who answered my questions about MetaForm with generosity, care, and patience. His
elaborations were crucial to
developing this argument. Unless otherwise attributed, all quotes from
Zaccai come from our e-mail correspondence
of September 17, 2014, a follow-up e-mail from
November 17, 2014, and a final fact-check on February 4, 2015.
Thanks also to Allison Ryder and
Zoe Nageotte who facilitated our conversations.

1 Speaking of the context of the mid-eighties,

Penny Sparke notes that designers in the United
Kingdom, supported by Margaret Thatcher, were being resurrected
as “heroes” of consumer
culture (Sparke 2014: 212). Key design historians of this period who sought to counter
this
portrayal are Sparke, Adrian Forty, and Judy Attfield amongst others.
2 Berger does also suggest that ergonomic
research gave rise to empathic research, although he
presents the former rather simplistically (mainly as a means
of improving the interaction between
humans and advanced technology), and attributes the rise of the latter to a
different set of actors:
psychologist Jane Fulton Suri and the design firm IDEO (Berger 2009: 99–125). He
overplays the
originality of IDEO’s method, claiming that from the time it was set up in 1991, it “began to
reinvent the whole process of studying consumers” (ibid. 111), a process that was in fact well
underway by the
1970s and 1980s. He also does not acknowledge that empathic research
emerged as much as a response to
disciplinary and social pressures as to commercial ones.
 Other experts consulted included Michigan
State psychologists Terry Allen and Carl Frost, and
3 Robert Sumner who studied the link between environment and
mental health (Abercrombie 1995:
211).
4 It should be noted, however, that Moore
herself downplays this feeling of marginalization, noting
merely that Raymond Loewy supported her desire to take
a leave of absence to study
biomechanics and gerontology (Moore with Conn 1986: 13–14).

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Sparke, P. (2014) “Objects,” in Iain Borden, Murray Fraser, and Barbara Penner (eds), Forty
Ways of
Thinking about Architecture, London: John Wiley & Sons, pp. 210–13.
Stephens, S. (1978) “Hidden barriers: the social, psychological and physiological factors which
impinge upon
the awareness of the handicapped, the elderly and the rest of society in experiencing
architecture,” Progressive Architecture 59 (4): 94–7.
Twemlow, A. (2009) “I can’t talk to you if you say that: an ideological collision at the International
Design
Conference at Aspen, 1970,” Design and Culture 1 (1): 23–50.
Westbrook, L. (2010) “Patricia Moore: Universal Designer, Undercover,” January 29,
www.cca.edu/news/2010/patricia-moore-universal-designer-undercover (Accessed 25/11/2014).
Zaccai, G. (1995) “Art and Technology: Aesthetics Redefined,” in Richard Buchanan and Victor
Margolin (eds),
Discovering Design: Explorations in Design Studies, Chicago: The University of
Chicago
Press.
 23

HOW PRODUCTS SATISFY NEEDS

BEYOND THE FUNCTIONAL
Empathy supporting consumer–product
relationships
 
Deana McDonagh
 

Introduction

Design is beginning to be viewed as an important value proposition within

the context of business, thanks to
companies such as Apple Computers and
OXO Good Grips™ that have managed to satisfy consumers beyond the
functional. Apple Computers sell lifestyle convenience through intuitive
interfaces, and have managed to bridge
the gap between technology and the
lived experience. OXO Good Grips™ have introduced an assistive
technology that
does not carry a stigma. Millions of consumers benefit from
Good Grips™ products without necessarily realizing
they were initially
inspired by and designed for people with arthritis. If such products were sold
as assistive
technology items (disability aids) it is extremely unlikely that
they would have become so ubiquitous.
Good design tends to produce seamless consumer experiences that can go
unnoticed. It satisfies the consumer both
functionally and emotionally in a
way that feels “designed just for me.” When a person experiences a negative
interaction with a product, they can feel frustrated, angry, and disappointed.
A typical example is “misreading”
the visual cues of a door. If you push the
door instead of pulling it, the experience is not only confusing but
can leave
you blaming yourself rather than challenging the integrity and clarity of the
product. Good design can
go unnoticed, but bad design can really stand out.
As we age and/or develop disabilities, it becomes more
critical that we are
able to open basic food packaging and medicine containers without undue
difficulty.
The environments in which we live, work, and play have a significant
impact upon our ability to complete tasks,
our health, our wellbeing, our
personal senses, our independence, and ultimately our quality of life. The
importance of ensuring we fill our personal space with products that
contribute positively to our lived
experience cannot be overstated. For
example, the confidence and ability to perform even basic tasks can diminish
for anyone who has struggled with basic food packaging, or with a television
remote control, because of poor
design. With increased numbers of older
people within our population it is becoming more important than ever to
ensure the material landscape supports aging at home and
independent
living. If we find our homes too challenging it could result in our being
relocated to another living
facility (e.g. assisted living, residential home),
which can be traumatic. Aging in place refers to ensuring that
our homes
accommodate our changing needs as we age, such that we remain
independent for as long as possible. The
aging population is both a challenge
and an opportunity that will require designers to extend their toolkit to
beyond that of a stylist.

Changing role of designers

Robert Verganti has highlighted that “people do not buy products but
meaning [sic]” (Verganti 2009: 4). Functionality alone will not generate a
competitive advantage within the
current experience economy. The role of
designers is no longer that of stylists. Traditionally designers have
received
consumer data and information (e.g. marketing intelligence reports and
human factors measurement data).
With the shift toward products satisfying
both functional and supra-functional needs, consumers are seeking
experiences, more product meaning, and an emotional connection with
products. Emotional sustainability refers to
consumers developing deeper
bonds with their material possessions, so that they are less likely to dispose
of
and/or replace them. Without an emotional connection, products can be
treated as disposable. The designer’s role
has become that of a bridge
between emerging technologies, lived experience, and the envisioned future
experiences of real people. With this subtle but significant shift in
responsibility toward the consumer,
empathic design research has become an
essential part of a designer’s toolkit (skill set).

Material landscape

Deborah Cohen’s book Household Gods: The British and Their Possessions
(2006) provides a
cultural history of how, in nineteenth-century Britain,
home environments were thought to denote status,
morality, wealth, and
personality. Cohen claims that, historically, men and then women dominated
interior
decoration. In today’s socio-cultural climate it tends to be a more
shared domain. What we fill our home
environments with matters, therefore
(Cohen 2006). Products can symbolize our successes, status, age, culture,
and education. Table 23.1 highlights Riggins’s “Socialness of Objects”
(1994), their meaning
for the consumer (use categories), and the significance
of the ways in which products are positioned physically
within our home
environments. Display syntax refers to the way in which we place objects
(e.g. clustered photos
of family and friends), and often conceal objects (e.g.
anti-dandruff shampoo). Our home environments provide us
with the
opportunity to highlight prized possessions and present ourselves to others,
however aspirationally.
Products can have different meanings for consumers
throughout their lives, and being able to categorize and
identify priorities for
the consumer is a significant part of understanding supra-functional needs.
Designers
need to be sensitive and receptive to the ways in which products
are presented and displayed, while also being
mindful of what is not visible
(e.g. stigma products). Values can be better understood within the context of
the
consumer’s home environment. Loyalty to particular sports teams, for
example, may not immediately be apparent during initial conversations with
people, yet color schemes in their home
may be determined by their team’s
color scheme.
Building on Riggins’s categories and display syntax, Table 23.2
introduces the concept of
technology. Within the past twenty years
technology has impacted on how we communicate, how we work, and how
we
carry out daily tasks. It is embedded throughout our material landscape.
The designer plays a crucial role in transforming technology into products
that will be positively received by
consumers.
Table
23.1 Categories
Micro-sociology of objects and
display syntax.
of objects

categories of possessions
and their meaning to the
individual
Intended use Bread knife for slicing bread
Unintended use Cleaning toothbrushes in dishwasher
Status objects Sports car
Esteem objects Trophy
Collective objects Sports memorabilia
Stigma objects Marital aids, condoms, anti-dandruff shampoo
Inauthentic objects Fake antiques, unread books
Social facilitators Board games, playing cards
Occupational objects Plumbers’ tools, academic books
Indigenous objects Illinois corn, Nottingham lace
Exotic African masks
Time indicators Newspaper, retro-style wall clock
Display syntax

the way possessions are

displayed in relation to one
another
Co-location Kitchen tools in the kitchen, household tools in the garage
Highlighting Trophies or certificates
Understating Possessions below or above eye level
Clustering Family photographs, wedding china, or jewelry
Dispersing Plants or scented candles located throughout the home
Status consistency Coordinated furniture and furnishings
Status inconsistency Eclectic collection of crockery and cutlery
Degree of conformity Style, color, and proportions of objects
Flavor Ultra-modern floor rug or conservative wallpaper
Source: Based on Riggins (1994).

Table
23.2 Building on the categories
of objects from Riggins’s “Fieldwork in the living room: An
Technologyautoethnographic essay” (1994).
Traditional (more established) Laptops, desktop computers
Emerging Integrated software to manage finances

Imbedding sensors under the human skin

Computer imbedded Refrigerators providing audit of food contained within

Automobile management systems

Wearable Pedometers and heart monitors
Monitoring Home security camera system including baby monitors
Screening Smart toilets (screening feces and urine)
Robots Roomba

David Wolfe and Robert Synder have identified “four seasons of life”
(2003: 126) in terms of consumption.
Considering these stages of life in
terms of the relationships individuals have with their material landscapes is
important:

• Childhood (spring) is a time of learning about oneself and

others, and
gathering a relatively small cluster of personal possessions. Children
tend to be consumers of
products rather than customers.
• Early adulthood (summer) focuses on developing an identity
distinctive
from childhood. This is often the stage when individuals become more
sensitive to their material
possessions as a means of expressing
themselves. The individual at this stage is engaged in primary material
acquisition as both consumer and customer.
• Middle adulthood (fall) signifies a slowing down of
acquisition and an
emphasis on possessions offering deeper meanings.
• Later adulthood (winter) is the final stage and there tends to
be an
emphasis on a reduction of possessions, also known as downsizing.

Though there is personal variance between the stages, generally speaking

over the typical life span we carry
fewer possessions toward later adulthood
compared with early adulthood, and their value and meaning can deepen.

Empathic horizon

Focusing on the needs of consumers is not a new concept in itself, but what
is shifting is the way in which
designers are becoming originators of data
and how they transform that data into design-relevant information.
Consumer-centered design does not only require skills (e.g. listening) and
resources (e.g. time), it also relies
upon the level of a designer’s experience,
understanding, and insight. The empathic horizon acknowledges that the
way in which we perceive the world is shaped by the way in which we have
experienced it (Denton and McDonagh
2003). This can be a barrier if design
experts perceive themselves as intuitively understanding the needs of the
consumer without necessarily developing empathic insight and awareness.
Designers rarely, if ever, design
products for people “just like them” and so
expanding their empathic horizon becomes critical in enabling them to
understand their target consumers. Humans are complex, and our functional
and supra-functional needs are dynamic,
non-static, and ever changing.
Applying empathic design methods has proven to be a valuable strategy in
supporting more appropriate design outcomes, especially when the consumer
experience is outside that of the
designer’s.
Benjamin Cuff et al. (2016) have cited forty-three definitions of empathy,
and acknowledge
there are probably as many definitions as there are people
writing about empathy (Decety and Jackson 2006; de
Vignemont and Singer
2006). As in the designing process, in problem solving, and in design
thinking, there are
prescriptive methods that work for all design projects.
Design is a relatively new discipline (Nelson and
Stolterman 2012), and, as a
community, designers are accustomed to borrowing and adapting research
techniques
from other disciplines (e.g. human factors, psychology,
anthropology). Equally, it is important that they appreciate the complexity of
emotional needs and the varying depths of
empathic understanding of others.
Empathy is not only about putting oneself in another’s shoes (Spiegelberg
1975); rather the fact of stepping outside one’s own empathic horizon shapes
one’s view of the world and allows
one to “attempt to see the world through
their eyes” (Finlay 2005: 278).

Empathic understanding

Empathic understanding is gained by “entering the private perceptual world

of the other and becoming thoroughly
at home in it” (Rogers 1975: 4). Table
23.3 introduces different depths of empathy that can
be created when
engaging with others. Finlay encourages designers to apply empathic design
research approaches,
beginning with observing (connecting), mirroring
(acting), and finally the deep dive (merging). If introduced
early in the
design curriculum in an educational context, and/or early in the process in
design practice,
empathic design can become an integrated part of problem
identification through to design solution.
Table
23.3 Based onDesigner/consumer
Empathic depth the three
different but coexisting dimensions
Example of empathy.
of activities
empathic distance
Connecting-of The Other’s embodiment to This may involve the designer shadowing a
our own person in order to further understand ‘the day in
the life of’ the individual. They may observe
everyday activities, paying particular
attention
to behavior, facial expressions, how long tasks
take, and general mood.
Acting-into The Other’s bodily This may involve the designer conducting
experience empathic modeling in which they try to
simulate the
experience of the person by
limiting their hand strength and dexterity, if
they were trying to gain insight
into arthritis.
Equally they may role play, and begin to
respond to situations in ‘character’ as if they
were
the person.
Merging-with The Other’s bodily This more immersed level where the designer is
experience becoming one with the person in their daily
experiences may require a more prolonged time
scale (e.g. spending 7 days using a wheelchair
if they aim to
do a deep dive). This is a more
intense approach, over a longer period, which
often generates a deeper and
richer
understanding of the person.
Source: Finlay (2005).

There is much to gain from designers going outside their comfort zones to
embrace the normality of doing things differently. By observing others, it
becomes immediately clear that, as
individuals, we carry out similar tasks in
different ways. When you reflect on the last time you watched someone
else
brush their teeth or cook, it becomes clear that we consider our way of
completing tasks as “the norm” and
everyone else’s as deviating from that
norm. As designers, recognizing the multiple ways in which any one task
can be completed is key to gaining an empathic understanding of others.

Empathic design research activities

Engaging with a product that feels as if it was not designed for you (e.g. the
size and scale are not appropriate
to your hand) can be off-putting compared
with the delight of discovering a product that feels designed
just for you.
Designers need to get closer to the consumer to help develop products that
not only meet needs but anticipate emerging needs.

For advocates of design empathy, designers must not only be

informed and inspired by consumers, but also be
able to observe and
feel for the consumers.
(Kwok-Leung Ho et al. 2011: 96)

Table 23.4 highlights a selection of activities the designer (design team) can
take part in
to support their designing process. The activities vary in the
amount of time, skill, and resources required.
Empathic modeling is a means
through which we inhabit the experience of
another person. Nothing can
replace the lived experience of the individual for whom the product is being
designed. These activities require relatively limited resources and will
generate empathy, insight, and
understanding that will lead to more creative
and appropriate design solutions.

Table 23.4 Empathic

designOutcome
Activity activities Visual
Restricting mobility of This is a no-risk activity that stiffens and limits
arms and legs the mobility of arms and legs. Such
activity
affects and impacts macro movement (e.g.
eating, dressing, and walking with a natural
gait).
Restricting hand This activity provides rapid immersion into the
dexterity and mobility challenges if a person has any limited hand
strength and/or dexterity. Such activity affects
and impacts micro hand movements, gestures,
and ability to
complete tasks (e.g. texting on
phone).
Visibility goggles This activity provides a rapid experience of
impaired vision. The goggles can be produced
using paper and safety glasses for a low
technology tool. More expensive products are
commercially available
that simulate
concussion, eye fatigue, and intoxication (drug
and alcohol).

Graham Pullin (2009) makes it clear that the only way to understand the
experience of another is to experience
what they are going through, which,
in turn, influences the mindset of the designer. From exploring activities
within relatively private environments (e.g. inside the classroom or the
design studio) the next stage would be
to shadow individuals within their
particular environments, which could then lead to the designer conducting
empathic modeling in more public spaces (e.g. what does it “feel” like to be
fed by someone else in a
restaurant?). Such explorations can lead to problem
identification.

Embedding empathic design approaches in the design

curriculum

The University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign has a large population of

students with disabilities, with between
eighty and a hundred wheelchair
users within a typical semester. These students function highly academically,
yet
may face physical or cognitive challenges. Experiencing the world
differently through the eyes and minds of the
non-typical user/consumer
offers significant opportunities for designers. Individuals who cannot reach,
cannot
walk, or cannot see can be very creative in the ways in which they
navigate and organize the material world
around them.
The author has integrated empathic design approaches into the curriculum
of the Industrial Design degree program
at Illinois and offers a specialist
course (Disability + Relevant Design) that brings students with disabilities
together with other design students in a collaborative situation. The students
with disabilities mirror the
emerging aging population. They provide an
essential contact for their peers as they complete tasks and engage
with the
material landscape differently.
Opening up courses and degree programs to students who may never have
considered design as a career option
enriches the experience of all involved.
Inviting speakers to share their lived experiences also becomes a real
and
relevant source for students and enables them to begin to develop a deeper
understanding of others. One
speaker spoke about himself as a teenager who
was trying out for College-level football. After a sporting injury
left him
paralyzed he had to reinvent himself. Our own developing needs as
individuals cannot always be foreseen,
and design students need to be
sensitive to that.
Recently, forty students, mainly industrial design students and five non-
design students with disabilities, were
required to create a self-portrait using
their feet. For the design students, their identity is based on their
ability to
draw. The non-design students may not be able to use their hands. This
activity offered a level
playing field for the whole group. The portraits
created by all the students were of a high level (see Figure 23.1). One
student, who has difficulty
holding a pencil, had not drawn in six years and
found the experience reminded her of how much drawing relaxed
her. The
design students were proud of their own efforts and amazed at how they
were able to complete the task. A
“new normal” was experienced by
everyone in the class.

Figure
23.1 Self portraits drawn using
only feet.

In addition to inclusive courses such as Disability + Relevant Design, the

Industrial Design program at the
University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign
has graduated its first Masters student who is legally blind, and the
first
undergraduate student who is in a wheelchair. The student group as a whole
benefits from diversity and its
growing concept of normality.

Conclusion
As we become more discerning as consumers and shift toward owning fewer
products that hold more meaning for us,
empathically designed products that
satisfy needs beyond the functional will become the standard. As a design
community we can no longer assume our users will be able-bodied or will
use products in ways envisaged by the
designers. The emerging consumer
base is changing and designers need to meet both the functional and the
emotional needs of all consumers. Not only will more empathically designed
objects respond to needs, they will
also contribute to a positive and
empowering material landscape for everyone.
Designers will probably be designing for people with different needs,
abilities, and aspirations, and the ability
to empathize with people during
product development will be a critical skill to ensure products satisfy both
functional and emotional needs. As we strive toward having fewer products
in our homes, but products with more
meaning for individuals, people’s
changing requirements need to be anticipated throughout the various life
stages. Designers have an opportunity to enable, engage, and empower
individuals through their material
landscapes.

References

Deborah Cohen (2006) Household Gods: The British and Their Possessions, New Haven: Yale
University Press.
Benjamin M. P. Cuff, Sarah J. Brown, Laura Taylor and Douglas J. Howat (2016) “Empathy: a review
of the
concept.” Emotion Review, 8(2): 144–53.
Frederique de Vignemont and Tania Singer (2006) “The empathic brain: how, when and why?” Trends
in Cognitive Sciences, 10: 435–41.
Jean Decety and Philip L. Jackson (2006) “The functional architecture of human empathy.”
Behavioural and Cognitive Neuroscience Reviews, 3: 71–100.
Howard Denton and Deana McDonagh (2003) “Using focus group methods to improve students’
design project research
in schools: drawing parallels from action research at undergraduate level.”
International
Journal of Technology and Design Education, 13(2): 129–44.
Linda Finlay (2005) “Reflexive embodied empathy: a phenomenology of participant–researcher
intersubjectivity.”
The Humanistic Psychologist, 33(4): 271–92.
Denny Kwok-Leung Ho, Jin Ma and Yanki Lee (2011) “Empathy @ design research: a
phenomenological study on young
people experiencing participatory design for social inclusion.”
CoDesign, 7(2): 95–106.
Harold G. Nelson and Erik Stolterman (2012) The Design Way: Intentional Change in an
Unpredictable World, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
Graham Pullin (2009) Design Meets Disability, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
Stephen Harold Riggins (1994) “Fieldwork in the living room: an autoethnographic essay,” in The
Socialness of Things: Essays on the Socio-Semiotics of Objects, ed. Stephen Harold Riggins,
Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter: 101–47.
Carl Rogers (1975) “Empathic: an unappreciated way of being.” The Counseling
Psychologist, 5: 2–
10.
Herbert Spiegelberg (1975) Doing Phenomenology: Essays on and in Phenomenology, The
Hague:
Martinus Nijhoff.
Robert Verganti (2009) Design-Driven Innovation: Changing the Rules of Competition by
Radically
Innovating What Things Mean, Boston, Mass.: Harvard Business Review.
David Wolfe and Robert E. Snyder (2003) Ageless Marketing: Strategies for Reaching the Hearts
and
Minds of the New Customer, Dearborn, Chicago: Majority.
 24

REFASHIONING DISABILITY
The case of Painted Fabrics Ltd., 1915 to 1959
Joseph McBrinn
 
 

Introduction

In 1972 a fire at Wentworth, home to one of Britain’s most eminent

aristocratic families, the Fitzwilliams,
“burnt for three weeks” and consumed
some “sixteen tons of the Fitzwilliams’ correspondence” (Bailey 2008: 11).
Counted amongst the losses were the private papers of Lady Maud, who had
married Billy, the seventh Earl
Fitzwilliam in 1902, and who is remembered
as both a fashionable hostess of Edwardian and inter-war society and a
self-
styled Lady Bountiful. A few of her letters, however, have survived and are
now deposited in the Sheffield
Archives. Amongst these is a letter written in
1945 to her friend Annie Bindon Carter, in which the Countess
Fitzwilliam
records her regret that Painted Fabrics Ltd., a textile business founded by
Carter some years
earlier, seemed to be “coming practically, to an end.” In
the letter she recalled not only that “The curtains
still hang at Wentworth, &
here, my bedspread to match, all of which you made [for] me,” and “What
happy days
they were the exhibitions at Wentworth & 4 Grosvenor Square &
then at Claridge’s & my court train, to
which [the] Princess Royal drew the
King’s attention as I went past all very merry & delightful,” but also
the
“many ‘Lives’ you have made happy, who, without you, would have been so
sad & [had] no interest left,
with nothing to do or look forward to.” Carter,
as the Countess Fitzwilliam intimated, had desired to transform
the lives of
her workers by “accomplishing & producing something truly worthwhile”
(PF/5/2 February 2, 1945).
Founded in Sheffield thirty years previous to this letter, Painted Fabrics
Ltd. was one of the many charitable
organizations set up in the wake of the
First World War in Britain to help severely disabled soldiers back to
employment. Since 1939, due to falling sales, it had been on hiatus and
Carter had grave concerns about its
future. Although Carter had argued that
Painted Fabrics had been central in transforming public perceptions of
“the
handicapped,” as the inter-war years drew to a close the disability of the men
seemed to have expended its
one-time fashionability and the decision was
made to downplay its visibility.1 The company would, in the end, struggle on
through the 1940s and 1950s but would never again
recapture anything like
the success it sustained throughout the 1920s and early 1930s, when design
and disability
momentarily coalesced in the production of luxury objects
fetishized and commoditized to salve the conscience and
curiosity of a
privileged and aristocratic elite.
The Countess Fitzwilliam was not alone in praising Annie Bindon Carter
as both founder and driving force behind
Painted Fabrics. Following the
official opening of new premises for the company’s Sheffield workshop in
the
summer of 1925, Princess Mary, who became the official patron, wrote
to Carter admiring her determined
“inspiration” in setting up such a laudable
enterprise (PF/5/2 August 9, 1925). Painted Fabrics was, however, far
from
unique. It was one of a number of private charitable organizations that were
created to support the mass of
soldiers who survived the First World War
with an unprecedented range of horrifying physical and psychological
wounds. It is estimated that approximately 1,640,000 British servicemen
were injured during the war and of these
750,000 were discharged with
permanent disabilities (Bourke 1996: 54; Cohen 2001: 4). Unlike other
countries that
sought to support their disabled ex-servicemen through a
network of state and charitable initiatives, the British
government largely
abdicated responsibility for all but the most basic material and economic
welfare of such men.
Instead, upon returning to civilian life disabled ex-
servicemen in Britain struggled, and often failed, to
reintegrate and recover
the social, cultural, and economic positions they had left behind, such was
the severity
of their disabilities.
It is estimated that in Britain during the First World War over ten thousand
charities were founded to assist its
veterans (Prochaska 1995: 176). Some six
thousand of these were dedicated to the disabled (Cohen 2000: 296). Like
many of the workshops and employment schemes established during and
after the war, Painted Fabrics partook of the
pervasive idea of design as a
necessity for individual, and national, healing—more specifically of craft as
curative work in which the making of things became fundamental to a
process of convalescence, rehabilitation, and
reintegration. The idea came to
Carter, a Nottingham-born designer who had trained at the Sheffield School
of Art
and the Royal College of Art, during 1915 whilst she volunteered
teaching art classes to convalescing soldiers at
Wharncliffe War Hospital
(formerly the South Yorkshire and West Riding Asylum), just northwest of
Sheffield. The
story was often recounted to journalists:

One man, who had lost three-quarters of his right arm and his left
hand, looked on miserably, yet it was he
who, under the guidance of
Mrs. Carter, was instrumental in launching the fashion for painted
dresses, a
fashion which grew so that in one year 2,800 were sold.
Strapping an old shaving brush to the stump of his left
arm, Mrs.
Carter taught him to stencil. Later she substituted silk and other
materials for paper, and had them
made into tea-cosies and cushion
covers and sold them to her friends.
(PF/4/3/1 June 8, 1933)

By the end of the war Carter had trained seven men and decided to carry on
her work by finding premises in a
“poor part of Sheffield.” This developed
into a model village for fifty disabled men, and their families,
“producing
hand-patterned furnishing and dress goods, ecclesiastical work, and stage
curtains and hangings, by
means of hand-stencilling, screen printing, block
printing, and spray printing.” It was noted that of men
employed (this never
reached beyond sixty) there were “only 56 undamaged arms and 50
undamaged legs between
them,” and the catalogue of injuries included
“amputated legs, amputated arms, spinal wounds, paralysis,” as well
as “fits,
seizures, neurasthenia, epilepsy, [and] severe nerve trouble” (PF 7/4/3/1 List;
IWM 38(41).656). In formally setting up the company in 1918, aside from
£976 6s. raised by public appeal, capital
was put up by Carter’s husband,
who owned a chemist business, and two of
Sheffield’s steel manufacturers
(PF/2/2 BCM, May 27, 1918; PF/2/5 AR undated).
Carter’s ideas were ambitious from the start. In May 1918 at the first
convening of its business committee to
discuss the company name and
trademark, it was suggested that both Selfridges and Harrods be approached
as
possible distributors. Carter was also acutely aware of the need for the
press to attract customers: “For the
purpose of publicity it was agreed that
the names of the entire Committee should be used and that the executive
committee should be ‘Starred’!” (PF/2/2 BCM, May 12, 1921). In 1926,
Countess Fitzwilliam became the first
honorary member of the executive
committee. This appeal to aristocratic benevolence to help rescue the
disabled
veteran from penury Carter herself termed a blend of “sob stuff and
snob appeal” (Carter quoted in McClarence
2014). Like many similar
charities Painted Fabrics was self-supporting. It received no government
grant for
training or capital expenses such as machinery—although the men
were entitled to a small statutory pension, which
topped up their meagre
thirty shillings a week wage. When the firm was officially closed in early
1959 there were
twelve widows of First World War veterans and seven of the
original men left, and four new men disabled during
the Second World War.
What differentiated Painted Fabrics from other design businesses that
employed disabled soldiers in inter-war
Britain, and how are we to interpret
its history and its meaning beyond bare facts?2 Annie Delin has suggested
that such “invisible disabled creators/artists” are often harder to
locate and
appreciate as “The absence of disabled people as creators of arts, in images
and in artefacts, and
their presence in selected works reinforcing cultural
stereotypes, conspire to present a narrow perspective of
the existence of
disability in history” (Delin 2002: 84). In some ways Painted Fabrics
operated at the interface
of the two competing models of interpreting
disability: the medical model, which sees disability as a physical or
pathological defect that needs to be treated, cured, corrected, repaired, or
eradicated; and the social model,
which sees disability, like able-bodiness, as
constructed by social, political, and economic forces operating in
a network
of power relations that legitimize, validate, and stabilize hegemonic notions
of embodiment and
identity. As Tobin Siebers has argued, disability has
increasingly come to be understood as “not a physical or
mental defect but a
cultural minority identity,” and a subject position akin to gender, class, and
race (Siebers
2008: 4). In her study of the tropes of disability in aspects of
cultural production, such as fiction writing,
Rosemarie Garland Thomson
has further suggested:

Unlike the ethnically grouped, but more like gays and lesbians,
disabled people are sometimes fundamentally
isolated from each
other, existing often as aliens within their social units … Yet
representation frequently
obscures these complexities in favor of the
rhetorical or symbolic potential of the prototypical disabled
figure,
 who often functions as a lightening rod for pity, fear, discomfort,
guilt, or sense of normalcy in the
reader.
(Garland Thomson 1997: 15)

Although much path-breaking work has been done on the symbolic function
of the disabled character in literature
and the reclamation of disabled agency
in contemporary art, there remains no available research on disabled
people
as design practitioners (Garland Thomson 1997; Crutchfield and Epstein
2000; Millett-Gallant 2000; and
Siebers 2010). Any writing about design’s
relation to disability tends to emanate from an able-bodied
position that
appears unable, or unwilling, to engage with disability as
anything beyond
an infantilized stereotype of passivity and dependency. The use of craft as a
form of
occupational therapy for a whole range of disabilities, a stereotype
in itself, has surprisingly generated almost
no discourse—even though
Sharon Snyder and David Mitchell have pointed out that throughout
disability history
“Commodity and therapy would endlessly overlap”
(Snyder and Mitchell 2006: 62).3
An orthodox design studies approach to researching Painted Fabrics might
begin by: situating the company in a
canonical framework of design; or
perhaps reassessing it in the context of inter-war textiles and fashion; or
reconsidering it through the lens of feminism and the career of Annie Bindon
Carter, or of the other women
designers employed in the workshop such as
Edith Jagger; or indeed picking at the sticky issues of gender, class,
or race
by thinking through inter-war philanthropy as extending the Victorian
fashion of “slumming.” However, for
the remainder of this chapter I suggest
we approach Painted Fabrics differently, from a disabled perspective.
From
here all sorts of new lines of questioning might open up. For example, what
did the men who worked at
Painted Fabrics make of being looked at during
the displays and sales of their work in the lavish settings of
Wentworth,
Grosvenor Square, and Claridge’s? What did it mean to work with a tactile
medium, such as painted or
printed fabric, or hand-make clothes, if you had
lost an arm or had no hands? And what did it feel like to be
working in a
company that utilized the same language of affect employed by Victorian
charities? To be clear,
though, I am not suggesting we simply transpose some
of the most compelling ideas from disability studies, such
as the use of
disability in a narrative as a kind of prosthesis, or marker of aesthetic
nervousness, on to design
history (Mitchell and Snyder 2000: 49; Quayson
2007: 15 and 25). Rather, an interrogation of how disability was
refashioned
in inter-war Britain to suit a variety of patrons and purposes—from the
perspective of the
often-silent subaltern (and here I am also thinking of the
example of postcolonial studies and Queer
Theory)—might enable us to
expose, problematize, and possibly destabilize, ideas about the regulation
and
normativization of design in Western capitalist societies that continues
to stigmatize, marginalize, and exclude
the disabled.

Looking

Rosemarie Garland Thomson has argued that “The history of disabled

people in the Western world is part of the
history of being on display, of
being visually conspicuous while politically and socially erased” (Garland
Thomson 2002: 56). Complicit in this history is the use of photography—
perceived since its invention in the
nineteenth century as a scientific record
of truth and realism (Garland Thomson 2000: 335). However, in modern
industrialized society, as Elspeth Brown has shown, photography became a
way “to anchor truth in claims about
individual character and efficiency
through an analysis of workers’ subjectivities, both corporeal and
psychological” (Brown 2005: 4). During the 1920s photography would
become an essential feature in the promotion
of Painted Fabrics. In 1926,
following the General Strike, the company made a considerable loss of £730
14s. 8d.,
and there was much discussion of how to bolster sales (PF/2/2 MPF
June 14, 1927). After the strike the
Fitzwilliams, as owners of over one
hundred local collieries and thought to be Britain’s richest family, quickly
transferred their “near-feudal sense of obligation” from the miners to
charities such as Painted Fabrics (Bailey
2008: 265). The Countess
Fitzwilliam ceased to tour the pit villages in the afternoons dispensing alms
from a
chauffeur-driven yellow Rolls Royce, and threw open the doors of
Wentworth, the largest privately owned house in Britain, and their Mayfair
mansion for Painted Fabrics
exhibitions, sales, and fashion shows.
These quickly grew into major events and, after 1930, were often held in
the new ballroom at Claridge’s hotel. In
the private view of the 1932
exhibition the press recorded there was “never such a gathering of
distinguished
people at any previous exhibition … The room was filled and
one saw on all sides so many ‘fashionable’ women that
it might have been”
the major event of the Season, and they joked that the “tableau of fashion in
which beautiful
Society girls acted as mannequins” looked like someone had
illustrated Debrett’s (PF/4/3/1
June 9, 1932). Women’s bodies became
central here for the display of Painted Fabrics designs (in iridescent
silks,
georgette, and crêpe-de-chine) in a visceral conflation of ghostly beauty born
of horrifying corporeal
suffering. At one point Countess Fitzwilliam had a
court train “stencilled for her in exquisite colours and
charming designs”
(PF/4/3/1 July 8, 1937) by the Painted Fabrics men, reviving a performative
form of
philanthropy popular amongst Victorian aristocrats (for this see
Helland 2007).
However, originally the disabled men’s bodies had been placed center
stage. In 1929, for instance, for a planned
royal visit to the Sheffield
workshop, Annie Bindon Carter circulated a memo making it clear that for
publicity
purposes they needed to limit the presentation of the people
“entirely to the disabled ex-service men” (PF/3/7
December 2, 1929). A
press photograph from the 1920s of “Three Typical Examples of the Men
Employed by ‘Painted
Fabrics’” makes explicit the significance of the men’s
bodies (see Figure 24.1). Described
as “types” the photograph shows, from
left to right, W.T. [Taffy] Llewellyn in the wheelchair, Billy Whitham in
the
center who is standing supported by a brace, and Arthur Fisher on the right,
who is standing without use of
his prosthetic legs. As an image of the war
disabled, purposely made for advertising, it deflects from the actual
work of
the men and instead redirects our gaze to a way of seeing disability in terms
of its otherness—a process
David Hevey has termed “enfreakment” (Hevey
1992: 53–74; 1997: 367–78). As an image it differs very little from
the
medicalized photographs of veterans receiving occupational therapy in
books published during the war, such as
The Work of Our Hands: A Study of
Occupations for Invalids (1915), Handicrafts for the Handicapped (1917),
or Reconstructing the Crippled
Soldier (1918) (Bogdan 2012: 2). Rosemarie
Garland Thomson has further contended that such images enable us
to see
that:

pictures choreograph a social dynamic of looking, suggesting that

disability is not simply a natural state of
bodily inferiority and
inadequacy. Rather, it is a culturally fabricated narrative of the body,
similar to what
we understand as the fictions of race and gender.
Disability, then, is a system that produces subjects by
differencing
and marking bodies.
(Garland Thomson 2002: 74; and see Garland Thomson 2009: 3–11)
 Touching

If by the early 1930s images of the disabled workmen at Painted Fabrics

were replaced by press photographs of
“mannequin parades” and publicity
using professional models (see Figure 24.2), it also
reveals the increasing
sophistication of the firm’s textiles and fashions. Painted Fabrics was one of
several
high-profile charities employing disabled ex-servicemen not just in
the production of craft (i.e. handmade
goods), but specifically in the small-
scale manufacture of textiles. At Painted Fabrics machines and tools were
adjusted to “fit the particular disability of the man employed,” including the
sewing machines which allowed the
men to do everything from picot edging
to hem stitching (PF/1/1 unpublished typescript). Annie Bindon Carter was
adamant that they could surmount any disability including “paralysis, loss of
limbs, head wounds, and double
amputation of hands” (NAL, V&A 43.E
Box 1). She later recalled the nature of craft, of small-scale hand
processes,
was essential as it afforded a greater proximity, perhaps even intimacy,
between maker and material.
She proudly recalled that the first man to be
“taken on seriously (meaning paid for his labour), was a case who
had lost
both his hands. The brushes at that date, were tied to this man’s bandages”
(PF/1/1 unpublished
typescript). She further stated:
Figure
24.1 “Three Typical Examples of
the Men Employed by ‘Painted Fabrics,’ ” Publicity leaflet
for Painted Fabrics Ltd., undated, Sheffield
Archives PF/1/2.
Courtesy: Sheffi eld City Council, Libraries, Archives and Information.

The reason for adopting what is often called “luxury trade” is solely
on account of the disabilities. It was a
trade at which a man could
lie, sit or stand. It has an unending interest in the productions of
these various
patterns, and it is possible for a man without hands,
and for very serious hand disabilities to be employed.
Also, it is the
only physical work that a large percentage of the disabilities of
“Painted Fabrics” can do.
(You will note that a man who has lost
both hands cannot feed himself, dress himself, or get out of the
room,
but he can do painted fabrics, and the same applies to a man
who has lost both legs and one arm.) Another type
of case which we
are able to take is, serious neurasthenia and head wounds, which
require variation of light
work. We are able to pass these cases
through painting, cutting out, packing, finishing etc., so as to make
variation of position, change of workshop and change of work.
(ibid.)
Figure
24.2 Publicity image of a model
wearing a coat designed and made by Painted Fabrics Ltd.,
undated, Sheffield Archives PF/4/2/7.
Courtesy: Sheffi eld City Council, Libraries, Archives and Information.

Surface and texture were, then, something that all men at Painted Fabrics
encountered—an intensely powerful
experience for the recently disabled
who perhaps felt suddenly severed from the sensorial world. Santanu Das
has
pointed out that there have been studies of sound, smell, and sight but
little on touch in the First World War,
even though the violence and
mutilation of war had in some way “restored tenderness to touch” for many
men (Das
2005: 29 and 4). However, touch need not always be on a purely
physical register, as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has
suggested:

texture seems to have some kind of definitional grounding with

reference to the sense of touch, texture itself
is not coextensive with
any single sense, but rather tends to be liminally registered …
Indeed, other senses
beyond the visual and the haptic are involved in
the perception of texture.
(Sedgwick 2003: 15)

Sedgwick has further suggested that “a particular intimacy seems to subsist

between textures and emotions. But a
double meaning, tactile plus
emotional, is always there in the single word ‘touching’; equally it’s internal
to
the word ‘feeling’” as such “texture and affect, touching and feeling seem
to belong together” (ibid.: 17 and
21).

Feeling

In making what were, essentially, dresses and accessories marketed to the

wealthy to wear during the Season (at
events such as Henley, Ascot, or
Cowes) the men at Painted Fabrics showed “patience and skill as unfailing
as
their cheerfulness,” all the more remarkable as they “would be fully
justified if they sat down and mourned for
their lost limbs, their lost eyes,
their lost health” (PF/4/3/1 June 28, 1936). Disabled ex-servicemen were
often
talked about in terms of their emotions or their affectivity. Annie
Bindon Carter suggested that even though
“Each [man] bears not only the
indelible mental scars of the great ordeal” and “the terrible bodily marks of
modern warfare,” they were “Happy Though Maimed” in a workshop full of
“smiling faces and happy chatter” (NAL,
V&A 43.E Box 1). However, in
the recovery, rehabilitation, and re-employment of disabled veterans the
actual
feelings of the men involved are mostly unrecorded and remain absent
from the historical record. Although the
Painted Fabric archive is both
extensive and comprehensive there is little evidence contained within it as to
how
the men did actually feel. Taffy Llewellyn wrote to Annie Bindon
Carter, on more than one occasion, expressing
his sincere thanks and
gratitude for her kindness (PF/5/2 January 29, 1928: PF/5/2 February 10,
1942). Equally
the surviving correspondence of Arthur Fisher offers a
similar picture of stoic “cheerfulness” (SA X210).
However, in the late 1990s an oral history project recorded the testimonies
of several children of the men
employed at Painted Fabrics. Many of these
children remembered their father’s disabilities as in no way impinging
upon
their work painting and stenciling delicate patterns on dresses, parasols, and
bedspreads (SA X223 9504-A).
Desmond Brookes, whose father W.G.
Brookes, like several of his Painted Fabrics colleagues, had been employed
at
Sheffield’s famous Hadfield’s steelworks at the outset of the war,
remembered the kindness of Annie Bindon
Carter, who bought individual
presents for the children at Christmas, and
the Countess Fitzwilliam, who
sent the families braces of pheasant (SA X223 9503-A). Brookes suggested
that
“today we would frown on these people a little as being do-gooders,”
but for the most part the men “didn’t think
of it as charity” and accepted
their “lot” (ibid.: 2 and 10). However, he further recalled:

Well my father was of the opinion that the marketing was all wrong
… My father was a kind of works
representative on the management
committee. So he had a say but obviously nobody took any notice,
he was just
one of the workmen … He thought they should aim for a
wider market in the first place … And he always thought
the prices
were pitched too high really … He had this resentment of how he
had been treated, not by those of
Painted Fabrics, he always
respected them, but he always felt that I suppose in the end the
Government could
have done more. Because there was nothing … I
mean if you were disabled you were grateful for employment.
(ibid.: 11 and 13)

As early as 1933 Captain Lionel Scott, the company’s administrator and

financial manager (whom the men thought a
snob), publicly commented that
any financial problems the company experienced were not caused by the
unstable
market for luxury fashions but rather by an increasing public
“apathy” to disabled veterans (PF/4/3/1 December 7,
1933). By 1939,
following the decision to employ professional dressmakers in London, and
the setting up of new
retail premises at 29 Clarges Street in Mayfair, Scott
stated in his annual report that as a result of rising
indifference “we are
making no mention whatever about the disabled men” (PF/2/2 AR June 5,
1939). How must such
disabled men have felt to be told that the tide of
public interest and sympathy, on which they had been made to
feel so
dependent, was now beginning to ebb away?

Conclusion

In 1944 the British government introduced the Disabled Persons

(Employment) Act enshrining the right to work for
all disabled people in
Britain. In some ways charities like Painted Fabrics lost what had at one time
been their
unique selling point. And although Annie Bindon Carter
continued to run the company after the Second World War it
was in a much-
reduced capacity, especially in terms of labor resources as disabled ex-
servicemen could, in
principle, work anywhere, prompting her to consider
for the first time employing people with accidental,
industrial, or congenital
disabilities (PF/2/5 January 9, 1959). Although the study of design has been
largely
silent on the critical frameworks that define and delineate disability,
let alone philanthropy, disability
studies has been quick to see the link
between the representation of disability and the “institutional practices
of
charity” which, in the case of Painted Fabrics, was the business of design
(Evans 1999: 278). Rosemarie
Garland Thomson has suggested that charity’s
need to obscure and consume the disabled subject is endemic of “late
capitalism’s scramble to capture markets” (Garland Thomson 2002: 64), and
Sharon Snyder and David Mitchell have
also argued that charity in relation
to disabled labor acts “as the rhetorical structure that allows the
exploitative
nature of capital relations to operate unchallenged” (Snyder
and Mitchell
2006: 64). Although the conceptualization of disability at Painted Fabrics
recycled or refashioned
pre-existing ideas, the fifty or so disabled men
employed between 1915 and 1959 were undeniably active agents in
the
production of luxury commodities that enjoyed national, if not global,
acclaim (PF/4/3/1 August 6, 1938;
PF/2/5 September 13, 1920). Only by
approaching such design from the perspective of the disabled people
involved—an approach that necessitates us standing outside the
normativizing systems and ocularcentricity of our
own culture—can we
begin to grasp the implications of disabled subjectivity in design studies, a
counter-narrative that remains totally undervalued and completely under-
researched.
 Notes

1 In December 1958, at the last sale held by the firm, Carter

stated that Painted Fabrics had been a
pioneer of “occupational therapy” and that it had “helped to make people
all over the world realise
that disablement need not mean a life of frustration and idleness. The world of the
handicapped
owes a deep debt to Painted Fabrics, to its organisers and to its workers” (PF/4/3/1 December 3,
1958).
2 These facts are recounted in several sources, including
“Painted Fabrics,” The Flowing Stream,
Vol. 19, No. 2 summer 1998, pp. 52–3; and Ruth
Harman and Jan Carter, Painted Fabrics Ltd
1915–1959, Sheffield Archives in conjunction
with the City Museum and Mappin Art Gallery and
Sheffield Hallam University, 1998 and Sheffield Libraries
Archives and Information, 2007,
www.sheffield.gov.uk/libraries/archives-and-local-studies/research-guides/painted-fabrics.html
[accessed February 11, 2016]. There is also a brief mention of Painted Fabrics in Jeffrey Reznick’s
“Material
culture and the ‘after-care’ of disabled soldiers in Britain during the Great War” (see
Reznick 2014: 91–102).
3 Historians of the First World War have, however, started to
tentatively explore this area (see
Bourke 1996; Cohen 2001; Reznick 2004 and 2014; Anderson 2011; and Malone
2013).

References

Primary

All sources are drawn from the Painted Fabrics Ltd. Archive, Sheffield
Archives (hereafter PF) unless otherwise
indicated. All quotes are courtesy
of Sheffield City Council, Libraries, Archives and Information (SA), the
Imperial War Museum (IWM), London, and the National Art Library,
Victoria & Albert Museum (NAL, V&A),
London.

IWM 38(41).656 List of some men who have found Work with “Painted
Fabrics.”
Imperial War Museum.
NAL, V&A 43.E Box 1 “Painted Fabrics”: A Trade for Badly Disabled Ex-
Servicemen,
SASMA, n.d. [June 1925], p. 1, National
Art Library, Victoria & Albert Museum, 43.E Box 1.
PF/1/1 unpublished typescript “The reason why ‘Painted Fabrics’ was started in the first
place, and the reason why a
so-called ‘Luxury Trade’
was chosen,” unpublished typescript by Annie Bindon
Carter.
PF/2/2 BCM, May 27, 1918 “Painted Fabrics” Disabled Sailors & Soldiers Mutual
Association, Minutes of
Business Committee, Meeting in
Master Cutler’s Parlour, Cutler’s Hall, May 27, 1918,
5.30 p.m.
PF/2/2 BCM, May 12, 1921 “Painted Fabrics” Disabled Sailors & Soldiers Mutual
Association, Minutes of
Business Committee, May 12,
1921.
PF/2/2 MPF June 14, 1927 Minutes for Painted Fabrics Ltd., June 14, 1927, Coal
Aston, Sheffield.
PF/2/2 AR June 5, 1939 Administrator’s Report, June 5, 1939.
PF/2/5 AR undated Annual Return undated.
PF/2/5 September 13, 1920 Minutes of Meeting, September 13, 1920.
PF/2/5 January 9, 1959 Letter from Mrs. Carter, January 9, 1959 about liquidation
of Painted Fabrics.
PF/3/7 December 2, 1929 Other People Employed at Painted Fabrics Limited,
December 2, 1929.
PF/4/3/1 June 9, 1932 “Princess Royal With a Hawker’s Licence,” Sheffield Daily
Telegraph, June 9, 1932.
PF/4/3/1 June 8, 1933 Eleanor Leach, “Painted Fabrics: Work of War-Disabled
Men,” Morning
Post, June 8, 1933.
PF/4/3/1 December 7, 1933 “Painted Fabrics Fair: Danger of Apathy Towards Work of
Ex-Servicemen,” December 7,
1933, unattributed press
cutting.
PF/4/3/1 June 28, 1936 H. Pearl Adams, “Woman and Her World: The Pageant of
Henley: Painted Fabrics,”
The Observer, June 28, 1936.
PF/4/3/1 July 8, 1937 “Painted Fabrics,” Queen, July 8, 1937.
PF/4/3/1 August 6, 1938 Painted Fabrics merchandise was sold in Paris and New
York and exported as far away as
South Africa, India, the
Caribbean and Australasia—see “World of Women,”
Sheffield
Telegraph, August 6, 1938.
PF/4/3/1 December 3, 1958 “Painted Fabrics to be closed,” Sheffield Telegraph,
December 3,
1958.
PF/5/2 August 9, 1925 Letter from Sybil Kenyon-Slaney [Lady-in-waiting to
Princess Mary] to Annie Bindon
Carter, August 9, 1925.
PF/5/2 January 29, 1928 Letter to Annie Bindon Carter from W.T. Llewellyn
D.C.M., January 29, 1928.
PF/5/2 February 10, 1942 Letter to Annie Bindon Carter from W.T. Llewellyn
D.C.M., February 10, 1942.
PF/5/2 February 2, 1945 Letter from Maud, Countess Fitzwilliam to Annie Bindon
Carter, February 2, 1945.
PF 7/4/3/1 List of some men who have found Work with “Painted
Fabrics.”
SA X210 See letters from Arthur Fisher to his fiancée, Annie Bell,
and his mother, Ellen
Fisher—“Painted Fabrics Limited:
Records of Arthur Fisher, Employee and Resident,”
Sheffield Archives.
SA X223 9503-A Painted Fabrics Research Group, Interview with Mr.
Desmond Brookes, undated, 9503-A,
Oral History
Transcripts, Sheffield Archives.
SA X223 9504-A Painted Fabrics Research Group, Interview with Mrs. Nash,
March 2, 1995, 9504-A, Oral
History Transcripts,
Sheffield Archives.

Secondary
Anderson, J. (2011) War, Disability and Rehabilitation in Britain: “Soul of a Nation,”
Manchester and
New York, Manchester University Press.
Bailey, C. (2008) Black Diamonds: The Rise and Fall of an English Dynasty, London,
Penguin.
Bogdan, R. (2012) Picturing Disability: Beggar, Freak, Citizen, and Other Photographic
Rhetoric,
Syracuse, NY, Syracuse University Press.
Bourke, J. (1996) Dismembering the Male: Men’s Bodies, Britain and the Great War,
London,
Reaktion.
Brown, E.H. (2005) The Corporate Eye: Photography and the Rationalization of American
Commercial Culture, 1884–1929, Baltimore, MD, Johns Hopkins University Press.
Cohen, D. (2000) “Will to work: disabled veterans in Britain and Germany after the first world war,”
in D.
Gerber (ed.), Disabled Veterans in History, Ann Arbor, The University of Michigan
Press.
——(2001) The War Come Home: Disabled Veterans in Britain and Germany, 1914–1939,
Berkeley
and Los Angeles, University of California Press.
Crutchfield, S. and Epstein, M. (eds) (2000), Points of Contact: Disability, Art, and
Culture, Ann
Arbor, The University of Michigan Press.
Das, S. (2005) Touch and Intimacy in First World War Literature, Cambridge, Cambridge
University
Press.
Delin, A. (2002) “Buried in the footnotes: the absence of disabled people in the collective imagery of
our
past,” in R. Sandell (ed.), Museums, Society, Inequality, London and New York,
Routledge.
Evans, J. (1999) “Feeble monsters: making up disabled people,” in J. Evans and S. Hall (eds), Visual
Culture: The Reader, London, Sage and Open University.
Garland Thomson, R. (1997) Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American
Culture
and Literature, New York, Columbia University Press.
——(2000) “Seeing the disabled: visual rhetorics of disability in popular photography,” in P.
Longmore and L.
Umansky (eds), The New Disability History, New York, New York University
Press.
——(2002) “The politics of staring: visual rhetorics of disability in popular photography,” in S.L.
Snyder and
B.J. Brueggemann (eds), Disability Studies: Enabling the Humanities, New York,
Modern
Languages Association.
——(2009) Staring: How We Look, Oxford and New York, Oxford University Press.
Helland, J. (2007) British and Irish Home Art and Industries, 1880–1914: Marketing Craft,
Making
Fashion, Dublin, Irish Academic Press.
Hevey, D. (1992) The Creatures Time Forgot: Photography and Disability Imagery, London
and New
York, Routledge.
——(1997) “The enfreakment of photography,” in L.J. Davis (ed.), The Disability Studies
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New York and London, Routledge.
McClarence, S. (2014) “From trenches to tablecloths,” The Yorkshire Post, April 27,
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Malone, C. (2013) “A job fit for heroes? Disabled veterans, the Arts and Crafts Movement and social
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Millett-Gallant, A. (2000) The Disabled Body in Contemporary Art, Basingstoke, UK,
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Mitchell, D.T. and Snyder, S.L. (2000) Narrative Prosthetics: Disability and the
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Reznick, J.S. (2004) Healing the Nation: Soldiers and the Culture of Caregiving in Britain
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——(2014) “Material culture and the ‘after-care’ of disabled soldiers in Britain during the Great War,”
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Cornish and N.J. Saunders (eds), Bodies in Conflict: Corporeality, Materiality and
Transformation, London and New York, Routledge.
Sedgwick, E.K. (2003) Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity, Durham, NC
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Siebers, T. (2008) Disability Theory, Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press.
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London,
University of Chicago Press.
 25

SOCIALLY INCLUSIVE DESIGN

A people-centered perspective
Rama Gheerawo
 
 

Introduction

Socially inclusive approaches are an increasingly important part of twenty-

first-century design. These have
developed over recent decades to gain
prominence with designers, in education, the public sector, and in business
(Clarkson and Coleman 2015). Whether termed community-driven,
empathic, participatory, or people-centered, these
practices play a
leadership role in addressing pressing social concerns, from digital
exclusion or personal
health, to major global challenges around human
rights and inclusion (Eikhaug 2009: 158). This is vital in moving
design
practice and praxis toward a standpoint that includes people’s needs,
aspirations, and perspectives as a
foundational part of the creative process.
Importantly, these approaches talk to the positive social attitude
that is
particularly prevalent in a new generation of practitioners, observed over
the course of twenty years of
teaching international design students.
Design has a history of engaging with larger social contexts, but this has
often been based on the idea of
designers as endowed leaders and subject
experts, who use their personal skills and creative affordances to
benefit
people. As prominent designer Bill Moggridge (2001) noted at the turn of
the century, this personal
approach results in designers creating ideas
mainly for themselves which leads to the exclusion of others. When
applied
in the design space, existing models of creating social good can result in a
value system that is based
on notions of the designer as the benevolent or
philanthropic expert, rather than on peer-to-peer exchange with
end users
(Donahue and Gheerawo 2009).
This relationship between designers and the people who use their designs
needs to evolve. The idea of “designing
for” people, which was so
prominent during the last century, is now evolving toward “designing with”
people, and
subsequently incorporating processes around “designing by”
people (Fulton-Suri 2007). As both public and private
sector organizations
struggle to better understand and relate to customers, citizens, and
communities, this
democratization of practice offers a framework for
designers to move toward the more people-centered and
equitable processes
that are needed today (see Figure 25.1). This does not herald the death
of
the individual designer or innovator, but signals an evolution of the role to a
more multi-faceted stance
where users become participants, evaluators, and
even authors of solutions (see Kelley and Littman
2006).
Figure
25.1 Fostering a
people-centered perspective.
Photo: The Helen Hamlyn Centre for Design/Petr Krejci.

Inclusive design

There are a number of different movements, ideas, and terminologies

associated with a socially-focused attitude
to design. Co-operative Design
was one of the first terms to emerge in Scandinavia (Ehn and Kyng 1987:
17–58) and
Participatory Design has developed over the past couple of
decades, focusing on how people can be involved
directly and proactively
in design development (Sanders and Dandavate 1999). User-centered
design and
human-centered design encourage attention to and consideration
of the individual as a central tenet, and terms such as Co-design (Sanders
and Stappers 2014: 1–4) and Co-creation
are freely used in the academy, the
studio, and the boardroom.
However, this chapter focuses on Inclusive Design (ID), defined in 2000
by the British Government as “products,
services and environments that
include the needs of the widest number of consumers” (Department of
Trade and
Industry 2000), marking it as a business strategy as well as a
creative one, and linking social equality to
innovation. ID has been
described in various ways—as a practice, methodology, philosophy, or
technique—but it is
internationally recognized and used globally by
governments, industry, designers, policymakers, and social and
creative
organizations. The idea was articulated by Roger Coleman (Coleman 1994)
in a paper delivered at the
International Ergonomics Association’s 12th
Triennial Congress, and now forms the underlying focus of the Helen
Hamlyn Centre for Design (HHCD) at the Royal College of Art (RCA),
which Coleman co-founded with Jeremy Myerson
in 1991 (following the
DesignAge program of that year) and of which the author has been a
member since its
inception.
ID shares its ideology with Universal Design (UD) and Design for All
(DfA). All three have their origins in
designing for older or disabled people,
but have evolved to embrace varying uses, definitions, and applications.
Different cultural, historical, and political factors across the world have
affected the precise ways in which
these ideals have been interpreted and
expressed (Vavik and Gheerawo 2009: 5).
UD originated in the United States and is now adopted by countries in the
Far East and some organizations in
Europe. Japan is a leading nation with
its International Association of Universal Design comprising over a
hundred companies, with names such as Toyota, Panasonic, and Hitachi
developing UD solutions over the past decade
(see www.iaud.net). The
driving philosophy has been enshrined in
seven principles articulated in
1995 by a group including architect Ron Mace at North Carolina State
University.1 UD is typically described as the design of products
and
environments to be usable by all people, to the greatest extent possible,
without the need for adaptation or
specialized design.
 DfA started with barrier-free accessibility for people with disabilities but
has become a strategy for
mainstream, inclusive solutions. It is about
ensuring that environments, products, services, and interfaces work
for
people of all ages and abilities in different situations and under various
circumstances. This nomenclature
is particularly used in continental Europe
and parts of Scandinavia (see www.designforall.org).
ID sees design differently, encouraging designers to work directly with
individuals and communities to gain a
greater perspective on the challenges
and opportunities that exist in their day-to-day lives. Importantly, it
enables
designers to have a more holistic understanding of human behavior, and the
results can be more nuanced
contributions that address the multiplicity of
influences that collectively shape our world.
The benefits of an ID approach are all around us. Both Ford and Toyota
have recently used ID philosophy and
processes to create new vehicles. The
first generation Ford Focus was developed with the needs of older people in
mind but the result was a vehicle that was easier to use, own, and drive for
everyone. OXO Good GripsTM revolutionized kitchen utensils but (as was
noted earlier in Chapter 23) was inspired by looking at people with arthritis
(Keates and Clarkson 2004: 12–14). Their non-stigmatizing, well-designed
range sold in thousands, setting a
benchmark for other companies. As OXO
President Alex Lee noted in an interview with the author in 2010: “We have
achieved an annual growth of thirty percent since 1991 and have won more
than one hundred international
awards.”
Successful ID is inclusive of people with a variety of demands, rather
than being devised exclusively for them
relating strongly to critical ideas
around social inclusion (D’souza 2004: 3–9). The aim is to enable choice
and
independence rather than to stigmatize or address deficits, talking to
capability models such as those delineated
by Sen (2007) or the Asset-
Based Community Development Approach (McKnight and Kretzmann
1990) that moves away
from traditional needs-orientated frameworks to
capacity-focused alternatives. This creates a strong case for
ID’s potential to
redress social inequalities and impact systems at a larger scale, becoming an
operational
conduit to implement social ideals.
An inclusive attitude is integral to designers who want to effect change.
This implies sensitivity to social
challenges, such as demographic change
due to the upsurge in numbers of older people across the globe (Coleman
and Pullinger 1993), seen in its most radical form in Japan and northern
Europe, but also evident in China,
India, and many other countries (UN
2013). Older people are an untapped market, with products and services
typically aimed at younger age groups (Myerson 2001: 5).
Other areas include the increase in the number of people living with
disabilities, or the currently inexplicable
rise in neuro-diverse conditions,
such as autism or Alzheimer’s. Even large-scale, complex situations, such
as
rethinking the future city, digital technology, or re-framing financial or
political systems, can benefit from ID
methods. Sustainability has three
aspects: environmental, economic, and social (Porritt 2006). All three need
to
be addressed but ID is a powerful tool in achieving social sustainability
through its ethos of equity and
participation.
Changing legislation that champions human diversity and outlaws
discrimination is resulting in a rising number of
regulations that designers
need to observe. This is typically expressed as having equal rights and
access to
goods and services, which is close to ID ideology. Norway is a
leading example, with a series of UD Action Plans
created to ensure the
country is universally designed by 2025 (e.g. Norwegian Ministry for
Children and Equality
2009). The effect of directive legislation has been
noticeable within the region. New trains, buses, websites,
and public spaces
are being created, inspired by ID principles. When a new passenger ferry
was designed for
Rogaland, ID guidance for boats did not exist, therefore
the shipbuilders created new standards that have now
been written into
practice. As Ivan Fossan, CEO of the shipping company Tide Sjø, noted,
the best ID measures are
those that are not seen.

A short history

The origins of socially inclusive design, whether termed ID, UD or DfA,

have not always been design-led. Seismic
societal shifts have affected
development, and other influences from individuals and organizations have
played a
role. Some key events are noted here.
In the US the Civil Rights movement and the Vietnam War were
significant turning points in the struggle for human
rights, leading to many
UD and ID developments. In 1964 the American Civil Rights Act was
signed, promising “full
and equal enjoyment … of goods and services.” The
language and intent is something that ID, UD, and DfA
approaches have
built on. The Vietnam War saw large numbers of disabled, young veterans
become increasingly
outraged at the second-class treatment they received
on return to the US.
Large rallies and vocal campaigners brought human
rights violation on the basis of disability into social
consciousness
(Clarkson 2003: 2).
Designers, architects, and ergonomists have also informed the
development of socially inclusive design. Henry
Dreyfuss, a celebrated US
industrial designer, stated that design should not just be about style, but
should
benefit people, and his 1955 autobiography was entitled Designing
for People. His seminal
publication from 1960, Measure of Man, signaled a
defining moment in bringing people into
design through the use of
ergonomic data.
Selwyn Goldsmith, a British architect, published ergonomic guidelines
that included wheelchair users in 1963. In
1971, Victor Papanek, an
Austrian-born industrial designer living in the US, once again challenged
design’s
style-led philosophy through his landmark book, Design for the
Real World, discussing
social and ecological considerations that continue to
have resonance today (Papanek [1971] 1985).
Empathy is considered fundamental to the socially inclusive designer
today, but immersion techniques draw on some
daring sociological
experiments. In 1979, aged twenty-six (as noted in Chapter 22 of this
volume), designer Patricia Moore carried out an age-simulation experiment
by
dressing up as different eighty-year-old women and traveling across the
US to experience the public treatment and
perception of older people
(Moore 1985). Around two decades earlier John Howard Griffin, a
journalist living in
Dallas, underwent an immersive experience to
understand the truth about the difficulties that African-Americans
faced in
some southern US states. Griffin darkened his face using medication and
documented his experience
(Griffin 1962). Owing to threats and derision
after publishing his book Griffin and his family moved to Mexico.
Moore’s
work was also viewed negatively by designers and social scientists at the
time. However, their approaches
are now seen as pioneering in creating
research empathy.
The Paralympics have changed perception around disability. In 1948 Sir
Ludwig Guttmann, a German neurologist at
the Stoke Mandeville hospital
in the UK, organized a sporting competition for Second World War veterans
with
spinal cord injuries to aid their rehabilitation. By 1960 the Paralympics
were considered to be an established
part of the official Olympic Games
(Bailey 2008). At the 2012 Paralympics in London demand for tickets was
on a
par with the Olympics and the culture and language around disability
changed. Paralympic competitors were seen as
athletes and branded as
superhumans in the supporting advertising campaign.
The Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park hosted the “most accessible Games
ever” and at the heart of it was an ID
approach. Supported by the London
Mayor and the Olympic Committee, the new buildings had to conform to
ID
standards and large areas of historic London were developed to be
inclusive and accessible. The South Bank of the
River Thames underwent
significant development, with people who had different mobility
requirements setting the
agenda, testing ideas, and driving solutions. The
London Legacy Development Corporation, charged with
transforming the
existing venues and developing the site into lifetime neighborhoods,
published its own set of ID
guidance, demonstrating how important ID is as
it moves forward.2

Broadening boundaries: redefining approaches to age and

ability

Historically, ID has focused on older or disabled people who were generally

excluded from mainstream design.
However, the people-centered
techniques developed by ID can be used to
address the needs of other
marginalized and underserved groups within society beyond the age-ability
construct.
Those communities that are traditionally ignored by designers and
businesses can provide the strongest
inspiration for new ideas that are also
applicable to mainstream markets. For example, packaging that is
developed for people with arthritis can be easier for everyone to open. An
automatic door benefits everyone, not
just older or disabled people.
Emphasis has been placed on aging populations in ID endeavors as this
demographic is now becoming the majority in
almost every country.
Although there is diversity within aging, designers tend to see older people
as a
homogeneous group and terms such as the over 65s, retirees, or even
elders imply a lack of specificity or
individuality. Issues of representation,
such as sexuality, class, race, personal economy, cultural stigma, and
stereotype are under-addressed as design seeks a standardized image of an
older person – typically Caucasian,
financially secure, and heterosexual.
 The list of those who are excluded when going beyond concepts of age or
ability is not easily defined, but ID has
an obligation to go beyond the more
obvious or traditional user groups that it deals with. There is an emerging
role for the socially inclusive designer to provide advocacy of these
considerations and be more representative
of diverse populations. Some
outline considerations in expanding definitions of exclusion follow.
Despite the international sign for disability being a wheelchair user (Ben-
Moshe and Powell 2007), disability is
not limited to such a physical
representation and many conditions can be less obvious, such as diabetes or
early-onset dementia. Most people have a disability, whether minor or
major, permanent or temporary. These can be
sensory, physical, or cognitive
and include conditions such as allergies.
Many products, services, and processes do not include women. On the
global stage, education and creating economic
opportunity will become key
to righting the gender imbalance (Mau and The Institute without
Boundaries, 2004:
227). Designers should include the needs and aspirations
of women without resorting to tokenism, such as the
pinking-up of
technology, which has been prevalent recently amongst digital device
manufacturers.
Immigration and migration have increased ethnic and cultural diversity in
most major cities. However, lack of
integration can occur. The result can be
evident in education, employment, politics, and economics. Cultural
background is also critical as nuances in behavior, differences in language,
and variance in expression all need
to be considered in design.
Economic exclusion is another critical area for consideration. Many
people across the world struggle at the
minimum level of subsistence and
this translates into a lack of basic needs, amenities, services, food,
healthcare, housing, or education in both developed and developing
economies. Sensitivity to economic
circumstance and perspective is key, as
is the formulation of solutions that provide systemic change relevant to
the
scale of the issue. ID methods do not just benefit wealthier communities,
but can work across the economic
spectrum supporting ideas about shared
prosperity and the civic economy (see, for example, Ahrensbach et al.
2011).
Location can also play a role. Even within a small country or city,
different areas can have varying standards of
healthcare, life expectancy,
services, and utilities. Geography can dictate access to energy, clean water,
staple
food, and natural resources. There are many other types of exclusion,
so it is essential that ID is not limited
to older and disabled people. It should
be seen as a process of
people-centered innovation that has wide
applications for a range of social challenges and contexts.

Passive to active: people not users

The relationship between designers and the recipients of their designs has
typically been one of
producer–consumer. However, since the turn of the
century, co-creative and co-designed approaches have begun to
replace
more traditional models. Conducting research with people can engender a
greater level of inventiveness by
challenging designers to seek new, creative
solutions. An empathic stance is key for designers, researchers, or
practitioners working in this area (McGinley 2012).
There is still a tendency for designers to objectify the people they work
with, seeing them as useful in testing
or validating ideas, rather than as
human beings with a context, lifestyle, attitudes, and desires. The term user
or consumer can remove the human perspective, which runs the risk of
missing deeper connections with the
individual. Users just use, consumers
only consume, but people live.
The recent emergence of design ethnography, which has seen designers
co-opt tools from social science, has
resulted in a plethora of new methods,
some of which bring into question the opposing time demands of design
and
ethnography (Hunt 2011). Design operates in much shorter timescales
and many of the ethnographic methods employed
by designers have come
to be known as rapid ethnography (Norman 1999).
At the HHCD, designers are encouraged to work with people in their own
space, to empathize with them, and
understand their context, as nothing can
replace this type of direct contact (Warburton 2003: 260). This is
especially
important when a young designer is tasked with designing for a person who
might be more than fifty
years older. The designers are schooled in a range
of research techniques, including co-creation techniques,
expert
consultation, interviews, observation in situ, testing with prototypes,
research kits, and cultural probes
(Gaver et al. 1999: 21–9).3 If the designer
cannot be present, methods such as diaries or video logging can record
material in absentia (Pink 2005: 275–90).
Designers are encouraged to
derive their own methods that build on existing ones. They see the act of
design
research as an inventive procedure itself and do not solely relegate
creativity to building outcomes.
Novel methods are sometimes developed at the HHCD to suit a shorter-
term, more designerly purpose, for example
Design Provocation where
props, visuals, or sketch ideas are shown to people to stimulate
feedback
and provoke discussion (Eikhaug and Gheerawo 2010: 66–7). This
originated in a technology project
conducted in 2006 that asked older
people to discuss digital technology, something they were unfamiliar with,
and
even fearful of. Creating a set of mocked-up ideas around managing
health or money, such as digital medicine
bottles and piggy banks, allowed
them to respond to the ideas and take ownership by drawing over and
modifying
them.
In ID, the search is for creative insights rather than a detailed
understanding of every aspect of a person’s
life. Debates continue over the
integrity of design ethnography methods, their use and applicability, as
designers and corporations look to individuals, groups, and communities to
search reflexively for points of
inspiration (see, for example, Clarke 2011).

Enabling knowledge exchange

A challenge for ID is to engender knowledge exchange and maintain a

presence across three main areas of activity,
namely business-driven,
community-centered, and public-facing. Making a case for socially
inclusive design within
a business context has been a focus for the past
decade, with many companies now understanding the value of a
customer-
facing approach. The private sector, ever keen to innovate, has been
motivated to take up and invest in
new inclusive models of learning. Even
within education there has been a willingness to engage with design,
evidenced by the increasing presence of design within business schools.
Talking to business has been a key focus at the HHCD with its Research
Associates program taking new, or recent,
Royal College of Art design
graduates and teaming them up with industry partners to conduct ID
projects. Over one
hundred and eighty projects have been completed to date
with over one hundred and twenty different organizations.
A key challenge
has been to look at how to present the rich insights gathered on each project
to the companies.
The result was the Insight Bank, a digital platform that
brings together people’s quotes, videos, and insights in
an easy access
repository providing a qualitative evidence-base for business decisions,
inspiration, or
reflection (Gheerawo et al. 2014).
ID methods need to develop as designers work with communities and
individuals. Developing contributions and
partnerships that account for a
community’s point of view is important in order to help designers become a
trusted part of the process. This also assures more sustained engagement by
allowing members of the community to
create, participate, and deliver
ideas, rather than simply act as grateful recipients of design expertise.
As public services need to innovate against the background of financial
reductions, a consensus has been growing
about the importance of design.
The question is not whether the public sector should incorporate social and
innovative aspects in procurement or decision-making, but how to do it
(HaselMayer and Rasmussen 2011: 6).
Rethinking services around the
needs of the user has become part of the vocabulary of this sector. For
example,
in recent changes to the UK government’s digital services, a
driving principle was “user needs, not government
needs”
(www.gov.uk/design-principles). The
result was the replacement of over
one thousand different web portals with the GOV.UK website, which has
become
quickly recognized as a standard for digital public services. This
people-focused motivation also saves money as
it functions at a much-
reduced cost to that of maintaining the previous sites.
ID needs to showcase its capabilities and contributions. Support materials
outlining practical tools and
approaches are becoming more prevalent, such
as Methods Cards, developed by innovation consultancy IDEO (2003),
and
Business of Inclusive Design, a book published by the Norwegian Design
Council
(Eikhaug and Gheerawo 2010; see also
www.innovatingwithpeople.net). There has been a growth in prominent
Inclusive Design, Universal
Design and Design for All awards in the past
decade, as well as a number of networks,4 and exhibitions. In 2013 the
author co-curated an Anglo-Norwegian exhibition, “Design That
Makes a
Difference,” comprising twenty ID projects that were shown at three venues
in the UK.5 These all represent a rising perception of the value of ID.

Addressing challenges: looking forward

As Information Technology (IT) becomes more pervasive, the new barriers

to inclusivity become increasingly
digital. Technology applications have
become more pervasive in both personal and professional lives (Woods
2003:
577). There is some history of collaborating with people as Co-
operative Design has involved users in the
creation of IT products
(Greenbaum and Kyng 1991). However technology-specific strategies need
to be developed
within ID processes, working with communities to
establish a new understanding of how IT is used to support
communication,
lifestyle, and information exchange (Hofmeester and de Charon de Saint
Germain 1995).
Designers need to step beyond safe topics within ID and not be afraid to
address challenging or taboo subjects.
At the HHCD, one project looked at
sexuality across the lifespan. The
designer created sensitive modes of
engagement to understand this highly personal subject area. Initial
responses
from the older participants directed the project to be about
intimacy not just sexuality, and led to a poster campaign entitled, “Love is
Love at Every Age” that showcased a
timeless and respectful message for
people of all ages to enjoy, and to which younger people can aspire.
Design is not the only driver in the socially creative process, however. A
recent RCA project to redesign the
interior treatment spaces of emergency
ambulances invited paramedics and patients to be part of the design team
(see Figure 25.2). This co-design process translated key insights from
ambulance users into
sketch designs and a full-scale test rig. By making the
people who deliver and use the service central to design
development, the
project achieved a completely reconfigured treatment space that improved
clinical efficiency and
enhanced the patient experience.
Figure
25.2 A co-design project to
redesign the interior treatment space of an emergency ambulance
brought paramedics and patients into the
design team.
Photo: The Helen Hamlyn Centre for Design/Tim Saunders.

There are some other socially inclusive practices with which ID should
engage. Social innovation is described as
an idea that works for the public
good,6 or collaborative action to
go beyond institutions that marginalize
collective needs or preserve inequalities,7 and is viewed as important within
society, government, academia, and business. It extends
from public service
and policy innovation, to initiatives in assistive technology, and aspects of
civic
participation and creative entrepreneurship. Across these areas, ID
also has a key role to play in creating and
delivering outcomes conveying
innovations of social value to communities and markets. Both ID and social
innovation can potentially bring great benefit to each other as they have
similarly equitable ideals.
ID is more closely aligned to contemporary social expectations today
than it was in the past. It has moved from
being a niche practice to
becoming an important and valued consideration across the range of design
disciplines.
Its methods and philosophy can have a far-reaching effect, as it
is much more than a social ideal for designers
to live up to. It can help to
positively transform government, and the public and private sectors. In
summary,
the socially inclusive approach at the heart of ID, driven by the
empathic values of the people-centered
designer, will be powerfully
transformative in defining a more positive future for society, raising the
importance of design in the process.

Acknowledgments

Sean Donahue from ArtCenter College of Design and Onny Eikhaug from
the Norwegian Centre for Design and
Architecture have been invaluable in
developing ideas around ID theory and practice through personal
collaboration over recent years. Dr Chris McGinley, Dr Jak Spencer, and
Professor Peter Buckle from the Royal
College of Art have supported with
editing and research.

Notes

1 The seven principles are: 1) equitable use; 2) flexibility in

use; 3) simple and intuitive use; 4)
perceptible information; 5) tolerance for error; 6) low physical effort; 7)
size and space for
approach and use. Connell, B. Jones, M. Mace, R. Mueller, J. Mullick, A. Ostroff, E. Sanford,
J.
Steinfeld, E. Story, M. and Vanderheiden, G. were all involved in publishing the Principles of
Universal
Design.
2 The London 2012 bid made a commitment to deliver “the most
accessible games ever.” See:
http://queenelizabetholympicpark.co.uk/our-story/transforming-east-london/accessibility and
https://queenelizabetholympicpark.co.uk/~/media/lldc/policies/lldcinclusivedesignstandards
march2013.pdf [Accessed: April 18, 2015].
3 See www.designingwithpeople.org and www.inclusivedesign.no for more tools and methods
[Accessed: April 18, 2015].
4 For examples of EU networks see IDeALL at www.usercentredbusiness.com [Accessed: April
18, 2015] or
EIDD Design for All Europe at www.dfaeurope.eu [Accessed:
April 18, 2015].
5 The exhibition was a collaboration between the Norwegian Design
Council (with co-curator
Onny Eikhaug), the Helen Hamlyn Centre for Design, and the Royal Norwegian Embassy in
London, showcasing 20 Inclusive Design projects. See www.hhc.rca.ac.uk/194-
5277/all/1/Design-that-Makes-a-Difference.aspx [Accessed: April 18, 2015].
6 Definition from the Centre for Social Innovation, Canada. See
www.socialinnovation.ca/about
[Accessed: July
19, 2015].
7 Definition delivered by Matthew Turner, Thinker-in-residence,
Jockey Club Design Institute for
Social Innovation in Hong Kong at a lecture in 2013 at the 10 Day Fest social
innovation festival.

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 26

WHAT IS “SOCIALLY RESPONSIVE

DESIGN AND INNOVATION”?
Adam Thorpe and Lorraine Gamman
 
 

Design against crime as socially responsive design

Socially responsive design is a field of design practice that “takes as its

primary driver social issues, its
main consideration social impact and its
main objective social change” (Gamman and Thorpe 2006; 2011). It is a
“socially situated” (Suchman 1987) practice that is contingent on context, in
particular the agency of the people
in and around it. It is this contingency
that determines a design approach that is responsive rather than responsible.
As researchers and practitioners in socially responsive design our work
with the Design Against Crime Research
Centre at the University of the
Arts, London, seeks to change things for the better for those victimized by
crime. This includes those who suffer loss or injury by being subjected to
criminal acts and those who perpetrate
these acts, and in doing so damage
not just the lives of others but also their own linked to prosecution and
punishment. It also includes the citizens of wider society who share in the
financial burden of publicly funding
the “cops, courts and corrections,”
which in England and Wales in 1999/2000 was estimated to cost around £60
billion and rising (Brand and Price 2000).
Central to our designing against crime work is the understanding that
those people who experience crime are well
placed to help design against it,
and are integral to our activities. We apply this understanding via a
collaborative approach to design research and practice that connects
communities of interest with communities of
practitioners around issues of
concern. We bring together individuals and organizations from multiple
disciplines
and diverse social actors, including criminals, police, victims,
advocacy and interest groups, service providers,
manufacturers, suppliers,
and local and national government, with designers, architects, planners,
criminologists, ethnographers, and engineers. Where possible we ensure
these multiple actors are involved in the
identification of the challenges
faced and the articulation of the design questions that arise in response to
these challenges. Actors contribute diverse insights, knowledge, and other
resources in the co-definition and
prioritization of the specific challenges
and contexts to be addressed, and the co-development and/or review of
design responses to these challenges to enable others to respond to similar
challenges in their local contexts. This iterative, collaborative review of
proposals and
prototypes seeks to ensure that responses are effective and fit
for purpose for the contexts and publics they aim
to serve. To illustrate this
socially responsive approach and the outputs that it has co-created and co-
produced
to design against crime, we offer the following case studies.

Case study 1: Karrysafe anti-theft bags and accessories (2000–

2)

The Karrysafe project (2000–2) explored the collaborative application of

crime prevention theory to practice in
the production of a collection of bags
and accessories that responded to increases in street crime, particularly
theft
from the person and robbery. The collection was launched in the summer of
2002, publicized by the Design
Council, which funded the project, and sold
via Selfridges in London and online. The products and their marketing
promoted awareness of the issues surrounding property theft and how to
avoid it whilst helping users to avoid
victimization (see
www.designagainstcrime.com/projects/karrysafe/). The bags also
demonstrated the commercial viability
and demand for such products to
other designers and brands in the hope of promoting other designed
responses that
might further reduce the incidence and impact of property
theft. Those interested in developing their own
responses could (and can) do
so, drawing on the openly shared design resource (www.inthebag.org.uk)
that “visually animates statistical and
criminological data and combines it
with contextual information directly relevant to design.” Of particular value
to designers are the visualizations of “theft perpetrator techniques” that
clearly show how crimes are committed
and the frameworks, such as the
Conjunction of Criminal Opportunity (Ekblom 2011), that help practitioners
understand the contextual factors influencing criminal events and think
through ways of responding to them
through design.

Case Study 2: CaMden anti-theft bike stands (2006)

The CaMden anti-theft bike stands (see Figure 26.1) are designed to
encourage cyclists to
lock both the wheels and the frame of their bike to the
bike stand so as to reduce their vulnerability to theft.
The bike stands are one
of several design exemplars produced by the Bikeoff Project, a research
initiative of the
Design Against Crime Research Centre that explored how
the design of cycling related products, environments,
communications, and
services can reduce cycle theft and increase cycle use. Bikeoff’s
collaborative research
began in 2004, with an Arts and Humanities Research
Council (AHRC) funded study (Thorpe et
al. 2004) that observed and
recorded bicycle parking practices and provision to investigate the link
between
cycle parking and cycle theft. These findings were published and
circulated widely amongst dutyholders (those
with a duty of care) by
Transport for London (TfL) and the Home Office, alerting those responsible
for cycling
provision and promotion to the significance of cycle security to
cycle use and the potential for reducing cycle
theft (and therefore promoting
cycle use) through design. The knowledge from this study was applied and
developed
in collaboration with local and national partners (including TfL,
London Cycle Campaign, London Borough of
Camden, Metropolitan Police,
Government Office for London, City of Brighton and Hove, Sussex Police,
Cycle
Touring Club of Great Britain, Broxap Ltd cycle parking equipment
suppliers, and others). Collaborative working
with cycling and crime
prevention networks identified knowledge gaps and research questions that
informed further
collaborative research, including an AHRC/ EPSRC Design
for the 21st Century project that aimed to “kick start a
design revolution to
reduce cycle theft and increase cycle use.” This project saw the Bikeoff team
collaborate
with a constellation of local and national partners to co-develop
and co-deliver research that: informed cycle
parking and security guidance
and policy in the UK and Europe; created design resources that supported
new
product development through national competitions and challenge
prizes; and provided tools and methodologies for
qualitative and quantitative
design evaluation that were applied to the testing of product exemplars
created by
the project, such as the bike stands shown above. The outputs of
this collaborative research were published and
disseminated (Thorpe et al.
2010) and have been adopted, applied and developed in diverse
contexts by
actors ranging from design entrepreneurs to policy makers.

Figure
26.1 CaMden anti-theft bike
stand.

Design Against Crime Research Centre.

Case Study 3: ATM Art Mats (2010)

ATMs have been on our streets for over forty years and using one is a daily
activity for most people in the UK.
In 2013 a total of 2.9 billion pounds in
cash withdrawals (LINK 2013) were made at UK automatic teller machines
(ATMs). Although most transactions are crime free, criminals target ATMs
in an attempt to steal users’ cash and
cards. In 2013 UK losses due to ATM
crime totaled 31.9 million pounds, an increase of ten percent on 2012 figures
(Payments Council 2014). Whilst the design focus for ATMs has been on
developing user-friendly interfaces and
original encryption software to
ensure transactions are easy to make, can be verified, and avoid abuse, the
banking and technology sectors have not been idle in implementing new
measures to secure ATM transactions against
common ATM crime
techniques. Many banks take a multi-channel approach to ATM security with
interventions in areas
of technology, environment, and behavior (of ATM
users).
One such intervention is the introduction of safety zones, that is, yellow
boxes printed on the footway to define
a defensible space that customers can
point to when requesting privacy. Despite their contribution to security,
there
is little enthusiasm amongst banks, businesses, or those who use and manage
our streets for this strategy.
This is because yellow lines are more commonly
associated with instructing vehicles, rather than people, and many
consider
that their appearance detracts from the appeal of our high streets and signals
insecurity.
This project responded to the challenge by creating ATM Art Mats—
artworks that were installed on the footway in
place of the yellow boxes. The
artworks were popular with businesses, customers, and other users of the
streetscape and proved effective in granting more privacy to ATM users.
Recent iterations of the project have
involved local people in the creation of
the ATM Art. This process uses the creation of artworks as a means to
raise
awareness for ATM security (and the right to privacy), whilst also affording
greater local ownership of,
and pride in, the public realm for ATM artists and
their communities.
The three socially responsive design projects outlined above all produced
designed objects that could be sold in
the market place to reduce crime, as
well as design resources that were made freely available online to those who
wished to have a go at resolving similar problems in their own way. They
also created a community of diverse
practitioners who got to know each
other and have subsequently come together to address further issues of
concern. To understand the nature and significance of the multiple and
mutable contribution of socially
responsive design the principles and
processes that deliver this kind of design research and practice are now
described in depth.

Designing for what we want more of: reframing the anti-social

Design against Crime has always considered, and responded to, the
contested desires of users and abusers of
products, systems, and services, as
well as those who unwittingly misuse the outputs of design, or rather use
them in ways that were unanticipated or unintended by the designer. In this
way Design against Crime has sought
to promote the enjoyment and
effectiveness of legitimate use as well as to deny
illegitimate abuse. The
three projects described above illustrate socially responsive design research
and
practice as an approach to designing out crime that reduces opportunities
for anti-social behaviors at the same time as promoting opportunities for pro-
social
behaviors. This understanding of the need for design to address “what
you want more of” (the pro-social) rather
than solely “what you want less
of” (the anti-social) is evident in the work to reduce bag theft and promote
enjoyment of the public realm as a place “where strangers can meet”
(Sennett 2010) free from the fear of
victimization. It is also explicit in the
work to promote cycling through the reduction of cycle theft and to
reduce
street crime through community arts projects.
As Batson (1998) observes, the term pro-social “was created by social
scientists as an antonym for antisocial.”
Pro-social describes behavior that is
positive, helpful and intended to promote social acceptance and social
ties,
linked to “helping, sharing, donating, co-operating, and volunteering” (Brief
and Motowidlo 1986). Evidence
suggests that pro-social activities are central
to the wellbeing of social groups across a range of scales
(Helliwell and
Putnam 2004).
Despite the inclusion of social ecology and psychology within theories for
Crime Prevention Through Environmental
Design, linked to strategies such
as activity support (the idea that designing in social
behaviors will reduce the
opportunity and incidence of anti-social behaviors), the majority of design-
led crime
prevention practice has been oriented around target hardening and
reducing risk
(probability of harm), rather than promoting opportunity
(probability of benefit). The Design Against Crime
Research Centre’s
pursuit of “more positive,” as well as “less negative,” outcomes from
design
extends the limited (and limiting) discourse of anti-social prevention and
anti-social promotion to
consider pro-social prevention and pro-social
promotion. Figure 26.2 illustrates how these
two approaches coalesce and in
doing so reframes design against the anti-social as design
for the pro-social.

Figure
26.2 Socially responsive
intervention, reframing risk as opportunity.
Design Against Crime Research Centre.

The validity of this account is evidenced in the work of Robert Sampson

(2012) who observes that highly
socialized neighborhoods, that is, those that
benefit from strong community ties—such as higher levels of social
connectivity between residents and the involvement of residents in public
life and community collaboration—experience lower levels of violence,
crime, and anti-social behavior.
Furthermore, according to Sampson “strong
social infrastructure” impacts positively on a surprisingly wide
variety of
outcomes, including child health, high-school graduation, teen births, adult
mortality, social
disorder, and even IQ scores, creating what he refers to as
an “enduring neighborhood effect” (Sampson 2012).
This ability to reframe anti-social problems as opportunities for pro-social
intervention is important in the
context of socially responsive design because
of the “wicked” (Rittel and Webber 1973; Buchanan 1992; Buchanan
and
Margolin 1995) nature of many social challenges. Wicked problems are
complex, networked problems with no
single origin or owner and multiple,
sometimes contradictory, desirable outcomes for the people and agencies
(actors) involved. To ensure the engagement of the multiplicity of actors
necessary to impact upon these complex
networked problems, the design
process with which they are required to engage must acknowledge and
address the
multiple and diverse drivers that matter to them. Thus, the
challenge or problem must be reframed as an
opportunity to address the
multiple or common values of the actors involved. Dorst, the founder of the
Designing
Out Crime Research Centre at the University of Technology
Sydney that emerged in 2007, has developed and
articulated this account of
reframing in a clear methodological way (Dorst 2015). He describes a series
of steps
supported by a set of design methods and tools. Dorst’s
methodology enables groups of actors to identify and
articulate their values
in order to find new perspectives from which to address previously
intractable
challenges. Examples include the reframing of problems
associated with drunkenness and anti-social behavior
linked to the night-
time economy of the Kings Cross district of Sydney. Instead of persisting in
ever harsher
policing of these “problems” in the existing frame of crime and
disorder, the challenge is reframed as one of
designing a safe and secure
festival. The act of reframing anticipates the behaviors and values of the
actors
involved and accommodates them in pro-social ways, rather than
regarding and responding to them through an
anti-social/policing lens.

Design that is responsive not responsible,

fraternal not paternal

The above account of socially responsive design articulates a shared agenda

with other socially oriented design
approaches, including: Ezio Manzini’s
(2015) design for social innovation, which seeks to find new ways in which
to address societal goals and challenges in socially beneficial ways; Cottam
et al.’s
(2006) “transformation design,” which seeks to change systems and
organizations in order to better address
societal concerns; and Nigel
Whiteley’s (1993) “socially useful design,” which applies design to social
needs and
human wellbeing over and above stimulating human desires in
order to drive market economies. The prioritization
of the social driver
above others is also shared with the socially responsible design of
Victor
Papanek (1971), although his exclusion of market considerations is a point
of difference between a design
that is responsive to problems and
opportunities and a design that considers itself to be responsible for them.
In
1971, Papanek argued that “design has become the most powerful tool with
which man shapes his tools and
environments (and, by extension, society
and himself)” and that design must be “independent of concerns for the
gross
national product if it is to genuinely serve rather than exploit society” (ix). In
the forty years since these ideas were expressed, despite increased awareness
of social and
environmental concerns, and the role of consumerism in adding
to them, within the design profession as elsewhere,
the “market” and the
consumerism that drives it has accelerated, permeating more aspects of
society in the
process. Whilst design for social innovation and sustainability
seeks to facilitate new ways for society and
humanity to thrive outside
market-led paradigms—from skills exchange and time banking, to
collaborative
consumption and gift economies—many designers continue to
face the day-to-day reality of addressing societal
needs and seeking societal
change whilst operating within the dominant market economy. Here, we see
socially
responsive design as a socially useful design approach that, whilst
prioritizing the
social, embraces diverse practices and intensities of market-
oriented activity in its practice. It demonstrates a
response to Morelli’s call
“to review Papanek … from a new perspective, which reduces the distance
between
market-based and socially oriented initiatives” (Morelli 2007: 19).
A further point of departure for the responsive from the responsible in
design concerns the rejection of the paternal pre-eminence of design as the
cause of societal problems and consequently and conversely, the means
with
which to address societal challenges and drive social change. Whilst design
has doubtless played a key role
in driving consumption, and conversely has a
key role to play in delivering social change, it is evident that the
discipline of
design(ers) alone cannot deliver this transformation. As described above, the
wicked nature of
societal challenges necessitates the involvement of multiple
stakeholders, often working in response to competing
or contradictory
drivers and producing desirable outcomes, in their reframing and solution. In
such scenarios we
recognize that design is not of sovereign status, and that it
plays its part alongside other disciplinary skills
and competencies, designers
contributing alongside other actors. A designer may serve his/her own
agenda or, as
is customary within a discipline that serves the needs of others,
a designer may identify and respond to the
needs and requirements of other
stakeholders. Here, the conflicted nature of wicked problems makes it
unclear
which of the stakeholders’ perspectives a designer should be
responsible to. Such
scenarios require collaboration and compromises
between stakeholders—a fraternal approach
to designing that is responsive
to the context in which a design activity is situated and
the people with
whom a designer is designing. This fraternal approach is preferred to a
paternal approach in which a design is produced for a group of
stakeholders
to whom the designer considers him/herself responsible.

Open innovation for wicked challenges

Simple problems (problems that are readily defined) are easy to solve,
because defining a problem frequently
leads towards a solution. The
definition of a problem is subjective; it comes from a point of view. Thus,
when
defining problems, all actors (people and organizations who play a role
in relation to the issue—exerting effect
or experiencing affect) are equally
knowledgeable (or unknowledgeable). Some problems cannot be solved, not
least
because actors cannot agree on the definition of the problem, nor,
therefore, on what constitutes a desirable
outcome. These problems are
wicked. Socially responsive design recognizes the need to reframe wicked
problems as
design opportunities; opportunities that address and
accommodate the diverse agendas of as many of the actors
involved as
possible so that they are willing to collaborate to address the problems that
they effect or are
affected by.
As open, complex, and networked problems, wicked challenges require
open, complex, and networked responses.
Clearly, the complexity of social
challenges is too great to be considered from one perspective. Consequently,
complexity must be distributed so as to enable a considered response in a
given context. Accordingly, wicked
challenges favor responses that are open,
collaborative, iterative, and “agile.” (Beck et
al. 2001) Openness and
collaboration allow for a diversity of disciplinary approaches, skills,
expertise,
and resources to be brought to bear on a challenge. Iteration and
agility respond to the mutable nature of these
challenges.
This approach to finding new ways of responding to social challenges can
be understood as a process of “open
innovation” (Chesbrough 2003). This
means that the knowledge (and assets) required to address complex
challenges
is unlikely to reside in one person or organization. It is an
approach that necessitates that knowledge exchange
supports knowledge
generation and innovation. It shares the risks and rewards of innovation and
promotes the
diversity of the actors involved and the contexts addressed
(each actor recombining the shared knowledge in the
way that is most
appropriate to their given operational context). Open innovation approaches
offer a good fit to
wicked challenges.
Reciprocal and cooperative approaches to problem solving are appropriate
when addressing problems that lack
clarity about their owners or origins. If a
problem belongs to no single involved actor, it consequently belongs
to all
involved actors, albeit in different ways and to different degrees in different
contexts.
Accordingly, the diversity of actor perspectives, evaluative criteria, and
desirable outcomes around a wicked
problem necessitates responses for
which the outcomes are as diverse as the actors involved and their
operational
priorities and contexts. This accommodation of pluralism in
response to shared concerns demonstrates a model that
is agonistic; one that
simultaneously supports collaboration in response to a commonly held
problem, whilst
accommodating dissent and diversity with regard to specific
actors’ responses to their perception of the problem.
Tams and Wadhawan (2012: 10) note that wicked problems are “further
compounded by how each solution is part of a
larger interdependent system,
creating further unintended consequences and problems.” They warn that,
“in this
sense wicked problems are unstoppable” and subject to “repeated re-
solution—not solution.” This mutability is
well served by the open
collaborative networks that are fostered by socially responsive design.

Designing as publics: assembling, forming, and serving

The socially responsive design approach we describe here “requires

designers to work in a very different way”
(Cottam et al. 2006), that is, “to
evolve from being the individual authors of objects or
buildings, to being the
facilitators of change among large groups of people” (Thackara 2005). It
acknowledges
that “at the heart of design is the need to mobilise cooperation
and imagination.” It is a design process that is
“kept open to requirements
that by necessity are evolving, as well as to be able to arrive at novel, and
sometimes unexpected, solutions.” This requires that “decisions about
possible design trajectories are not made
too quickly” and that “the various
stakeholders involved present their work in a form that is open to the
possibility of change” (Binder et al. 2012). This conception of socially
responsive design positions it as a form of design for open innovation. When
it is
applied to address social challenges it becomes a form of design for
social innovation.
The diverse roles for design (from sense making to problem solving) in
the context of social innovation are
discussed in detail elsewhere (Manzini
2015: 40). The idea that socially responsive design makes a contribution
to
social innovation that starts with design actions which contribute to the
formation of what Manzini calls
“designing networks” and “designing
coalitions,” is relevant here. Manzini describes designing networks as
networks of “mutually independent actors” whose different initiatives
interact and thus influence each other and
the result, “even though they are
working without a shared idea of what it [the result] could or should be.”
Designing coalitions are defined as “tighter networks whose members
collaborate to achieve shared results.” In
our model of social innovation as
open innovation we understand designing coalitions as nested within
designing
networks, and that our actions as socially responsive designers are
in some part linked to the assembly of
“publics” (Dewey 1927), such that
they may become designing networks, and agitation of these networks such
that
designing coalitions might precipitate from them. In this way socially
responsive design is both public forming (perhaps more accurately described
as public assembling, given that it is the issue
of concern itself that forms the
public and the design action—or agitation—that assembles it) and public
serving in that these actors, once assembled as a designing coalition, can
deliver
collaborative problem solving activities that, in their address to the
public’s problems, serve the public’s
needs (Thorpe 2014).
Understanding the design process as a complex journey, the “motivations
and expectations” (Manzini 2015) of which
run from sense making to
problem solving, allows a multitude of design actions, outputs, and
outcomes to emerge.
At the beginning, the emphasis is on sense making, that
is, gathering, visualizing, and synthesizing
perspectives, knowledge, and
insights of involved actors. As the journey continues, participants
corroborate
understandings, similarities, and differences linked to a process
of definition and redefinition. The design
briefs that emerge are then
responded to by coalitions of actors, including designers with the relevant
skills,
competencies, and assets to prototype, test, and iteratively develop
designed responses to the briefs in the hope
of providing solutions to the
problems (re)defined.
 Design Against Crime has iteratively developed a staged methodology
that structures this approach. This
methodology has been written about in
detail elsewhere (Gamman and Pascoe 2004; Gamman and Thorpe 2006;
2009;
2011; Thorpe et al. 2010) and is illustrated in Figure 26.3.
The designed outputs of this process constitute part of a solution to the
problems they address. Since wicked
challenges are mutable and cannot be
solved, the products, services and environments created increase the
operational capacity of involved actors, helping them do better
when
confronted by challenges. A bike stand, for example, helps cyclists lock their
bikes more securely; a bag
prevents pickpocketing; and an artwork creates a
defensible space for an ATM user. Whilst the design coalitions
collaboratively design these outputs, the collection, collation, and synthesis
of the knowledge exchanged creates
resources that increase the innovative
capacity of other actors within the wider network.
These other actors may go
on and seek to form coalitions of their own to find new ways to address
similar
problems in their local contexts. A further, less tangible, output of
these projects is the network of actors
itself, the public that is, which is
assembled as a potential designing network that is brought into being around
the issue of concern.

Figure
26.3 Socially Responsive Design
Methodology.
Design Against Crime Research Centre.
 What does a public assembling activity look like and how might the
assembled public be agitated such that a designing coalition might
precipitate from it? In 2004–5, during the early
stages of the Bikeoff project,
a number of activities were delivered by the design team that contributed to
the
assembly of the public from which the design coalition that contributed
to the outputs described above was
formed: a research publication (Thorpe et
al. 2004) was created and distributed to policy
makers and cycling
infrastructure providers; a weblog was created and contributions promoted
by a sticker
campaign targeting bike parking in London; a major public
exhibition, Reinventing the
Bikeshed, was curated as part of the London
Architectural Biennale; and in 2006 the Bikeoff team co-hosted
the
inaugural London Bicycle Film Festival. The festival celebrated cycling by
showing films in which cycles,
cycling, and cycle culture were the stars and
it brought the cycling public together. As part of the festival,
and in
collaboration with Transport for London’s Cycling Centre of Excellence, a
curated program of films about
bike theft, made by cyclists, was screened to
police officers, cycling officers, and cyclists. The screening
served as a kind
of community-created training for those concerned with bicycle theft and its
prevention. These
designed “agitations” proved successful in assembling a
public for cycle theft within the cycling public and
precipitating designing
coalitions that acted together, and independently, to address the problem
from both
combined and individual perspectives. These actions contributed
to changes in policy,1 redrafting of guidance and standards,2 and the
design
and delivery of new, more secure bicycles, locks, and cycle parking.
Consequently, at a time when cycling
was increasing, cycle theft went
down,3 and the knowledge exchanged
and generated with all the actors
involved was later written up, contributing to police training materials
(Johnson et al. 2008).

Socially responsive design—a “thing” that makes us sensitive

Central to this approach, and this chapter, is the understanding that the
significance of design’s role in
response to societal challenges goes beyond
the actions, “motivations and expectations” (Manzini 2015) that lie
between
sense making and problem solving. Design and designing is able to bring
people together around a shared
concern, assembling a “public” (Dewey
1927), a potential designing network which, with the necessary catalyst,
may
precipitate a “designing coalition” (Manzini 2015) composed of many
people, with many interpretations of a problem. In co-designing, these
people have to talk to each other;
they have to deliberate; and they have to
argue and understand each other’s perspectives and the actions,
principles,
and values that frame their concerns. They have to agree on goals and
actions for reaching them in
the process of “reframing” (Dorst 2015) the
problem as an opportunity for positive change.
In this context, socially responsive design describes both the process and
the outputs of designing. Yet our
outputs of designing are not limited to the
material products, services, and environments that might be delivered
towards the problem-solving end of the design journey. Nor are they
completed by the insights, visualizations,
and prototypes that are outputs of
the sense-making activities of design. We understand socially responsive
design and designing as a thing, “a socio-material assembly that
deals with
matters of concern” (Binder et al. 2011). This design thing supports a
multiplicity of actors in making sense of their own and (each) other’s
actions,
principles, and values, and in so doing making sensitive themselves
and each other to
their potential as assets in a collaborative response to the
challenges and opportunities that emerge.
Aside from design thinking, defined by Cross (1982), Buchanan (1992),
Brown (2009) and
Lockwood (2010) amongst others, the contribution of
socially responsive design relates to design feeling, which is linked to the
designerly qualities of empathic recognition and
understanding of (one)
another fostered amongst a confederacy of actors engaged in the design
action. In the
context of socially responsive design, we are not only
considerate of, and sensitized to,
the feelings and potential of people as users
of design, linked to the public serving
function of design, but also as
participants in design, linked to the public
forming/assembling, socially
responsive function of design.
By bringing people together around issues of concern and sensitizing them
to their own,
and each other’s, potential as collaborators in new ways of
addressing societal goals and challenges, socially
responsive design actions
generate affects that contribute to the creation of the conditions for social
innovations that deliver social change.

Notes
1 The Home Office made cycle theft a comparator crime, which
prioritized address to cycle theft
amongst UK police forces.
2 Secured by Design Schools Design Guide 2010 (2010); Building
Research Establishment Secured
By Design Sustainable Homes Standard (2009); Spanish Energy Saving and
Diversification
Institutes Cycle Parking Manual (2009); Safer Parking Scheme New Build Guidance (p.10)
(2008);
Home Office “Eco Towns design guidance” (2008); Home Office bike theft prevention
communication (2008); Transport
for London “London Cycling Design Standards—A guide to the
design of a better cycling environment” (2005).
3 Rose Ades, formerly Head of TfL’s Cycle Centre of Excellence,
went on record and suggested that
at a time when cycling was increasing Bikeoff made a contribution to reducing
national bike crime
statistics (Putting the Brakes on Bike Theft Seminar, Barbican, 2008).

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 27

USER EXPERIENCE DESIGN IN

DIGITAL SERVICE INNOVATION
Ming Cheung
 
 

Introduction

In recent decades, much of the world has witnessed a transformation from

manufacturing to knowledge-based service
economies. The United States,
the United Kingdom, and Australia have become post-industrial societies in
which
the services sector dominates. While the services sector in China,
which is still in the midst of such a
transformation, is increasing in economic
importance (International Monetary Fund 2014). There is also a growing
awareness of the economic benefits that innovative digital services can bring
to nations and organizations. The
US is home to the leading multinational
companies in this field, such as Apple and Google. In November 2014,
Apple’s brand value reached US$124.2 billion and Google’s US$56.6
billion, making them the world’s first and
third most valuable brands (Forbes
2015). The Apple’s App Store, iTunes, and YouTube are illustrative of how
intrinsic to our daily lives innovative media services have become. There are
also some successful UK companies,
such as Zoopla, King, DeepMind, and
SwiftKey. King Digital Entertainment is the largest game developer on
Facebook, and SwiftKey is famous for its smart prediction technology for
easier mobile typing (Australian
Government 2015). In Australia, the
services sector now employs more than eighty-five percent of the country’s
workforce and accounts for eighty-two percent of its real gross value added,
which measures the contribution each
sector makes to the economy
(Australian Government 2015). The Australian Government acknowledges
that “[t]here is
a growing awareness across the sector that innovation is as
important for service business as it is in the
manufacturing, mining and
agricultural sectors” (Australian Government 2012: 3). In China, the
Shenzhen-headquartered premier Internet service portal, Tencent, attained a
market valuation of US$50 billion in
2012. In the same year, it was ranked
eleventh on Forbes’s list of the world’s most innovative companies (Forbes
2012). Tencent’s WeChat service, which supports location-based social plug-
ins, allows users to befriend and chat
with nearby strangers through a simple
shake of their smartphones. These types of service systems did not exist
in
the pre-digital era and are now the focus of creative design. Design
was once
concerned only with the production of tangible goods, but it is now “a key
agent in the production and
co-production of useful things and meaningful
interactions with the latter gathering influence in a
post-industrial society”
(Brown 2012: 153).
The rationale of these innovations is that digital media innovation can
redefine the meaning, value, and
functionality of physical products and
systems. It can transform them into highly integrated service systems able
to
enhance the sustainability and humaneness of our social and economic
environments, while offering industries a
competitive edge. Over the past
decade, information and applications have become critical parts of the
functionality of physical products and systems. These include personal
devices, home appliances, transportation
systems, healthcare systems,
industrial machinery and facilities, public facilities, and agricultural
facilities.
The integration of service systems into physical systems requires a
high level of adaptability and
personalization that must be backed by
advanced research and development into the “contexts, chains of relations
between contexts, their triggering factors, and their influences on user
actions” (Sato 2004: 277). Many
transnational companies have set up their
design research offices in the UK to embed themselves within the
European
market. These include Google, Intel, Microsoft, Samsung, and LG. In China,
Xiaomi, the
Beijing-headquartered entrepreneur, has grown from a
technology start-up in 2010 to the world’s third largest
smartphone maker
(following Samsung and Apple) with US$12 billion in revenue in 2014
(International Data
Corporation 2014). Although it makes phones, its
business strategy of focusing on China and adjacent markets and
its
integration of service systems into its mobile device designs have made a
huge impact on its market
performance. The service is now the king, not the
product. This can have significant long-term implications for a
company’s
prosperity and regional competitiveness.
This chapter presents a conceptual framework titled Media Perception-
Reaction Model (MPR, see Figure 27.1), which I developed to examine the
factors and processes that could drive more effective
user experience design
in digital service innovation

Figure
27.1 Media Perception-Reaction
Model (MPR).

Source: Author.

Service design strategies

Internationally there is evidence that socio-cultural, economic, and

technological factors can exert significant
impact on users’ willingness to
adopt, and satisfaction in adopting, a digital service. For example, since its
inception, US-based Facebook has ascended rapidly to the peak of social
media popularity. Yet, while recent
statistics indicate that Facebook is
present in every major global market, in many cases with remarkable levels
of penetration (Statista 2014), time has exposed the fact that some aspects of
it are not as perfect as they
seemed at the outset. User privacy, in particular,
is a key point of contention. Users’ negative reactions toward
the service are
increasing as Facebook tries to communicate the notion that there is a
naturally occurring
acceptance of social transparency, while its own wealth
is sustained through the commodification of personal
information generated
by its users. This information is then sold on to advertising companies to
assist in
targeted advertising campaigns. Despite the controversy, Facebook
reported US$227 billion worth of economic
impact and the creation of four
and a half million jobs in 2014 (Reuters 2015).
Another example is China’s Alibaba. China’s policy of opening access,
and its accession to the World Trade
Organization, have motivated regional
economic integration. As a result, internationalization has become a major
theme in Chinese market strategies (Cheung 2012a). In September 2014,
Alibaba became the biggest US IPO (initial
public offering) in history (Wall
Street Journal 2014). The e-commerce boom in China is
breeding a user-
oriented culture characterized by frequent visits to e-marketplaces, such as
Taobao, part of the
Alibaba Group. While China’s e-commerce market is
burgeoning, user distrust of online purchases abounds. To
overcome
institutional deficiencies and enhance user experience, Taobao is
implementing technology-enabled forms
of electronic payment security,
product quality assurance, and online dispute resolution. Based on an
extremely
high Internet adoption rate, the transaction volume of China’s
online retail sector is forecast to reach RMB five
trillion by 2016 and RMB
ten trillion by 2020 (China Internet Watch 2013). PricewaterhouseCoopers,
in its recent
The World in 2050 report, states that China has already
overtaken the US in 2014 as the
world’s largest economy in purchasing
power parity terms, with its success in part due to its increasing
commitment
to developing information communication technology
(PricewaterhouseCoopers 2015).
The success of these US and Chinese companies stems from the service
design strategies that they use to develop a
system of sustainable service
ecologies (Moggridge 2007). Users are reached and connected through
different
touch-points relevant to their socio-cultural contexts. On Facebook
and Taobao, the touch-points include, but are
not limited to, businesses that
maintain pages on them, games that users play on the platforms,
advertisements to
users, and the formation of communities and online
connectivity services that help to cross cultures and
languages. The
sustainability of the service system also relies on involving the users in
exchanging value in
ways that are mutually beneficial economically and
technologically over time. For example, both Facebook and
Taobao provide
user-friendly interfaces that have enabled their users to create a new wave of
small businesses
and services on their platforms. Technology also allows the
sharing of user experiences; if users can make a
favorable correlation
between what is stated in the offer and what is true in context, then it is
easier for them
to believe that the product or service will deliver the
promised benefits (Cheung 2011).
The information revolution evidences a paradigm shift whereby user
experience and user-generated media content
play an increasingly important
role in service success. However, most studies to date have focused on one
media
channel at a time, for example, blogging, service reviews, tweets, or
videos, and evaluated its effects on
service acceptance (Archer et al. 2011;
Yoo and Gretzel 2010). Most have found that the
content of these channels
exerts a certain degree of influence on users, but the ever-growing increase
in media
convergence and interdependency raises questions for designers
about the interaction of various channels and
their effects on one another.
Furthermore, as service providers attempt to respond to perceived user
demand, it
remains unclear whether their online efforts actually encourage
trust and satisfaction, and whether there are
media-specific barriers to active
user engagement and willingness to contribute during human-interface
interaction. The answers to these questions have the potential to promote
more creative user experience design,
thus leading to wiser service strategies
through a combination of media.

User experience design

This chapter reports a study that I conducted in 2014 to identify preliminary

factors and processes that could
inform effective user experience design in
digital service innovation. The study involved in-depth, face-to-face
interviews with design professionals employed by forty-two digital service
companies in seven major cities:
Sydney and Melbourne (Australia); Hong
Kong, Shanghai, and Beijing (China); London (UK); and New York (US).
These
cities are home to some of the world’s best-known service companies.
A sample of organizations was identified
through online directories, trade
sources, and associations with information on award winners, an approach
that
would generate a rich dataset of “learning from the best.” Each
organization selected was asked for contact
details of its user experience
design managers who could serve as informants and they were then formally
invited
to take part in interviews. All interviews were conducted in person
by myself to ensure consistency in applying
the repertory grid technique that
was adopted to structure each interview (Alexander and van Loggerenberg
2005;
Tan and Hunter 2002).
The repertory grid technique’s aim was to elicit cognitive constructs in an
“uncontaminated” way, in contrast to
traditional interview techniques, which
may constrain or direct participants’ responses. In this study, each
informant
was asked to identify six digital service innovation projects in which he or
she had been involved.
Then, three of the six were selected at random, and
the informant was asked which two differed from the third
with respect to
their service design elements. The results were entered in a repertory grid
table. The process
was repeated several times with each informant. They
were also asked to apply a rating scale ranging from 1 (very
little) to 5
(major impact) to indicate the extent to which design contributed to the user-
perceived experience
of the service. The informant was also asked to share
evidence that could indicate users’ levels of reaction
toward each of the six
service innovation projects. This rating process identified the key elements
taken into
consideration by designers in the process of digital service
innovation. With the informants’ consent, all
forty-two interviews, of around
two hours each, were audio-recorded and transcribed verbatim. Two
independent
coders then undertook thematic coding analyses. The results of
the study
informed the development of the Media Perception-Reaction
Model (MPR), which involves four key constructs to
guide user experience
design in digital service innovation: firstly, the design elements of digital
service
innovation; secondly, user-perceived innovation in the service
experience; thirdly, user perception of service
aesthetics; and fourthly, the
users’ trust in and satisfaction with the service.

Service design elements

According to the study, the effectiveness of user experience design can be

gauged by breaking the touch-points
down into elements and measuring how
they are applied. The study identified five elements that are of most
relevance to design professionals, namely information, navigation,
engagement, entertainment, and
personalization. The information element
refers to the amount and quality of the service or service-related
information
available to users. According to the informants, one of the critical drivers of
interaction with
digital media is to provide users with comprehensive service
information. And they stressed that interpersonal
information, such as expert
opinions and user ratings and comments, can exert a social influence on a
potential
user’s attitudes. The navigation element refers to ease-of-use and
the accuracy with which users can navigate and
locate service information.
The informants pinpointed, for example, the effects of list versus matrix
information
formats, the use of graphical and tabular presentations, the
different dimensions of flow, and the role of color
in encoding and decoding
information to facilitate visualization and retrieval. The engagement element
refers to
users’ involvement and interaction with the stimuli appearing in the
digital medium. Amongst its possible
elements are social networks and
blogs. The informants noted, however, that an online user’s interest may
increase as the complexity of a stimulus increases, but it may also decline, or
even backfire and create a
negative attitude toward the interface, if the
stimulus becomes too complex. The entertainment element refers to
the
enjoyment and pleasure that a user obtains from an interaction experience.
Elements include a diversity of
digital media, such as games, audio and
video, animations, and virtual reality, as well as the novelty and
excitement
levels of such objects. The informants tend to support the view that emotion
plays a mediating role in
the experience, from interacting with media
elements to generating approach responses. The personalization
element
refers to the style and features of media content that match a user’s personal
preferences. Elements of
this aspect may include personalized digital
artifacts, personalized avatars, and the like. According to
informants greater
levels of personalized content engender more positive attitudes toward
digital media portals
and customization can exert behavioral effects on a
user’s browsing activity. Their views echo those of my 2012
study, which
reported the role of personalized design on building strong brand resonance,
as users interact with
and feel emotionally connected to the brand (Cheung
2012b).

User-perceived innovation

The study further revealed that user-perceived innovation, aesthetics, trust,

and satisfaction are the dependent
variables that could have intermediary
effects on the adoption of a new service. This would be affected by
complexity, compatibility, advantage over existing alternatives, etc.
User-
perceived innovation is a critical success factor underlying all the user
experience design projects of the
informants. This echoes the theory of the
diffusion of innovations, which espouses four main elements that
influence
the spread of new ideas: innovation, communication channels, time, and the
social system (Rogers 1962).
This process relies heavily on human capital.
Several studies examine user-perceived innovation in digital services,
particularly those involving
user-generated content. For example, there are
studies that have investigated the use of blogs to engage users in
the creation
and dissemination of service messages (Singh et al. 2008) and drawn on
media
theory’s notion of publics to examine the role of media sharing in the
formation of
collectives in social groups (Lindtner et al. 2011). Whilst the
latter research
constitutes a step forward in our understanding of the
interdependencies within user-generated content
activities, it is still
restricted to two media channels, namely, photo-sharing and audience
reviews. The greater
convergence and interdependency accompanying
varying levels and combinations of user-generated media content
remain
under-investigated. On the other hand, the digital design of many systems to
date is still a matter of
happenstance. The informants revealed from their
observations of the field that some practitioners frequently
rely on intuition
to determine appropriate interface designs, given the lack of prior training
and clear guidance
from design theory and scientific research. Intuition,
however, can be unreliable, and the impact of a design may
be greatly
diminished without a thorough understanding of the relationships between
design perceptions and user
reactions. After all, the design may reflect only
the “designers’ implicit theory about aspects of human
perception and
cognition” (Gillan and Bias 2001: 353). Hence, a major problem for the user
experience design of
many systems is that they were not designed with the
user perspective in mind. This is an area that requires
further research.

User-perceived aesthetics

The informants of this study also pointed out from their experience that users
approach interface stimuli that
can provide them with an aesthetically
enticing and pleasurable affective responses and avoid those that cannot.
This appears to relate to the concept of stimulus screening, which posits that
individuals differ in the way they
habitually screen environmental
information. Different combinations of emotional states lead to different
types
of screening behavior (Mehrabian 1991). For example, the informants
stated that the high degree of arousal
derived from a web interface’s
mentally taxing online atmospherics can deter users from further exploration
of
the site. They also found that both emotional pleasure and emotional
arousal have positive effects on user
responses to service websites, with the
former exerting a stronger mediating effect than the latter.

Trust and satisfaction

Unlike studies of online shopping, which target specific types of purchasing

behavior or the behavioral intention
to carry out such behavior (Davis et al.
1989), the Media Perception-Reaction Model
identifies constructs prior to
the establishment of behavioral intentions, namely, trust in and satisfaction
with
the service. The results of the interviews showed that, if the design
aspects of a user experience cause users to
feel they are being taken care of,
then their perceptions of innovation
and aesthetics will be positive and they
will react to the experience with a high degree of trust and
satisfaction. To a
certain extent, this finding echoes the expectancy value theory which posits
that individuals
respond to novel information by formulating or changing a
belief and then assigning a value to each attribute on
which that belief is
based (Fishbein and Ajzen 1975). An expectation is then created or modified
on the basis of
aggregated and valued beliefs. The informants of this study
suggested that people are goal-oriented, orienting
themselves to stimuli
according to their expectation of how probable it is that they contain a
particular
attribute or that a reaction will lead to a particular consequence,
and to their evaluation of the degree of
affect toward an attribute or response
outcome.

Implications and future research

Innovative service design presents a dilemma to organizations. On the one

hand, service innovation may offer
substantial economic benefits over
conventional business strategies. On the other, it may be perceived by
companies as involving significant risk with no guarantee of success. By its
nature, innovation is characterized
by surprise and novelty. For a business,
however, that novel choice will only be allowed or welcomed if it means
increased profit and/or better brand value. The core proposition of the Media
Perception-Reaction Model is that
causal relations play an important role in
innovative service design because they afford the business a way to
represent how it envisions and operates, and because they allow its
imagination free rein in considering how the
users of their service could or
would react if changes were made to its design.
If creativity is the act of generating new ideas, then innovation is the
process of applying those ideas to a
particular context. Creativity merely
marks the onset of innovation (Cheung 2012c). Unlike innovations in many
other fields, service innovation deals with networks of users, often across
contexts and cultures, and thus does
not occur in a vacuum. Innovative
companies see what other companies have seen, but think what most others
have
not thought or acknowledged. They have curious, open, and inquisitive
minds, and often make reference to the best
practices of the wider world
through, for example, learning and adaptation. On the other hand,
conservative
companies are often encouraged to follow suit without
questioning the prevailing assumptions and practices,
especially when
positive evidence about the success of their current business abounds. Such
rigid and
unquestioning adherence can serve to stifle originality. The
rationale of the Media Perception-Reaction Model is
to encourage designers
to step out of their comfort zones and understand the pros and cons of
available options
that could potentially maximize their companies’ or
clients’ service value. Surprise and novelty emerge only when
they
challenge both existing assumptions and the validity of their constituent
elements.
This study offers directions for future research. Firstly, the research
findings contribute to expanding our
breadth of knowledge on the subject of
creating and managing digital service innovation. At a strategic level, a
future study could investigate and analyze the current design strategies and
practices across four of the world’s
major economies (Australia, China, the
UK, and the US) in response to the rise of a digital service economy, in
an
effort to determine how the best of those strategies could be adapted and
applied to each other. Secondly, in
terms of methodology, a larger-scale
study could gather further firsthand empirical data from design professionals
in the four countries, given that the interactive
dynamics between industry
and academics have yet to be explored extensively in the literature. Such a
study’s
novelty lies in its cross-national data comparison, the results of
which would reveal new insights not easily
captured through surface data or
other means. The knowledge derived would be invaluable to service
organizations,
whatever their scale, as it would provide them with demand-
driven and evidence-based guidelines with which to
maximize return on
investment. Businesses will also benefit by incorporating the resulting
knowledge into staff
training and development, ultimately strengthening
their market performance. Thirdly, the Media
Perception-Reaction Model
has implications for service design education. Future research could look
into the
curriculum and the pedagogical strategies that design schools could
use to develop the creative and innovation
capacity of their future designers.
The findings could also be used as a fundamental building block for the
design of more relevant learning content in the service design field.

Acknowledgments

I would like to express my warmest appreciation to the forty-two design

professionals for their valuable
contribution to this study.

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 28

DESIGN + ANTHROPOLOGY
An emergent discipline
Prasad Boradkar
 

Understanding design anthropology

I struggle with the term design anthropology. My unease can be attributed

partially to the somewhat slapdash and
inelegant juxtaposition of the words
“design” and “anthropology,” devoid of any explanatory prepositions.
Design
anthropology, therefore, opens itself up to multiple interpretations
without certainty about what precisely it
stands for. Is this design of, for,
with, or
and anthropology? Is this a new type of anthropology informed by
design (a designerly
anthropology), or a new form of design inspired by
anthropology (anthropological design)? Or, is design
anthropology a new
theory and practice inspired by the interstitial spaces between the
disciplines? Fortunately,
a flurry of recent writing from academia and
industry that can be situated squarely between design and
anthropology
offers answers to these questions as it maps out an agenda for this emerging
field of study
(Bjerregaard and Lauring 2012; Clarke 2011; Drazin 2013;
Gunn and Donovan 2012; Gunn et
al. 2013; Ingold 2014; Milev 2013;
Smith 2011).
“On the face of it, anthropology and design would seem to point in
opposite directions” (Ingold 2014: 1).
Generally speaking, design is actively
engaged in creating new material goods with which to populate society;
anthropology spends its energy in critiquing the material to understand the
social. Design is largely a
generative activity, while anthropology is
fundamentally analytical. This by no means implies that design does
not
engage in critique or anthropology in creation; the sub-disciplines of design
studies and activist
anthropology clearly prove otherwise. But Ingold
refutes this polarity and goes on to point out the common ground
between
the disciplines. “Both design and anthropology are inherently speculative
disciplines, whose propositions
nevertheless only carry force to the extent
that they are grounded in a profound understanding of human lived
worlds”
(Ingold 2014: 1). This shared concern has led to several areas of
convergence between design and
anthropology.
Designers and design researchers have been borrowing heavily from
anthropology’s research methods for use in the
early stages of the design
process; simultaneously, anthropologists are getting more interested in
examining the
activity of contemporary design and the products of this
practice. In addition to the books, book chapters, and
journal articles that
have recently appeared in print, the presence of blogs, web groups,
conferences, and
workshops on the topic of design anthropology is evidence
of the growing interest in this field of study. New academic degrees in
Europe and the United States are now being offered under
the title of
“design anthropology.” It is clear from all this activity that there is
significant overlap between
these disciplines and growing numbers of
people engaged in this interdisciplinary study. Scholars from both
disciplines have attempted to delineate a position for this emergent topic by
describing the theoretical
intersections as well as distinctions between the
two disciplines, outlining the methodologies through which
anthropologists
and designers practice their craft, and imagining ways in which they could
inform each other. In
the recently published Design Anthropology: Theory
and Practice, the editors offer an
in-depth overview of the status of design
anthropology research, suggesting that it is “coming of age as a
separate
(sub)discipline with its own concepts, methods, research practices and
practitioners” (Otto and Smith
2013: 1).
Defining design anthropology succinctly has not been easy, though recent
texts document several attempts (Clarke
2011; Drazin 2013; Gunn and
Donovan 2012; Otto and Smith 2013; Tunstall 2013). For Clarke, this is an
area of
study that “brings together key thinkers and practitioners involved in
making and theorizing our contemporary
material and immaterial world: its
rituals, its aesthetics, and its interactions” (2011: 9). The sweeping scope
of
design anthropology is evident in this definition as it includes thinking and
making, theory and practice, and
both tangible and intangible things. Gunn
and Donovan describe it as “an emergent field concerned with the design
of
technologies that build upon and enhance embodied skills of people,
through attention to the dynamics and
performance and the coupling of
action and perception” (2012: 10). Here, the authors emphasize the nature
of the
process, type of skill, and activities of the people involved. They
describe it further as “different ways of
designing and different ways of
designing and using,” drawing attention to the relational nature of design,
production, and use (ibid.: 11).

Design anthropology then comprises a group of anthropologists

who do anthropological work, producing critical
cultural
commentaries alongside design and in ways that aspire to be
constructive for design. Their aim is
cultural commentary more
than design or marketing, but their work is only justifiable when it
engages with
those aims in some sense.
(Drazin 2012: 253)

Of these, Drazin’s definition not only describes the purpose and task of
design anthropology, but also specifies
what counts as justifiable output. It
is important to note that it is only when we include such terms as “action
and perception,” “making and theorizing,” and “cultural commentaries
alongside design” that design and
anthropology can shape each other in this
interdisciplinary endeavor.

Anthropology of art, experience, music, magic, and buildings

As a form of cultural critique of human society, anthropology has been

deployed in the examination of several
social phenomena, intellectual and
artistic disciplines, and human abilities. Before examining further how
design
and anthropology intersect, it might be of use to study how other
disciplines have engaged with anthropology. My
goal in this exploration
was to learn from analogous scholarship dealing with the relationship
between
anthropology and a variety of non-design disciplines. Hatcher’s Art
as Culture: An Anthropology of Art (1999), Gell’s Art and Agency (1998),
Turner and Bruner’s The Anthropology of Experience (1986), Merriam’s
The
Anthropology of Music (1964), and some more unusual ones, including
Greenwood’s The
Anthropology of Magic (2009) and van der Hoorn’s
Indispensible Eyesores: The Anthropology
of Undesirable Buildings (2009),
served as examples from which to learn about such scholarship and its
outcomes.

The study of the visual arts as an anthropological study calls for

considering art as an aspect of culture, and
using the methods and
theories that anthropologists have used to study other aspects of
culture, taking into
consideration a great many things instead of, or
in addition to, one’s own personal responses to particular art
forms.
It means that one needs to know where the art was made, who made
it, what its use was, what its
functions were, and what it meant to
the people who made use of it. This is the study of art in its cultural
context.
(Hatcher 1999: 1)

It is clear in the quote above that in order to examine art anthropologically

it has to be situated within a
broad socio-cultural framework, and not an
individual, critical one. In Art and Agency: An
Anthropological Theory,
Gell encapsulates this socio-cultural complexity by describing objects
produced by
artistic activity as devices by which to sense the “acquiescence
of individuals in the network of
intentionalities in which they are
enmeshed” (1998: 43). Gell explains, “the anthropology of art focuses on
the
social context of art production, circulation and reception, rather than
the evaluation of particular works of
art, which, to my mind, is the work of
a critic” (1998: 3). In the world of design, this can be compared to, and
equated with, the analysis of products during the phases of production
(design and manufacture), distribution
(marketing and sales), and
consumption (acquisition, use, and disposal). In Gell’s view, “this
production and
circulation has to be sustained by certain social processes of
an objective kind, which are connected to other
social processes (exchange,
politics, religion, kinship, etc.)” (ibid.). For Gell, the anthropology of art is
“the theoretical study of social relations in the vicinity of objects mediating
social agency” (ibid.: 4). Art
objects, therefore, have to be examined with
the recognition that that they have agency, and they, not unlike
humans, are
also social beings. In The Anthropology of Experience, Turner and Bruner
write, “the anthropological enterprise has always been concerned with how
people experience themselves, their
lives, and their culture. Traditionally,
anthropologists have tried to understand the world as seen by the
‘experiencing subject’, striving for an inner perspective” (Turner and
Bruner 1986: 9). The authors recognize
that experiences are personal and
individual, and the only way to study them is by “interpreting expressions.”
Therefore, an anthropology of experience is in fact an anthropology of
expressions and their meanings. In their
attempt to capture and analyze
expressions, the authors rely on interviews, observations, and narrative
accounts
from participants.
In an anthropological study of magic, Greenwood herself becomes an
informant during fieldwork. In other words,
she practices magic while
studying it. She remarks that anthropology’s rootedness in materiality and
rational
discourse made it difficult to find “explanatory frameworks that do
not reduce the experience of magic to
external terms or explanations that
obliterate its essence” (Greenwood 2009: 9). Greenwood explains that the
method of participant observation (observing herself as a magician) helped
create a “native’s account” of the culture of magic.
In the anthropological study of music, “emphasis was placed not so much
upon the structural components of music
sound as upon the part music
plays in culture and its functions in the wider social and cultural
organization of
man” (Merriam 1964: 4). Here too, the artifact (a musical
composition, for example) produced by the activity is
not as much the focus
as is the cultural context within which the activity (composing) is
performed.
“Ethnomusicology,” which at its core is an anthropological
study of music, “is both a field and a laboratory
discipline; that is, its data is
gathered by the investigator from among the people he is engaged in
studying,
and at least part of it is later subjected to analysis in the
laboratory” (ibid.: 37). The ethnomusicologist
therefore needs to be adept at
ethnography and musicology, able to conduct research in the field and able
to
critique it in a sound studio.
Finally, in examining buildings that have failed in some way, van der
Hoorn asks, “how do people affect
undesirable architecture, and how does
undesirable architecture affect them?” (2009: 1). The author discusses the
agency of buildings, their impact on people, and the narratives they call up
“in the form of ghost stories, crime
novels, urban legends or even tourist
guides” (ibid.). Aided by several interviews and accounts from a variety of
informants, van der Hoorn tells meaningful stories of buildings people hate
from the perspective of those people
who interact with them, and through
an analysis of the documents written about them. Here, the anthropological
perspective provides an alternative architectural critique drawn not from the
buildings directly, but through
ethnographies of the people who inhabit
them.
These anthropologies of art, experience, music, magic, and buildings
demonstrate that understanding how people
operate within their socio-
cultural context, focusing on the activity in addition to the artifact,
recognizing
the significance of relationships, and taking into account the
entire lifecycle of artifacts and processes, is
critical in such analyses. An
anthropological study of design would therefore mean presenting human
stories of
how design operates in this world, explaining design in all its
socio-cultural complexity, and following its
evolution through cycles of
production, distribution, and consumption.

The origins of design anthropology

The breadth of the type of work that can be referred to as design

anthropology, and the lack of specificity in
the definition of what design
anthropology means, makes it somewhat difficult to locate its precise
origin. In
their splendid introductory chapter to Design Anthropology:
Theory and Practice, Otto and
Smith (2013) trace some of the earlier
history of the field to the Hawthorne study conducted in the 1930s at
Western Electric in Chicago about the relationship between workplace
conditions and output. Other histories cite
Frederick Taylor’s experiments
as some of the early efforts in studying efficiency and worker motivation
(Baba
2005; Reese 2002). Several other studies conducted in the workplace
from the 1920s through the 1970s, and often
referred to as industrial
psychology, industrial engineering, or the more troubling human
engineering, are cited
as predecessors to the involvement of social science
research methods in industry (Moroney 1995; Reese 2002;
Schwartzman
1993). However, it is the work of Lucy Suchman of the Xerox Palo Alto
Research Center in HCI
(human–computer interaction) in the 1970s and
1980s that is often cited as
the early and direct involvement of the
anthropological method in product design (Baba 2005; Clarke 2011; Otto
and Smith 2013; Reese 2002). The rest of the history of design
anthropology, which included such pioneers as Jane
Fulton Suri of IDEO,
Rick Robinson of E-Lab and Sapient, Jay Doblin of The Doblin Group,
Steve Wilcox of Design
Science, and Liz Sanders of MakeTools, has been
well documented (Baba 2005; Blomberg et
al. 2003; Clarke 2011; Otto and
Smith 2013; Reese 2002; Squires and Byrne 2002; Suchman 2007; 2011;
Wasson
2000). Many of the current practitioners like Uday Dandavate and
Kevin Schmidt of Sonic Rim and Marty Gage of
Lextant tend to use the
term design research for their work, which in many cases is the application
of
ethnographic methods for the collection of qualitative data in the early
stages of the design process.

Design inspired by anthropology: focus on ethnography

Designers frequently use anthropological research methods in the early

stages of the design process as a means of
practicing human-centered
innovation (Cagan and Vogel 2002; Dreyfuss 1955; Griffin and Hauser
1993; Ireland 2003;
Kelley and Littman 2001). “It must be borne in mind
that the object being worked on is going to be ridden in, sat
upon, looked at,
talked into, activated, operated, or in some way used by people individually
or en masse”
(Dreyfuss 1955: 8). Dreyfuss is often recognized in industrial
design as one of the pioneers of user research, as
well as of human factors
and ergonomics. Human-centered design rejects aesthetics or technology as
the sole
drivers for product development; instead, it emphasizes the need to
understand the socio-cultural context within
which people interact with
things, and to use that knowledge to generate new design. The rapidly
growing field of
design research addresses this very need, largely through
such qualitative methods as interviews, participant
observations,
shadowing, cultural probes, journaling, and so on. The goal of these
methods is to be able to
identify people’s articulated, as well as their
unarticulated, needs. Corporations involved in human-centered new
product
development operate on the principle that knowing people’s needs will lead
to designs that are more
readily assimilated into their everyday lives.
Though the tradition of user research has existed in the design
discipline for
several decades (especially in the work of such visionaries as Robert Propst
and Henry Dreyfuss),
the explicit and widespread use of rapid ethnography
is relatively new. In design research, it has been defined
as “a research
approach that produces a detailed, in depth observation of people’s
behavior, beliefs and
preferences by observing and interacting with them in
a natural environment” (Ireland 2003: 26). Several large
multinational
corporations, like Intel, Nike, and Nokia, routinely hire anthropologists to
help design teams
understand the attitudes, belief systems, lifestyles, and
needs of social groups for whom they are designing new
products and
services.
This is probably the most active area of convergence between design and
anthropology that has led to new
research, publications, shared personnel,
and employment opportunities across disciplines. This form of design
anthropology as it is practiced today might fit under the label “applied
anthropology,” defined as the
“application of anthropological knowledge,
methodology and theoretical approaches to address societal problems
and
issues” (Kedia and van Willigen 2005: 1). Interestingly, some of the
definitions of yet another form of
applied anthropology, referred to as
business anthropology or organizational anthropology, are strikingly similar
to design anthropology (Baba 1986; 2005; Caulkins and Jordan 2013;
Denny
and Sunderland 2007; Jordan 2013). Baba outlines three key areas of
business anthropology:

anthropology related to the process of producing goods and

services, and the corporate organizations in which
production takes
place … ethnographically-informed design of new products,
services and systems for consumers
and businesses … [and]
anthropology related to the behavior of consumers and the
marketplace.
(Baba 2005: 84)

It is clear in this charter of business anthropology that much of the work

focuses on a specific form of
application, i.e. the use of anthropological
research methods in understanding a set of business practices,
related
outcomes, and their impact on consumers.
In addition, design anthropology, through its critical questioning, might
push mainstream design practice beyond
its current obsession with form-
giving and human-centeredness to more analytical forms of the practice,
such as
anti-design, critical design, and vernacular design (Clarke 2011;
Hunt 2011). It might guide designers in using
techniques inherent to the
discipline not merely to alter the shape of the material landscape but to
participate
more explicitly in prompting social change.

Anthropology inspired by design

Mirroring design’s interest in anthropology, in recent years, anthropologists
have expressed more interest in
examining design praxis, the participation
of people (designers and users) in the process, and the products that
result
from this activity. In the US, anthropology is often organized around four
sub-disciplines—biological or
physical anthropology, socio-cultural
anthropology, linguistic anthropology, and archaeology. While
biological/physical anthropology focuses its attention on evolution,
genetics, and primatology, linguistic
anthropology examines the social and
cultural meanings of language in human communication. Archaeology and
socio-cultural anthropology both engage directly in the material analysis of
designed objects and the human
practices from which they emerge, and
therefore have a closer relation to design. While archaeology is the study
of
human cultures and the natural, social, ideological, economic, and political
environments in which they
operated in the past, socio-cultural
anthropology concerns itself with in-depth examinations of the social
systems, cultural practices, historical and contemporary rituals, and the
human capacities that enable them.
Socio-cultural anthropologists are
interested in matters of everyday life and they conduct ethnographic studies
to understand gender relationships, family structures, mythologies, religious
activities, and economic systems of
societies.
Although traditionally associated with cultures and objects of ancient,
less-industrialized, or remote
civilizations, many socio-cultural
anthropologists have turned their attention in recent years to the study of
consumption, the activity of design, and the social meanings of mass-
produced, everyday objects. Exploratory and
inductive in nature, socio-
cultural anthropology possesses the conceptual flexibility to study complex
situations
involving people, the environment, and cultures in dynamic and
constantly evolving societies. According to
Berger,

the task of the anthropological analyst of material culture is to see

the role that various objects play in the
most important myths and
rituals of specific cultures and subcultures and the manner in which
all of these
relate to dominant values and beliefs.
(Berger 1992: 47)

By viewing objects as cultural data, socio-cultural anthropologists are better

able to comprehend their meanings
and social import. They gather
information over reasonably long periods of time using ethnographic
research
methods, such as field observation and key informant interviewing.
The material turn, often described as a recent
surge of interest in objects,
materials, the object–subject relationship, and the agency of things has
swept
through several disciplines in the social sciences and the humanities
including history, anthropology, and
cultural studies (Drazin 2013; Hicks
and Beaudry 2010; Joyce and Bennett 2010). This has aided in making the
process and products of design a focus of attention for anthropologists.
However, it seems that the relationship between design and anthropology
has not been one of equal exchange. While
design has explicitly adopted
anthropological method into its core practice, a lot less design thinking or
making
has entered anthropology. In fact, anthropology shies away from
intervention into the context that it studies; it
is committed to participating
only in the form of observation. Anthropologists “take only notes and leave
only
footprints” (Hunt 2011: 36). Can (and should) design change some of
these fundamental principles that have
defined the discipline of
anthropology since its inception? Design anthropology scholars tend to
think yes. Otto
and Smith, for example, would like anthropologists “to
develop ways to include the anticipation and creation of
new forms in their
ethnographic descriptions and theorizing” (2013: 12–13). Gatt and Ingold
“propose an
anthropology not of, as, or for design, but
anthropology by
means of design” (2013: 141, emphases in original). “In anthropology-by-
means-of-design, the active participation of the anthropologist in building
relationships and making things—that is, contributing to the unfolding
happenings in fieldwork—necessarily
becomes more deliberate and more
experimental” (ibid.: 149). However, can design’s predilection for active
intervention (instead of anthropological distance), rapid visualization
(instead of lengthy written
ethnographies), and making things (instead of
observing things) reshape anthropology? And if that is indeed the
case,
what new form does a designerly anthropology take? If design is imagined
as “conception and planning of the
artificial,” where the artificial refers to
artifacts made of human agency (Buchanan 1992) or as “courses of
action
aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones” (Simon 1996:
111), anthropology starts to take
on designerly characteristics.

Expanding design anthropology’s horizons

While the practice of design anthropology so far has largely been built
around the ethnographic turn in design,
scholars are now calling for a much
broader, more bilateral, and analytical as well as generative agenda for the
discipline. Design anthropology is now described as a means of theorizing
object culture in the twenty-first
century (Clarke 2011), studying the
materiality, temporality, and relationality of design (Gunn et al. 2013),
anthropology-by-means-of-design (Gatt and Ingold 2013), and reimagining
relations
between designing and using and between people and things
(Gunn and Donovan 2012). Its scope now includes
critical examination of
methods and practices, materiality and objectification, relations and
engagement,
techniques and gestures, ethics and politics, and knowledge
systems that bridge these disciplines (Clarke 2011;
Drazin 2012; 2013;
Gunn and Donovan 2012; Halse 2008; Küchler 2011; Louridas 1999; Miller
2011; Otto and Smith
2013; Squires and Byrne 2002; Suchman 2011;
Tunstall 2013). These recommendations for what design anthropology
should be and do suggest critical and interventionist engagement with the
world inspired by designerly ways of
knowing and doing. In a sense, new
conceptions of design anthropology invite the (sub)discipline to participate
in re-critiquing the social in designerly ways, and re-making the material
with anthropological critique in mind.
“The stance of design anthropology
encourages, even necessitates, a questioning attention to physical and
material contexts, as a route into examining contemporary conceptions of
social trajectories and attitudes
towards social change” (Drazin, 2012: 261).
The concern here “is with the material conditions of social life”
(Ingold
1987: 1). While design frequently takes the lead in imagining the material,
anthropology is usually at
the forefront in analyzing the social.

Conclusion: beyond anthropocentrism

In extending design anthropology’s boundaries of concern and locus of

action even further, I would like to insert
a third element to add to the social
and the material: the natural; and by the natural I allude to the
environment;
by material I mean all human-made things; and by social I refer to the
aggregate network of people,
relationships among them, and institutions to
which they belong. So far, of the four sub-disciplines of
anthropology it has
been socio-cultural anthropology that has had the deepest and most
developed relationship
with design. I have discussed business anthropology
and applied anthropology briefly here as well, but would like
to turn our
attention to ecological and environmental anthropology. And while one
might suggest that concerns
about the natural world, ecological issues, and
environmental problems are inclusive to our conceptions of design
and
anthropology, foregrounding them here lends additional purpose to this
discipline.

Ecological anthropology focuses upon the complex relations

between people and their environments. Human
populations,
socially organized and oriented by means of particular cultures,
have ongoing contact with and
impact upon the land, climate, plant
and animal species, and other humans in their environments, and
these in
turn have reciprocal impacts. Ecological anthropology
directs our attention to the ways in which a particular
population
purposely or unintentionally shapes its environment, and the ways
in which its relations with the
environment shape its culture and its
social, economic and political life.
(Attwood and Salzman 2009)

Both design and anthropology tend to be centered around and deeply

engaged with human culture. Both design and
anthropology are
anthropocentric in their approach, method, philosophy, and technique; they
tend to be of, by,
and for the people. And in fact, it is this common goal and
preoccupation
with humans that leads to the overlap between the
disciplines. However, as we face a growing number of
environmental
problems associated with global climate change, might it be apropos to
question this intensely
focused anthropocentrism? Though we design
products and services primarily for people, they do not impact only
people.
The consequences of design activity (human-centered or otherwise) reach
far beyond humans. We are, after
all, one of several million species who
live on this planet. Why then should our design be so anthropocentric?
Can
we not design products and services not only with people in mind, but also
other species and entire
ecosystems? Can design be more biocentric than
anthropocentric?
While anthropology is structured around our desire and need to better
understand humans, ecological/environmental
anthropology examines the
relationship between people and the environment, and might offer new
directions for
sustainable design.

This work [of environmental anthropology] is grounded in the

premise that anthropologists must engage across
disciplines and
with practitioners around the world to pose, analyze, and refine
viable possibilities, and in
doing so, move beyond disengaged
cultural critique. In fact—in going beyond our usual roles of
recognizing,
describing, analyzing, and deconstructing culture—
such work suggests that anthropologists can be co-creators,
with
engaged practitioners of our research projects, in the cultural
process.
(Lockyer and Veteto 2013: 3)

The notion of anthropologists as co-creators resonates closely with design

anthropology’s call to go beyond
participant observation to participant
action.
Many of our environmental problems are caused by an injudicious use of
the natural, in the creation of the
material, for social use. It is important to
note that the divisions between the social (related to people),
natural
(related to the environment), and material (related to human-made things)
are not as clear as one might
initially assume. As a species we are a
component of the ecosystems in which we reside, and are therefore a part
of
nature. Similarly, all the resources needed to produce the things we use are
extracted from the natural
environment. Finally, human-made things are
socio-technical systems rather than stand-alone physical things.
Therefore,
boundaries between the social and the natural, the material and the natural,
and the social and the
material are difficult to inscribe with hard clarity.
What might we expect if design anthropology, in its
critical stance, is able
to engage the social, the natural, and the material equally, and also examine
the
relations among them? And what if design anthropology, in its
designerly way, is able to generate solutions that
care for rather than injure
all three?
As this emergent area of study flourishes and matures into its own
discipline, rather than remaining a
sub-discipline of design and
anthropology, these are the kinds of complex issues and wicked problems I
hope it
will be equipped to analyze, understand, and solve.
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 29

DESIGN, DAILY LIFE, AND

MATTERS OF TASTE
Ben Highmore
 

Introduction

It has long been assumed that cultural tastes are used to perpetuate and
secure hierarchies of social difference.
Those with power, disposable
wealth, and leisure time have distinguished themselves from the poor and
laboring
classes by claiming to have more sensitive and superior tastes, or
sometimes just by asserting that they simply
have taste while those others
do not. Within consumer societies such distinctions have been materialized
through
the acquisition and consumption of commodities: by eating
luxurious foods; wearing elaborate and delicate
clothing; and by decorating
houses with expensive furnishings and exotic devices. In 1899 the
economist Thorstein
Veblen claimed that a leisured class distinguished itself
through a display of “conspicuous consumption” that
emerges from
“conspicuous leisure [that] grows gradually into a laborious drill in
deportment and an education in
taste and discrimination as to what articles
of consumption are decorous and what are the decorous methods of
consuming them” (Veblen 1994 [1899]: 32). The well-to-do learn how to
acquire the most tasteful items and to have
the most tasteful commerce with
them (to eat slowly or to walk languidly, for instance). The dominant
classes,
then, display their superiority through their material culture and
through a set of associated cultural
practices. The dominated classes, who
do not have the economic, social, and cultural resources to compete, are
refused access to this world of taste. (This is of course over-simplifying
Veblen’s thesis. Since Veblen’s time
the social scientist who has done most
to explore the relationship between power, status, and taste is
undoubtedly
the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, whose landmark publication
Distinction: A
Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (1986), was first
published in France in 1979, though it was based
on research undertaken
throughout the 1960s.).
The problem here is not simply one of social inequality; there is also a
theoretical problem at work. There is a
sleight of hand that hides the word
good in the word taste. The well-to-do are not being given an education in
taste, they are being given an education in the presumptions of good taste. It
is the same
problem that is associated with the word culture; in certain uses
of the word culture there is an assumption that
only certain items would
count as culture. Thus someone talking about culture could already have
discounted vast
swathes of what a more inclusive and anthropological
understanding of culture would necessarily include. With a
definition of
culture that is tied to a selected tradition of highly regarded works of music,
literature, and art, a whole world of culture either fails to
signify at all (the
anthropological culture of our on-going manner of living) or can only
signify negatively as
bad or low culture (pop music, say, or comics). If we
assume that what we mean by the word taste is good taste,
then we have
already ceded the meaning of taste to a dominant class which has a vested
interest in what counts as
taste, and how taste counts. The worlds of taste
for those excluded from immediate access to good taste (the
dominated
multitudes) are emptied of content, made to negatively reflect the world of
the dominant. The
passionate tastes and materiality of the majority are
refused a generative force. All that would be left for the
critical historian of
design to do would be to track the changing field of good and bad taste and
to show how it
benefits and disadvantages social groups (certainly not a
worthless project). There may, however, be more
interesting things to do
with taste than merely decide if it is good or bad.
To see taste as part of everyday life will mean having to treat it as part of
our on-going interaction with the
world. Taste, we have to insist, is
ordinary. Taste doesn’t just show us up and show us off; it describes a
foundational aspect of our world-making, even if that world-making is
undertaken within restricted means. For the
French sociologist Antoine
Hennion taste is “another declension of the word ‘attachment’” (2007: 111).
For him
taste is a verb, a reflexive activity that requires “an attention to, a
suspension of, a stopping at what is
happening” (ibid.: 108). His examples
often come from the world of amateurs—the sports enthusiast, the music
fan,
the amateur cook. For Hennion taste is an on-going process of
attachment and orientation, and it is a process
where objects take their time
to reveal themselves. For instance an inexpensive earthenware dish that you
bought
several years ago can become more and more valued by you as it
weathers and as you get used to how it cooks.
Taste is not enacted just at the
moment of choice, but in a living entanglement with our thing-world, which
at
times is vivid and emphatic (“I would be lost without that dish,” “I love
that chair,” “I’ve had it with this
table”) and at other times belongs to the
realm of the taken-for-granted, the un-emphatic (“What? This old thing?
Well, I suppose it’s alright”).
Taste is a word that should insist on our sensual engagement with the
world; we taste the world with our taste
buds, with our gustatory senses.
The etymology of the word taste includes a reference to touch and feeling
alongside gustatory sense. It also includes a reference to testing. The use of
taste to signify a form of
discernment not only expands these features of the
word but also turns them into metaphors that abstract them
from their
relationship to bodily experience (Williams 1983: 313–15). As children we
often find the bitter tastes
of certain vegetables unpleasant; as we grow into
adults we develop a taste for more bitter flavours. In this
sense taste isn’t an
accomplishment but a dynamic process of interacting with the world, and of
the continual
transformation of that world. We get a taste for things, we
develop sensual attractions through taste, through
smell, through our haptic
senses, and so on. And as our interactions change so the world changes for
us. But
while we might all taste sugar as sweet, there may be huge cultural
differences as to the connotations associated
with sweetness. Thus, for one
person or group a sweet cup of tea might be comforting, partly due to the
association of sweet as having connotations of sentimentality and
innocence; for another person it may be
experienced as unhealthy
(fattening, tooth decaying), or simply as inappropriate for a bitter drink such
as tea.
Taste, as a metaphor and as a material practice, tells us that the world
is always both sensual and marked with
cultural meaning. This is the world
of taste in our daily life: it is an ordinary, everyday activity of choosing, of
liking, of getting-to-like, of disliking, of orienting, of
getting-accustomed-
to; it is a world of sound and color, of tones and moods; and it is a historical
world where
those colors and sounds, smells and textures change over time,
and change in terms of how they animate the social
world.
 When we look at the world of design from the perspective of this, more
everyday, sense of the word taste, what do
we see? How does design culture
and its various social roles appear? How can it help us perceive the
resonances
of the way houses are furnished, or the way that commodities
have been designed and styled since the middle of
the twentieth century?
How does it help us to see the impact that the world of design has had on
our everyday
lives? Or the way that we live with the things around us?
It helps us, I think, by making us more attentive to the process of taste: to
the way that changes in design have
altered the sensorial world of daily life;
to the changes in our routines and habits. It helps us by sensitizing
us to the
material availability of certain designed items, items that have become both
ubiquitous and iconic in
consumer society. It helps us too by encouraging us
to work historically with a broad understanding that the
aim of the study of
design culture is not the isolated object but material designs as they
circulate in the social world. In the everyday world such objects are lively
agents and our companions in
world-making.

Austerity and affluence, anxiety and ease

Some of the major changes in the way that the world is experienced within
modernity are due to effects that have
been ushered in on the back of an
expansion of consumer culture and the design work that has facilitated this
expansion. Since the end of the Second World War many consumer
societies have witnessed changes in the way that
social differences are
perceived and acted on: there is generally less deference towards older
people or to
people from the upper classes. There is more informality in
schools, universities, and within households. There
are less fixed etiquette
rules for social interaction. Some of this can be seen in design culture: in
changes in
the clothes people wear; in the layout of seating in schools
(sitting around tables rather in rows in front of
the teacher); in the way our
houses are laid out and how the items that furnish them perform forms of
informal
and relaxed sociability. Technology has made many household
chores much easier and has produced a sea-change in
the way we
communicate with each other (though it is important to note that labor-
saving devices have often
increased that labor involved in household
maintenance; see Cowan 1989). The must-have designer items of the
twentieth and twenty-first centuries have been items that have become so
ubiquitous that some are only really
noticeable by their absence. It is the
uncommon household in contemporary consumer societies that doesn’t
have a
television, a refrigerator, a computer. It is the uncommon subject
who doesn’t have a mobile phone.
When the French philosopher and sociologist Henri Lefebvre declared
that “it was only after the Second World War
that capitalism succeeded in
thoroughly penetrating the details of everyday life” (1988: 75), he had in
mind the
exponential rise in the acquisition of durable domestic
commodities (washing machines, vacuum cleaners, and so
on), as well as
the way that the promotion of a new consumer society was fostered—in the
home and outside—via
commercial advertising on television and radio and
in magazines. In many European countries the transformation of domestic
life was experienced, not as a slow accretion
of new goods and new
practices, but as a fast disruption of older ways of life as new patterns of
living emerged.
Writing about the experience in France in the period from
the late 1950s to the late 1960s, Kristin Ross notes:

In the space of just ten years a rural woman might live the
acquisition of electricity, running water, a stove,
a refrigerator, a
washing machine, a sense of interior space as distinct from exterior
space, a car, a
television, and the various liberations and
oppressions associated with each.
(Ross 1995: 5)

In Britain, post-war reconstruction was focused on the modernization of

domestic life as part of a national plan
to rid the country of sub-standard
living conditions and unhealthy and inefficient practices. Exhibitions such
as
Britain Can Make It (1946) promoted good design as a moral and
practical imperative. But
examples of domestic design and advice on how
to recognize good design were not in themselves enough to alter the
domestic environments of a population, let alone the homes of the one and
half million people who queued for
hours to get into the exhibition (see
Figure 29.1). What was required was an available and
affordable set of
commodities (alongside the promotion of good design), and a general
level
of affluence on the part of the majority of the population.
Figure
29.1 Queues outside the
Victoria and Albert Museum at the Britain Can Make It exhibition,
1946.
Photo: Michael Whalley Wickham © Wickham Estate.

At the time of Britain Can Make It the country was in the grip of a
depressed economy and
undergoing more extensive rationing than was
deployed during the war. While the exhibition articulated ideas
about
modernization and design on the basis of class (the different households
were marked by the job of the
family patriarch: a managing director, a
young architect, a miner), the
majority of the people who visited the
exhibition, whether working- or middle-class, were envious of such
luxurious designs as fitted kitchens with lots of cupboard space, which were
clearly an unrealizable dream for
the vast majority. In an age of austerity
considerable wealth is the necessary prerequisite for embracing new
technologies and innovations in interior design.
Fifteen years later, in a period of affluence, nearly all households could
boast as normal such “necessary”
luxuries as televisions, radios, and
washing machines. Tastes were changing both obviously and
surreptitiously.
For instance, something as seemingly incidental as the
plastic washing-up bowl, which was almost universally
adopted by the end
of the 1950s, radically altered the sensorial experience of washing-up, a
practice that had
previously been undertaken in enamel bowls. With the
adoption of plastic bowls an activity that had been
exceedingly noisy and
had resulted in a good deal of breakage suddenly became almost silent and
resulted in few,
if any, glass and crockery casualties (Shove et al. 2007).
The artist and designer Richard Hamilton, speaking in 1959, recognized
that the new prosperity in material
comfort was being shaped by a cadre of
professional designers transmogrifying machinery into “must-have” items:

The fifties have seen many changes in the human situation; not
least among them are the new attitudes towards
those commodities
which affect most directly the individual way of life—consumer
goods. It is now accepted that
saucepans, refrigerators, cars,
vacuum cleaners, suitcases, radios, washing machines—all the
paraphernalia of
mid-century existence—should be designed by a
specialist in the look of things.
(Hamilton 1982: 135)

For Hamilton “design is a sales weapon—goods that sell to consumers must

show the hand of the stylist.” But, as
he notes, design wasn’t simply evident
in the styled object; it was also a feature of advertising and the media:
“Industry, and with it the designer, will have to rely increasingly on the
media which modify the mass
audience—the publicists who not only
understand public motivations but who play a large part in directing public
responses to imagery” (ibid.: 143).
Advertising and promotional culture aims to work on its audiences by
shaping desire and inculcating new needs.
Such an activity could be
imagined as ranging from benign to malignant (and Hamilton is relatively
neutral on the
values inherent in what he is witnessing). In the 1950s, in the
midst of a Welfare State society, the delivery of
good design for efficient
and clean living could be seen as relatively benign. But within a more
aggressive world
of consumer capitalism the inculcation of an acquisitive
desire can have malign consequences. In the late 1960s
Lefebvre described
contemporary consumer society as the “bureaucratic society of controlled
consumption” and saw
the promotional culture that accompanied it as a
form of violence. In describing an advert for men’s after-shave
he saw “the
twofold terrorism” of advertising: “be a well-groomed man. Every morning
become a tremendous guy who appeals to himself and to women. Use this
After-Shave, or you will be nobody and know
it” (Lefebvre 1971: 107).
 The world of consumerism doesn’t just add new desires into the mix of
daily life, it breeds anxieties and fears
too: do I smell; am I ugly; why don’t
I live like the family in the gravy commercial; why doesn’t my house look
like the houses in magazines? The world of consumer capitalism offers us
endless possibilities to express ourselves, it offers us endless ways of
making life more comfortable and
convenient, and it provides endless
opportunities to communicate. But it offers all this with a veiled threat: if
you don’t have commodity X then you will be a Nobody. When telephones
were first introduced they were advertised
as offering benefits (an easy and
immediate form of communication), but they also surreptitiously threatened
you;
those without telephones would become lonely and unloved as the new
owner of a telephone “loses touch with those
of her former friends who are
not on the telephone” (Anon. 1932: 233). Keep up or get out.

World-making

Taste and design might connote status but they are never reducible simply
to an articulation of status; taste
never reveals the stigmata of class as its
only task. Taste shows us identity (including class identity) as a
generative
force that makes worlds. Everyday tastes build worlds that are, for better or
worse, liveable. How
they are liveable is what matters. We are used to
asking questions such as “what do our tastes say about us?” but
too often
we let our answers stop too early. Taste may articulate an identity, or a
generational attitude, or a
form of social distinction, but it also reveals how
these phenomena are grounded in the world, how an identity
inhabits the
world (with ease or anxiety, with lightness or weight, with uncertainty or
with unflinching
confidence). As far as this goes there is no necessary
symmetry between social position and the ease or anxiety
in which taste is
lived. For instance, a young, working-class black woman might inhabit her
world of taste with a
confidence entirely lacking from someone with less
structured inequalities to face.
In Martin McMillan’s project on the post-war history of the West Indian
front, or living, room (a book, a
television program, and an exhibition), he
compiled an oral and a material history of how Caribbean migrants set
up
home in Britain across the second half of the twentieth century (McMillan
2009a and 2009b). Hearing, reading,
and looking at this collective memory
of everyday diasporic world-making what is immediately obvious is that the
practice of taste was complexly related to places left behind as well as the
place of arrival. But what comes
across most emphatically is the grounded
exuberance of the world-making; of rooms and lives that are putting down
roots and tracing routes, of rooms ready to celebrate, of rooms that had
arrived (see Figure
29.2). In the often hostile world of post-war race
relations this is a considerable achievement.
The example of several generations of black British citizens, both at
home and on the street, shows how taste can
be mobilized in distinct
contrast to an allocated social position. The cultural studies scholar Stuart
Hall, who
came to the United Kingdom from Jamaica in 1951, commented
on the way that British black youths were (and are)
disadvantaged
economically and educationally, demonized and denigrated in the
mainstream media, and yet they
exhibit a cultural confidence in their
everyday lives:

the stylisation of their own racialised bodies is a striking feature of

contemporary popular and visual
culture, something which has
made them the defining force in street-oriented British
youth
culture. Without them, it often seems, white British youth culture
would not exist.
(Hall 1998: 40)

Figure
29.2 Installation, The West Indian Front Room, Geffrye Museum, London, 2005–6.
© John Neligan.
Taste and design values (clothes, music, posture, and so on) don’t reflect
social hierarchies in any
straightforward way. Indeed, as with culture, it is
often the sprawling middle (middle-brow culture) that is
greeted with most
trepidation. In post-war representations of taste, negative focus has often
been on those whose
tastes seem to require too much deliberation, too much
effort, too much anxiety. Perhaps the taste-worlds most
pilloried have been
those belonging to the upwardly mobile petite bourgeoisie, a class of people
changing from
blue to white collar, from working- to lower-middle-class.
And it has been the upwardly mobile, aspirational
woman who has been the
particular target for scorn and derision. Television and film
comedies
abound with aspirational women who appear deluded as to what is classy,
or appear
ludicrously pretentious in their choice of clothes and furnishings.
I’m thinking particularly of the British
filmmaker Mike Leigh (see for
instance High Hopes or Abigail’s
Party) and the British television series
from the early 1990s, Keeping Up
Appearances, where Patricia Routledge
had to constantly navigate between her working-class relatives and her
upper-crust ambitions. In the United States the sitcom Frasier explores
some of the same
territory but achieves this by feminizing the character of
Niles Crane. The representation of gender, as a key
element in
understanding the declensions of taste and design as part of modern life, has
been the subject of some
of the most exciting scholarship within design
culture in the past thirty years (Attfield and Kirkham 1995;
Colomina 1992;
de Grazia with Furlough 1996; Sparke 1995). Such literature shows how
important it is to see the
way that class, gender, and race combine in post-
war representations of the suburban housewife (for instance see
Baxandall
and Ewen 2000; Silverstone 1997).
A return to Antoine Hennion’s work on taste within these contexts may
pay dividends. For Hennion the activity of
taste is profoundly self-reflexive;
it involves consideration, adjustment, and practice. For him the amateur
rock-climber is getting a taste for climbing by learning to pay attention to
ropes, cleats, and rock faces; the
amateur wine connoisseur is learning to
understand the flavors of grape and wine regions by taking time to savor
bouquets and flavors. In a culture where ideology privileges tastes that are
seen as effortless, automatic, and natural, Hennion’s concern with the
phenomenological pedagogy of
ordinary taste has much to offer. By de-
coupling taste from value he offers us a way of seeing a different
ecology of
taste. It might mean that analysis of the intersections of taste and design
would want to concentrate
precisely on those scenes where there is most
evidence of taste work: the socially mobile
suburban woman deliberating
(anxiously or not) on the dressing of her house; any child learning to inhabit
the
taste practices of their slightly older peers; moments and periods of
general taste change (for instance, the
work of nations and their populations
in instigating a taste for recycling, and how that has impacted on domestic
design).
To pursue the study of design and taste from the perspective of everyday
life would be to build on the work I’ve
already referenced in this chapter. It
would also mean, I think, recovering and reconnecting with the impetus of
two projects that might seem antithetical. The first one I have in mind is
Siegfried Kracauer’s The Salaried Masses: Duty and Distraction in Weimar
Germany, which was first published in German in
1930 (Kracauer 1998
[1930]). Kracauer, before he became known for his work in film theory, was
an editor and
article writer for the Frankfurter Zeitung. The Salaried
Masses
first appeared in this newspaper as a series of articles about a new
social class of office clerks, secretaries,
shop assistants, and so on—people
who undertook white collar work for blue collar pay, and whose parents
were
skilled craftspeople, factory workers, and domestic servants. The book
is a lively ethnography of the life-worlds
of these, mainly young, urban
types. It sparkles with insights in a way that more scientific sociology
usually
fails to. It describes the tastes, fashions, and attitudes of a new
social group for whom newness is a value in
itself. It also demonstrates a
popular use of critical theory as it seeks to grasp the phenomena it describes
in
a way that can critically prize open the historical moment to reveal its
active forces.
The other project I have in mind is Judy Attfield’s Wild Things: The
Material Culture of
Everyday Life, which was published in 2000. Attfield’s
book is a culmination of a career spent attending to
the seemingly
insignificant or denigrated objects of design culture and bringing to the
surface their lively
presence in the world. She described her objects as
belonging to “design in the lower case” and included things
like tufted
carpets and objects of domestic life in the post-war New Towns and
suburbs. Hers was an approach that
used the perspective of everyday life to
democratize aesthetic attention; it was a humanism forged through
feminism and a sympathetic interest in the ways in which people made their
own material worlds.
 Together they make an odd pair. Kracauer’s philosophical interests and
journalistic bravura can look high-handed
and aloof next to Attfield; while
Attfield’s work can seem slightly myopic, overly concerned with the detail
rather than the overarching picture. But at another turn of the dialectical
wheel reading them together brings
out the best in both, allowing an
ethnographic detail from Attfield to resonate beyond its specific context,
while Kracauer’s pronouncements begin to look more like experiments in
describing the materiality of culture.
They are both concerned to understand
the new social forms emerging in the wake of changes in capitalist modes
of
production with a sympathy that is a world away from the general
derision aimed at lower-middle-class life that
is the clichéd response of both
conservative aesthetes and left-wing avant-gardists.
In conclusion we could say that, on one level at least, taste is the material
practice of lived culture, it names
our likings and loathings, our choosings
and avoidings, and it determines
what our attention is drawn towards and
what it ignores. Taste could be thought of as the glue that allows a life
to be
collaged together as “a whole way of life” (see Williams 1989 [1958] for a
deployment of this phrase). A
whole way of life doesn’t mean a life stripped
of contradiction; rather it means a life-world knitted together
via attitudes
and dispositions that are materially performed, though not in circumstances
chosen by us. A whole
way of life privileges the styles of our living as long
as the sense of style is given body and shape, and is
distanced from the
surface shine that is attached to the word lifestyle.
A lot rests on the fact that taste is performed under circumstances that are
not chosen by us. The economic
system that animates consumer society is
capitalism, and the period since the Second World War has seen many
consumer societies changing from state-managed capitalism to the free fall
of free market capitalism. As a
result, the fundamental characteristic of
capitalism—its fluctuating cycles of prosperity and recession—has been
intensified. Such cycles have had a palpable effect on the way we see the
relationship between class and taste.
But the circumstances that we have
inherited also include histories of racism and sexism that continue to shape
our world. Seeing taste as an ingredient of all life as it acts on and is acted
on by historical forces is not an
antidote to a society based on unequal
divisions of resources, and the perversities of sexism and racism, but it
is a
way of seeing how ordinary life is shaped by these forces, how it responds
to them, and makes something of
them.
 References

Anon. (1932) Daily Mail Ideal Home Exhibition Catalogue, London: Daily Mail Publishing.
Attfield, J. (2000) Wild Things: The Material Culture of Everyday Life, Oxford and New
York: Berg.
Attfield, J. and Kirkham, P. (eds) (1995) A View from the Interior: Women and Design,
London: The
Women’s Press.
Baxandall, R. and Ewen, E. (2000) Picture Windows: How the Suburbs Happened, New York:
Basic
Books.
Bourdieu, P. (1986) Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, translated
by R. Nice,
London: Routledge.
Colomina, B. (ed.) (1992) Sexuality and Space, Princeton: Princeton Papers on
Architecture.
Cowan, R. S. (1989) More Work for Mother: The Ironies of Household Technology from the Open
Hearth to the Microwave, London: Free Association Books.
de Grazia, V. with Furlough, E. (eds) (1996) The Sex of Things: Gender and Consumption in
Historical Perspective, Berkeley: University of California Press.
Hall, S. (1998) “Aspirations and Attitude … Reflections on Black Britain in the Nineties,” New
Formations, 33: 36–8.
Hamilton, R. (1982) “The Persuading Image,” in Collected Words, London: Thames and
Hudson:
135–43.
Hennion, A. (2007) “Those Things That Hold Us Together: Taste and Sociology,” Cultural
Sociology, 1 (1): 97–114.
Kracauer, S. (1998 [1930]) The Salaried Masses: Duty and Distraction in Weimar Germany,
translated by Quintin Hoare, London: Verso.
Lefebvre, H. (1971) Everyday Life in the Modern World, translated by Sacha Rabinovitch,
New
Brunswick: Transaction Publishers.
Lefebvre, H. (1988) “Toward a Leftist Cultural Politics: Remarks Occasioned by the Centenary of
Marx’s Death,”
in G. Nelson and L. Grossberg (eds) Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture,
Urbana:
University of Illinois Press: 75–88.
McMillan, M. (2009a) “The West Indian Front Room: Reflections on a Diasporic Phenomenon,”
Small Axe, 28: 135–56.
McMillan, M. (2009b) The Front Room: Migrant Aesthetics in the Home, London: Black Dog.
Ross, K. (1995) Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering of French
Culture,
Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
Shove, E., Watson, M., Hand, M. and Ingram, J. (2007) The Design of Everyday Life,
Oxford and
New York: Berg.
Silverstone, R. (ed.) (1997) Visions of Suburbia, London: Routledge.
Sparke, P. (1995) As Long as it’s Pink: The Sexual Politics of Taste, London:
HarperCollins.
Veblen, T. (1994 [1899]) Theory of the Leisure Class, New York: Dover.
Williams, R. (1983) Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, 2nd edition, London:
Fontana.
Williams, R. (1989 [1958]) “Culture is Ordinary,” in Resources of Hope, London: Verso:
3–14.
 Part V

DESIGN AND POLITICS:

ACTIVISM, INTERVENTION,
REGULATION
 30

CONFIGURING DESIGN AS
POLITICS NOW
Tony Fry
 
 
An opening frame. The fundamental difference between ‘design as politics’
and ‘design and politics’ is
essentially that the former does not assume or
accept institutionalized politics, or political science, as a
given and
authoritative designator of ‘the political’. Neither does it accept that design
becomes/is political by
engaging with, or subordinating itself to, the service
of political institutions or causes.
My book Design as Politics was published in 2011 and, as will become
clear in a moment,
quite substantial changes have occurred during the past
five years, both in the world and in relation to my own
work’s worldly
political engagement. This work had three main objects of focus:
geopolitics; time spent in, and
the historical and contemporary study of,
Egypt; and an engagement with issues on the global future of cities
(Fry
2014). What now follows underscores a dialogue with myself after
revisiting the 2011 publication.
Let me start with two linked questions upon which to reflect: what does
‘design as politics’ add up to now? What
does it mean?
I don’t have one answer to these questions, but at the most general I
would say that the more I think, read, do
and see, the more I view design as
it is as part of the problem of an unsustainable mode of world-making. For
this situation to change, what design is understood to be and does has to be
remade. To do this makes design, in
and after its transformation, far more
overtly political. One can cluster a large number of contextual
observations
around this comment that expose how design can be re-situated, like:
• understanding the city as unsettled (design confronting the uneven
conditions of the
illusion of permanence, order, control, continuity in
the recognition of growing vulnerabilities, new
fragmentation and
increasing socio-metabolic dysfunction);
• recognizing ‘borderlands’ as emergent spaces of forms of ‘design-in-
action’ based
upon ‘epistemological disobedience’ (the rejection of
inappropriate, redundant and dominant modes of knowledge
(Kalantidou and Fry 2014));
• grasping design’s placement in the ‘in-between’ of geopolitical time and
space (an
anti-Eurocentric view of design theory, discourse and
practice);
• comprehending that the project of Sustainment (design for sustainability
and against
sustainability) is unavoidable if humanity is to have
anything like a viable future (Fry 2011).

While the kinds of critical perspectives just outlined prompt design to be

re-situated, so also do worldly
events, although in the main this is not being
understood. Thus, if one views ‘design as politics’ post-2011 one
can see a
major escalation in crucial domains of criticality, as with the six examples
below:

• The dynamic of the Asia Pacific is changing. Although taking several

decades, China
is now committed to becoming a maritime power in the
region. What this means is that the already delicate
relations to Japan,
Taiwan, the Philippines and Indonesia are, or will become, tenser and
potentially volatile.
The purchase of arms by Asia Pacific nations is
already twice that of anywhere else in the world. Added to this
situation, the USA has already increased its naval, air force and army
presence in the region. Against this
backdrop it is by no means certain
that economic and pragmatic interests will win out over historically
deeply
embedded political-ideological objectives. However the situation
unfolds, its consequences will be felt globally
(SIPRI 2014).
• Violence in the Middle East and Central Asia manifests the lack of a
resolution of
very longstanding theo-cultural and political problems –
problems that seem to have an endless capacity to
escalate, and which
now are being universalized and having security consequences for cities
almost everywhere.
Going beyond any simple characterization of a
 ‘clash of cultures’ there seems to be little recognition that there
can be
no political solution that is not equally a cultural solution, and one that
must come from within the
Muslim world itself.
• For a number of years there have been warnings of a dangerous
convergence between
growing global population numbers, global
warming and vector-borne diseases, thereby creating pandemics. It may
be the case that Ebola is the first marker of a pattern of pandemic events
that may unfold over this and later
centuries.
• The picture of the impacts of climate change is constantly changing. For
example,
one can cite just the recent recognition that: the melting of
glaciers in the western Antarctic is now an
unstoppable process that will
result in sea-level rises of three or four metres over coming centuries;
that deep
sea temperature increases are contributing as much to the
problem as melting ice; and that changed sea levels are
altering the
planet’s gravitational field (Abrahams and Nuccitelli 2014; Goldenberg
2014). Such discoveries all
indicate that the scientific understanding of
the situation remains partial, that the political response to the
situation is
totally inadequate, that there is still virtually no understanding that
climate change is a massive
cultural and design problem linked to
coming dramatic events (like the loss of large numbers of coast cities,
towns and villages) and transformations of modes of earthly habitation.
• A much clearer sense that Capital has arrived at the end of the
objective
of inclusion implicit in the projected ambition of modernity and
globalization that in the end
everyone would be a beneficiary. That this
illusion is bankrupt is now evident in the failure of both projects. A
whole segment of the world’s poor has now been written off. The poor
are being eternally abandoned to their
poverty. This change is
significantly marked by the rise of mega-regions as structures of
exclusion of population
that lack social, economic or technological
capital. The humanitarian institutions have been left in the world of
the
past by such structural socio-economic and cultural changes.
• Finally, there has been a widening gulf between the problems and
complexity of the
contemporary world and the ability of politicians,
political institutions and available political ideologies to
deal with them.
Myopia and the status quo currently rule.
 Rather than these six areas of critical concern being outside the remit of
design praxis, they are its destiny if
humanity is to be sustained in any
recognizably viable form. In them is to be found design’s futuring agenda.
Now let me go back to the opening of Design As Politics (2011) where I
said:

As Nietzsche well understood, human beings have always had a

propensity toward destruction. The more we made,
the more we
destroyed. In making our world within the world we failed to
understand what of the former was
being destroyed. Once we
reached sufficient numbers and gained sufficient technological
muscle, destruction
became devastation – which we render in both
horrific material and aestheticised forms. Prosaically,
technocratically, this situation may now be called structural
unsustainability.
Nietzsche saw this moment coming and named it in a very
particular way around 1883–5 when he was writing
Thus Spoke
Zarathustra (1969). He wrote of the last man, the overman, the
superman and
of the wasteland growing. He issued the warning:
‘woe to him who harbours wastelands within’. The wastelands
are
of course the product of devastation.

What he meant by the last man was a subjective and anthropocentric being
fated unless able to change. In facing
this finitudinal circumstance we,
collectively, either rise above ourselves or fall. Nietzsche names what we
need
to become: superman. It’s become an unfortunate term, partly because
of its crude and misplaced appropriation by
the Nazis in Germany in the
1920s, and partly because of its science fiction connotations. I am going to
use
Heidegger’s reading of the term to radically recast what it usually
means. Heidegger said:

The ‘superman’ does not simply carry the accustomed drives and
strivings of the customary type of man beyond
all measure and
bounds. Superman is a qualitatively, not quantitatively, different
form of existing man. The
thing that the superman discards is
precisely our boundless, purely quantitative non-stop pro-gress.
The
superman is poorer, simpler, tenderer and tougher, quieter and
 more self-sacrificing and slow of decision and
more economical of
speech.
(Heidegger 1968: 69)

From a Western culture of excess, from the wasteland, if we want a future

we unreservedly need to become supermen
and superwomen (Fry 2011: 1–
2). So what do Nietzsche’s words, and my comment upon them, now mean?
I suggest not
only that they communicate that the imperative of our
becoming ‘other than we are’ increases by the day, but that
at the same time
the means to be able do this constantly evades us. Thus wasteland has
continually to grow and
the importance of advancing an agenda of ‘design
as politics’ constantly increases. The key argument of the book
begs
repeating: ‘democracy is unable to deliver Sustainment (the post-
Enlightenment project beyond
“sustainability”)’ (ibid.: 4).
Now not only is the scale of the project of sustainment yet to be
recognized and, as such, not merely an
intellectual exercise, but equally that
it actually poses an even greater challenge to our imagination. Echoing
Heidegger’s reading of Nietzsche, we have to image ourselves, and the
worlds we create, as based on other ways of becoming human. This is not a
matter of visualizing a destination,
least of all a utopian one, but rather of
starting a journeying towards difference yet to begin.
I evoked Georges Bataille when I wrote the book in order to help a
process of imagining the Human, Selfhood and
the Political as being other
than they currently are. Here is the quote and my comment after it.

For Hegel, it is both fundamental and altogether worthy of

astonishment that human understanding (that is
language,
discourse) should have had the force (an incomparable force) to
separate its constitutive elements
from the Totality. These elements
(this tree, this bird, this stone) are in fact inseparable from the
whole.
They are ‘bound together by spatial and temporal, indeed
material, bonds which are indissoluble.’ Their
separation implies
the human Negativity toward Nature of which I spoke, without
pointing out its decisive
consequences. For the man who negates
nature could not in any way live outside it. He is not merely a man
who
negates Nature, he is first of all an animal, that is to say the
very thing he negates: he therefore cannot
negate Nature without
 negating himself … Thus human Negativity, Man’s effective desire
to negate Nature is
destroying it – in reducing it to his own ends, as
when, for example, he makes a tool of it (and the tool will
be the
model of an object isolated from Nature) – cannot stop at Man
himself; insofar as he is Nature, Man is
exposed to his own
Negativity … It is the very separation of Man’s being, it is his
isolation from Nature, and,
consequently, his isolation in the midst
of his own kind, which condemns him to disappear definitively.
(Bataille 1990: 14–15)

What Georges Bataille says above not only illuminates an idea running
through the entire history of human
thought, but also exposes the
unknowing that travels with anthropocentrism – an unknowing that casts a
shadow
over virtually all human knowledge, not least science.
The position I took when I wrote the book was that the whole discourse
of sustainability is a minor instrumental
diversion when compared with the
project of Sustainment. One of its many limitations is that it takes ‘the
unsustainable’ to be known and self-evident whereas it is a vast and largely
unrecognized complexity, which is
why I said:

Structural unsustainability names a condition of mind and action

that materially erodes (un-measurably)
planetary finite time, thus it
gathers and designates the negation of ‘the being of time’, which is
equally the
taking away of our future. It embodies a process that
has become elemental to modern economy, culture and
politics.
This process has been named as defuturing, and what it produces as
the defutured. In our age,
structural unsustainability is of such a
scale that it marks the opening of a new epoch in human worldly
habitation – an epoch of unsettlement, wherein being and being-in-
place become perpetually insecure.
(Fry 2011: 21)

But more than this, I emphasized that we must remember, ‘Human beings
are not born unsustainable: they are made
so by the structures, values,
traditions and knowledge into which they are thrown as they learn to be in
and of
the world’ (ibid.: 111).
 Subsequent work on ‘design and the question of history’, which radically
revises the very project of ‘design
history’, gives even more weight to the
comment below on defuturing as it names those destructive actions of
human beings that reduce our collective time of being and so accelerates
our eventual extinction (Fry 2014):

Defuturing has a history with a burgeoning narrative of things,

structures, industries, processes and
ontologies. It brings into
question the ‘rights of man’, ancient and modern, to appropriate
planetary resources
and to destroy terrestrial, aquatic and
atmospheric environments of biological dependence without any
futural
account. More than this, defuturing has also nurtured desires
and conduct that have: sanctioned the erasure of
cultures of
material modesty; fostered global inequity; and condoned the use of
unchecked mass destructive
violence as an expedient politics. In
myriad ways, defuturing has legitimised the sacrifice of the future
for
the wants of those people of the present who are, or aspire to be,
affluent.
(Fry 2011: 22)

Now is the only time we have. We never experience the past or the future.
This is why I pointed out that our now
is:

a time unlike any other in human history. For the first time in our
existence ‘we’ discover that we are
responsible both for putting the
future of our planetary existence (and much else) at risk, and for
dealing
with this situation (if we can). Two questions thus loom: is
it too late to stop doing what we destructively do
and then, do we
have enough time to adapt to the circumstances of the devastation
we have created? Empirically,
we lack affirmative and clear
answers to either question. Yet politically, we still have to act, be it
without
certainty. We must strive to take our fate firmly in our own
hands. So acting implies a new kind of politics
and the political
deployment of design by both designers and by those who
knowingly or unknowingly make design
decisions.
(ibid.: 47)
To understand these remarks is to grasp, no matter how hard it is, that
design is situated among those practices
in which an ethical/unethical
choice is unavoidable. The critical issue here is, whether the choice is
known to
be a political act in the context of, as indicated, ‘knowingly or
unknowingly’ making design decisions. It should
‘now’ be clear that
Design as Politics ‘is not just another issue to add onto the existing political
agenda;
rather it is a politics in its own right with the potential to transform
the nature of political action’ (ibid.:
101).
All design decisions, big or small, are directional and futural. To be
political, as Carl Schmitt defined and
affirmed, is to be dangerous. I’d
previously recognized this in saying:

This ontological condition is but one more thing concealed and

eroded by the reduction of politics to
administration. Western
democratic nations struggle to maintain a politics of political
difference. Centrism is
now a feature of almost every mainstream
political party (evident when
one examines policy, rhetoric,
gestures and the preoccupation with personality and ego).
Popularism demands a
politics without danger and actions that call
for no sacrifice. In the emergent epoch of unsettlement, all that
is
politically decided and designed is ‘on the line.’ Against this
backdrop, Sustainment means giving over to
action against (our)
inherent structural unsustainability.
(ibid.: 127)

This condition spans not just the destructions of the environments of ‘life’s’
dependence but equally of those of
‘social equity’ and ‘intercultural peace’.
The ontological designing of structural unsustainability is coercive –
it is a
colonialism of the subject (the consumer). To realize this, and be alienated
from the condition, is not
to be free but to move into a borderland
(Kalantidou and Fry 2014).
It is now worth placing design in a ‘politics’ of Sustainment and, via the
book, saying a little more about
design in this context.

[Reiterating] the politics of Sustainment can be summarised as

being: the creation, negotiation and
establishment of a commonality
in difference (the plural nature of Sustainment) and the remaking of
 ‘the things
of the world’ as directionally considered
(material/immaterial) objects of ontological designing – all to make
time. While every existing designed object (singular and
compound) goes on designing (often with defuturing
consequences)
what is being proposed, as part of the agenda of commonality, is
that such ‘things’ are given, by
design intent (materially,
performatively and semiotically) a singular direction so that their
designing
designs their own, and their users’ propensity toward
futuring. While this implies a significant material
change of many
products, structures and systems, it more dramatically requires the
recoding and relearning of
what a vast number of existing things
are, how they should be used, where and how. Inseparably bonded
to this
is the transformation of ways of thinking and engaging
questions of equity and justice. So although the
ontological
designing aspect of Sustainment requires a degree of physical
change, more fundamentally, it
depends on the creation of
perceptual and political change.
(Fry 2011: 166)

By implication, design education needs to dramatically change, away from

‘design for the world’ (and the ‘design
world’) to ‘design in the world’ (as a
comprehended force of ‘worlding’). In 2011 I pointed out that:

We are now in a position to say just a little more about the kind of
things that a new political imaginary
needs to embrace – even so,
the actual imaginary is still out of reach.
The vision it projects clearly has to centre on Sustainment as the
measure and rule of all things. As continual
process, and absolute
authority, Sustainment clearly needs an institutional foundation
(‘the Sustainment’ as
project) supported by a practice (Redirective
Practice) which government (inchoately post-democratic), the law
(terra-nomos) and economy (general exchange) all serve.
The perspective cannot be singular, nationalist or utopian. The
vision has to be able to be pursued by plural
means, be lodged in
the local and the global, and be a regime able to deliver realisable
results framed by
actual needs in time rather than by pragmatics. As
such, the address to change has to be reactive (identifying
and
 responding to what needs to change), prefigurative (establishing
new directions) and bonded to a new
economic paradigm.
(Fry 2011: 166–7)

The implication of what is proposed here requires ‘trigger’ exposure,

action, events and debate, together with
the recognition that the process
outlined will span decades, with disaster feeding the impetus to adapt. As
the
now current slogan says: ‘adapt or die!’
The most controversial part of the book was around the notion of the
‘Dictatorship of the Imperative’. Here is
what I said:

Schmitt understood that sovereignty’s power lies with the ability ‘to
decide the state of exception’ (Hirst,
1987: 21–2). Currently ‘we,’
no matter who or where we are, lack the authority to decisively act
against the
rule of those ‘democratic’ administrations which view
unsustainability as if it were just another problem to
manage among
others. There is no agency with sufficient power to act otherwise.
All are impotent in the face of
this situation, including the
international institutions of humanism (especially the United
Nations and its
agencies). Moreover, these institutions also fail to
recognise the significance of ‘anthropocentric being’ as a
crisis
underscoring humanity’s future. That which is fundamentally
critical and essentially at stake, is
continually concealed by
immediate pragmatic preoccupations (this not least in the financial
domain where the
response to dysfunction is to attempt to reform
and then reinstate the status quo).
(Fry 2011: 123)

The ‘Dictatorship of the Imperative’ means a ‘Dictatorship of the

Sustainment’ – clearly such language is
emotive. But in defence of its use it
makes clear that Sustainment is not a matter of choice. To act
unsustainably
cannot be individually contained. What begs to be understood is that the
very notion of freedom
under the law (the condition of limitation) that
emanated from the West has arrived at a cathartic moment. In an
age of
deepening structural unsustainability the law has proved at best to be
inadequate to secure the freedom to
continue to be, and at worst totally
helpless. The loss of destruction (in all its dimensions) is greater than
the
profit made from it (in all its dimensions). With this new condition of
limitation all freedom will be lost.
In the face of what are now destined
climatic, environmental, biophysical, geopolitical and socio-cultural
conditions, any notion that business as usual methods of change can deliver
a viable future is gross myopia.
On the relation between freedom, limitation, ‘unfreedom’ and design I
pointed out that:

we learn something we instinctively know from Theodor Adorno’s

Negative Dialectics: in so far as the subject is
a subject (has been
subjectified) who exercises ‘free will’ s/he is always held within
unfree worldly
circumstances (Adorno, 1973: 213). ‘Free will’ does
not own freedom. From at least Spinoza onward (as in his
Ethics)
there has been a major philosophical enterprise aimed at totally
breaking the claimed connection between freedom and will
(Deleuze 1988: 69).
(Fry 2011: 215)

And as was, and now is, clearly understood:

In this defuturing age of unsettlement it becomes more apparent

that regulatory delimitations (like ‘freedom
under the law’) are
insufficient to deliver those unfreedoms upon which future
freedoms depend. Design comes
into the picture as embedded in
the nature of externality – it holds sway over the propensity of
external
things. So many designed things have a major dispositional
consequence in forming a subject’s ontology,
including the
character of their unfreedom (enabling or disabling the subject’s
exercise of freedom). The
design of unfreedoms for freedom can be
directly posed against the humanitarian idealism of the privileged
acting for the underprivileged. This is because unfreedoms (the rule
of law and political institutions) can be
the mechanism of
redistributive justice (Fry 2011: 215–16). The words of
Levinascited earlier, now gain a new
resonance: ‘we must impose
commands on ourselves in order to be free’ (Levinas 1987: 17).
(Fry 2011: 216)
Life, all life, is lived in post-evolutionary life. The world-within-the-world
of human creations has so
contaminated its worldly host that so many
natural processes of adaption cannot keep pace with the speed of
change
(loss of biodiversity due to a rapidly changing climate is a clear example of
this). Our own uneven
inability to adequately adapt to the biochemical and
techno-social is a less clear and more complex and
contentious example of
inorganic change. As I said in the book:

This means that we all now live in a world wherein structural

unsustainability has speeded change beyond the
possibility of
evolutionary adaptation – the ‘natural’ ability of processes of
change simply cannot keep pace
with the pace of forced
circumstantial change. This means that redirection towards
Sustainment by design has to
respond to such a rate of change of
defuturing (design thus overrides the biocentric notion of
evolution).
Moreover, the defuturing character of structural
unsustainability means that humanity at large can now no
longer be
at home in that world it has historically made for itself (via
denaturalisation, the construction of
forms of negation and outright
devastation). In such making that has rendered the given world
inhospitable, we
and subsequent generations can only be at home in
the homelessness of our loss, in our alienation.
(Fry 2011: 198)

Against this backdrop of our human beings increasingly occupying a

technosphere that is changing so quickly that
adaption, beyond a functional
instrumental accommodation, is impossible, one needs to grasp that while
people
‘care’ about technology it does not care about ‘us’. It is unfeeling
and godless. No matter whatever appearance
and functions are created it
can never be humanized. Increasingly it acts as a ‘nature’ and as a law unto
itself
(in its ‘will to will’). There is now very little correlation between an
ability to create a technology and an understanding of what it will do, its
temporality (including how it will
transmute), what it will create or what it
will destroy.
At this point I should point out that over the past three years the issue of
‘repair’ of the broken world in
which we live (materially and psycho-
socially) has become an important concern with specific focus on the city
(via the concept of ‘metrofitting’). In the book I wrote:

One can view the ontological character of ‘care’ within ‘Design as

Politics’ as it merges with Neu Bildung.
‘Care’ here means an
inscribed performative quality of the being of all human beings: it
is both that care of
the self that intuitively anticipates danger and
acts; and it is also the intrinsic performative qualities of
things (that
care).
Understanding care as performative means understanding that
our well-being and the well-being of all beings is
indivisible. Thus
care for and by ‘the environment’ is care for ‘life in general’ as it
un-differentially cares
for the life of humans. So, for instance, in
caring for the quality of air, soil and fresh water, we are
equally
caring for ourselves and for the quality of food ‘naturally’
produced.
(ibid.: 207)

While my views on a Neu Bildung (a new basis for education) and care
differ little in the present, I now put more
emphasis on the absolute
imperative of Sustainment:

Designing has to be grasped and made present as an activity that

extends well beyond the rubric of designers.
Designing goes ahead
of all that we intentionally bring into being, thus it is integral to all
forms of
prefigured human productive action. More than this, it is
also the consequence of much that is produced –
designed things,
functionally, operatively, go on designing with positive or negative
consequences for users
and often society as a whole.
(Fry 2011: 75)

Thus, just sharpening what I said in the book (Fry 2011: 237), design must
be taken beyond its current limits,
which means it needs to become: another
kind of design thinking and practice. It has to be taken beyond the remit
of
existing design discourse: acknowledge that humanity at large is entering a
third moment of worldly habitation
(the age of unsettlement); and turn away
from any faith in institutional politics towards acting politically.
 References

Abrahams, John and Dana Nuccitelli (2014), ‘New research reveals what’s causing sea level to rise’,
Guardian, 31 October.
Adorno, Theodor (1973), Negative Dialectics (trans. E.B. Aston), London: Routledge.
Bataille, Georges (1990), ‘Hegel, Death and Sacrifice’ (trans. Jonathan Strauss), Yale French
Studies
78.
Deleuze, Gilles (1988), Spinoza: Practical Philosophy (trans. Robert Hurley), San
Francisco: City
Lights.
Fry, Tony (2011), Design as Politics, London: Berg.
Fry, Tony (2014), City Futures in the Age of a Changing Climate, London: Routledge.
Goldenberg, Suzanne (2014), ‘Western Antarctic ice sheet collapse has already begun scientists
warn’,
Guardian, 13 May.
Heidegger, Martin (1968), What is Called Thinking (trans. J. Glenn Gray), New York:
Harper and
Row.
Hirst, Paul (1987), ‘Carl Schmitt’s Decisionism’, Telos, 72.
Kalantidou, Eleni and Tony Fry (eds) (2014), Design in the Borderlands, London:
Routledge.
Levinas, Emmanuel (1987), Collected Philosophical Papers (trans. Alphonso Lingis),
Dordrecht:
Matinus Nijhoff Publishers.
Nietzsche, F. (1969), Thus Spoke Zarathustra (trans. R. J. Hollingdale), Harmondsworth:
Penguin
Books.
SIPRI, The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (2014), Asian Arms Sales
Report,
Stockholm: SIPRI Publications.
 31

DESIGN FOR THE REAL WORLD

Victor Papanek and the emergence of humane
design
Alison J. Clarke
 
 

Industrial design differs from its sister arts of architecture and

engineering in one basic way: it is the only
profession that has
moved from discovery to degeneracy in one generation …
members of the profession have lost
integrity and responsibility and
become purveyors of trivia, the tawdry and the shoddy, the
inventors of toys
for adults.
(Papanek 1971: xxi)

In 1971 a publication that would transform the ambitions of a generation of

designers was published under the
title Design for the Real World: Human
Ecology and Social Change. The first in a series of
polemical design books
whose publication spanned two decades, its author, Victor Papanek, adopted
a populist
rhetoric urging designers to look beyond commercial product
styling towards a social imperative. As
designer-cum-design theorist,
Papanek formulated a transdisciplinary vision of socially responsible design
in
which designers, anthropologists, psychologists, filmmakers, biologists,
engineers, and users united to form a
socially inclusive practice geared to
the problems of the “real world.” The brand of design activism Papanek and
his followers promoted in the 1970s laid the foundations for a field we now
recognize as a branch of design
studies. Pre-empting the twenty-first-
century shift towards design as a dispersed phenomenon, Design for the
Real World drew upon a range of influences, condensing within its pages an
ersatz
manifesto for an era facing the first crises of post-industrial
development. In the preface to his book Papanek
asserted prophetically, “it
is time that industrial design, as we have come to know it, should cease to
exist”
(ibid.: xxii).
The publication, which has never fallen out of print in over four decades,
advocated an alternative economy of
design: practitioners dedicating at
least ten percent of their professional time on social causes, from design
for
the elderly to design for developing countries. The design most indicative
of this approach is the oft-cited
example of a low-tech radio for the
indigenous Indonesian populations supported by Unesco. A low-cost
appropriate
technology item, costing less than nine cents per unit, it
consisted of a dung-powered transistor radio encased
in a recycled tin can
(see Figures 31.1 and 31.2). As an inclusive
design, users were encouraged
to customize it using their own decorative scheme. This concept of
inclusivity,
made at the expense of formal aesthetic consideration, caused
disquiet within the Modernist design fraternity.
During a visiting lecture at
the Hochschule für Gestaltung Ulm, Papanek purportedly horrified the
assembled
professors with an example of his indigenous tin can radio
replete with brightly colored appliqué decoration,
shells, and sequins (see
Figure 31.2). The gathered luminaries of functionalist design
queried why
Papanek had chosen not to embrace the tin can’s industrial aesthetic,
painting the design a tasteful,
industrial matt grey (see Figure 31.3).
“Painting it would have been wrong,” retorted
Papanek in Design for the
Real World, “[F]or one thing, it would have raised the price of
each unit by
maybe one twentieth of a penny each … [M]uch more importantly,” he
continued, “I feel that I have no
right to make aesthetic or ‘good taste’
decisions that will affect millions of people in Indonesia, who are
members
of a different culture” (ibid.: 164).
Figure
31.1 Tin can radio, designed
for “developing countries” by Victor Papanek and George
Seeger at North Carolina State College, using
recycled and locally sourced materials.
Courtesy: UNESCO. Source: Victor J. Papanek Foundation, the University of Applied Arts Vienna.

Figure
31.2 Victor Papenek and George
Seeger’s tin can radio, decorated.
Courtesy: UNESCO. Source: Victor J. Papanek Foundation, the University of Applied Arts Vienna.
Figure
31.3 Victor Papanek, c. 1979.
Courtesy: Victor J. Papanek Foundation, the University of Applied Arts Vienna.

Although some critics accused Papanek of peddling a form of neo-

colonial discourse that patronized his clients,
his approach to design and
development was endorsed by leading organizations such as UNESCO, the
International
Council of Societies of Industrial Design (ICSID), and the
United Nations Industrial Development Organization
(UNIDO), having a
crucial impact on the defining of a new interdisciplinary field (Clarke 2015;
2016). Design for the Real World represented a self-declared attempt to turn
design from “First World”
concerns to those of the excluded,
peripheralized, and socially disadvantaged. Broader contemporary
movements in
counter culture and appropriate technology shaped the
discourse’s emphasis on the social and the humane. But
crucially Papanek’s
ideas emanated from a complex history of émigré discourse rooted in the
birth of the
industrial design profession in 1930s USA.

The origins of design for the real world

An Austrian-American Jewish émigré who had escaped to the US from

Vienna as a youth in 1939, Papanek (1923–98)
exported a sharply honed
political perspective from the progressive culture of “Red Vienna,” a city
famed for its
inter-war socialist housing, hospitals, kindergartens, and civil
infrastructure. The phenomenon of the “Cultural
Exodus” from Austria, a
term used to describe the significance of the émigré experience as a crucial
tenet of
American Modernism, is well documented within art history (Baron
and Affron 1997). As early as 1968 Ernest Wilder Spaulding’s The Quiet
Invaders: the Story of
the Austrian Impact upon America identified the
networks of Austrian Jewish émigrés who exerted enormous
influence in
the international and US context; a thesis that has expanded to acknowledge
the extraordinary legacy
of turn-of-the-century Vienna specifically in
shaping the aesthetics and ethics of twentieth-century architecture
from
Frederick Kiesler to Richard Neutra. Historians have identified distinct
waves of migration from Austria in
the first half of the twentieth century
that brought with them shared, as well as distinct, sets of
circumstances.
The Architektur–Migration phenomenon has subsequently been extended to
a previously unexplored set
of commonalities between the aesthetic and
ethical design practice of Vetriebener (exiles) and refugees that fled
to the
US following the annexation of Austria in 1938 by the National Socialists.
Significantly, the Cultural
Exodus paradigm suggests that Viennese émigrés
brought with them a specific critical approach grounded less in
concrete
references and more specifically in a modern consciousness that, coupled
with the experience of
displacement, equipped these individuals with a
distinctive visionary capacity (Boeckl 1995).
As a US designer Victor Papanek has typically been understood as
belonging to the tradition of post-war pragmatic
North American anti-
corporate lobbyists, such as Vance Packard and Ralph Nader. Yet his early
experiences and
later social émigré networks in the US clearly define him
as belonging to the twentieth-century Cultural Exodus
phenomenon
identified by architectural and cultural historians. As the only child of a
bourgeois family, living
in the prestigious Ringstrasse area of Vienna, his
arrival as a refugee in late 1930s working-class New York
City, immersed
in an alienating cacophony of poverty and popular consumer culture,
undoubtedly had life-changing
consequences that permanently altered his
ideas of social justice and material wellbeing.
Like other US émigré designers, including America’s feted industrial
designer of the streamlined age, Raymond
Loewy, Papanek’s initial status
as an outsider lent him a fresh perspective on a nation at odds with Old
World
European culture. While Loewy had a privileged rather than refugee
émigré status, settling in New York in the
early twentieth century from an
affluent Jewish-Parisian background with plenty of upper echelon social
connections, Papanek shared with him a sensibility of the informal
ethnographer, making acute observations of a
host environment rife with the
contradictions of unbridled consumer capitalism, its excess, and its
inequalities.
Loewy, representing as he did the apotheosis of commercial
design he would later pit himself against,
nevertheless shared with Papanek
the mantle of crusader against New World vulgarity. In his autobiography,
Never Leave Well Enough Alone (a first edition copy of which Papanek held
in his personal
library), Loewy describes himself as belonging to a morally
superior set of designers who challenged the
non-progressive horrors of
nouveaux riches consumption:

[N]ightmares of vulgarity were sweeping the country, what were

the odds against us, the pure boys, apostles of
simplicity and
restraint? Our only hope was that some men of taste would revolt
against their gilt outrages and
turn to us for help.
(Loewy 1951: 95)

Using a polemical tone strikingly similar to that Papanek later adopted in

Design for the Real
World, Loewy positioned himself as part industrial
designer part reformer; transforming “bad” consumer
culture, in the form of
“trashy” Modernistic designs, into “good” consumer culture. “Besides the
serious designers such as Dreyfuss, Van Doren, Ray Patten, Arens, Teague,
Sakier, Wright, and others,” commented Loewy of the 1930s, “we had to
contend with a group of twenty or so
crackpot commercial artists,
decorators, etc., without experience, taste, talent, or integrity, who called
themselves industrial designers” (ibid.: 128). Design for the Real World
condemned the
classic model of the designer that Loewy and his ilk
epitomized, that of the commercially-driven “genius” shaping
the
technocratic future of a capitalist economy. Arguably, however, the
inception of the publication could be
traced back to the very era it sought to
chastise for styling and bolstering consumption. When Papanek arrived in
New York City, living in a hostel alongside other impoverished refugees
and fellow émigrés, the design
extravaganza of the 1939 New York World’s
Fair plastered the front pages of the major newspapers, magazines, and
design press. As the principal designers and choreographers of the New
York World’s Fair spectacle, Loewy and his
fellow “crusaders” proffered an
inescapable vision of design’s transformative power. Papanek witnessed the
birth
of a new profession that offered migrant-outsiders the opportunity to
share in the making of modernity.
By the 1940s, however, there were far more compelling influences
emanating from fellow émigré designers and
design writers. In 1944
Bernard Rudofsky’s ground-breaking Museum of Modern Art exhibition,
Are
Clothes Modern?, overturned the bastions of conventional curatorial
tropes with a format-busting show that
defied formalist aesthetic
hierarchies. Rudofsky threw aside Modernist discourse, and appropriated
the role of
the anthropologist juxtaposing vernacular, ancient, primitive, and
contemporary clothing “to take the blinkers of
tradition off modern eyes so
that they can see that certain conventions … are in fact useless, impractical,
irrational, harmful and unbeautiful” (Rudofsky 1944). This quasi-
ethnological approach to design as material
culture, where the making of
clothing was viewed as a cultural rather than fashion phenomenon
understood
holistically in relation to “its effect on architecture, living
habits, and behavior,” defined a new approach to
design analysis. Defying
the “good design” dictum of institutions like the Museum of Modern Art
(MoMA) New York
and the mainstream Modernist design and architectural
establishment, Rudofsky coined an approach that demanded
the indigenous,
the vernacular, and the outsider be included on an equal footing. The
principal aim of this
comparative rhetoric device was to cast light on the
absurdity of modern Western culture’s unique claim on
“progress.”
Bernard Rudofsky’s later exhibitions and publications, including
Architecture without
Architects: A Short Guide to Non-Pedigreed
Architecture (1964) and Streets for People: A
Primer for Americans (1969),
paved the way for Papanek’s Design for the Real World
with their defiance
of the professionalization of innate human needs and activities. They
embraced a
cosmopolitan, humanist design agenda whose legacy is evident
in the alternative design movement of the 1970s, and
some aspects of
contemporary design studies.

Critiques of consumption, its discontents, and counter cultures

While Rudofsky was taking New York by storm, over on the West Coast in
1940s California, the Jewish-German
émigrés Max Horkheimer and
Theodor W. Adorno were introducing the US to the critical theory of the
Frankfurt
School. In particular, theories derived from their 1944 seminal
essay, “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as
Mass Deception,” created a
new critical framework for understanding
popular culture, and its
discontents. Horkheimer and Adorno famously construed the “culture
industry” as being
akin to the alienating effects of industrial labor in its
influence; the superficial and stupefying enjoyment
generated through the
mechanisms of popular culture leading to a state of “false consciousness”
preventing
authentic social relations and political engagement. On the East
Coast, the New School of Research in New York
City was also a haven for
exiled European intellectuals and academics, and provided a meeting point
and focus for
émigré networks that some historians argue underpinned
twentieth-century American Progressive Liberalism.
Institutions such as the New School valorized progressive, left-leaning
émigré discourse. Papanek drew on this
critical tradition by translating the
consumer critique into a populist treatment of everyday design. By the
early
1960s, after a decade attempting to establish a design practice with little
success, Papanek presented a
regional television show, Design Dimensions.
Aired on an educational channel it used
evocative program titles depicting
the absurdity of contemporary product culture, including “The Chrome
Plated
Marshmallow,” “Road Maps to Hell,” and “Let Them Eat Fakes.”
The titles echoed those of his future seminal work,
Design for the Real
World, featuring similarly provocative titles including “Do It
Yourself
Murder,” “Our Kleenex Culture,” and “Rebel With a Cause,” parodying the
idiosyncrasies of mainstream
design and US consumer culture.
Design for the Real World, as noted earlier, has been incorporated into
the historiography
of the postwar North American genre of US consumer
critique heralded by popular figureheads such as Vance
Packard, whose
bestselling exposé of the manufacturing industry’s use of advertising and
product obsolescence,
The Waste Makers (1960) became a best-seller.
Obsolescence was viewed as a corollary to
advertising, a process of
manufacturing goods that relied on gimmickry, whimsy, and contrary to the
Modernist
ethos, the commercially-driven principle that products should
avoid enduring aesthetic form. Packard’s previous
best-seller, The Hidden
Persuaders (1957), had been an outright condemnation of the US
advertising industry, its insidious practices, and mechanisms of deceit.
Packard decried the use of
increasingly-sophisticated psychological
techniques, such as motivational research, devised to manipulate the
ordinary person into embracing a potent culture of brands.
The year following the publication of The Hidden Persuaders, economist
John Kenneth
Galbraith’s The Affluent Society (1958) described the
detrimental effects of an “economic
of abundance,” charting the rise of
private wealth and the demise of public, collective civil culture. Most
significantly he asserted that economic theory must take into account the
importance of advertising in
artificially creating high rates of consumption
to support high rates of production. Galbraith asserted that, in
the late
twentieth century, corporations no longer used advertising to convey
information around product merits
but rather to generate desire, and then
promise the satiation of desire through the endless production of goods.
The
function of advertising, Galbraith famously wrote, is “to bring into being
wants that previously did not
exist” (1958: 141). Following in the North
American tradition, consumer and political activist Ralph Nader’s
Unsafe at
Any Speed: The Designed-In Dangers of the American Automobile (1965)
was an
exposé of ill-designed cars that sacrificed safety in the name of
profit.
Crucially, two other publications of contemporary significance frame the
design activism Papanek forged in the
late 1960s leading into the 1970s:
Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media (1964) and
The Medium is the
Massage: An Inventory of Effects (1967). In recognizing the aesthetic
resonance and rhetoric of modern advertising, McLuhan revealed its
real
power, as suggested in the ironic title of his second, best-selling, book The
Medium is
the Massage (1967). The symbiosis of media and message
conflated process and meaning, summarized in a
classic McLuhan quote:
“The modern Little Red Riding Hood, reared on singing commercials, has
no objection to
being eaten by the wolf” (McLuhan 1951: 21). Like
Rudofsky before him, McLuhan had an equally attractive populist
rhetoric
that Papanek drew upon and reapplied as a contemporary voice of design
criticism.

Forging 1970s design activism

Over the course of his career, Papanek took academic positions and guest
professorships across Europe, Asia,
South America, and Australasia with
certain continents, countries, and cultures exerting a pronounced influence
on the politics of his work. Following the success of Design for the Real
World: Human Ecology
and Social Change, Papanek co-authored, with US
design engineer James Hennessey, a hands-on political
counterpoise to
capitalist-dominated design culture. A guide to practical and alternative
products, Nomadic Furniture (1973) formed part of a broader anti-mass-
consumption movement exemplified in 1973
by the International Design
Center (IDZ) Berlin and its exhibition Design it Yourself: Möbel
für
Grundbedarf des Wohnens (furniture for basic living). The exhibition
featured designs by Papanek,
described in the accompanying literature as a
“UNESCO expert” and highlighting his alternative design culture
credentials. The emergence of this do-it-yourself, spontaneous design
aesthetic challenged the supremacy of mass
manufacturing standardization
and democratized design. As part of a broader discourse of alternative
culture, the
exhibit promoted the idea of self-empowerment by the adoption
of low-impact appropriate technology: a set of
basic design instructions and
a simple set of tools. Self-assembly furniture and the new Low-Tech-Kultur
were
meant as an overtly political statement regarding the overturning of
hierarchies of taste and design authorship.
That same year Hennessey and
Papanek had published Nomadic Furniture and the following
year came the
sequel, Nomadic Furniture 2 (1974), both editions using the illustrative
subtitle “How to build and where to buy lightweight furniture that folds,
inflates, knocks down, stacks, or is
disposable and can be recycled.” The
books described a newly transient lifestyle that demanded movable,
stackable, self-assembly items, echoing Papanek’s admiration for the
compact, need-driven Scandinavian design
culture he featured heavily in
Design for the Real World (Clarke 2013). Freed from the
burden of
traditional social relations, geographic ties, and inherited “bulky, heavy”
furniture that was “always
a bitch [sic] to move,” Nomadic Furniture
(1973) drew on a similar
US counter culture movement that had spawned
the Whole Earth Catalog, a late 1960s and
1970s lifestyle guide to
alternative non-commodity culture.
The expanded edition of Nomadic Furniture 2 (1974) featured examples
of Papanek’s own
nomadic designs, mostly conceived in projects with
students, including a two-seater foldaway seating unit
captioned “Fold-
Down Dining Bench,” constructed as a casual furniture solution from “pine,
beech or whatever.”
The accompanying image showed Papanek
demonstrating the nomadic furniture with a post-script emphasizing the
cultural and corporeal informality such items could engender: “the unit
could also sit directly on the floor for
parties and relaxing.” Posing before
his backdrop of anthropological and vernacular artefacts was far from an
incidental choice: they were core to Papanek’s holistic design approach
and
an overt means of associating himself with alternative, authentic cultures.
The same ethnographic artefacts
would appear as illustrations of intuitive,
low-technology design under the title “The Best Designers in the
World?”
in the last of Papanek’s books, The Green Imperative (1995).
But it is perhaps Papanek’s least commercially successful book, How
Things Don’t Work
(1977) (co-authored with James Hennessey), that
endures in its critique of the naively optimistic adoption of
technology by
designers. Following the polemic established in Design for the Real World,
the book reiterated design’s complicity in environmental ruination in a way
that remains apposite to contemporary
design culture:

We must recognize the obvious. It costs more to produce our

present forms of ugliness than to create better
alternatives. We will
be forced (like it or not) toward better, saner and more energy-
saving tools and devices
simply because we cannot afford any other
kind.
(Hennessy and Papanek 1977: xiii)

A decade had lapsed between the writing of Papanek’s lesser known sole-
authored book, Design
for Human Scale (1983), and his final, The Green
Imperative (1995). Twenty-five years
after the release of his ground-
breaking and provocative book Design for the Real World: Human
Ecology
and Social Change, The Green Imperative stood as a testament to the
author’s life-long commitment to
socially responsible design. Research and
writing for the book were supported by a US National Endowment for the
Arts Distinguished Designer Award, and an Outstanding Design Award
from the IKEA Foundation, Netherlands. As a
tenured professor of design
at the University of Kansas, Papanek’s favorable circumstances stood in
stark
contrast to those surrounding the publication of his first seminal text,
the critical tone of which had caused
consternation within the US design
fraternity and saw Papanek ostracized within the mainstream design
community.
Support for the writing of The Green Imperative also revealed
the changing emphasis within
the design industry itself which, in the
decades since Papanek’s first book, had acknowledged the prescience of
environmental and social issues.
Written over a period of four years, during fellowships and residencies in
locations as diverse as Bali, the
United Kingdom, and rural Spain, the book
covered topics that had been the mainstay of Papanek’s work since the
1970s, including the anthropological, spiritual, and cultural aspects of
design, as well as the significance of
biomorphics and the natural world.
Reading more as a textbook in style than his previous publications, the
edition offered students examples of “good practice” in design through
vernacular case studies, and application
of appropriate technology. The US
edition of the book featured the subtitle Natural Design for
the Real World,
deliberately drawing on the fame of Papanek’s original best-selling book.
Significantly,
considering Papanek’s repeated assertion that the European
design world appreciated him more enthusiastically
than the US, the UK
edition appropriated a more nuanced subtitle, “Ecology and Ethics in
Design and
Architecture,” reflecting the respective differences in marketing
perceptions. The book was also intended to
introduce the ideas of the
former cult-design figure, Victor Papanek, to a new generation of students
and a
green-aware audience.
In the event, however, The Green Imperative proved anachronistic. Its
rhetoric belonged to
a more idealist era of theoretical debate that predated
the rise of the superstar designer and omnipresent brand culture that
preoccupied the design critics of the early 1990s. As such it
had a less than
enthusiastic reception when it appeared in 1995. Ken Isaacs, a US design
activist and
contemporary of Papanek, wrote a scathing review of Papanek’s
final book in a leading theoretical design journal
of the time. He condemned
the work as irrelevant and “problematic” to contemporary design practice,
lacking in
innovation, “complacent and timid” in its approach. Papanek’s
well-worn meditation on the harmonious design of
authentic cultures, from
Inuit ice dwellings to Mongolian yurts, coupled with his warnings of the
dangers of mass
marketing and consumption, all seemed quaintly naive in
an era of aggressive free-market politics and the
widespread demise of state
infrastructures. Isaacs described Papanek’s polemic poignantly as mere
“whistling in
the cemetery” (Isaacs 1997: 78).
Set within the context of a mid-1990s design criticism increasingly
looking to non-objects, interactions, and
digital design rather than
traditional manufactured product design and architecture, the didactic tone
and
content of The Green Imperative fell on deaf ears. The battles it
described had already
been lost; designers were equipping themselves with
an alternative theoretical apparatus with which to manage an
ever more
complex design environment reliant on embedded digitalized technologies
and new dispersed tropes of
corporate power.
Nevertheless, The Green Imperative consolidated Victor Papanek’s
international reputation
as a key proponent of an alternative and critical
approach to design and was widely adopted as a key textbook in
design
studies courses. In the year of its publication, 1995, Papanek received the
international Lewis Mumford
Award for Development. The book would be
Papanek’s last substantial interjection into the politics of design
culture; his
health faltered and he passed away in Kansas, US, three years after its
publication on January 10,
1998.

References

Baron, S. and M. Affron (eds) (1997) Exiles and Emigrés, the Flight of European Artists from
Hitler,
Munich: Prestel.
Boeckl, M. (ed.) (1995) Visionäre & Vertriebene: Österreichische Spuren in der modernen
amerikanischen Architektur, Berlin: Ernst & Sohn.
Clarke, A. J. (2013) “‘Actions Speak Louder:’ Victor Papanek and the Legacy of Design Activism,”
Design and Culture, 5(2): 151–66.
——(2015) “Emigré Culture and the Origins of Social Design,” in M. Bruinsma (ed.) Design for
the
Good Society, Utrecht Manifest 2005–2015, Rotterdam: NAI Publishers, 164–79.
——(2016) “Design for Development, ICSID and UNIDO: The Anthropological Turn in 1970s
Design,” Journal of Design History, 29(1): 43–57.
Galbraith, J. K. (1958) The Affluent Society, London: Hamish Hamilton.
Hennessy, J. and V. Papanek (1973) Nomadic Furniture 1, New York: Pantheon Books.
——(1974) Nomadic Furniture 2, New York: Pantheon Books.
——(1977) How Things Don’t Work, New York: Pantheon Books.
Horkheimer, M. and T. W. Adorno [1944] (1991) Dialectic of Enlightenment (trans. John
Cumming),
New York: Continuum.
Isaacs, K. (1997) “Review: The Green Imperative: Design for the Real World by Victor
Papanek,”
Design Issues 13(2): 78–9.
Loewy, R. (1951) Never Leave Well Enough Alone, New York: Simon and Schuster.
McLuhan, M. (1951) The Mechanical Bride, New York: Vanguard Press.
——(1964) Understanding Media, New York: McGraw-Hill.
——(1967) The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects, Toronto: Bantam Books.
Nader, R. (1965) Unsafe at any Speed: The Designed in Dangers of the American
Automobile, New
York: Grossman.
Papanek, V. (1957) The Hidden Persuaders, New York: David McKay.
——(1960) The Waste Makers, New York: David McKay.
Papanek, V. (1971) Design for the Real World: Human Ecology and Social Change, New York:
Pantheon Books.
——(1983) Design for Human Scale, New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold.
——(1995) The Green Imperative: Natural Design for the Real World, New York: Thames &
Hudson (and by Thames & Hudson London as The Green Imperative: Ecology and Ethics in
Design and Architecture).
Rudofsky, B. (1944) “Tradition Challenged in Museum of Modern Art Exhibition, Are Clothes
Modern?” MoMA press release, November 27.
——(1964) Architecture Without Architects: A Short Guide to Non-Pedigreed Architecture,
New
York: Doubleday.
——(1969) Streets for People: A Primer for Americans, New York: Doubleday.
Wilder Spaulding, E. (1968) The Quiet Invaders. The Story of the Austrian Impact upon
America,
Vienna: Österreichischer Bundesverlag.
 32

IMPOSSIBLE MAYBE, PERHAPS

QUITE LIKELY
Activist design in Helsinki’s urban wastelands
Eeva Berglund
 
 
Design is becoming involved in mainstream social and economic processes
buoyed along by heightened fears and
hopes for the future. Where
sustainability underpins urban decision-making, design thinking is already a
pronounced disposition, with design generally conceived as the ‘method
used by society to envision how we want to
live in the future’ (Moore and
Karvonen 2008: 30). To make cities even better, even faster, new types of
activists are taking things into their own hands, experimenting with
alternative designs here and now. Design
activism is a new player on many
an urban stage.
Two greenhouses, built independently of each other on apparently
abandoned land in central Helsinki, tell us
about design activism’s arrival in
the Finnish capital. Both greenhouses could be described as small-scale
experiments in making sustainable futures. One was built in 2000 as a
temporary structure when Helsinki was one
of ten European Capitals of
Culture, and demolished just seven years later. The other was built in 2012
when
Helsinki was World Design Capital (WDC). Both projects point to a
future shaped more by environmental collapse
than by commercial dreams,
yet both have also contributed positively to the city’s efforts to market itself
as an
attractive location to business and the creative class alike. As so often
with design activism, their critical
edge can get lost as they become
entangled in more mainstream change-making schemes.
This means that writing about design activism presents its own
challenges. Given the fickle forces directing
urban development today, it
may be that small-scale greenhouses are more likely to pop up than not in
interstitial urban spaces awaiting capital-intensive development.
Particularly in a city like Helsinki, currently
in a major construction boom,
pop-up or meanwhile uses are easily
enfolded into a neoliberal urban
management regime that panders to private interests as much as it serves
civic
values. A critical analysis should, then, aim to ring warning bells
while avoiding the risk that activism might
be co-opted by power and
rendered into commercial value. I take seriously the activists involved, who
have shared
their stories with me, and I trust that, like social movement
actors generally, they know what they are doing. At
the same time I take a
comparative and critical perspective which allows me to suggest that the
grassroots urban
interventions proliferating today have political
significance: they question the material, cultural and political
organization
of everyday life in ways that municipal or state authorities
can hardly dream
of, even as they bolster mainstream agendas.
In creating them, those who produced and maintained these greenhouses
wanted to foster alternative social
realities. They were activist in showing a
pronounced concern for righting wrongs here and now, but they did not
think of themselves as design activists, perhaps not even as activists. They
were just interested in practical,
hands-on activity. The influence of climate
change on policy, however, has meant that experiments of all kinds
with
urban sustainability are becoming popular in city governments (Evans and
Karvonen 2014). In addition to
corporate- or university-sponsored
municipal efforts around the world, the past five to ten years have witnessed
a blossoming of do-it-yourself (DIY) urbanism or voluntary and/or semi-
legal physical interventions in urban
space (Thorpe 2012; Douglas 2014),
such as Helsinki’s two DIY-greenhouses.
This is not to overlook the fact that design skills have been harnessed for
a long time in an effort to build a
better tomorrow (Fuad-Luke 2009), with
as well as for vulnerable
others – better housing, safer streets, sustainable
food or other provisioning, transport, etc. – in often
co-creative or
collaborative processes. A well-known type of design activism, sometimes
known as artivism, has deep historical roots in utopian counter-cultures that
sought to provoke the
mainstream. This history parallels that of
industrialization and is discussed in the contemporary context by, for
instance, Mouffe (2013). But it can also be understood as critical design, as
popularised Anthony Dunne and Fiona
Raby (www.dunneandraby.co.uk),
with an attitude that
questions what is normal and acceptable through
design interventions, interrupting users’ habitual relationships
to (usually)
familiar things. Examples recently seen in Helsinki have included using
parking spaces as a
temporary outdoor living room, or buying advertising
space to display anti-consumerist messages.
By any definition, design activism seeks to disrupt everyday experiences,
perhaps altering the physical
environment or placing objects in public
places to trigger new thoughts or unanticipated behaviours, usually with
a
potential audience in mind, and often practised outside conventional social
contexts, for example as DIWO or
Doing It With Others. A constantly
changing, vague and even internally contradictory concept, design activism
can
also refer to practices such as crafting or making as alternatives to
buying (Hackney 2013), combinations of
computer hacking, 3D-printing
and art, sometimes carried out in designated maker-spaces (Kohtala and
Bosqué
2014). On a larger scale design activism encompasses a range of
interventions in urban space, and often involves
architectural elements
(Awan et al. 2011). Here too the variation is striking: from
guerrilla
gardeners who want to add greenery and beauty to derelict cityscapes; to
urban food-producers; and even
to creators of road infrastructure, such as
those who informally built stairways and ramps to access Cairo’s ring
road
in 2011 (Nagati and Stryker 2013). Though design activism has usually
been treated as the province of
subcultures, increasingly it is a vehicle of
public engagement that brings together designers, end users,
commercial
players, policy makers and, as the Cairo example shows, citizens whose
needs have been bypassed. By
definition it is creative and specific to place.
The list of examples from around the world is long and growing
fast. Little
wonder, perhaps, that the literature on the topic tends to come in the shape
of catalogues and
compendia, nonetheless thoughtfully compiled (e.g.
Ferguson and Urban Drift 2014; Rosa and Weiland 2013).
That activist design has political implications is clear. For Anne Thorpe
(2012) it serves wronged, excluded or
neglected constituencies; for Alastair
Fuad-Luke (2009: 27) counter-narrative and positive change are its
hallmarks; for Guy Julier, activist design’s
starting points are ‘overtly
social, environmental and/or political issues’, but it ‘also intervene[s]
functionally in these’, and as such it even constitutes a ‘recognizably
international movement in design’ (Julier
2013: 219). It does hark back to a
period of radical design that flourished in the 1970s when design’s identity
became an explicit problem; designers were creators of all things good and
beautiful, yet simultaneously
handmaidens to the disastrous social and
environmental costs of industrial capitalism and consumer culture.
Champions of design for good, such as Victor Papanek and Richard
Buckminster-Fuller, were key figures in these
counter-cultural movements,
but that period’s significance for design activism probably lies more in the
‘mish-mash’ (Fuad-Luke 2009: 45) of people who aspired to an alternative
to consumerism and its negative impacts.
In dropping out of mainstream
society – quite literally sometimes, in the deserts of the American West –
their
utopias mixed practical ingenuity with social critique (Boal et al.
2012).
Design’s heightened social and political significance is now of interest
well beyond design. Where design is used
to alleviate poverty or suffering,
or draw attention to persistent injustice, its critical politics are visible
even
as the promise of design, and design thinking specifically, easily shades into
hype, design offered as a
panacea (Kimbell 2011). In many countries
activism increasingly merges into policy, particularly in relation to
averting
future environmental catastrophe by reducing carbon emissions. Rather than
a cause for celebration, as
Chantal Mouffe (echoed by many others) puts it,
it often seems that every ‘critical gesture is quickly
recuperated and
neutralized by the forces of corporate capitalism’ (Mouffe 2013: 85). So
when people around the
world are experimenting with self-organizing,
socially and environmentally oriented and, above all,
future-securing
alternatives to a crisis-riven mainstream, they are undoubtedly
compensating for losses they have
suffered through the retreat of a welfare-
oriented state.
In looking at small-scale activist practices in the design-friendly
environment of twenty-first-century Helsinki,
this chapter takes an
ethnographic point of view, sympathetic to the activists, to explore what it
is to be both
against and part of the unsustainable present. Paraphrasing
Moore and Karvonen (2008) I seek to avoid both the
‘pessimistic drift’ of
social and political analysis, and the over-optimism characteristic of the
designer, and
suggest that activism alters the imaginations of all who
encounter or participate in it. I argue that through
working in and on the
greenhouses, and in questioning the material, cultural and political
organization of
everyday life in ways that policy makers can hardly dream
of, this activism definitely qualifies as contentious
politics. I claim this
despite the fact that activists are often reluctant protesters and despite the
tendency of
critical gestures to become co-opted into mainstream agendas.
Rather than design activism, however, one might more accurately talk of
activist design. There are two reasons for this. Firstly, those involved in
Helsinki do not
self-identify as design activists. Secondly, activist design as
a concept is more encompassing, able to capture
the full repertoire of
design-influenced actions, which go beyond self-styled radical behaviours
to others that
are activist in the sense of being urgent and aimed at a greater
good. An activist ethos in this sense is in fact
part of the neoliberal
condition; projects that use design in an activist way to make the world a
better place
come from the mainstream as well as the margins. The need to
respond to geopolitical, economic and environmental
crises grounds action
from the grassroots to the corporate boardroom (Fuad-Luke even talks
about the ‘professional activism industry’, 2009: 5). Activist design thus
encompasses
design activism, but not the other way around.

Sustainable design in city centre Utopias

Built as a temporary structure on a contested but central piece of urban

wasteland in 2000, the glass pavilion
that later came to be known as
Happihuone, or the Oxygen Room, was once dubbed the ‘most
human
place in Helsinki’ (Dirk Schultz, quoted in Kohtala and Paterson 2015). It
involved architects, designers
and artists, and delighted tens of thousands of
people before being dismantled in 2007. The Turntable urban farm
and
vegan café, similarly hidden away at the centre of things but about two
kilometres further north, is the
outcome of guerrilla gardening activities by
an established environmental organization, Dodo, and, at the time of
writing
in 2015, is flourishing. The activities of both, and their very existence,
speak of a critique of the
mainstream, a strongly felt desire and need for an
alternative to a destructive version of ‘normal’. Yet, as I
have noted
elsewhere (Berglund 2013), both could be seen as harmless to the status
quo, just quirky elements of
Helsinki’s policy-sanctioned creativity. After
all, the first was made possible when Helsinki was one of nine
European
Capitals of Culture and the second benefitted from Helsinki’s status as
World Design Capital in 2012.
They added to the city’s overarching priority
to present itself as accommodating creativity and innovation, a mix
of fun
and marketing perhaps. But though these achievements can be translated
into narrowly economic terms, their
more interesting political legacy, the
collective and embodied imaginings1 enacted through the greenhouses,
cannot.

The Oxygen Room

At the turn of the millennium, just across from the parliament building, at
the heart of the city, were a few
hectares that could justifiably be described
as urban dereliction. Surrounding this apparently vacant landscape
were the
national post office and cultural venues, including the opera, the Finlandia
Hall and the Kiasma Museum
of Contemporary Art. While waiting to be
developed it was a mix of shrubs and grassland, car park, some contested
railroad buildings and Töölö Bay, an inlet of the sea.
In 2000 Helsinki was the European Capital of Culture. With public
funding an Art Garden turned much of the area
into a playground for
residents. Seizing the opportunity, a women’s network, Kvinnor i Extas
(‘women in ecstasy’
in Swedish, Finland being a bilingual country), applied
to be part of the Cultural Capital programme and built a
gallery-like
construction in this interstitial space using old windows donated by the city
from its own recently
renovated winter gardens. Meanwhile, elsewhere,
Finnish designers interested in the o2 global network of
design-for-
sustainability started a process that resulted in the foundation of a Finnish
o2 chapter. The
glasshouse was opened at the edge of the Art Garden in the
summer (see Figure 32.1). It was
really more than a greenhouse, a pavilion
of elegant proportions surrounded by trees and a garden, and all this
surrounded by city. The garden and greenhouse became hugely popular and,
rather than being dismantled, the
building was sold to an arts collective,
Valon Voimat. In 2001, o2 Finland received grant money, organized a
summer exhibition on eco-design and environmental art, purchased the
greenhouse in turn, and was given permission to operate there until the end
of the year. Cindy
Kohtala and Andrew Paterson (2015) wrote:

This set a surprising – and sometimes stressful but always

energising – pattern. Apply to the city for
permission to remain.
Apply for grants. Repaint the greenhouse and repair the roof.
Replant the garden. Invite
contributors and find partners. Prod and
nudge volunteers. Organize exhibitions, installations and
workshops.
Play music. Show movies and videos. Just keep going,
 no matter what happens. In 2002 we began calling the
greenhouse
Happihuone, Oxygen Room.

They later appointed a curator to organize its programme. A textile artist,

Papu Pirtola, told me that she was so
impressed by this kitchen garden in
the city centre that she sought out those responsible and offered her
services
and ended up working there for several years, organizing an annual cycle of
events and even overseeing
the construction on the site of a sauna made of
peat. The work was something she felt compelled to do, an act of
sanity in a
crazy world.
For the designers the impetus was predominantly about promoting
sustainable design, and showcasing green, as
opposed to merely
commercial, design. Partly inspired by the idea of sustainable business,
partly hoping to
launch the Finnish design profession into new, more
hopeful areas of activity, they clearly gained huge pleasure
from working at
the greenhouse. There was a desire for change at societal
level too, but
initially the project was not self-consciously transgressive. In fact, the o2
group had considered
the Design Museum as a possible partner for an
exhibition on sustainable design before alighting upon the
brilliant – as it
turned out – idea of using the delightful, if unlikely, greenhouse.
Figure
32.1 The Oxygen Room, Helsinki,
2003.

Photo: Cindy Kohtala.

Yet the very fact of the greenhouse, and its persistence on that very spot,
did play a part in the shaping of new
social dynamics and urban space. Self-
consciously a breathing space away from the informational fog and hectic
pace of neoliberal capitalism, the Oxygen Room became a symbol of
people choosing to produce their own urban
culture instead of passively
consuming it. To paraphrase Kohtala and Paterson, it was a weird assertion
of civic
and creative autonomy in the shadow of the high culture around,
not to mention the massive wave of urban
construction looming in the
(then) future. The Oxygen Room drew people and things into new and
excitingly
generative possibilities. As recent social thinkers might put it
(e.g. Harvey and Knox 2014), it was a
provocation of, simultaneously,
material, conceptual and political import. It was also adjacent to an
enormous
planning controversy. I can only sketch out the story very briefly,
and emphasize that it alerted Helsinki
citizens to the materiality of their
own identity.
At issue were some old railway buildings, affectionately still known as
the Makasiinit (an
old Finnish word for warehouse). No longer used by the
rail services, they were proposed for demolition to be
replaced by a concert
hall. In the interim they had, however, become a venue for autonomous,
small-scale and
low-budget urban culture, of which the Oxygen Room was
a natural extension. From the mid-1990s until construction
machinery
moved in in 2008, the Makasiinit were the heart of ‘one of the most intense
and influential planning
conflicts’ Helsinki had ever seen (Lehtovuori 2005:
203). A milestone in that process was the spectacular fire
that demolished
most of them, only days before they were due to be demolished in May
2006. A peculiar L-shaped
fragment of nineteenth-century wall still
remains, surrounded by an ongoing construction process that has
replaced
the Art Garden with a concert hall and a row of office and retail blocks.
In cultivating – literally – an alternative to the high culture and high
finance being promoted around it, the
Oxygen Room fostered friendships,
practical skills and, in its design and art exhibitions and performances,
collective practices in which thinking and doing could not be prised apart.
In that sense it was not really a
symbol of something other than itself.
Rather it was a vehicle for the kind of human flourishing that Moira
Gatens
and Genevieve Lloyd, drawing on the work of the seventeenth-century
philosopher Benedict Spinoza, write
about: an orientation towards
engagement with what is beyond the self in the present, extending the self
and
persisting into the future (Gatens and Lloyd 1999). Spinoza’s
philosophy has already had great, if indirect
influence on ecologically
preoccupied thought,2 but Gatens and
Lloyd elaborate on a less-known
dimension in Spinoza’s ethical and political writings, the significance of the
imagination as at once material, collective and connected with emotions.
Their book, Collective
Imaginings, captures much of what the people
behind the Oxygen Room and, as I will now show, the Turntable a
few
years later, have been engaged in.

The Turntable
In August 2009 a group of mostly young activists celebrated a successful
harvest from a small guerrilla garden –
two raised beds of about three
square metres each – on derelict railway
land. By the summer of 2012
things had moved on, and, on land rented from the transport ministry near
the same
site in the Pasila neighbourhood, was an urban farming ‘test lab’
with a vegan café and social hub hosting a
lively programme of events
(http://kaantopoyta.fi/info). A fluid and loose network of actors – as social
movements are – has been
developing the space as a centre for
experimenting with ways to transition to an ecologically viable way of life
in the city. Perhaps even more influential than the space itself, are the traces
it leaves online, where urban
gardeners and others disseminate and
communicate the experiments they are carrying out or learning about:
so-
called peeponics, which uses human urine as a fertilizer; vegan and other
sustainable foodways; permaculture;
sustainable urban planning; and so on.
In 2012 Helsinki was the third World Design Capital, a status granted by
the International Council of Societies
of Industrial Design (ICSID). The
Turntable was one of over three hundred, mostly citizen-initiated design
projects funded by the foundation set up to administer events. Activists
were able to buy material and employ
professional builders to augment the
substantial volunteer labour on which it mostly operates, but interestingly,
they are keen to build up a commercial basis for operating it, so that it
should not be dependent on such
charitable income. The Turntable is
accessible only (now that fences have gone up to stop short cuts through
shrubbery and over tracks) by one paved road. At the end of it are semi-
abandoned railway sidings and a red-brick
idyll protected as built heritage,
a grungy atmosphere of two old railway turntables, one of which is now the
greenhouse (see Figure 32.2). Planting is everywhere (sometimes hard to
distinguish from
shrub) indicating that a process of putting down roots has
been going on for several years now in a
self-conscious, if diffused and
loosely organized, act of occupying this space. Some positive media
attention
notwithstanding, such an environment comes as a surprise,
particularly as this part of Helsinki is usually
discussed in a future
declamatory tense typical of spatial planning institutions, required by their
nature to
make promises about wonderful futures (Abram and Weszkalnys
2013). Pasila
is one of the sites where Helsinki is building on a scale never
before witnessed in the city (http://en.uuttahelsinkia.fi/pasila). The former
railway lands to the north of the Turntable are turning into a gargantuan
construction site. Pasila has for long,
however, not been considered
pleasing; the seventy hectares of shopping complexes, new railway station
and
housing to come, are flanked by 1980s and 1990s office buildings and
residential blocks that are,
architecturally, mostly mediocre.

Figure
32.2 The Turntable, Helsinki,
Spring 2014.
Photo: Eeva Berglund.

As at the Oxygen Room, those associated with the Turntable are

overwhelmingly energised by it and talk of it with
great fondness. Several
volunteers, whom I have explicitly asked, claim to have no idea how many
hours – or
hundreds of hours – they have contributed in making and
maintaining furniture, tending the plants, cleaning,
serving customers in the
café, writing, designing and brainstorming. It is a community, if a very
loose one, as
much as a place. Again, it is only occasionally a site of
protest, when, for instance, public debates are
organized to discuss future
planning schemes. If anything, it is a fluid group of people more inclined to
get to
work than to campaign in conventional ways, more interested in
maintaining the award-winning dry toilet or
reducing the average Finnish
fork-print than in being anti anything. In one of the
buildings a workspace
for sustainability-oriented social enterprises is slowly taking off. Although
there are
studios and obvious signs of paid work around the Turntable, the
greenhouse itself is an alternative to
conventional space, not quite
workplace yet not quite home and not exactly a café. It is a kind of ‘third’
(Kohtala and Bosqué 2014) or ‘lived space’ beyond these, but also an idea
of a possible future space (Thorpe
2012).
The day-to-day running of the Turntable rests substantially on the
shoulders of two men who, in sociological
terms, could be described as
charismatic. Kirmo Kivelä is a graphic designer and Jaakko Lehtonen a
perpetual
student and activist with an entrepreneurial streak. One or both of
them is often to be found in or near the
area, where both have workspaces.
Such charisma is a core element of activism (Melucci 1996), and is
sometimes
considered a weakness, but the Turntable is run under the
auspices of a well-established environmental
organization, Dodo. This
diffuses responsibility and nurtures wider participation. The extremely
positive press
received by the activists is also a source of strength, as, for
now, is the fact that the area is somewhat
forgotten; literally as well as
figuratively left to develop its own future in the shadows of a quite different
way of designing a new Helsinki.

Activist times

Activism is generally associated with social movements and challenges to

the status quo. Combined with design,
however, activism now flows across
the borders of social institutions (Julier 2013) so that the imperative to
engage with design and to contribute to world-improving and fun-
enhancing activities is becoming an element of
governance and even a civic
virtue. In wealthy – and other – cities we are now all being made
responsible for the
future. To assist in this process, a new professional class
has emerged, made up of consultants and facilitators
who may have
disciplinary, domain-specific expertise in, say, design or architecture,
perhaps politics or
finance, but who are valued or supported because of
their ability to advise, to communicate, to inspire. In
Helsinki two such
organizations that were important in the run-up to the
WDC year in 2012
were Demos Helsinki (www.demoshelsinki.fi) established in 2005 and
Helsinki Design Lab,3 from 2009 to 2013. They represented a new type of
expertise, a new way of coping with the
world. They told us that the world
was now, in the twenty-first century, too complex and scary to administer
with
eighteenth-century institutions, such as voting or specialist experts.
Instead, they promoted design and design
thinking, and they supported
activism as an ethical posture.
 The arrival of these actors on the political stage makes experiments like
the Oxygen Room and the Turntable
interesting, but it also complicates the
analysis of their political impact. When design is so present in
municipal
and national policy rhetoric and presented as inherently activist, when even
what counts for expertise
is up for grabs (Collins 2014), and when so many
decry the shallowness of public life and its turbo-charged
commercial-cum-
knowledge sector, one cannot take design activism at face value. To
understand it requires
charting its political context anew, a task which is
only just beginning.
When the Oxygen Room was dismantled in 2007, the quirky and
increasingly eco-chic urban culture of Helsinki was
barely recovering from
the controversy over the Makasiinit warehouses. In 2005 when Lehtovuori
argued that the
city government had misjudged the direction of
developments and that the planning system was failing disastrously
to
recognize, let alone ride, the wave of a ‘creative disorder’ already palpable
in Berlin or Brussels
(Lehtovuori 2005: 223), he was no doubt correct. By
2012 things had changed, however. The edgy new urban vibe was
part of
the WDC programme and thus of policy. In fact, it was so positively valued
that it made critical
reflection on the entry of design into policy and politics
difficult. There was the self-styled Alternative
Design Capital network and
some ridicule and resistance – hilarious examples on social media of the
visual and
linguistic bloopers of the festival machinery for instance – but by
January 2013 design was already being
incorporated into Finland’s national
economic strategy.4
Counter-narratives were muted or absent. The promise
to design the world out of its mess was linked to
predictable innovation-talk
(Huuskonen 2011) and mostly amounted to educating the public about the
potential of
design, offering consumer advice, promising to solve problems
with technical solutions or experimenting with
design principles to enhance
citizen participation in local development. As the Turntable’s successful bid
for
money indicated, DIY-greenhouses, even if they were built by greens,
hippies and possible anarchists, could be
seen as integral to such a
programme.
Eco-chic and green entrepreneurialism are easy to harness for such an
agenda, and so there are good reasons to be
cautious in celebrating the
radicalism or inevitable virtue of design as it goes activist. ‘Today’, Blair
Taylor
writes, ‘business speaks the language of social movements,
addressing ethical concerns while simultaneously
insulating itself from
critique’ (Taylor 2013: 745), a process that has done nothing to rein in
hyper-competition
or austerity. Helsinki too wants to be a green, smart,
caring city (City of Helsinki 2013) of urban experiments.
One legacy of the
WDC year is Design Driven City, a pilot project where three ‘city
designers’ deploy design
skills to enhance citizens’ active roles in city
development. Elsewhere temporary uses are encouraged (see, for
example,
www.toimivakaupunki.fi/en) by authorities
and developers for clearly
commercial reasons, as little more than ‘cosmetic’ supports of speculative
urban
development whose association with activism can be cynically
exploited (Tonkiss 2014). This is one way in which
politics is squeezed out
of the contemporary city, a key site of our seemingly ‘post-political’ era (cf.
Mouffe
2013).
To embrace the idea that we live in a post-political era, like the
argument
that critique is futile, is, however, to accept the core mantra of popular
neoliberalism, the TINA
doctrine of There Is No Alternative. Another
problem is that it would overlook the conceptual and not just the
practical
richness of activism. Finally, it would ignore the local specificities of
political cultures that are
not immediately recognizable to Anglophone
readers, but that may offer genuine alternatives. Rather than a story
about
capitalism’s cunning capacity to subsume and defuse critique, Helsinki’s
activist design could be narrated
as a story about a different mixing and
matching of old and new political ideals. For, in the Finnish experience,
the
state is not always (in danger of becoming) a villain.
A father-figure of design activism, Victor Papanek, famously exhorted
the profession to ‘design for the real
world’, rather than creating ‘permanent
garbage to clutter up the landscape’ (Papanek 1985: ix). His green aims
were probably less significant than his call to the profession to uphold
moral and political values, but arguably
both remain significant in the
Nordic world, including in Finland. Alison Clarke (2013) presents Papanek
as
someone who saw Finland as a design culture based on a sustainable life,
rooted in a harsh climate that makes it
hard to ignore or fight against
immediate natural forces. Finland’s architectural (Nikula 2005) and design
(Korvenmaa 2010) histories certainly lend weight to this view, further
bolstered by Papanek’s (and others’)
praises, although Finnish lifestyles
today hardly qualify as sustainable. Many Finns have a sense of a national
design heritage and, rightly or wrongly, weave into that story a strand of
nature-loving, if not politically
green, ideology. Alongside this precursor to
a sustainability discourse the history of Finnish design tends to
emphasize
collective as opposed to private good, and so sits well in today’s urban
activist milieu and the high
value it puts on the commons. Like their
Scandinavian neighbours, whom Papanek also admired, Finland has long
had
a markedly consensual political culture, where disagreement is frowned
upon. To be an activist thus neither pits
one automatically against the state
nor, as at the Turntable, makes one opposed to business in principle. But
more important than either of those is, as activists themselves will say, that
activism is a joy.
This is why I have chosen to interpret both greenhouses as instances of
collective imagining, a significant human
capacity about which Spinoza
(also) wrote (Gatens and Lloyd 1999). By attending to what people say and
do
collectively as activists, and connecting these things up to local
institutions and inherited political cultures,
I have tried to satisfy a curiosity
more than a taste for judgement, and narrated the practical work of
imagining
a sustainable future in an overwhelmingly unsustainable present
as something to explore, not to explain away.

Notes

This text is based on participation and observation, as well as on documentary sources. Thanks to all
my friends
in Helsinki, particularly Cindy Kohtala, for their help and inspiration, and to participants
of the ‘Design
Culture: object, discipline and practice’ conference in Kolding, Denmark, 18–19
September 2014, for theirs.

1 This idea is drawn from Gatens and Lloyd 1999.

2 Mostly via Gilles Deleuze’s work, more recently Jane Bennett’s,
e.g. 2010.
3 It was run as part of SITRA, formerly the Finnish Fund for
Innovation, under parliamentary
oversight. Despite trying to set down roots in a local tradition of activist
design, HDL flourished
only briefly.
4 Design Finland Programme: Proposals for
Strategy and Actions,
www.tem.fi/files/39560/design_finland_programme.pdf (accessed 30 December 2014).

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 33

DESIGN FOR MEANINGFUL

INNOVATION
Stuart Walker
 

Introduction

Design research today is characterized by its focus on technological

innovation, especially digital innovation,
and on collaborations between
university researchers and private or public sector organizations to address
practical concerns. In tandem with this direction, funding bodies encourage
and often stipulate
cross-disciplinary partnerships and look favourably upon
projects that contribute to ‘real world’ impact. These
widespread practices,
however, can be problematic. They tend to endorse, rather than
disinterestedly critique,
the dominant paradigm which, despite its many
material and practical benefits, is highly destructive of the
natural
environment (Carolan 2014: 32–5), deeply inequitable and socially divisive
(Piketty 2014: 417; Skidelsky
and Skidelsky 2012: 30) and, on an individual
level, associated with a sense of meaninglessness (Taylor 2007:
561, 717).
Also, such intimate involvement of funding bodies in the positioning of
academic inquiry can seriously
compromise vitally important elements of
scholarship, not least critical distance and academic freedom. As Waters
says,

colleges and universities are places in which people are [or should
be] encouraged to let their scientific,
philosophical, and literary
fancies fly … The so-called free market – which is anything but free
– is not a
concept that should be considered the ultimate framework
for the free play of ideas … The problem is that the
advocates for
the market say that what cannot be counted is not real.
 (Waters 2004: 9)

Despite the difficulties of doing so within this trenchantly instrumental

climate, some take a different path,
pursuing design studies that critique
narrowly framed technological and economic interpretations of progress;
business-focused academic research; and the prioritization of impact over
curiosity-based inquiry. It is a path
that offers opportunities for design to
address some of the more significant concerns of our age. Over time, such
work may be capable of fostering changes in understanding and contributing
to what we might term meaningful
innovation. Because of their diverse and
emergent areas of focus these areas of design research have a variety of
labels, including critical design, speculative design and
propositional design.
To contextualize these countervailing directions this chapter begins with a
discussion of the role and nature of
design practice in academia. An
overview of the historical developments that set the agenda for design in the
twentieth century, which still dominates the field in the twenty-first, allows
us to better understand the
contribution of these new directions to advancing
the discipline. The works of several designers are discussed,
including
examples from the author’s own academic design practice. These illustrate
the kinds of issues being
addressed, the relationship between theory and
practice, and the roles of creativity, subjectivity, rhetoric and
polemic in
design research.

Advancing design practice: unapologetically polemical

What kind of knowledge, understanding or truth should we expect of the

designer, including the designer within
academia whose task it is to advance
knowledge, understanding and notions of truth in, about and through design?
If it is the case that design is a form of demonstrative rhetoric (Buchanan
1989: 93–4), then a designed object
implicitly asserts a position. It
represents an argument in form, and this makes design a quite different kind
of
activity from disciplines that adopt more objective scientific or quasi-
scientific approaches. Where the latter
prioritize empirical evidence,
quantitative and/or qualitative data, and strive for objective facts based on
the
existing condition, the former encapsulates values, relies on persuasive
argument, and
incorporates the subjective decisions that are inherent to
design practice in order to conceptualize a potential condition. Unavoidably,
therefore, the discipline of design includes human values, even
though they
are addressed tacitly rather than explicitly.
Generally, the arguments and priorities being expressed in form will be in
accord with the dominant
socio-economic condition. The products of
mainstream design, therefore, assert ideas about that which purportedly
constitutes the good life – even though designers have no special
qualifications for making such assertions
(ibid.: 94). They also benefit the
economic bottom line of the organization producing them. In this context,
the
persuasive or rhetorical role of designed products – looking pristine,
beautiful, desirable, etc. – is highly
influential, especially when coupled with
powerful and ubiquitous marketing.
However, it is also possible for designers, and is a responsibility of
practice-based design researchers within
academia, to encapsulate in form
and thus declare a rhetoric that questions the dominant socio-economic
condition
by creating objects that challenge its assumptions, draw attention
to its failings and/or demonstrate other
possible design routes. This kind of
practice moves design from a position that accords with and essentially
confirms to current norms to one that critiques those norms. It is this values-
based rhetoric of critique and
contestation that makes this kind of design
inherently polemical.
This brings us to a related and critical point for the design practitioner
working in this area within academia.
Academics are expected to write
books and papers that describe, explain and justify their work. In doing so,
academic norms tend to seek and demand objectivity, and the values and
opinions of the individual researcher are
supposed to be set aside. Evidence-
based research and repeatability of results take precedence over rhetoric, and
polemic tends to be frowned upon as un-academic. Yet, as we have seen,
creative design practice within academia that aims to challenge the status
quo will be unavoidably
polemical; this is intrinsic to the nature of the field
and, as such, it should not be evaded or regretted.
Design is not a
deterministic discipline, even though elements of it may be based on
scientific principles and
natural laws, for example, when specifying strength
of materials for a particular design. Many of the most
influential aspects of
design – those related to conceptualization, aesthetics and use – are often far
more
subjective and are based on the views, preferences and creative
decisions of the designer.
 Given that design is subjective and rhetorical and, when it contests the
normative condition, polemical, then
clearly the academic pursuing this kind
of work has a responsibility to reveal the position being asserted and
provide
some elucidation of the basis of the contestation. It follows that any written
accompaniment to such
design will also be rhetorical and polemical because
it, too, will assert, clarify and make the case for, a
values-based position that
contests current norms. However, as discussed, designers are no more
qualified than
anyone else to advocate such a position, yet they cannot help
but do so if they are to engage in the practice of
designing. Despite this,
polemic still tends to be regarded as somehow improper within the academic
design
community. As a consequence, design research is becoming
increasingly unfaithful to the inspirational, creative,
synthetical and
unavoidably subjective forms of thinking-and-doing that are so critical to the
discipline’s
practice and advancement. Too often, it seems, design within
academia tries to legitimize itself by focusing on
other areas. There is much
emphasis on the quantitative and qualitative methods developed in the social
sciences;
the acquisition of ethnographic data, coding and analysis;
workshops and focus groups; and the development of
plans, frameworks and
toolkits. Useful as some of these may be, they are not core to creative design
practice.
Instead they often serve as industrious and reliable (in that results
are certain) substitutes for design
practice, which, being creative, is more
uncertain and carries an element of risk. Useful or not, these
methodical,
analytical approaches are missing the mark in relation to design practice and
its particular
contribution to knowledge advancement. Plans, frameworks
and toolkits are all concerned with the development of
abstract,
generalizable principles, checklists and rules of
engagement and behaviour.
In the process, the inspiring, wonder-full, creative heart of design is being
lost and
the very nature of the discipline is being denied. In contrast, the core
disciplinary activity of design
practice, and polemical design practice in
particular, is concerned with concrete,
non-generalizable particularities,
which become manifested via specific decisions, materials choices,
compositions and aesthetic judgements. The designing process is one of
transmuting theoretical ideas into
creative, synthesized, specific formal
expressions. When this process is an integral aspect of critical inquiry
it
requires the designer to consider how such expressions are able to convey,
challenge and make us see anew the
ideas and assumptions of contemporary
life. For these reasons, it becomes essential to focus on and uphold the
distinctive contributions to knowledge of creative design and the methods
and approaches of design practice
within academia and within design
research and scholarship.
Finally, what should a peer-reviewer of this kind of work be looking for in
assessing its quality and
contribution? From the foregoing it is clear that they
should not be basing their primary critique purely on the
fact that it is
polemical. Neither should they be basing it on the nature of the polemic
because, like the designer, they too have no special qualifications for
asserting a position. Furthermore,
critique should not rest on whether the
reviewer agrees or disagrees with the position asserted. Instead,
judgements
about the veracity of the work, its quality, significance and
contribution
should be based on such considerations as:

• The consistency of the argument. Judgements of quality and

academic
merit should not rest on the fact that design is grounded in the assertion
of a particular position that
is values-laden because values and rhetoric
are inherent to the discipline. As long as the position asserted is
made
fully transparent and consistently argued, this should not pose a problem
in the context of academic design,
even though some, perhaps many,
might disagree with that declared position.
• How that declared position becomes transmuted into form and if the
resulting objects constitute a ‘successful’ transmutation. This requires
consideration and articulation of
such factors as the aesthetic experience,
the quality of the execution, the use of materials, the detailing of
the
expression, the functionality of the object and so on.
• The emotional or other effects a design might have on a
viewer; that is,
its capacity as a visual, tactile, sensual thing to affect the viewer or user
and invoke an
intuitive, felt response.
• Aspects of significance that a design historian or critic may
raise, which
even the designer may not have realized. This refers to what an informed
critic might say about
the piece in relation to its place in the development
and history of design or its contextualization within a
larger sphere of
reference.

In other words, the value of designed artefacts and their assessment in

contributing to the field should be based
on sensibly appraising the work
itself, rather than on processes, data acquisition techniques and information
which are all secondary to creative design. Clearly, to do justice to this
critical core of the discipline it has
to be this way. Yet, design criticism is not
a well-developed field within academia, where a peer-reviewer
considers
and thoughtfully discusses and critiques the design work, as an art critic
would do for art objects.
Consequently, design research tends to focus on
data acquisition and analysis and, absurdly, practice-based
design research
tends not to be regarded favourably or taken seriously (Malpass 2013: 335).
We will now take a brief look at the context in which contemporary design
arose and how it has developed and been
practised over the past century.
This will allow us to better understand the aims and motivations of design
research and practices that question mainstream design, its normative
assumptions about innovation and the system
in which it exists.

The basis of contestation

Modernity has its origins in philosophical and scientific developments that

began as far back as the European
Renaissance. The Enlightenment yielded a
worldview that emphasized rationalism, empiricism and materialism, and
the
Industrial Revolution saw technological advancements and the emergence of
mechanized production. These
accomplishments were attended by a
population shift from countryside to town, as people sought work in the new
factories. Hence, technological progress went hand-in-hand with social
change and urbanization. This led to the
industrialization of Europe and the
United States and, in the nineteenth century, major developments in the
mass-production of goods.
Modernity, and the artistic and cultural responses to it referred to as
modernism, were unequivocally
future-facing, technologically optimistic
and firmly based in a philosophy of reason. Over four to five centuries
of
Western development there emerged a philosophical outlook that prioritized
rationalism, materialism,
technology, secular democracy and capitalism,
which regarded this cultural milieu as superior to other, less
‘developed’,
societies (Young 2003: 41, 60). When combined with the West’s new-found
technological might, it led
to the exploitation of other nations in ways that
included slavery, colonialism and the acquisition of lands and
natural
resources. In the latter half of the twentieth century, however, the West’s
confidence in this outlook
began to wane as its premises came under
increasing scrutiny. The implicit faith and optimism in industrialism
and
technology, and their roles in creating a better future, became more difficult
to sustain after the
industrialized genocide and atomic bombing of civilians
in the Second World War. The 1950s witnessed nuclear
proliferation, the
Cold War and the persistent threat of a conflagration between the West and
the Eastern Bloc.
Increasingly, the priorities of modernity were being
contested and we entered a time of post-modernity,
environmental awareness
and an increased emphasis on human rights.
Despite many developments in the intervening decades the wheels of
modernity grind on, as is to be expected after
several centuries in the
making. The prominence given to technological progress as a primary agent
of economic
growth still dominates our political, educational and corporate
institutions. Also, Western hegemony is still
very much in evidence in the
form of globalized corporate activities, financial investments and selective
warfare
(Piketty 2014: 59; Williams 1983: 100–2).
In the first part of the twentieth century designers were exploring ways of
designing for the ‘modern’ conditions
of their times – especially the advent
of mass-production technologies. Designing for the emerging post-modern
condition not only challenges the conventions of modernity but also requires
the designer to confront a multitude
of new concerns. These involve social
justice, environmental care, retrieval of traditions and recovery of more
profound understandings that were eschewed under modernity’s rationalistic
eye. There is renewed recognition,
too, of the need not just for specialization
but also for broader perspectives and imaginative synthesis. It is
these
multifaceted issues that are driving design today. Taken together they form a
diverse and rather
disorganized array of activities that include:

• service design – involving organizational systems and

development of
non-tangible outcomes for planning and delivery of services;
• social innovation – exploring strategies for change to address
social
issues and behaviours;
• interaction design – for and within digital environments;
• product design – how contemporary concerns are affecting the
conceptualization and production of material goods.

Design after modernity

An early example of post-war designers challenging predominant modes of
design, architecture and city planning
was the Radical Design movement of
1960s Italy. Adolfo Natalini wrote, ‘if design is
merely an inducement to
consume, then we must reject design’ (Revel in New York 2009). In the
United States and Britain the counter-culture movement spawned a variety
of new
directions. Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog, first published in
1968, listed products
and sources for grassroots self-empowerment (WEC
2014). Buckminster Fuller’s visionary design ideas found a
willing audience
among young people looking for alternative directions (BFI 2014). In
Design
for the Real World, Victor Papanek (1971) urged designers to reject
designing for superficial wants and to
focus on human needs, and E. F.
Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful (1973) called for a
reassessment of
Western-style economics so as to include people and planet. In the late 1970s
and 1980s the
Memphis design collective, led by Ettore Sottsass, created
alternatives to modernism’s stark
form-follows-function approach; their
designs were characterized by surface patterns and decorative veneers.
However, unlike the counter-cultural directions emerging elsewhere, the
Memphis designers were less politically
active and their designs were
quickly embraced by the mainstream, becoming sought-after pieces among
affluent
clients (Raizman 2010: 370–3). One of the most influential
contributions of the 1990s came from the Dutch design
collective Droog.
Established in 1993 by Gijs Bakker and Renny Ramakers, Droog designs
were a comment ‘on
plenitude, over-consumption, the pretensions that beset
the profession’ (Ramakers n.d.).

Contemporary design directions

In recent years a variety of new directions have emerged that contest current
design norms and offer comment,
critique, constructive alternatives and
pointers to a different kind of future. Collectively, we can refer to
them as
design activism, which Fuad-Luke has described as: ‘“design thinking”,
imagination
and practice applied knowingly or unknowingly to create a
counter-narrative aimed at generating and balancing
positive social,
institutional, environmental and/or economic change’ (Fuad-Luke 2009: 27).
The focus of many design efforts has moved away from object design to
the pursuit of more socially oriented
approaches in which the role of the
designer often becomes one of facilitation (Malpass 2013: 335). This raises
several substantive concerns. In making the transition to facilitator, designers
set aside their core
disciplinary knowledge, skills and experience in creative
development and visualization. These are the
distinguishing contributions of
the discipline, which are hard won through years of studio practice. Setting
them
aside devalues the creative process and the expertise involved in
effectively manifesting ideas. With this
transition there is also a shift away
from a reflective, solitary process of thinking-and-doing, visualization
and
studio-based practice to collective processes such as workshops, focus
groups and a reliance on words.
Intuitive, holistic ‘right brain’ activities are
replaced by rational, verbal, analytical ‘left brain’
activities. Strongly
associated with the arts, the former are capable of creative synthesis whereas
the latter
focus on details and are associated with scientific approaches and
evidence-based research. Critically, being
required to make one’s thoughts
explicit can actually be counterproductive to creativity (McGilchrist 2009:
65,
259–60). Furthermore, there is an urgent need today to rethink the nature
of our objects and our material culture
in general because it is these objects,
and their modes of production, marketing, use and disposal that are so
intimately linked to un-sustainability. Essentially, contemporary, globalized
production
is still based on the principles and growth-oriented priorities of
modernity. These are not only outdated but are
representative of an
increasingly dangerous path – one that is
contributing to socio-economic
tensions (Piketty 2014: 571; Mishra 2012: 306–9) and enormous
environmental
problems (IPCC 2013). There is a need today to pay far
greater attention to product design and the development of
alternative
visions of material culture. Therefore, this present discussion confines itself
to the design of
objects that a) are a form of design activism that contests
institutional and disciplinary orthodoxies, and b)
embody an alternative
rhetoric based on other values.

Object-focused design for meaningful innovation

Under the umbrella of design activism, a range of contemporary issues are

tackled that:

• challenge the conventions of product design within the predominant

corporate paradigm
by revealing its shortcomings; encapsulating and
 expressing other priorities; or illustrating potential futures
or dystopias
based on current trends;
• explore how the design, production, use and demise of objects can
beneficially or
detrimentally contribute to personal wellbeing, social
equity, environmental care, and positive organizational
and economic
change. This may be achieved at a purely conceptual level, as part of a
practice-based research
agenda, or through the creation of functional,
marketable objects that stand in contrast to mainstream design;
• explore how new creative directions can contribute to the development
of constructive
and more profound notions of ‘the good life’. Here,
practice-based design research is integrated with theoretical
ideas about
values and virtue. Intuitive, creative ways of thinking characteristic of
design practice are
combined with rational, systemic ways of thinking
characteristic of theory development – they advance in tandem,
are
mutually informing and, together, form a balanced approach.

This is a form of design that embraces a wide spectrum of approaches and

yields objects that range from the
practical to the speculative. Together, they
represent attempts to respond to contemporary experiences and
conditions in
ways that are considered to be constructive and meaningful. According to
Hick, we act meaningfully
when we interpret the world around us correctly
and act appropriately (Hick 1989). At the physical level, this
means ceasing
to use approaches that are detrimental to the ecological systems on which
our survival depends. At
the social level, it means acting in ways that are
ethically appropriate and socially just. At the personal
level, it means acting
in ways that are in accord with deeper human values and conducive to
spiritual wellbeing
and human flourishing. These different aspects of
meaning – practical, social and personal, together with
economic means –
are captured in the Quadruple Bottom Line of Sustainability (Walker 2011:
187–90; Walker 2014:
42).
Let us now look at a range of approaches that, broadly, fall under the
rubric of design activism or polemical
design.
Critical design. Develops design proposals that seek to disrupt the status
quo by
challenging assumptions about products and their role in everyday
life. It often employs satire and is concerned
with the potential implications
of technologies. It focuses on asserting a position about and through objects,
rather than adopting any particular approach or method. Critical design is
especially associated with the
socio-cultural implications of material culture
and with the work of Dunne and Raby at the Royal College of Art
(see
Figure 33.1), though others participate in similar kinds of explorations.

Figure
33.1 Designs for an overpopulated
planet: foragers.
© Dunne and Raby. Photo: Jason Evans.

Durable design. Cooper (2010) has discussed longer-lasting products as a

strategy for waste
reduction. Norman (2005) and Whiteley (1994: 29–31)
have explored the emotional aspects of designed objects.
Bringing these
together, Chapman considers emotionally durable design. Designing
products
that are capable of enduring physically while maintaining their
emotional appeal to the user raises questions
about the developments, traits
and priorities of modernity – including progress, resource waste, over-
production,
individualism, and the lack of sustained attachment to
contemporary products. Through reasoned argument and the
creation of
conceptual objects, Chapman explores various facets of product design, the
role of narrative, and
designs that can age gracefully, enabling lasting
attachments and the accumulation of meanings (Chapman 2005).
Such
directions challenge designs that foster built-in obsolescence, fast fashion
and disposability – all of
which typify consumer society and are logical
developments of progress-and-growth economic agendas.
 Speculative design. Focuses on emerging scientific and technological
ideas and their
potential implications for material culture. It projects socio-
technological possibilities, and visualizes
scenarios and product uses. Its
stance is essentially critical, questioning the potentialities of science and
technology, and it is often implicitly dystopic (Malpass 2013: 338). Through
provocative objects, usages and
narrative descriptions, it asks us to consider
the implications and possibilities enabled by scientific and
technological
progress.
Grassroots design. Is concerned with approaches that are place-based and
locally relevant.
Examples that are not object focused but are more
concerned with social innovation include the transition town
movement in
the UK (Transition 2014), and micro-credit banking in Bangladesh
(Grameen 2014). Grassroots design
that focuses on material artefacts covers
a wide spectrum. The
architecture of Christopher Day, for example, is deeply
connected to locale. He uses local materials and labour
and his designs fit
well with both the natural environment and the local vernacular. Day is
concerned with
creating places that nourish the soul (Day 2003). In a similar
way, Sebastian Cox employs traditional techniques,
coppiced hardwoods and
contemporary aesthetics to create imaginative, practical furniture that
adheres to
sustainable principles (Cox 2014). A more radical back-to-basics
example is the Toaster
Project of Thomas Thwaites. By attempting to create
an electric toaster from scratch, Thwaites explores the
hidden costs of
inexpensive consumer products and the gulf between general knowledge and
the specialized
knowledge that produces everyday material things (Thwaites
2011). These two very different examples are shown in
Figures 33.2 and
33.3.
Figure
33.2 ‘Shake’ sideboard from
coppiced Kentish sweet chestnut and English ash, Sebastian Cox,
2014.
© Sebastian Cox.

Figure
33.3 The Toaster Project,
Thomas Thwaites, 2010.
© Thomas Thwaites. Photo: Daniel Alexander.

Associative design. Subverts our expectations of ordinary products and

our conventional
notions of objects. Through context, use and materials our
expectations are challenged. Elements of existing
objects, and recovered and
recycled parts, are recombined in unexpected ways to create objects that
raise
questions about disposability, waste production and our attitudes to
material culture (Malpass 2013: 338).
Propositional design. In my own academic design practice propositional
design is used to
probe the nature and meanings of products and the
environmental, social and personal implications of their
manufacture, use
and disposal. There is a strong emphasis on local materials, processes,
markets and
repairability, all of which run counter to globalization,
international distribution and disposability.
Propositional designs are
implicitly critical of the predominant system and serve to encourage a
systemic shift
towards more distinctive, beneficial, considerate and positive
notions of products. The designer can take into
account local needs and
tastes and, in the process, shipping and packaging are all reduced. Through
more locally
focused production, products can also be more easily returned
for upgrade or repair, which reduces waste as well
as the need for product
replacement and the use of virgin resources, waste and damage that
replacement entails.
Another area of focus has been the creation of objects for, what might be
termed, inner work rather than outer
utility. One of the unprecedented
characteristics of modernity has been its disregard for more profound
understandings of human meaning, and this has been associated with a sense
of disenchantment (Taylor 2007:
715–17). Yet we are, by nature, seekers of
meaning and without some greater sense of significance in our lives,
people
easily fall into despair (Armstrong 2008: 1). These contemplative objects,
examples
of which are shown in Figure 33.4, serve as tangible reminders of
the need for inner
attention and are points of focus for reflection and
contemplation. Like traditional religious icons, their role
is symbolic rather
than utilitarian. Here, symbolism can be employed to reflect or transcend
any particular
religious tradition, the latter being, perhaps, more fitting in a
multicultural world.
A further area of focus for propositional design can be categorized as
counterpoints to
common conventions and assumptions. A counterpoint is an
opposite view in an argument, used to emphasize or
clarify through
juxtaposition and contrast. Counterpoint design employs a specifically
countervailing rhetoric to contest the status quo and express a different
position via tangible artefacts rather
than rational arguments. By
emphasizing or clarifying aspects of contemporary design through
contrasting themes
and antithetical objects, accepted norms can be seen
anew and reassessed. To be in accord with the critical
concerns of our time,
design has to become far more responsive, not only to environmental and
social
responsibilities but also to understandings of personal meaningfulness
and wellbeing (Walker 2014: 7–23). Andrea
Branzi’s Grandi Legni series,
for example, are very large wooden structures – ancient
beams and small
cabinets with mythic images – that do not fit easily into conventional ideas
of design (see
Figure 33.5). Yet, they bring to the fore those things that
cannot be accessed via
screen-based technologies (Walker 2011: 174).
In my own design practice, I have created non-functional, product-like
objects that encapsulate arguments and
assert a position about contemporary
design-related concerns. Oedipus Eyeglasses, for
example, expresses our
contemporary self-imposed blindness towards the relationship between, on
the one hand,
progress-and-growth agendas and ever-growing consumerism
and, on the other, environmental devastation and social
injustice (see Figure
33.6). If not checked, our current direction could threaten our very
existence
and, traditionally, such an existential crime is attended by self-blindness. In
Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, the protagonist’s figurative blindness means he
marries and has children by his own
mother. His subsequent, self-imposed
physical blindness is the price paid for this existential crime – for
polluting
and spoiling something that, thereafter, can never be restored to its former
purity (Scruton 2014: 4).
Figure
33.4 Left, functional material
goods, clockwise: Lather Lamp; Ephemeral Candlestick;
Inconvenient Mobile Phone; Technology and Nature.
Right, contemplative objects for
‘Inner Work’, clockwise: Memento Credo; Cana; Oriel Triptych. Stuart Walker,
2006–11.
© Stuart Walker.

Figure
33.5 Grandi
Legni GL17, Andrea Branzi. Edition: Design Gallery Milano, Nilufar, 2010.
© Andrea Branzi. Photo: Ruy Teixeira.

Figure
33.6 Oedipus
Eyeglasses: accessory for an existential crime, Stuart Walker, 2014.
© Stuart Walker.

Conclusions
It is clear from the foregoing that mainstream design is part of a larger
system that, although supported and
maintained by corporate, political and
even educational agendas, is acutely destructive of the natural
environment,
inherently socially divisive and, at the individual level, unconducive to
deeper notions of human
flourishing. The various attempts to address these
issues through design can be collectively referred to as
design activism.
However, within the design milieu in recent years much prominence has
been given to areas that
are not core to the creative process and the
visualization contributions of the designer, but are concerned with
social
change, design as facilitation and non-tangible outcomes that centre around
workshops, discussion and the
development of generalizable instruments.
This raises several concerns:

• These approaches tend to employ methods that prioritize speech, text,

systematic
enquiry and analysis. In contrast, creative design is
characterized by approaches that involve holistic aesthetic
judgements,
synthesis, silence, intuition and spontaneous insight.
• Even though most manufacturing has moved to Asia and design in the
West has shifted
towards social innovation, services and systems, this
does not mean that concerns associated with product design,
production,
use and disposal have disappeared.
• Practice-based design research does not fit easily into the conventional
academic
peer-review process, which can act as a disincentive to
pursuing this kind of work.
• Research funding bodies, which also rely on peer-review, tend to favour
projects that
are collaborative, evidence-based and have a potential for
real-world impact, with fewer funds being available
for sole researchers,
curiosity-based research and practice-based approaches.

The cumulative effects of these trends are a matter of significant concern.

The change of focus in design studies
from product design to other areas,
combined with a lack of incentives and appropriate review mechanisms for
practice-based inquiry, means that a research gap has developed at a time
when its contribution has, arguably,
never been needed more. It means that
there is relatively little substantive work being done to imaginatively
rethink
the nature of our material culture so that it addresses important
contemporary concerns and aligns with
comprehensive understandings of
sustainability. The examples discussed here represent the exception rather
than
the rule.
For all these reasons, it is especially important today for design schools
and design researchers to uphold the
distinctive contributions of creative
design and the methods and skills of design practice. If practice-based
design
research is to be appropriately recognized and critiqued within academia the
emphasis must move away from
objective, analytical methods, evidence and
proofs, to a greater recognition that design is values-laden,
intuitive,
subjective, rhetorical and, in academia, often polemical. Hence, the value of
such work and its
assessment in contributing to the field has to be based on
thoughtfully critiquing the design work itself.
Notably, because this kind of
design work is based, to a greater or lesser extent, on subjective judgements
and
values-based arguments that contest the status quo, it is inherently
polemical. Like other forms of design,
including mainstream design, one
cannot definitively prove the ‘correctness’ of the
position asserted; rather,
reasonable and consistent arguments can be supported by reference to
authoritative
sources, experience and precedents and, of course, by
examining the design work itself. Finally, to continue down
a path that is so
clearly and severely problematic in terms of environmental, social and
personal welfare is
neither innovative nor meaningful. The various
overlapping approaches discussed here – critical, grassroots,
durable,
speculative, associative and propositional, as well as sub-categories that
explore contemplative objects
and counterpoints – are all attempts to take
product design in new directions, to transcend the status quo,
contest its
assumptions and design for meaningful innovation.

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 34

TOWARDS HOLISTIC
SUSTAINABILITY DESIGN
The Rhizome Approach
Rebecca Reubens
 
 

Understanding sustainability

The word sustainable prefixes several common words—including design—

indicating that sustainability has become a
conceptual cornerstone across
disciplines (Schindler et al. 2010). Ironically, despite
being such an
important and non-negotiable concept, sustainability—which stems from
the Latin sustinere, meaning to support or endure—has no universally
accepted definition (Ehrenfeld 2008).
This is probably because the science
of sustainability is still nascent (Komiyama and Takeuchi 2006), and our
understanding of it is still evolving.
Sustainability began to be crystallized as an ecological concept during
the Industrial Revolution, following
public dissent on the state of the
environment due to unprecedented development (Hawken et
al. 1999). As
the links between ecological unsustainability and exponential
industrialization-based economic
growth became clearer, the concept of
sustainable development (SD) was concretized: this created a paradigm
shift
in understanding sustainability as a primarily ecological concept, as it
married post-industrial ecological
concerns with development—which has
social and economic connotations (Barash and Webel 2002).
As our understanding of sustainability grew, the social, ecological, and
economic tenets of SD and Elkington’s
triple bottom line of planet, people,
and profit (Elkington 1997), have been supplemented by culture as a vital
tenet (Duxbury and Gilette 2007). In the future, it is likely that the social,
economic, and cultural tenets of
the four pillar model (Hawkes 2001) will
be further supplemented.
However, the acute and pressing unsustainabilities which threaten human
survival and survival of the systems that
constitute our world—ranging
from traditional development issues such as poverty, hunger, health, and
income
security, to new challenges such as climate change and
globalization (Munasinghe 2010)—leave us with no option
but to address
sustainability, while simultaneously trying to unravel the concept and
understand what shapes it.
Some trace the beginning of unsustainability to the Industrial Revolution.
Others argue that the preconditions
for the Industrial Revolution’s full-
blown take-off (Rostow 1960) were created over the passage of the human
development process; therefore they trace the beginnings of unsustainability
back to the advent of human
development, and the emergence and evolution
of the first
production-to-consumption systems (PCSs) (Wollenberg and
Ingles 1998).
From the beginning of human activity, each phase of development and
subsequent wave of prosperity secured PCSs,
creating food security; this
was conducive to population growth, which called for more resources, in
turn
prompting a concentric phase of development (Attah 2010). Thus,
incremental development over the ages was the
cause and effect of
cumulative development, and simultaneous cumulative unsustainability.
Human PCSs impacted sustainability at several levels (Munasinghe
2010). The production input influenced raw
material utilization and flows—
ecological sustainability; the production process affected the dynamics of
labor
and employment—social sustainability; and systems of exchange
affected trade and development—economic
sustainability. All of these were
orchestrated by changing human worldviews (Ehrenfeld 2008), which
influenced
how we perceived the world, and our relationship with
everything that constitutes the world, including each
other—cultural
sustainability.
It is evident that development underpinned by PCSs shapes sustainability.
It is therefore crucial for future PCSs
to be informed by the lessons of past
development, and to be based on alternatives to the
industrialization-centric
SD paradigm; SD has been criticized for being a narrow construct founded
on the Western
ideals of modernization and economic growth (Nurse 2006),
which gives ascendancy to economics over social,
cultural, and ecological
issues (Hawken et al. 1999), the pursuit of which has heightened
problems
of poverty and unemployment (Akubue 2000).
An alternative to the industrialization-centric SD paradigm is even more
vital in this age of globalization and
technology where PCSs span nations,
and production centers have shifted to developing countries in the South,
with huge renewable resource and labor reserves.
If the prevalent SD model is perpetuated in these countries, it will carry
with it the seeds of unsustainability
inherent in it (Ehrenfeld 2008). Even
worse, the innate social, economic, ecological, and cultural costs of this
paradigm will be magnified in these countries, owing to their nascent levels
of governance and burgeoning
populations.
That the pursuit of development will continue is unquestionable. Equally
obvious is that sustainability rests on
this development being different from
the past, where PCSs existed at the cost of ecologies, economies,
societies,
and cultures.

Design and designers: potential sustainability enablers

Design has an important role and potential in enabling sustainability since

design decisions orchestrate
PCSs—including material production and
processing, fabrication, distribution, use, and end-of-life handling
(Waage
2007)—and thereby determine material and human resource flows. These
PCSs in part and in whole, and their
collateral effects, including
environmental, social (White et al. 2008), and cultural
spin-offs, shape
sustainability.
If design continues to shape PCSs—especially in developing countries—
in line with the prevailing
industrialization-centric SD paradigm, not only
will it contribute to disseminating its inherent
unsustainabilities globally; it
will magnify them.
The possibility of masterminding and actualizing an alternative paradigm
by shaping PCSs through design
challenges designers to step out of their
traditional values-agnostic role
(White et al. 2008)—whereby designers
accept the client’s brief non-judgmentally, and do
not hold themselves
responsible for the direct and indirect social, cultural, ecological, and
economic spin-offs
of their design—and into the shoes of the “activist”
(Thorpe 2007), to create counter-narratives (Fuad-Luke 2009)
that look
beyond reducing unsustainability to pro-actively enabling sustainability
(Ehrenfeld 2008). Extending
the scope of the design function from a
product level to a systems level (Davis et al.
2010), by shifting desired
outcome—from the product to be designed, to holistic and systemic
sustainability
(Cuginotti et al. 2008)—can create the paradigm shift
necessary to move beyond reducing
unsustainability, to designing
sustainability.
Sustainability design calls for going beyond design’s typical
manufacture–use focus (Dewulf 2013) to reflecting
sustainability concerns
from across the PCS (White et al. 2008). Designers are ideally
placed to
harmonize disparate representations from across the PCS; designers’
visionary, creative, and analytical
thinking (Jin et al. 2011) allows them to
communicate with a cross-section of stakeholders
and synthesize diverse
and incomplete inputs and information, while maintaining a strategic
overview (Stappers
2007).
The same skill-set allows designers to leverage dynamic and complex
systems and scenarios as opportunities, such
as those at the intersection of
sustainability and globalized PCSs in flux. Unfolding scenarios engender
new
socio-economic and cultural patterns, which translate into uncharted
market potentials—including for
non-mainstream, niche products and
systems with high social and cultural value (Morelli 2006) aligned to
sustainability. The combination of generative and evaluative thinking
(Stappers 2007) allows designers to
navigate these nebulous intersections of
culture and market, because of their natural affinity with intuitively
deciphering emotions, values, and meanings, and communicating abstract
information (Maxwell et
al. 2003).
Recently, the push for designers to take on the mantle of enabling
sustainability has been
complemented and supplemented by a pull from the
growing importance of sustainability in
the business landscape. The
emergence of regulatory and non-regulatory sustainability frameworks
(White
et al. 2008) is pressurizing businesses to factor sustainability into all
their
activities, across their value chains (ibid.). This is bolstered by demand
from consumers (van Hemmel and Cramer
2002) who—informed by
product boycotts, media and non-government organization (NGO)
campaigns—are demanding
product transparency (White et al. 2008).
Several companies have already implemented
sustainability labeling,
branding, and marketing initiatives, pressing their competitors into
following suit to
be able to tap into the widening consumer base for
sustainable products and services (ibid.). All of this compels
businesses—
and thereby design—to view sustainability not only as a market niche, but
also as a matter of market
access (ibid.).

The Rhizome Approach: bridging the gap between

sustainability theory and practice

The serendipitous push and pull positioning and demanding that design act
as an enabler to sustainability is
augmented by the design skill set. Despite
this it appears that the interest in sustainability and sustainable
design
(Fuad-Luke 2009) has not translated into frequent practice by designers in
developed (Kang et al. 2008) or developing countries (Hankinson and
Breytenbach 2012).
Studies reveal that the reasons for this include: lack of knowledge about
sustainability; lack of holistic
overview of PCSs and value chains; failure to
include sustainability at a strategic level in the overall
approach; failure to
include sustainability criteria in the design brief; the lack of a collaborative
design
process; lack of tools; and failure to keep design teams in the loop
during the product actualization process
(Maxwell et al. 2003). In response
to this I developed the Rhizome Approach and the tools
to operationalize it
in 2010 as part of my PhD research at Delft University of Technology. My
research centered
on how to facilitate designers to design more sustainably
—especially in the context of design for and in
developing countries
working with renewable materials.
Designers working towards sustainability with developing countries’
renewable materials—such as bamboo—which are
not traditionally part of
mainstream industrial value chains, tend to focus on the material’s
ecological and
economic potential. While the resulting designs are eco-
friendly (ecologically sustainable) and marketable
(economically
sustainable), they do not capitalize on the potential of these materials to
contribute to social
and cultural sustainability. These materials can help
facilitate holistically sustainable and inclusive
development because they
are traditionally part of PCSs which involve a large number of indigent
producers—including marginalized groups such as women, craftspeople,
and ethnic minorities.
 The Rhizome Approach is named after bamboo’s complex underground
rhizome system. Each rhizome either sends up a
shoot or sends down a root,
and networks itself to other rhizomes to form a stable mesh that prevents
soil
erosion. A rhizome is not amendable to any structural or generative
model; it is a map and not a tracing (Deleuze
and Guattari 1987). Similarly,
the approach looks at seven distinct steps that, independently and
interdependently, facilitate sustainability design. The approach is designed
to be flexible and adaptable to
different contexts, while remaining strongly
rooted in sustainability and the interconnections between its
social,
economic, ecological, and cultural tenets. Table 34.1 provides an overview
of the
Rhizome Approach.
Each step of the Rhizome Approach is discussed below.

1. Lack of knowledge about sustainability

A designer’s understanding of sustainability shapes their sustainable design
values, and thereby affects their
behavior and attitude, and the likelihood of
their designs being mindful of formal and informal sustainability
regulatory
frameworks (Hankinson and Breytenbach 2012). In order to factor
sustainability into their designs,
designers need to understand it as a
systemic construct resting on interconnected tenets. Designers need to
appreciate the links between the tenets and, better still, understand them
(Shedroff 2009).
Sustainability is not yet integrated into mainstream design education
(Hankinson and Breytenbach 2012); most
design literature cites eco-design
as an umbrella term for sustainable design. Consequently, designers
practicing
sustainable design tend to focus on the ecological tenet and not
on the holistic picture (Maxwell et al. 2003).
Designers don’t expand their sustainability knowledge as professionals
either by working on
sustainability-related projects or through professional
peer exchange platforms, such as conferences (Hankinson
and Breytenbach
2012). Consequently, they lack knowledge of sustainable materials (Mate
2006), their impacts
(Kang and Guerin 2009), and sourcing (Hankinson and
Breytenbach 2012). Incidentally, designers who have a greater
knowledge
of eco-materials seem to use them more frequently (Mate 2006).

Table 34.1
Step Overview of
the Rhizome Approach
Barrier Aim Method
1 Lack of knowledge about Inform designers about Provision of background
sustainability sustainability and the reading material covering
connections between its the connections between
tenets sustainability,
design,
material, and PCS
2 Lack of a holistic overview of Sensitize designers to the Exposure visits to different
PCS systemic PCS nodes of the value chain
and PCS’s stakeholders
3 Failure to include Factor sustainability into the Introducing a blueprint,
sustainability at a strategic strategic blueprint of the towards which all
level in the overall enterprise participants in the
approach collaborative design
process
work collectively
4 Failure to include Articulate sustainability Clear brief supplemented by
sustainability criteria in the criteria in the design brief the Holistic Sustainability
design brief so that it can be factored Checklist (HSC) to clarify
into the
front-end design desired
design and the
phase impact on each tenet of
sustainability
5 Lack of a collaborative design Provide inputs from different Constant linkage and
process stakeholders towards a interaction with PCS
collaborative design stakeholders during the
process design process
6 Lack of tools to measure Increase designers’ Evaluation of design against
holistic sustainability accountability to factor HSC by the designer and
against indicators sustainability into their two external evaluators
designs and provide a
tool
to measure the
sustainability achieved
7 Failure to keep the design Keep designers in the loop Involving design team in all
team in the loop during until final product iterations of the design, up
product actualization actualization, thereby to final product
retaining
their actualization
responsibility for the
product’s sustainability
© Rebecca Reubens.

The first step of the Rhizome Approach therefore advocates bridging the
theoretical knowledge gap on
sustainability by providing designers with
information through focused presentations and reading material.

2. Lack of holistic overview on PCSs and value chains

Sustainable innovation needs to factor in the entire product lifecycle and
product supply and value chains early
on (Maxwell and van der Vorst
2003), in the front-end innovation stage
(Maxwell et al. 2003). Limiting
design focus to the company, rather than including the
forward and
backward linkages that comprise the entire PCS, is a barrier to sustainable
design (ibid.).
Task specialization and division of labor have led designers, like other
actors in the industrial PCS, to lose
sight of the systemic picture. Because of
this loss of overview, designers tend to address easily apparent
problems—
such as ecological unsustainabilities—rather than exploring integrated
issues and reaching holistically
sustainable systems solutions (ibid.).
The difficulty in maintaining a holistic overview is increased with PCSs
being spread across nations and
geographies, compounding the difficulty in
assessing the reliability of product suppliers and manufacturers
(Hankinson
and Breytenbach 2012).
Step 2 therefore advocates supplementing the didactic learning from Step
1 with hands-on exposure to the entire
PCS. The aim is to facilitate
experiential learning—including by firsthand visits to the different nodes of
the
value chain—to understand how the independent actors of the PCS
collectively impact sustainability.

3. Failure to include sustainability at a strategic level in the

overall
approach
The failure to incorporate sustainability at a strategic level inhibits concerns
relating to it becoming an
inherent part of an organization’s key business
systems—including design (Maxwell et al.
2003). Designers lack
motivation to practice sustainable design because of resistance from their
organizations
(Bacon 2011).
One of the reasons for this is the lack of clarity on sustainable design
benefits (van Hemmel and Cramer 2002),
especially immediate benefits
(Hankinson and Breytenbach 2012). Sustainable solutions sometimes cost
more (Aye
2003; Mate 2006) and involve more time (Hankinson and
Breytenbach 2012; Aye 2003; van Hemmel and Cramer 2002;
Bacon 2011)
for sourcing (Aye 2003) and research (Hankinson and Breytenbach 2012);
innovative solutions sometimes
mean looking beyond the product being
designed, to the larger picture—including the possibility of a product
service combination (Maxwell et al. 2003).
 In order for sustainability to be factored into innovation and design,
despite it seeming to involve extra effort
with unclear immediate benefits
(Hankinson and Breytenbach 2012), it needs to be championed as a key part
of an
organization’s strategic approach.
Step 3 focuses on introducing sustainability into an organization’s
strategic blueprint, towards which all
participants in the collaborative
design process work together, collectively.

4. Failure to include sustainability criteria in the design brief

Sustainability is not frequently included in design briefs alongside
traditional criteria—including market,
customer, and quality and production
feasibility; it is seen as an expensive (Aye 2003; Mate 2006; Bacon, 2011)
add-on to the design brief that conflicts with the functional requirements of
the product (Hankinson and
Breytenbach 2012; van Hemmel and Cramer
2002), rather than being an integral part of it.
This could be because sustainability is not yet frequently required by
legislation (van Hemmel and Cramer 2002)
and is rarely insisted upon
(Hankinson and Breytenbach 2012). Client resistance (Aye 2003), client
knowledge
(Davis 2001), and the perception that sustainable products are
not yet
needed by clients (van Hemmel and Cramer 2002) are also reasons
why sustainability is not included in the design
brief.
If sustainability is included in the design brief, it can be factored in early
on in the design process, at the
front-end stage (Dewulf 2013). This
minimizes the need to “clean up” several consequences of the “product
lifecycle” (White et al. 2008).
Step 4 therefore advocates including sustainability in the design brief,
and bolstering this with the Holistic
Sustainability Checklist (see Table
34.2), to clearly outline the criteria desired in the
design, and their impact
on each tenet of sustainability.

5. Lack of a collaborative design process

It is not just the designer but also the different functional units within an
organization that shape the final
design, and thus the manner in which it
impacts sustainability (White et al. 2008).
Sustainability is also impacted by
different occupational groups and stakeholders across the supply chain
(ibid.). Therefore, in order to enrich the innovation process, design needs to
seek and consider inputs from
within and outside an organization, from
collaborators who may not traditionally be part of its innovation team
(ibid.).
Step 5 advocates creating platforms that allow for collaborative decision-
making by encouraging and actively
facilitating a constant linkage and
interaction between designers and actors, facilitators and enablers of the
PCS.

6. Lack of tools
Designers cited the lack of appropriate tools as a barrier to sustainable
design (Aye 2003). Several of the
existing tools are misaligned with design
requirements (Lofthouse 2006) because they focus on cleaning up the
lifecycle and do not support the front end innovation process (Walker
1998), which is where sustainability design
actually needs to begin.
While several of the existing tools outlined issues related to sustainable
design (Lofthouse 2006), and provided
insights to the process and outcomes
of designing sustainably (White et al. 2008),
designers were not clear on
how to put them into practice (Lofthouse 2006). Designers wanted tools
that had
accurate and accessible information (Aye 2003; Hes 2005; Davis
2001), packaged together in a manner which made
referring to them easy
and not time-consuming (Lofthouse 2006).
Designers also cited the difficulty in measuring sustainability as a barrier
(Bacon 2011), and cited that clients
unwilling to invest in sustainable
design, due to its immediate additional cost, might be convinced if its
long-
term economic savings could be quantified (Hankinson and Breytenbach
2012). Tools to quantify sustainable
design achievements and communicate
them through different mechanisms, such as ratings, could help legitimize
sustainability efforts as credentials (ibid.).
In Step 6, the designer and two external experts evaluate the design
against the Holistic Sustainability
Checklist introduced in Step 4. The three
evaluations allow for investigator triangulation (Denzin 1978) as a
method
of reducing the discrepancies between the three scores. The final score
gives designers the opportunity to
reconsider aspects of their design, and
develop a more sustainable iteration. The quantitative output of the
checklist can be used to showcase the sustainability achieved, including
through a branding and labeling
initiative.
Table 34.2 The Holistic
Sustainability Checklist Ecological Social Cultural Economic
MATERIAL CONSIDERATIONS
  1 Renewable materials •
  2 Minimally treated materials • •
  3 Recyclable materials • •
  4 Recycled materials •
  5 Local materials • • • •
  6 Fairly traded materials •
  7 Ecologically certified materials •
  8 Non-toxic materials • •
  9 Less/no materials from intensive agriculture •
PRODUCTION CONSIDERATIONS
10 Minimum materials • •
11 Minimum production steps • •
12 Renewable energy for production •
13 Minimal energy for production • •
14 Low-emission-techniques • •
15 Proper management of production effluents and • •
waste
16 Reduce/reuse production waste • •
17 Indigenous treatments and processes • • • •
18 Consulting indigenous communities on production • •
issues that
affect them
19 Safe and healthy work environment • •
20 Fair wages and benefits to producers • •
21 No child labor • •
22 No forced labor •
23 Fair working hours •
24 Freedom of association and collective bargaining •
25 No discrimination • •
26 Local employment opportunities • • •
DISTRIBUTION CONSIDERATIONS
27 Minimum product volume and weight • •
28 Minimum and clean transport • •
29 Local PCS • • •
30 Minimum packaging • •
31 Reusable packaging • •
32 Recyclable packaging • •
33 Packaging made from low-impact materials •
CONSUMER USE CONSIDERATIONS
34 Minimum/clean energy during usage • • •
35 Minimum consumables • •
36 Safe to use •
37 Customizable • • •
38 Easily upgradable • •
39 Classic design • •
40 Minimum and local maintenance and repair • • • •
END-OF-LIFE HANDLING CONSIDERATIONS
41 Reduced material complexity •
42 Biodegradable •
43 Easy to disassemble • •
44 Reusable • •
45 Recyclable • •
46 Promotes/uses local recycling systems • • • •
Source: Reubens 2013: 28–9.

7. Failure to keep design team in loop during product

actualization
The final design is often the result of several subsequent iterations by
different functional groups—including
design, production, marketing, and
merchandizing (White et al. 2008). Each of these
functional groups receives
an iteration from the previous functional group working on the product;
after working
further on the iteration they “throw this over the wall” (i.e.
pass this on to the next functional group in the
design pipeline) (ibid.).
Often, these groups do not communicate with each other on the iterations,
and
consequently fail to understand the “upstream and downstream”
implications (ibid.) of their iteration. So, even
if a functional group—
including design—has tried to factor in sustainability, another functional
group may not be
mindful of this, and may make changes that reverse or
lessen the sustainability efforts of the past groups in
their iteration (ibid.).
In the end, none of the functional groups—including the design team—
takes ownership or accountability for the
unsustainabilities in the final
design, because they were not involved with design decisions before and
after
they threw it over the wall.
Step 7 therefore advocates keeping designers in the loop from the front-
end stage right up to final product
actualization so they can maintain an
overview of the process (ibid.), and ownership of the design outcome.

The Rhizome Approach in sustainability design practice

I developed the Rhizome Approach in 2010 and trialed it in 2011 in India

through a collaborative fourteen-day
workshop, involving multiple
institutions. The workshop process was monitored and documented, and
empirical data
was collected through questionnaires to check whether the
Rhizome Approach helped designers to design more
sustainably.
The findings from the workshop were extremely positive, and revealed
an especial interest and appreciation of the
Holistic Sustainability Checklist.
The checklist draws on different frameworks, such as the D4S rules of
thumb by
the United Nations Environment Program and Delft University of
Technology, the Business for Social Compliance
Initiative (BSCI), and the
conventions of the International Labor Organization. The checklist,
therefore,
functions as a theoretical integrative framework to support the
policies, standards, and compliance methodologies
of different institutions
working towards sustainability at different nodes of the PCS. Drawing on
these
frameworks—which have already achieved a high degree of
institutionalization—helps to increase the normative and cognitive
legitimacy of the checklist (Dendler 2012).
I refined the checklist in 2013 for use by the United Nations Industrial
Development Organization (UNIDO) as a
set of standards for its initiative
to brand and label sustainable Vietnamese handicrafts. Further information
on
the Holistic Sustainability Checklist can be found in UNIDO’s manual
titled Achieving,
Assessing and Communicating Sustainability: A Manual
towards Branding the Vietnamese Handicraft Sector
(Reubens 2013), which
includes a description of the branding initiative, alongside a detailed
elaboration of each
factor on the Holistic Sustainability Checklist. The
Checklist is now in the process of being operationalized by
UNIDO in
Vietnam.
The Rhizome Approach continues to be refined and adapted for different
contexts at my sustainability design firm,
Rhizome, in India, where it is an
intrinsic part of the design methodology we follow. The approach has also
been
adapted and adopted by several institutions—including the Design
Innovation and Craft Resource Centre in India
and Sustainable Product
Innovation in Vietnam—and designers—both students and professionals.
I designed the Rhizome Approach to be deconstructed and reconstructed,
based on Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987)
principles of connection and
heterogeneity—any point of a rhizome can be connected to anything and
must be; a
signifying rupture—a rhizome may be broken, but will start up
again on one of its own lines or a new line;
cartography and decalcomania
—a rhizome is not amenable to any structural or generative model as it is a
map and
not a tracing; multiplicity—it is only when the multiple is
effectively treated as a substantive multiplicity
that it ceases to have any
relation to the one. It is hoped that sustainability design praxis based on this
approach will imbibe the properties of a rhizome through the design of
products and systems that are socially,
culturally, ecologically, and
economically interlinked, and yet are independent, sustainable as both
independent
elements and part of an interdependent larger system.

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^
 35

REGULATING DESIGN
Spaces and boundaries of the late-nineteenth-century
public house
Fiona Fisher
 
 

Introduction

In recent years, legal geography, a relatively new sphere of cross-

disciplinary enquiry, has begun to investigate
“the co-constitutive
relationship of people, place and law” (Bennett and Layard 2015: 406) and
has taken as a
starting point “the premise that the legal co-creates the spatial
and the social while the social and the spatial
co-create the legal” (Layard
2015). In making these associations visible, legal geography has begun to
open up
new perspectives on the hidden forces that shape places and social
relations within them. The relationship
between people, place, and law can
be a similarly productive area of investigation for design historians seeking
to account for the circumstances of the production of historical aesthetic,
spatial, and material worlds, and
their influence on those we inhabit today.
This chapter approaches that relationship from the vantage point of
design
and with reference to a single building typology, that of the late-nineteenth-
century public house.
Occupying a central place in British culture, the public house has, for
much of its history, been both highly
contested and closely regulated.
Throughout the nineteenth century the discourse on alcohol, or the “drink
question” as it came to be known, spoke to a host of contemporary concerns:
social regulation, urban
modernization, economic performance, poverty and
its causes, working-class health, morality, and the pursuit of
leisure, to name
but a few. The regulation of the sale and public consumption of alcohol in
British cities formed
significant points of focus within the context of those
debates (see Nicholls 2009). As integrated and visually
prominent elements
of the urban fabric public houses were, along with their customers, sustained
targets of
reform. As such, the urban public house is a useful model through
which to explore some of the ways in which the
public and private spaces of
the nineteenth-century city, and the social liberties associated with them—
freedom
to consume, to inhabit and use public space, to privacy within the
public sphere—have been negotiated through
design and in which legislative
measures to regulate design have, in turn, shaped the production and
management
of public space in response to patterns of social use.
This chapter begins by setting out the principal legislative parameters
within which the modern public house
evolved, focusing on the place of
design in late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century licensing law. It then
looks at a number of examples of local authority interventions in the design
and control of licensed sites that
occurred in the final third of the nineteenth
century, and at their role
in the production and mediation of the pub’s
interior and exterior design and social uses. Design is considered
both as a
set of culturally embedded processes involving multiple actors and agencies
and as the outcome of those
processes.

The public house and licensing law, 1872–1904

Historically, licensing legislation has sought to control the production and

sale of alcohol and to aid public
order through measures to restrain
consumption, minimize drunkenness, and prevent unwanted activities taking
place in and around licensed sites, such as prostitution and gambling. The
basis of much of today’s licensing
legislation was established from the late
nineteenth century in a series of Licensing Acts (1872, 1874, 1902, and
1904) that constituted the legal framework within which the modern public
house evolved. As well as determining
such matters as the issue and removal
of licenses, the regulation of licensing hours, and the penalties
applicable for
licensing infringements, these late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century
Acts introduced
measures to control the planning, design, and alteration of
buildings in which alcohol was sold. In so doing,
licensing law
acknowledged a relationship between the drinking environment and social
behavior.
 The context of legislative change in the 1870s was one in which licensed
sites came under increased scrutiny in
response to rising levels of alcohol
consumption, and against a background of increased working-class leisure
and
wages (Dingle 1972; Bailey 1987). As Paul Jennings has indicated of
the Licensing Act of 1872, “At the time, it
was important not only as a
consolidating and modernising measure but from the fact that, in the context
of
greater public concern over drink and drinking places, it inaugurated a
period of restrictive licensing”
(Jennings 2013: 60–1).
The Licensing Act of 1872 determined the type of environments in which
alcohol could be sold and stated that no
new license for the sale of alcohol
for consumption on the premises would be granted unless the building in
which
it was served met an “annual value,” to be set according to the
population of the area and assessed by the
licensing justices (Intoxicating
Liquor [Licensing] Act 1872, sections 46 and 47). The Act differentiated
between
sites that were suitable for the sale of liquors and those that were
suitable for the sale of beer, maintaining a
long cultural distinction between
the two. It also required that all premises be “in the opinion of the licensing
authority, structurally adapted to the class of license for which a certificate is
sought” and comprise, “if the
license authorise the sale of spirits, two rooms,
and if the license do not authorise the sale of spirits, one
room, for the
accommodation of the public” (ibid., section 45). To prevent the free transfer
of liquor, licensees
were prohibited from allowing direct communication
between licensed and unlicensed sites of public entertainment
(ibid., section
85). This was one of a number of measures that aimed to distinguish the
commercial portions of
licensed sites used by customers from those used, for
example, by the licensee’s family, staff, or paying guests,
as well as from
surrounding homes and businesses.
After 1872, political discussion about the retail trade in alcohol centered
on the question of how best to reduce
the number of licensed sites.
Temperance and the licensed trade became more closely allied with party
politics.
The Liberals favored the “local option”—a scheme for local
prohibition—and the licensed trade sided with the
Conservatives who, while
broadly accepting the need to reduce the number
of licenses, demanded fair
compensation for those affected. As Mark Girouard has indicated, as a
consequence
public house building booms correlated with periods of
Conservative power, when there was greater confidence
within the licensed
trade (Girouard 1984: 86–9).
 The Licensing Act of 1874 introduced further measures to control the
design of licensed sites by allowing the
provisional granting of licenses in
the case of buildings under construction (The Licensing Act 1874, section
22). In such circumstances applicants were, in future, required to present
plans for consideration by the
licensing justices, creating an early
opportunity for their involvement in the design process. This trend toward
increased intervention continued into the early twentieth century. It offered a
strategy for public house
improvement within the wider context of urban
modernization, and supported license reductions as a means of
mitigating the
perceived social harm of excess alcohol availability.1
Further licensing legislation of 1902 clarified the meaning of the term
“public place” in relation to public
order offenses, redefining it as “any place
to which the public have access, whether on payment or otherwise”
(The
Licensing Act 1902, section 8). In addition, the Act formalized established
aspects of local licensing
practice, such as that of submitting architectural
plans for building alterations to licensing justices for their
approval. In the
case of new license applications, the 1902 legislation required any person
applying to deposit
“a plan of the premises in respect of which the
application is to be made” with the clerk of the licensing
justices no later
than twenty-one days before the annual licensing meeting (ibid., section
11[1]). In the case of
alterations to established licensed sites it imposed new
restrictions, placing an emphasis on the visibility of
drinkers and stating that
any change to a building “which gives increased facilities for drinking, or
conceals
from observation any part of the premises used for drinking, or
which affects the communication between the part
of the premises where
intoxicating liquor is sold and any other part of the premises, or any street or
other
public way, shall not be made without the consent of the licensing
justices” (ibid., section 11[2]). The Act
empowered licensing justices to
remove a license or to direct a building’s return to its original condition in
cases of unapproved alterations (ibid., section 11[2]). It also allowed the
licensing authorities to demand that
“such alterations as they think
reasonably necessary to secure the proper conduct of the business shall be
made
in that part of the premises where intoxicating liquor is sold or
consumed” (ibid., section 11[4]).
The Licensing Act of 1904 was principally concerned with license
removals and with compensation in the case of
non-renewed licenses,
including ones in which premises were deemed to be “structurally deficient”
or
“structurally unsuitable” (The Licensing Act of 1904, section 1[1]).
Together, these Acts of Parliament gradually
increased the powers of local
authorities to determine the design of licensed sites and became a powerful
driver
of modernization.

Ownership and amenity

In considering the relationship between design processes, design outcomes,

and the national legislative framework
within which decisions about design
were made, the space in which licensing law was enforced, and sometimes
supplemented by the local requirements of police and licensing authorities,
was significant. It was at a local
level that the new laws were tested and the
powers of licensing
magistrates pitted against the competing commercial
interests of publicans and breweries. Frequent negotiations
over public house
alterations took place at local licensing sessions, many of which were
reported in the leading
licensed trade journals. These disputes reveal the
ways in which licensing law was interpreted and applied, often
inconsistently, according to local concerns and preferences. They also
suggest ways in which design was mediated
within a local context, revealing
the mix of civic, social, and commercial ideals that underpinned design
decisions, and the means through which human actors and the law affected
wider changes in the management of
public space. Design regulation can be
seen more clearly, in this context, as productive of, and responsive to,
social
behaviors, and as a driver of modernization, as well as a response to
complex conditions of urban
modernity.
In London, in the period between the Licensing Acts of 1872 and 1904,
the relationship between the public house
and the street was reconceived in
social, as well as spatial and material, terms. Whereas
early-nineteenth-
century sites had been relatively open to the street, the development of the
modern commercial
facade fundamentally altered that relationship in the
second half of the nineteenth century. The propped-open
tavern door was
gradually replaced with doors that closed behind each customer. Plate glass
windows—often with
obscured glass—replaced older-style sash windows
that had opened the interior to the air and to view from the
street. Outdoor
drinking spaces, such as the door-side seating that was often found to the
front of older
taverns, slowly disappeared as buildings were modernized.
Service spaces, such as yards and storage buildings,
were increasingly built
over as ground floor drinking spaces were extended and as public houses
were re-built,
often with enlarged cellars to accommodate an expanding
range of products. Access to these was frequently located
to the front of a
building rather than to the rear, to allow roadside delivery from the dray.
A dispute over a bird seller’s Sunday morning market pitch is indicative
of the ways in which the exterior spaces
of the public house and the social
activities associated with them were beginning to be transformed in that
period. The question of Sunday trading was highly contested in the 1870s
and street vendors, in particular, were
seen as a hindrance to respectable
Sunday morning churchgoers.2 The
bird seller, Thomas Payne, rented a
space above the cellar flaps of The Carpenters’ Arms in London’s New Cut.
The
publican, from whom it was hired, considered the area to be part of his
property (The
Times January 13, 1872: 11; February 12, 1872: 11). The
police claimed that Payne’s stall prevented the free
passage of pedestrians
and summoned him for obstruction. The ensuing case centered on whether
the space where he
pitched his stall, including the cellar flaps on which it
stood, was privately owned or formed part of the public
footway.
Until 1870, the owner of The Carpenters’ Arms had paid for the
maintenance of the area, but in 1870 the local
Vestry had paved the footpath
from the building to the road. The owner complained that he had only
allowed the
completion of the paving on the condition that he assumed the
cost. However, the case went against him and the
area adjoining The
Carpenters’ Arms was absorbed into the public sphere, where it became
subject to municipal
management and control. This form of assimilation is
consistent with that identified by Martin Daunton who, as a
result of his
research into working-class housing, which charted a shift from communal
to more private and
cellular residential models, posited an associated shift in
public environments and a move toward clearly
defined, bounded, and
regulated municipal and commercial spaces (Daunton 1983).
In the 1890s more extensive evidence of the incorporation of peripheral
spaces into the public sphere can be
found in agreements relating to the
management of London’s public house urinals. From 1855 responsibility for
the
provision of public toilets rested with Vestries and District Boards
(Vestry Clerk’s Records, L/V/C/32). At that
time publicans had no obligation
to provide toilets for their customers. Many provided urinals, some provided
water closets, and others made no provision at all. Licensees may have been
reluctant to offer anything more than
basic facilities because of the legal
responsibility that that entailed. As London brewery Young & Company
found when they were summoned by the sanitary inspector for failures at
The White Horse in Stepney, those
providing facilities could be called to
account if they were not maintained in good order whether or not the
fault
was theirs (The Times, 12 August 1895: 14).
Public house urinals were often situated in yards, or were set into external
walls where they were cut off from
the rest of the interior and accessed by
means of a door from the street. Such locations conformed to the latest
sanitary advice. Clarke’s Pocket Book for Plumbers, for example,
recommended that water
closets and urinals should be perfectly airtight,
separated from surrounding spaces, next to external walls, and
ventilated
independently of the rest of the building (1893: 83). Although there was
nothing in national licensing
legislation to determine the location of public
house toilets, in the 1890s London’s Tower and Wandsworth
magistrates
insisted that all public house urinals be placed outside (Royal Commission
on Liquor Licensing Laws,
1897–9, c.35600). Local Vestry records show
that street urination was a problem in the vicinity of public houses
with no
facilities for customers, while in other locations public house conveniences
were the only facilities
available to members of the public. One reason for
their ruling may, therefore, have been a desire to make public
house urinals
available for public use outside licensing hours, thereby alleviating a more
widespread problem of
urban hygiene.
Support for that argument can be found in the practice of marking the
position of the nearest public convenience
on architectural plans submitted
to licensing justices in South London in the 1880s and 1890s. Examples
include
plans for alterations and additions to The Bull in London’s Old Kent
Road in 1888 and for the rebuilding of The
Black Horse in Tabard Street in
1894 (RIBA, PA1190/29 and PA1190/23). The attention given by licensing
justices
to the proximity of public facilities suggests that this may also have
informed their responses to requests from
owners to make alterations to their
licensed sites.
Finding appropriate locations for public conveniences was often difficult.
Residents frequently opposed plans to
site them in view of their homes,
while retailers objected to their presence nearby, particularly in places where
they might be a “nuisance” to female customers or staff. A petition to
remove a public urinal from Tabernacle
Square submitted to the St.
Leonard’s Vestry in Shoreditch in 1876 complained, for example, that
“Neither male
nor female can sit at the window nor look into the Square,
especially on Sundays without being shocked or
offended and insulted at the
most indecent sights one is compelled to submit to” (Vestry Clerk’s Records,
Hackney
Archives, L/V/C.34). Concerns of this type are consistent with
wider patterns of urban change, for example, those
identified by Deborah
Brunton in her study of sanitary reform in Scottish cities (Brunton 2005:
196–8).
One way in which local authorities attempted to resolve such problems of
location was to engage in co-operative
ventures with local businesses. In
June 1894 the United Vestry of the Parishes of St. Margaret and St. John the
Evangelist in Westminster passed a resolution allowing owners or lessees to
hand over places for management as
public urinals (City of Westminster
Archives, 495/158). As a result the
Vestry acquired sites on which to build
new facilities, a number of which were situated close to public houses,
one
to the rear of The Lord High Admiral in Vauxhall Bridge Road and one in a
yard next to The Griffin at York
Place in Villiers Street (City of Westminster
Archives, 495/213). The Vestry also took over the management of
three
public house urinals: one at The Wellington in Page Street; one at The Blue
Boar’s Head in King Street; and
one at The Portman Arms in Wood Street
(City of Westminster Archives, 495/158; 495/159; 495/161). There is
evidence of a similar venture at The Beehive in Shoreditch in the 1880s,
suggesting that such practices extended
across London.
These agreements show that the local Vestry usually undertook to bear the
cost of lighting, flushing, cleaning,
and keeping facilities in good repair,
while the licensee agreed to do nothing to prevent public access
throughout
the day and night. Co-operative enterprises of that type, which extended only
to the provision of
urinals and not to public conveniences for women,
allowed the Vestries to improve local sanitary provision
without the type of
opposition frequently encountered in the case of new facilities. They also
benefited
publicans by removing the expense of cleaning and repair.
Significantly, they may also have reduced the liability
for supervision over
what was, for a variety of reasons, a problematic semi-public space. In
seeking to attract
respectable working- and middle-class customers to their
businesses, managing the social use of the spaces around
them became
increasingly important to late-nineteenth-century licensees, some of whom
paid policemen to keep
“loungers and rough characters” from their doors
(Booth Notebook B348: 71).3
 Conforming to licensing legislation was another concern for licensees
operating within the stricter post-1872
regulatory context. Situated beyond
their direct visual control, street-opening urinals offered shelter for the
type
of illicit activities that were most likely to threaten the good name of a
business. One of George
Duckworth’s police notebooks, in the Charles
Booth Archive, records an interview with the landlord of The
Ordnance
Tavern in Canning Town (Booth Notebook B348:129). Duckworth reported
that the publican had hired
detectives to watch a man suspected of gambling
and noted that the urinal at the side of his building had been
used for that
purpose. A separate entry by Duckworth makes reference to the service of
drinks to on-duty
policemen in public house urinals (Booth Notebook B348:
191)—a prohibited activity that carried heavy
penalties—and offers further
indication of the difficulties associated with such liminal spaces.
Examples of local attempts to manage the peripheral spaces of the public
house reveal the means through which
ownership and control over them
were assigned, and point to the diverse interests—regulatory, commercial,
and
sanitary—that informed the design of the public house, its relationship
with the street, and the production of
new forms of privatized public space.

Visibility and regulation

Other aspects of boundary regulation are more suggestive of the ways in

which attitudes toward the public
consumption of alcohol shaped consumer
preferences and commercial practices to inform the interior and exterior
design of the public house.
In the 1890s the public house window became a locus for negotiation
between publicans and magistrates as their
conflicting commercial and
regulatory desires collided at the public house boundary. While publicans
sought to
create visual privacy for customers—a particular concern in
attracting more middle-class drinkers to their
businesses—regulators
preferred to open the public house interior to view.
By that time obscured
windows had become part of the visual language of the commercial facade
of the modern
public house. London publicans employed a variety of
window-screening methods, and the use of opaque glass,
window shutters,
curtains, and solid bands of advertising material, such as posters offering
cut-price spirits,
are among the examples that can be seen in late-nineteenth-
century photographs (see Figures
35.1 and 35.2).
 In London, licensing magistrates objected to the use of opaque glass,
which in their view threatened to undermine
control by hindering the
supervision of ground-floor drinking spaces and their users from the street.
Public
drunkenness was a problem in the capital—the majority of street
disorder offenses brought before magistrates
between 1870 and 1914 were
linked to insobriety (Petrow 1993: 213)—and concerns over visual control
surfaced at a
point at which the licensed trade was most keen to demonstrate
its respectability and attract middle-class
customers. When magistrates in
Wandsworth, Newington, and the City of London made attempts to restrict
the use of
obscured glass in both windows and interiors of public houses
under their control they met with significant
opposition from the licensed
trade. Accounts of local licensing sessions show how rights to public privacy
played
out in disputes about window design and window coverings in the
1890s.
In Battersea, the licensee of The Freemasons’ Arms on St. John’s Hill
petitioned Wandsworth’s magistrates for
approval of alterations to his
business in 1895. The case was recorded in Licensed Victuallers’
Gazette
and Hotel Courier (June 7, 1895: 361). At the licensing session of April that
year it was suggested
that his windows be made of clear glass from a height
of four foot six inches above the ground, as the
magistrates wished the
interiors of all public houses under their control to be open “more to the
public view”—an
indication that co-operative forms of social regulation may
have been valued as a means of moderating drinking
behaviors.
On his return to court in May 1895 the licensee was represented by a
leading figure in the licensed trade defense
movement who argued that
publicans “had nothing to conceal” by obscuring their windows and claimed
“the same
right as that possessed by any other tradesman to deal with the
fronts of their premises as they thought proper,
and to have that amount of
privacy which every other shopkeeper took care to secure” (ibid.). While
conceding
that other types of refreshment places often had plain glass
windows, he claimed that those were usually filled
with items of stock,
lending privacy to the interior. The privacy of users was, as he went on to
argue, a
significant consideration:

Customers desired it, and a man in his private house did not have his
windows open to the passers-by. He did
not desire to make an
exhibition of the moving jaws of those who were at dinner. Privacy
 of this kind was
desirable, and it was from this point of view that the
trade objected to the proposal.
(ibid.)

The appeal was significant in positioning The Freemasons’ Arms alongside

other types of refreshment spaces that
had begun to attract middle-class
customers, allowing Mr. Maitland, acting for the publican, to make a point
about the public provision of refreshments that would have been less
palatable if offered with respect to liquor
sales, and one which was also
designed to appeal to the middle-class sensibilities of the licensing
justices.
Figure
35.1 The Fox Public House, High
Street, Tooting, 1880s.
© Historic England.
 Similar points were made in other contexts in which window designs were
contested. Charles Deakin, Chairman of
the City of London Licensed
Victuallers and Restaurant Keepers’ Trade Protection Society, in his
evidence to the
Royal Commission on Liquor Licensing Laws, raised the
issue of public dining, the need for which had grown with
increased urban
mobility. Deakin argued that the ruling had caused serious difficulties for
licensees in the City
“because a large number of people take their lunch at
counters, and they object strongly to being overlooked”
(Royal Commission
on Liquor Licensing Laws, 1897–9, c.35595).
Figure
35.2 The Feathers Public House,
Dockhead, Bermondsey, 1880s.
© Historic England.
 In both cases appeals to the privacy rights of customers deflected attention
from the central issue for
regulators, which was that of visual control. It was
a successful strategy. In the case of The Freemasons’ Arms,
as the proposed
alterations were felt to be slight magistrates did not force the issue, but
nonetheless insisted
that their policy would stand in relation to other cases
(Licensed Victuallers’ Gazette and
Hotel Courier, June 7, 1895: 361).
Further discussion on the subject of window design appeared in the
Licensed Victuallers’
Gazette just a few months later, when an application
for alterations to The Post Office Hotel came before
the City of London
Police Court (October 18, 1895: 665). The licensee wished to place a screen
or curtain at his
windows to give “some degree of privacy” to those inside.
City of London magistrates had previously ruled against
the use of colored
glass in public house interiors in their district, but had made no ruling on
window design.
Representations made on behalf of the publican included a
complaint that idlers were able to “flatten their
noses” on his plain glass
doors and observe all that was going on inside (ibid.: 665). Having visited
The Post
Office Hotel the magistrates conceded that it would be unfair to
force the applicant to comply, as tradesmen with
older licenses faced no such
restriction. Accordingly, they permitted the installation of a screen or curtain
up
to a height of five foot six inches from the level of the footpath. In
another contemporary defense recorded in
Licensing World and Licensed
Trade Review a publican claimed that a clear glass facade
“would be ruinous
to his business” and invoked the privacy rights of his staff, arguing that it
was questionable
“whether respectable barmaids would stay under such
circumstances” (April 4, 1896: 215). He was permitted to
alter his property
on the condition that each window incorporated a clear border “with spaces
left for
observation, to be unobstructed” and that all glass above five foot six
inches remained clear (ibid.).
In each example the licensing magistrates based their height restrictions
on their view of who might monitor the
interior. At The Freemasons’ Arms
the glass was to be clear above four foot six inches from the ground, to
ensure
a public view, while at The Post Office Hotel the curtain or screen
was to be five foot six inches above the
footpath, a ruling assumed at that
time to have been set in order to obstruct the view of “any ordinary foot
passenger” but to permit easy supervision by the police, who were generally
of taller stature than average
(Licensed Victuallers’ Gazette and Hotel
Courier, October 18, 1895: 665). Newington
magistrates abandoned their
attempts to impose local glazing regulations due to the strength of the
opposition
they faced from the licensed trade, but in Wandsworth restrictions
on window design remained in force at the time
of the Royal Commission on
Liquor Licensing Laws in the late 1890s.

Conclusion

Late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century legislation lent support to a

variety of local initiatives to
regulate social activity in and around London’s
licensed sites through interventions into their design and
management.
Examples of such initiatives help to explain localized patterns of spatial,
material, and aesthetic
change, and reveal the mediating role of design
within an evolving urban context. While licensing legislation and
policy
were among the most significant drivers of public house modernization,
forming a framework of
possibilities within which the design of the modern
public house evolved, such examples also show how
socio-culturally
determined practices, such as that of window screening, informed licensing
policy. As such, the picture that emerges is one of a reciprocal relationship
between design, legislation, and licensing policy, and of its significance in
the formation and negotiation of
boundaries between public, private, and
commercial spaces.

Notes

1 Another context in which the relationship between drinking

habits and the design of licensed sites
was explored, and which informed licensing practice, was that of the
Royal Commission on Liquor
Licensing Laws (1896–9), which heard evidence from, among others, policemen,
magistrates,
ministers, temperance workers, philanthropists, representatives from the medical profession, and
members of the licensed trade.
2 For a summary of attempts to regulate Sunday trading see Taylor
(1875).
3 The Charles Booth Archive includes notebooks that record walks
taken by Charles Booth’s
assistants in the company of London policemen in the 1890s. These were used to produce
the
“Maps Descriptive of London Poverty 1898–1899” that updated those published in earlier volumes
of Booth’s
survey of London poverty. See Charles Booth Online Archive, http://booth.lse.ac.uk.
Citations are to the police notebook and page number.

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Manchester, Manchester University Press.
Petrow, S. (1993) Policing Morals: the Metropolitan Police and the Home Office,
1870–1914, Oxford,
Clarendon Press.
RIBA, Design for alterations and additions to The Bull, Old Kent Road, 1888, PA1190/29.
RIBA, Design for the alteration and rebuilding of The Black Horse, Tabard Street, 1894, PA1190/23.
Royal Commission on Liquor Licensing Laws (1897–9) Minutes of Evidence taken before the Royal
Commission on
Liquor Licensing Laws. Evidence of Mr. Charles Deakin, 29 June 1897.
Taylor, P. A. (1875) “Sunday Trading,” Cowen Tracts, www.jstor.org/stable/60203273, accessed
November 25, 2015.
The Times (1872) “Police,” January 13, 11.
The Times (1872) “Police,” February 12, 11.
The Times (1895) “Police,” August 12, 14.
Vestry Clerk’s Records, St. Leonard, Shoreditch. Correspondence on street improvements, disorderly
houses,
paving, drainage and other issues, 1866–78, Hackney Archives: L/V/C/32.
Vestry Clerk’s Records, St. Leonard, Shoreditch, “Ladies’ Dressing and Retiring Rooms,” January
1875, Hackney
Archives: L/V/C/32.
Vestry Clerk’s Records, St. Leonard, Shoreditch, “Petition to remove a urinal from Tabernacle
Square,” 17
October 1876, Hackney Archives: L/V/C/34.
^
 Part VI

DESIGNING THE WORLD:

GLOBALIZATION,
TRANSNATIONALISM,
TRANSLATION
 36

A WORLD HISTORY OF DESIGN

Victor Margolin
 
 

Introduction

I am writing this chapter at the end of 2014, just months before Bloomsbury
will publish the first two volumes of
my World History of Design. The
books span the extended period of time from the first
toolmakers, even
before humans emerged, to the end of the Second World War. The third and
final volume, which
will address the period from the end of the Second
World War until the early twenty-first century, is still in
progress. The
volumes include much material that was originally new to me. When I
began to teach design history
at the University of Illinois, Chicago at the
beginning of the 1980s, the narrative structure of most design
history
courses and programs was focused on the United States and Europe. I
organized my survey course around
that narrative, including both product
design and graphic design to accommodate the range of students in my
classes. I must admit that I developed a basic format for my course when I
first started teaching and did not
alter it significantly during my career of
more than twenty-five years.
At the same time I introduced the course I started to engage with design
scholars around the world as the
founding editor of Design Issues. It was
my good
fortune to arrive at the University of Illinois, Chicago, when some
colleagues in the School of Art and Design
were planning to launch an
academic design journal. I was invited to join them and I participated in its
planning. We agreed that the journal should be dedicated to design history,
theory, and criticism.
From the beginning we sought contributors from all parts of the world
and began to attract design history
articles from Turkey, Mexico, Brazil,
Singapore, Hong Kong, and other places outside the canon on which my
own
teaching was based. I also began traveling to different countries for
lectures and conferences and met designers
and design historians who were
engaged in research that was previously unfamiliar to me. In many of the
countries
I visited, English was not the first language and I felt that the
research produced by scholars in those
countries should be better known to
the English-speaking design history community. As a journal editor, I was
able to encourage some scholars to submit articles to Design Issues, which
has published a
considerable number of them over the years.
With the Journal of Design History’s (JDH) appearance in 1988 and the
launch of Design and Culture twenty years later, in 2009, other venues
opened up for the publication of design
history articles. The JDH has been
international since its inception and has, like Design
Issues, published
numerous historical accounts of design outside the Euro-North American
orbit. In addition,
a few broad design history surveys have been published
in non-English speaking countries such as Italy, Mexico,
Japan, and Spain,
although these, with several exceptions, have tended to follow the models
that were originally
published in English.1
My commitment to a world history of design was abetted by my
recognition that among historians in related
cultural fields—art, music,
literature, architecture, and technology—there was comparable interest in
expanding
their canons and the geographic boundaries of their coverage.
Literature, for example, has long included a strand
of comparative studies,
although initially the focus was on European writers. Some years later this
focus
broadened to include writers from other parts of the world. Wider
geographic coverage in film studies began with
Paul Rotha’s seminal
survey of world cinema, The Film Till Now, in 1930, although the
author’s
brief inclusion of films from outside Europe or America did not enlarge the
canon sufficiently to take
full measure of the film industries in Egypt, India,
Mexico, and other countries that were thriving at the time
he published his
book.
More recently, efforts to create world surveys have been made in art and
architectural history as well as the
history of technology. Among these,
Terry Smith’s Contemporary Art: World Currents (2011)
introduced a
global perspective to the study of recent art, eschewing, however, the larger
project of tracing the
origins of current art practices in all the cultures that
have been neglected in the prevailing surveys, such as
Marilyn Stokstad’s
Art History. (2014)
Another impetus to undertake a world design history was the challenge of
forging a global narrative, something
that had not yet been done for design
when I started to write. Although the subject seemed daunting, I was
inspired by Arnold Toynbee, Will and Ariel Durant, William H. McNeill,
and other historians who had produced
general world histories, and
especially by Lewis Mumford, author of two more specialized books,
Technics and Civilization (1934) and The City in History (1961).

A brief historical excursus

The practice of design history may be said to have taken off in the early
1970s when a group of academics in
Britain introduced courses into the
curricula of the former polytechnics. This was in response to a Ministry of
Education report that mandated courses in the history of each artistic
practice the polytechnics offered
(Coldstream 1960). It was no problem for
art and sculpture courses since histories of those practices were well
developed but it was a greater challenge for design programs since no
textbooks for teaching design history
existed at the time. There were,
nevertheless, texts by Nikolaus Pevsner and Siegfried Giedion that took the
history of objects for use seriously. Pevsner in his Pioneers of Modern
Design (1949),
whose first version, Pioneers of the Modern Movement, was
written in 1936, focused on
avant-garde art and architecture, along with
selected craft and decorative art practitioners, to create a
teleological
account of modern design. Giedion was more interested in democratic
objects of use in America and
his Mechanization Takes Command (1948)
enfolded them into a narrative of mechanization, a
process with which he
had considerable disagreement.
Early design history courses were forged from existing histories of art,
decorative arts, technology, and
architecture. A major narrative
achievement in the early days of design history in Britain was the multi-unit
Open University third-level course on the history of
modern architecture
and design from 1890 to 1939, the development of which began in 1972.
While the emphasis was
on design in Europe and America, the canon was
expanded to include architecture and technology. This had several
consequences. First, it separated the course from the traditional decorative
arts narratives and characterized
design as an integral component of modern
life. Second, the course was not created explicitly for design
students.
Consequently course leaders and those who wrote the course books were
free to bring in subjects that
contributed to a broader cultural narrative than
one of exclusive interest to designers.
Several years before the Open University course development began,
American journalist Ann Ferebee published
A History of Design from the
Victorian Era to the Present (1970). Ferebee’s book was
sketchy but it
embraced a wide swath of subject matter that ranged from Victorian
architecture to corporate
logotypes. The broad inclusion of objects covered
might well have contributed to a basic design history canon
although it is
not known how wide the book’s influence was. At the same time, Ferebee
emphasized visual styles
and formal trends, which she embodied in several
diagrams. She embedded formalist issues in her brief narrative,
thus
precluding any obligation to explain design on any other terms. It is no
wonder that the book did not
advance the cause of design history as a
narrative practice that could relate to the larger field of history.
By contrast, John Heskett’s Industrial Design (1980), a brief survey
published in Thames
and Hudson’s World of Art series, did much to
position product design within a narrative of economics and
industrialization. Published in 1980, it was an indispensable textbook at the
time of its publication and
continues to be popular today. Heskett included
objects, such as military weapons, that were new to the design
history
canon. With the exception of his discussion of weapons, he had been
preceded in his attention to
mechanical appliances, for example, by various
authors of books in the Open University course series such as
Reyner
Banham and Adrian Forty. Nonetheless, Industrial Design made an
important break
with the histories of decorative arts and architecture.
Heskett’s book has a greater interest in production than
in cultural
experience, the latter a topic to which Penny Sparke gave more attention in
her survey text,
An Introduction to Design and Culture in the Twentieth
Century. Her book, published in
1986, included cultural elements such as
Pop design and Italian anti-design that were not germane to Heskett’s
narrative.
The same year as Sparke’s book appeared, Adrian Forty, an architectural
historian and an author of several Open
University texts, published Objects
of Desire: Design and Society from Wedgwood to IBM
(1986). Forty’s book
chapters were episodic rather than part of a continuous narrative. Thus he
did not introduce
a new story for others to follow but instead addressed
numerous forms of design in greater social depth than had
previously been
done. Forty had the benefit of training as an architectural historian but he
applied the
methodologies of his field to design. His studies of design in the
home and office, and his interest in
childhood, hygiene, and electricity
followed some of the themes of the Open University course, but his book
emphasized the social situations in which design is embedded and mounted
a strong challenge to prior texts that
had emphasized visual appearance as a
significant factor in design’s development.
Forty’s emphasis on the social was consonant with the new emphasis on
social history that had begun in the 1960s.
It was also compatible with the
work of Fernand Braudel, the French historian of the Annales school, whose
book The Structures of Everyday Life: The Limits of the
Possible (1981)
related material culture to practices and attitudes
of social life, although I
can’t say whether or not Forty knew of Braudel’s book, which was first
published in
French in 1979. Objects of Desire also appeared at the same
time as the first feminist
critiques of design history. In her seminal article of
1986, “Made in Patriarchy: Toward a Feminist Analysis of
Women and
Design,” Cheryl Buckley argued forcefully that in the design history canon
“Women’s interventions, both
past and present, are consistently ignored”
(Buckley 1986: 3).
One exception to Buckley’s critique was Isabelle Anscombe’s 1984 book,
A Woman’s Touch: Women
in Design from 1860 to the Present Day, which
had brought a number of new women into the canon. They were
not just
crafts persons, interior designers, and fashion designers—professions in
which women historically had
played important roles—but also other kinds
of designers like Eileen Gray, Charlotte Perriand, and Marianne
Brandt.
Design history developed rapidly from the early 1970s to the mid-1980s.
In texts such as the aforementioned, the
canon was expanded and calls for
wider inclusion were made. Methodologies from disciplines and
movements such as
architectural history, sociology, and anthropology were
brought to bear on design history. This opened up
possibilities for it to
develop into a mature discipline that could, by virtue of coverage and
methodology, embed
it within the larger field of historical studies. Since
that time, other design histories have been written as
numerous scholars
have contributed to further widening the canon and deepening the
methodologies (e.g. Fallan
2010 and Campi 2013).
Guy Julier’s The Culture of Design, first published in 2000, showed that
the products of
design activity were actually part of a much larger sphere of
reflection, discourse, and politics. Paul Jobling
and David Crowley’s
Graphic Design: Reproduction and Representation since 1800 (1996)
addressed social aspects of this practice in a series of chapters related to the
reading public, censorship, mass
communication, protest, and advertising,
while authors like Jonathan Woodham and Paddy Maguire focused on
design
policy, notably as part of British design history. The 2008 exhibition
Cold War Modern: Design
1945–1970, held at the Victoria and Albert
Museum, London, and its concomitant catalogue embedded design
firmly
within postwar politics. In this exhibition form was of interest, but primarily
as evidence of political
attitudes.

Towards a global narrative

A strong impetus to discussions about a world history of design was the

formation of the International Committee
for Design History and Studies
(ICDHS), which grew out of a conference in Barcelona in 1999. The
conference was
important on several grounds. First, it was bilingual and
papers were presented in English and Spanish. Second,
the organizers
included a number of papers by scholars outside the Euro-American orbit,
particularly dealing with
Latin American topics (Calvera and Mallol 1999).
By the third ICDHS conference, held in Istanbul in 2000, English
had
become the official language but the question of a global design history was
still on the conference agenda.
In a session entitled “Design History
Narratives; Local, National, or Global,” I shared the podium with Jonathan
Woodham and Anna Calvera in a discussion that featured the question of
whether or not a single voice could or
should dominate a world history of
design. The discussion was inconclusive as such discussions are bound to
be,
though I defended, and continue to defend, the value of a single voice
that can shape the parameters of a global
narrative, albeit one that can be
complemented and contested by others.
A further impetus towards a global design history was the series of three
conferences that Glenn Adamson, Giorgio
Riello, and Sarah Teasley
organized in London and Chicago in 2009–10. The outcome was a book,
Global Design History (2011), which included a group of papers from the
conferences with a
respondent for each. The papers were disparate in their
topics and attention to geographical locations, while
also serving as
examples of themes that might characterize a comprehensive global history.
The first design history text that purports to be global is History of
Design: Decorative Arts
and Material Culture, which was published in
2013. Edited by Pat Kirkham and Susan Weber, much of the book
is
dedicated to the period between 1400 and 1900, with coverage in each
section distributed more or less evenly
across the major world geographic
areas. As the title indicates the emphasis is on the decorative arts, but as
the
narrative moves closer to the present the coverage expands to include
graphic design and some mass-produced
products. The appearance of this
book is evidence that discussions of global design history are now firmly
established on the design history community’s agenda. The publication of
my own three-volume history will be
another contribution to those
discussions.

A world history of design

When I started my own world history of design I was building on an

already emerging discipline with narrative
strategies that transcended the
immediate concerns and special interests of practicing designers. Scholars
had
shown design history to be a rich topic of research that could and
should form part of a much wider documentation
and investigation of
human culture and its origins. It was evident that design was far more than
decorative
objects, or even mechanical things, but instead was manifest in
multiple forms in all aspects of life from the
material to the immaterial.
I profited from these advances in the field as I developed my own
narrative. Central to my story is an account of
how different strands of
technical, cultural, commercial, and social practice have led to our current
knowledge
of design and the way we are likely to understand design in the
future. A major challenge has been to write the
history of a subject whose
boundaries are indeterminate and whose subject matter has already been
partially
claimed by other disciplines.
If the story were told, however, design history is and always has been a
hybrid practice with subject matter
taken from the histories of other
practices, such as art, architecture, printing, craft, and technology. To
accommodate the diverse attitudes towards design, and the manifestations
of it in different societies and
cultures, I have adopted a characterization
that is by necessity interdisciplinary. In addition to fields that
are closely
related to design, such as art and technology, I draw from the narratives of
economic development and
politics, as well as social, cultural, and
intellectual history.
As an initial armature, I have broadened the range of what has been
included in the canonical narratives that
emerged in both industrial or
product design and graphic design. I have also looked at other forms of
design well
beyond the traditional decorative arts or even consumer
products and have considered the origins of more recent
design tendencies,
such as retail design, design for disability, service design, and systems
design. The
invention of Braille and prosthetic limbs, for example,
represents the origins of design for disability, a
practice that becomes much
more developed after the Second World War. Retail design is also an
important form of
design practice that has huge implications for how we
relate to each other
socially. The history of this activity shows how human
interaction has been consistently reduced and replaced by
mechanical or
self-service forms of acquiring goods. Take, for example, the US Piggly-
Wiggly grocery stores,
whose self-service methods of selling groceries
radically departed from the traditional general store and
entailed the
redesign of a retail process, which was evident in a totally new physical
environment.
While the history of transport intersects with the growth of consumption
(i.e. the spread of automobiles), the
social significance of transport differs
from culture to culture, as exemplified by the rickshaws of Japan, the
sampans of China, the galleons of Spain, and the ocean liners of France.
The ways in which transport developed
varies from handicraft to
industrialized manufacture and reveals much about the underlying
economic development
attitudes and strategies of different cultures.
Similarly, the development of weapons says much about how nations
have waged war as well as about which ones have
been in a political
position to do so. At the same time, weapons were crucial in subduing
hostile populations
that were subsequently colonized. This was the case of
Spain in Latin America and Britain in Africa, where the
superior firing
power of the Maxim gun enabled the British to colonize parts of Africa by
mowing down large
armies of native resisters.
 As well, I discuss the design of rockets, guided missiles, and spacecraft
and their relation to the Cold War. The
engineering accomplishments that
produced these weapons, spacecraft, and other objects are relevant to design
history when they are focused on human use rather than infrastructure
design such as dams, power grids, or
highways. In both historical and
theoretical research it has been customary to treat design and engineering
separately, but in fact the two are closely related. A prominent example of
the close relation between them is
the massive research effort undertaken by
all protagonists in the Second World War, where scientists, engineers,
and
designers worked together to produce weapons for their respective military
forces. As well, the history of
software design is a crucial part of modern
design history since as design develops it comes to play an
increasingly
important role in new product development.
Another way that I have broadened the canon is by writing about
previously marginalized individuals such as
women, and people of color.
Although Isabelle Anscombe and others have been adding women to the
narrative for the
past thirty years, I have discovered additional examples of
women who were working in divergent fields of design,
many in countries
that have not previously been well documented. I have also included more
people of color,
particularly African-American designers. Some years ago, I
did research on their activity in Chicago and found a
considerable number
of previously un- or little-known figures such as Charles Dawson, Tom
Miller, Eugene Winslow,
and LeRoy Winbush.2 I have thus been able to
work them into the international canon, along with several
African-
American designers from elsewhere in the United States such as George
Olden. Other designers of color
include the artists and craftsmen in Africa
under colonialism and previously who were experts in their particular
practices of ceramics, blacksmithing, and woodworking, even though these
activities were not previously
recognized as design.
I have had no trouble adding new types of products and new designers to
the canon, but the absence of an existing
global narrative has made it
difficult to pose questions about the place of design within the larger fields
of
politics, economics, and culture and to explore how that place has
changed over the centuries. As the editors of
Global Design History write in
their introduction,
“Global design history is not a matter of studying ‘hot
spots’ of exchange; it demands that all design be
understood as implicated
in a network of mutually relevant, geographically expansive connections”
(Adamson,
Riello and Teasley 2011: 6).
This has been my challenge. I began with the question of how design in
whatever form we define it has operated in
all parts of the world at all
times. This has meant rejecting a single definition of design or a particular
standard of quality and instead considering the different conditions that
have influenced the way people produce
things to meet their daily needs. I
have also sought to establish connections between different parts of the
world through trade, politics, war, and cultural dissemination. Looking at
design from the pers-pective of the
entire world has highlighted the
relevance of policies such as colonialism, which had a powerful influence
on
trade and economic development, particularly where colonies were
subjected to the decrees of their colonial
administrators who, in general,
sought to keep them as providers of raw materials and markets for finished
goods.
Designing within different cultures has been prompted by many factors
besides political power. One is the varying
environmental conditions to
which people in different parts of the world have had to adapt over the
centuries.
The way of life devised by the Inuit in northern Canada, for
example, is considerably different from life in a
medieval Japanese town.
Not only have people in different societies and cultures devised varied
means of
providing for their needs—food, shelter, clothing, transport, and
even weapons—under different climatic and
environmental conditions, but
they have also evolved contrasting attitudes towards technology, or technics
as Mumford would call it.
Not all cultures have embraced the idea of progress, which has been the
driving force of Western development. In
some cultures, tradition has been
much valued because it stabilizes various aspects of society—rituals, art,
and
human relations, for example. It is true that much of the world has
embraced the Western model of progress, but
not everyone has and, in fact,
design in more traditional forms is still very much evident in some societies
and
cultures.
As a directive for my narrative, I position design within a social and
political framework without imposing an
ideological agenda as, for
example, Marxist or Tory historians would. Although my sympathies are
with a global
movement towards economic fairness, social justice, and
democratic governance, I seek to explicate the ways that
design has been
motivated by multiple agendas and has contributed to the improvement of
human societies.
The narrative structure I have adopted follows that of other world
histories except that design is central to it.
I embed the history of design
within a geopolitical narrative that takes into account the relations between
geographic areas, including the period when some were nations and others
were colonies. Within those relations
there are many examples of
resistance, a number of which have been expressed through design as a
form of
self-sufficiency or competition with colonial economic models.
Likewise, languages also served as expressions of
identity, frequently as
forms of resistance to colonial power. As well, the history of design is
replete with
examples of racist depictions, in product advertisements, in
travel posters, and in other visual forms.
Unfortunately, much of the
colonial or racist history is still invisible. Certainly it has been little
emphasized
in previous histories of design and I have made a point of
identifying examples of racist attitudes, both in
iconographic depictions,
such as the Nazi film poster for Jud Süss or Jules Chéret’s
poster for the
Zulu performance at the Folies Bergère, and elsewhere.
Within the geopolitical framework, design is a central component of
industrialization, which I treat as a means
of gaining economic and political
power. During the time that industrialization in the colonies ruled by the
Western powers was repressed, they remained
politically and economically
weak. It was only after decolonization began following World War II, that
evidence
appears of design as an instrument of economic empowerment.
However, economic development also has a cultural
dimension, which
frequently drives it. A good example is Shanghai in the 1920s and 1930s,
where a desire to be
modern and, particularly, to follow a Western model,
led to many innovations in style, production, and
consumption. Shanghai
modernism is one of the many modernisms that can be seen in different
parts of the world.
Another strong factor of cultural development is the preservation of
national identity, particularly when a
nation is faced with pressure to import
products and services. During the interwar period in some countries,
artists
and designers sought to balance the recognition of indigenous traditions and
representations with modern
styles and design practices from abroad.
Consequently there were revivals of national forms and iconography as
part
of the movement towards modernity. This was the case in interwar Cuba,
for example, where artists were
encouraged to produce imagery based on
local traditions. Besides painting, that impulse was evident in commercial
art, where images of black Cubans became prominent and in contrast to the
depiction of Cuban social life as if it
was drawn from an F. Scott Fitzgerald
novel.
Where art histories have been reluctant, with the rare exception, to
include art that represents oppressive
political regimes, this fortunately has
not been the case in most design histories, which do generally include
Nazi
or Italian Fascist posters. However, we have learned little in such narratives
about how these authoritarian
regimes operated and how design was used to
create and support them. By looking closely at the regimes of such
authoritarian rulers as Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, Joseph Stalin, and
António de Oliveira Salazar, I have
sought to relate design to authoritarian
politics just as I have described its role in other forms of government
ranging from monarchy to democracy.
I could continue to recount ways in which I have sought to expand and
enrich the story of design history in the
three volumes of my world history,
a story that could only be told with a single voice, as it has required
control
of the narrative structure to make connections across time and geography
that emerged in the course of
the writing. Yet mine is only one history and
certainly invites others. I have produced these volumes as a
scholar from an
industrially developed country that has been accustomed to asserting a
powerful influence on
world affairs. While that position is not my own, at
the same time I have not written from the point of view of
someone whose
country has been persistently oppressed or overwhelmed by that influence. I
have sought to value
all positions within this global history through the
inclusion of many people outside the established community
of professional
designers. In that sense, I can say that I have created a narrative with
multiple points of view,
although I have honestly not been able to represent
all those views with the intensity of those who have grown up
with them.
At the same time, I have distinguished between a “grand narrative,” in
the pejorative sense that the postmodern
philosopher Jean-François Lyotard
described it, and a narrative that provides a wide enough space to describe
the
plurality of design across the world and throughout time up to the
present. There will surely be arguments with
my methods and narrative
choices, but if I have been able to map design’s history in such a way that it
prompts
debates about interpretations, inclusions, or omissions, then I will
feel that I accomplished what I set out to
do.

Notes

1 Enric Satué, for example, writes about some

Latin American graphic designers not mentioned by
Meggs or other English-language historians of design. See Satué
(1988). As well, Oscar Salinas
Flores, Historia del Diseño Industrial (Mexico D.F.:
Editorial Trias, 1992) includes chapters on
industrial design in Asia and Latin America. Other histories that
stick to a European narrative
include Enzo Frateili, Dieci Lexioni di Disegno Industrial: Breve
Storia (Milan: Franco Angeli,
1995) and Renato De Fusco, Storia del Design (Rome and
Bari: Editori Laterza, 1999). See also
Raymond Guidot, Histoire du Design, 1940–1990
(Paris: Hazan, 1994) and Beat Schneider,
Design—Eine Einführung: Entwurf im Sozialen,
Kulturellen und Wirtschaftlichen Kontext (Basel,
Boston, Berlin: Birkhäuser, 2005). Other brief histories
have been published by Rafael Denis in
Brazil and Masaki Tanaka, a specialist in graphic design, in Japan.
2 See the symposium report, African-American Designers: The Chicago Experience Then and
Now. www.uic.edu/depts/oceps/afamdesign.
Accessed March 31, 2014.

References

Adamson, Glenn, Riello, Giorgio and Teasley, Sarah (eds) (2011) Global Design History,
London:
Routledge.
Anscombe, Isabelle (1984) A Woman’s Touch: Women in Design from 1860 to the Present Day,
New
York: Viking Penguin.
Braudel, Fernand (1981) The Structures of Everyday Life: The Limits of the Possible, New
York:
Harper and Row.
Buckley, Cheryl (1986) “Made in Patriarchy: Toward a Feminist Analysis of Women and Design,”
Design Issues 3, no. 2 (fall): 3.
Calvera, Anna and Mallol, Miquel (eds) (1999) Historiar desde la Periferia: Historia e
Historias del
Diseño. Actas de la Primera Reunión Cientifica Internacional de Historiadores y Estudiosos del
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^
 37

‘WHY THEN THE WORLD’S MINE

OYSTER’
Consumption and globalization, 1851 to now
Grace Lees-Maffei
 

Introduction: design and consumption

Consumption is as important to the design process as ideation, production

and mediation, but it has not always
been proportionately represented in the
training of designers, design practice and the discourse surrounding
design.
Following the enormously influential design education practised at the
Bauhaus school of art and design
in Germany (1919–33), design school
curricula around the world have promoted studio-based learning through
doing
as a way of gaining hands-on knowledge and experience of materials
and processes in design. This approach has
emphasized design as principally
concerned with ideation (the process of capturing and developing ideas and
innovations) and production.
However, the first self-styled industrial designers working in the United
States in the 1930s (Sparke 1983)
incorporated intelligence from consumer
research to streamline their sales curves as much as the consumer goods
they
styled. While in the US Henry Dreyfuss modelled the measurements and
contours of his consumers, Joe and
Josephine, in his ergonomic approach
(Dreyfuss 1955; 1960), in the United Kingdom Independent Group artist
Richard Hamilton claimed that designers should not stop at designing goods
and services, but they should
simultaneously design the consumers for those
products (Hamilton 1960).
Efforts to integrate consumption and mediation into design curricula have
centred upon applying a body of
knowledge from marketing and
encouraging fledgling designers to engage in market research and user
testing, while
co-design and participatory design have foregrounded the
consumer (for an example, see Lee 2012). This consumer
emphasis is fitted
to a situation in which sustainable design is of paramount concern, and the
cradle-to-grave
life cycle of a designed object or service must consider not
only consumption but also post-consumption scenarios
(McDonough and
Braungart 2002).
Just as designers need to pay attention to consumption, so do scholars of
design studies and design history. This
chapter examines consumption and
globalization as interconnected developments, and reactions to their
planetary
impact, including sustainable design practices, the anti-
consumption movement and local and regional consumption
initiatives.

Marketing consumption

The consumption of designed goods has always been global. Today’s global
consumption networks have roots in
pre-modern and early modern structures
such as the Silk Road, which enabled the movement of goods and ideas from
East Asia via the Middle East to Italy and the rest of Europe; the concerted
empire building of the East India
Company (from 1600); the Dutch East
India Company (from 1602); and the triangular slave trade moving goods,
people and raw materials between Europe, Africa and America from the
fifteenth to the nineteenth century. As
people and goods are moved, so are
ideas. The globalization of consumption intensified in the periods of
industrial and digital revolution.
The period of technological development known as the industrial
revolution enabled the mass production of goods
through mechanized
manufacture. While the term revolution is apt as a description of the
enormous impact of industrialization, it is misleading as a way of describing
a lengthy
process, which has been variously associated with the nineteenth,
eighteenth and even the seventeenth century
(Brewer and Porter 1993: 2). A
raft of interconnected innovations attended the more notable introductions of
the
spinning jenny, flying shuttle, spinning mule and steam engine. Among
these were the infrastructure to support
new manufacturing methods, from
the canal network which transported goods more safely than horse-drawn
carts on
rudimentary roads, to the railways which collapsed nineteenth-
century time and space in the UK, the US, India and
beyond.
 The industrial revolution is said to have been accompanied by a
corresponding ‘consumer revolution’ (ibid.). If
manufacturers were able to
make designed goods in ever larger numbers, consumers had to be found to
buy all those
goods. Supply requires demand and vice versa. The
relationship between the industrial revolution and the consumer
revolution is
a point for debate among advocates of the Social Construction of
Technology, social
constructionists and adherents to technological
determinism among others (Bijker et al.
1987). Arguments about the extent
to which technological innovation exists independently of human need and
the
extent to which necessity is the mother of invention persist, as both
innovation and consumerism have grown in
the modern period. The
development of print culture in the eighteenth century aided the
dissemination of new
fashions and tastes, based on increased literacy,
increased leisure, lower paper and printing costs and improved
distribution
networks (the last also facilitated the circulation of consumer goods
domestically and
internationally). The relatively bare interiors known to
even wealthy inhabitants of eighteenth-century homes
sharply contrast, in
retrospect, with the cluttered homes of both Victorian consumers and
consumers today, as
shown in period homes and period rooms in museums
such as the Geffrye Museum of the Home in London.
A watershed moment in the recognition of the effects of industrialization
and the spread of consumer society on
design was prompted by the Great
Exhibition (see Figure 37.1), held in London in 1851
(Auerbach and
Hoffenberg 2008). One of a series of World’s Fairs, this gigantic
international exhibition
displayed the goods of almost thirty nations in a
global competition for ‘best in show’ for design and
manufacturing. The
Great Exhibition was part of a concerted campaign to promote British design
in the face of
competition from both the home of luxury, France, and the
apogee of mass manufacture, the US. It showed
commentators as diverse as
German architect and design theorist Gottfried Semper and popular British
novelist and
editor Charles Dickens that mass manufacture had injured
design quality (Semper 1852; Clemm 2005). The proceeds
of the Exhibition
were used to establish the South Kensington Museum (now the Victoria and
Albert Museum). There,
a ‘Chamber of Horrors’ of overly ornamented and
illusionistic design appeared alongside more approved, and
restrained,
exemplars through which the museum’s curators sought to educate
consumers and aspirant designers
alike.
Figure
37.1 The Great Exhibition, Hyde
Park, London, 1851, showing the interior of the ‘Crystal
Palace’ exhibition building festooned with a variety
of national flags.
© The British Library Board.

If manufacturing innovations were one driver of expanded consumption,

branding developments were another. The
division of human labour which
attended mechanized mass production was formalized in strategies such as
Fordism
and Scientific Management, and scientism informed the psychology
of branding as well as manufacturing. Branding
is ostensibly ancient; both
livestock branding and heraldry are considered forerunners of today’s brands
in terms
of their nominal labelling and differentiating functions (Mollerup
1997). For the period of industrialization,
the eighteenth-century ceramics
pioneer, Josiah Wedgwood, is noted as much for his innovations in
marketing as
for those in manufacture. He actively sought aristocratic and
royal patronage and then broadcast his clients’
approval; he tailored his
product range to changes in fashion; he set up a showroom; and he sold
tickets for
viewings of his technological masterpiece, a technically excellent
loss leader, the Portland vase (McKendrick
1960; Adamson 2014).
Branding proper took a leap forward with the selling of goods in pre-
portioned amounts in printed wrappers,
rather than as loose quantities, sold
by weight in amounts requested by the purchaser. Wrappers provided a space
for branding, the creation of a consistent identity and quality assurance. This
development extended to a range
of goods, including groceries and, notably,
soap. A prize-winning exhibitor at the Great Exhibition was soap
manufacturer A. and F. Pears. At the Exposition Universelle de Paris (1878),
Pears exhibited Ruggero Focardi’s sculpture ‘You Dirty Boy’ and
subsequently had copies made for retail
displays. Pears later used John
Everett Millais’s painting ‘A Child’s World’ (1886) for its soap
advertisements,
such that the image became famous as ‘Bubbles’. Other
early soap brands include Lever Brothers’ Sunlight soap
(1884) and
stablemate Lifebuoy. In Japan, Kāo was the pre-eminent soap brand
(Weisenfeld 2004). These products
used familiarity to build consumer
confidence. Consumers had preferred to see goods on open display, to know
what
they were getting. Branded, packaged goods led to a shift in
consumption practices in which wrapped goods were
perceived as authentic,
safe and hygienic, as well as being imbued with the qualities emphasized in
the visual
and textual branding and advertising messages.
Marketing and advertising developed as industries expressly to stimulate
consumption. By 1850 print culture was
in full swing; newspapers,
magazines and mail order catalogues were all functioning to communicate
local,
regional and national patterns of consumption to international and
global audiences through wide distribution and
circulation. Syndication
spread messages across nations and internationally. Early advertising
techniques ranged
from the ‘puff’ – in which a writer was paid for a story
wherein a product was mentioned, as if incidentally – to
‘shout louder’ ads –
where typography was used to give the impression of emphatic persuasion.
Psychological
understanding informed more sophisticated approaches at the
turn of the twentieth century as advertisers learnt
to appeal to consumers’
dreams and desires rather than simply to their needs (Benjamin and Baker
2004).
Within the period covered by this chapter, the introduction first of radio,
then film, television and, more
recently, the World Wide Web as channels for
global communication changed advertising strategies. While the BBC’s
World Service exemplified the soft power of Empire, Hollywood’s movie
studios continued to send out cinematic
visions of the American Dream
rooted in consumerism. Television advertisements produced primarily by
national and
multinational corporations which could, and can, afford large
advertising budgets are accompanied today by the
views of bloggers and
vloggers influencing what an increasingly large group of consumers say, buy
and do.
Communication technologies have been, and continue to be, one of
the defining features of consumption and
globalization in the period since
1850. The increasing sophistication of advertising has extended to
multi-
platform campaigns bridging print media, product placement in films, TV
advertising and, more recently, to
guerrilla advertising strategies as
interventions in the urban environment and viral campaigns making use of
social media networks.
Mass consumption is based on mass production and vice versa, and the
first nation to industrialize – Great
Britain – and the pre-eminent consumer
society – the USA – have exerted a disproportionate influence across the
world. British global influence has been bound up with colonialism, while in
the twentieth century, also known as
the ‘American century’ (Edwards and
Gaonkar 2010: 1; Haskell 1999; Phillips 1999), Americanization really took
hold in Europe and elsewhere. Following the Second World War,
consumerism garnered as much anxiety as it did
celebration. During the
Cold War capitalism and communism fought it out among the homes of East
and West. In the
so-called kitchen debate Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev
and US President Richard Nixon each claimed superior
living standards for
their communist and capitalist regimes respectively, within the context of a
US kitchen at
the 1959 American National Exhibition in Moscow (Reid
2008). Since the fall of the Iron Curtain, towards the end
of the twentieth
century, consumerism has become a global pattern in east and west, north
and south.
Western consumerism of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century
has occurred within a post-industrial
context in which countries such as the
UK survive as service economies rather than through manufacturing or
trading raw materials. Post-industrial consumer societies enjoy goods
manufactured offshore and delivered by the
massive shipping containers that
depart from Chinese and other East Asian manufacturing centres. A sense
among
Western consumers of the 1980s that goods Made in Taiwan, and
more recently Made in China, were of inferior
quality has been replaced by a
recognition that it is largely economically unviable to manufacture goods
using
expensive Western labour, so that contemporary consumer goods are
typically made in East Asia for consumption in
the West and East alike.
Contemporary concerns about manufacturing standards, for example
surrounding the
toxicity of paint used for some children’s toys manufactured
in China (Lipton and Barboza 2007), have influenced
the desirability of local
and regional, as opposed to global, chains of production and consumption.
This position
is allied with various consumer campaigns to buy domestic
goods, and more formal export restrictions as well as
the legal, economic
and political protection of l’exception culturelle in France,
introduced in
1993 as part of the GATT (General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, a
forerunner of the World Trade
Organization) in a bid to stem the tide of,
first, Americanization and, more recently, globalization.

Theories of globalization

Wider debates about globalization, combined with the continuing influence

of post-colonial theory, international
developments in higher education and
the contemporary focus on sustainability, have all informed the ways in
which design, particularly, is understood.
Design historians have largely focused their attention on industrial
manufacture, and therefore on the output of
Western industrialized nations.
This tendency has been the subject of some criticism in recent years,
influenced
by the writings of post-colonialist theorists such as Edward Said,
Homi Bhabha and Fernando Ortiz. Said’s model
of Orientalism critiqued the
Eurocentric pattern of intellectual and cultural history in which an exotic and
generalized East (Orient) is imagined in novels, and other cultural artefacts,
for consumption in the West (Said
1978). Said’s approach has been criticized
for its binarism; rather than the West simply exploiting the East,
more
interaction needs to be recognized, his critics argue. Certainly, design history
shows interaction to be a
more apt model, as in the transnational and
transcultural development of textiles and ceramics, for example. Homi
Bhabha’s model of hybridity has been widely influential as an alternative to
binaristic thinking about centre and
margin (Bhabha 1994). Bhabha’s
approach allows for a more fluid understanding of identity and a refusal of
metanarratives. Similarly, Fernando Ortiz’s model of transculturation
describes how an object or image acquires
new resonance as a result of
merging and changing contexts (Ortiz 1995 [1940]).
In our own century, mainstream media and academic discourses across the
humanities and social sciences alike have
been preoccupied with
globalization (Applebaum and Robinson 2005). Where Max Weber used the
model of bureaucracy
to represent the society within which he wrote (Weber
1991 [1947]), sociologist George Ritzer (1993) sees the
fast-food restaurant
as having become a more representative contemporary paradigm. Ritzer has
criticized the
increasingly homogeneous nature of global culture using the
term McDonaldization to denote a reconceptualization
of rationalization.
Following design historian Anna Calvera (2005) we can see that the local,
regional, national and global exist in
complex interrelations with one another
in late-twentieth-century and early-twenty-first-century consumer
markets.
Calvera quotes fellow design historian Tevfik Balciog˘lu as recognizing that
‘the tacit acceptance of
the universal communicative power of design and its
multicultural identity does not only support, but also
requires a global
understanding of the subject’. Calvera regards this as ‘the first time design
standards were
seen as multicultural, the outcome of a synthetic process
resulting from the contribution of many different
regions and cultural
realities’ (Calvera 2005: 371). The places in which designs, materials,
images, objects,
services and other behaviours are produced conditions their
characteristics and their reception. This is as true
of designs intended to
transcend local, regional or national contexts to pursue an international
agenda, as it is
of ‘vernacular’ design.
Since Calvera’s important articulation, a tendency to examine the history
of design using the convenient and
time-honoured unit of national history
(Lees-Maffei and Fallan 2013) has all but ceded to a concerted effort to
globalize the field in response to the wider economic, political, technological
and cultural processes of
globalization. Work in design history that has
addressed globalization ranges from methodological reflections
(Woodham
2005) to analyses of global brands (Huppatz 2005) and recognition that
multinational corporations ‘like
Coca-Cola, McDonald’s, Carrefour, Sony or
Disney’ have ‘reconfigured design’s impact on culture’ (Adamson, Riello
and Teasley 2011: 8).
Consumers in the West have available to them (depending on income, of
course) a global range of goods that may be
consumed simultaneously. In the
case of fashionable clothing, a tweed skirt woven by Abraham Moon in
Yorkshire,
England, may be worn with Ugg boots from Australia (or branded
UGG Australia boots from California, USA) and a
tunic made from West
African cotton, machine-sewn in China and accessorized with an Italian
leather handbag. As
well as providing consumers with a range of options
through which to express their identities and allegiances,
these products
enable cultural tourism through consumption rather than travel. Similarly, a
typical food court in
a UK shopping centre will offer, in close proximity,
several Italian options, more than one Japanese restaurant
with or without
conveyor belt service, a facsimile French bistro, pastiche American diner
and so on, in addition
to the high street Anglo-Indian restaurant serving the
national dish, the hybrid chicken tikka masala. For the
indecisive, certain
restaurants provide dishes from around the world in one menu (such as that
at the supermarket
Tesco-owned Giraffe chain), thereby taking culinary
tourism to the level of gustatory bricolage.
While national identities have been communicated through the
consumption, use and display of designed goods as
much as through
practices and rituals, we might well ask whether the idea that design from a
particular country
is recognizable remains a useful model when the
contemporary design process is characterized by global chains of
influence
and globalized manufacture. Given that design has always been global, this
more recent globalization is
perhaps best understood as an accommodation
of the global, national and local. Global corporations, such as
McDonald’s,
have negotiated market segmentation and differentiation along local,
national and regional lines,
while designers and ‘starchitects’ such as Sir
Norman Foster have collaborated internationally, as well as
locally, using
information and design technologies that transcend space and time. But just
as global brands have
found success with consumers across the world,
whether through consistency or the strategic application of local, national
and regional differentiation, so their ubiquity has
engendered a desire for
products with authentic local, regional and national associations.

Against consumption and globalization

Consumerism and globalization have attracted extensive criticism. Capitalist

consumer societies privilege those
people with the capital to invest as
shareholders and owners and other stakeholders, and those with sufficient
disposable income to shop recreationally rather than purely for need. People
without capital or disposable income
are disadvantaged in consumer
societies, and this is true both at the macro level of developing countries and
at
the micro level of individuals on limited budgets. Following Zygmunt
Bauman’s analysis of the inequalities of
consumerism, Serge Latouche has
argued that even the affluent lose in consumer societies, as their consumerist
tendencies engender spiritual malaise in place of satisfaction (Bauman 1998;
Latouche 1993). However, this
critique is not solely the preserve of social
theorists; a number of activist groups have been influential in
calling
attention to the costs and drawbacks of consumption and globalization.
Activism in response to globalization has included the decidedly gentle
Slow Food movement. Founded in 1986 in
response to a proposed
McDonald’s fast food restaurant in Rome, the Slow Food movement
promotes seasonal, local
foods (Slow Food 1989). Slow Food’s first
international congress was held in Venice in 1987 with the Slow Food
publishing house, Slow Food Editore, being launched at the same time, and
international branches followed (Slow
Food n.d.). Campaigning has centred
upon eco-gastronomy and the availability of food such as raw milk cheeses,
which have suffered from large retailing methods, practices such as
pasteurization and associated food safety
legislation. For design particularly,
the Slow movement favours authenticity as a product characteristic
(engaging heritage and the vernacular in design), the maintenance of craft
traditions and urban design which
promotes public engagement.
Slow Food inspired the Cittàslow movement, founded in Chianti,
Tuscany, in 1999, which now has member cities and
towns around the world,
including in Korea, South Africa and the USA (Cittàslow 2014; also Pink
2007). Following
the Slow Food emphasis on localism and low food miles,
Cittàslow has promoted wellbeing and public infrastructure
so that ‘Slow’
cities bear comparison with the various ‘Liveable City’ initiatives in San
Francisco, US, and in a
consortium of several cities in the UK. They
campaign for low-carbon living through improved public transport
infrastructure and better siting and distribution of affordable housing to
facilitate a move away from personal
car ownership, as well as enhanced
healthcare, education and leisure services to support wellbeing (Liveable
City
2015).
We might differentiate lifestyle activism and cultural activism. Adbusters
magazine (from
1989) is produced by the Adbusters Media Foundation to
challenge the enormous number of advertising images
circulating in
consumer societies. Adbusters is known for subversive appropriations of the
language and imagery of advertisements following a practice promoted by
the Situationist International movement
(1957–72) as détournement.
Founded in Canada by Kalle Lasn and Bill Schmalz, Adbusters now appears
in several international editions. Adbusters Media Foundation promotes
direct
action, such as Buy Nothing Day which was launched in 1992. In the
US Buy Nothing Day is held on the day after
Thanksgiving, known as Black
Friday, one of the busiest shopping days of the year when seasonal
Christmas shopping is supposed to begin in earnest. Adbusters has also
promoted
the Occupy movement (see Figure 37.2), a global direct action
protest movement targeting
financial districts and the banking industry with
anti-capitalist, anti-consumerist messages (Adbusters Media
Foundation
2015). The slogan ‘We are the 99%’, used by the Occupy movement since
2011, points to the fact that
one per cent of the world’s population owns a
disproportionate amount of the world’s wealth and that the other
ninety-nine
per cent pays the price for that inequality. Occupy was catalysed in part by a
long process of
capitalist accumulation, which has increased wealth
inequalities, and in part by the recession of 2007–9, caused
by poor banking
practices in the US and UK in relation to subprime mortgage sales. This
recessionary wave has had
a global impact, bankrupting weaker economies
such as that of Greece.
Naomi Klein has considered the culture-jamming practices of
organizations such as Adbusters alongside the work of
artists and edgier
activists who disdain Adbusters for its quasi-commercial methods, such as
selling stickers to
promote Buy Nothing Day (which were later withdrawn).
In this work, Situationist détournement is harnessed to critique globalization
and capitalism:

One of the most popular ways for artists and activists to highlight
the inequalities of free-market
globalization is by juxtaposing First
World icons with Third World scenes: the Marlboro Man in the war-
torn
rubble of Beirut; an obviously malnourished girl wearing
Mickey Mouse glasses; Dynasty playing on a TV set in
an African
hut; Indonesian students rioting in front of McDonald’s arches.
(Klein 1999: 298)

Klein notes the way in which advertisers recuperate critical techniques such
as these. Diesel’s ‘Brand O’
campaign adopts this strategy of juxtaposition to
sell jeans rather than critique multinational corporations,
such as
McDonald’s and Nike, for unethical business and manufacturing practices.
Klein follows Susan Douglas in
pointing out that second-wave feminism was
pre-eminent in promoting anti-consumerist thinking in the 1960s and
1970s
(Klein 1999 cites Douglas 1994: 227).
Klein’s book, like so much of the associated criticism, seeks to change the
behaviour of consumers as much as
marketers and manufacturers. The same
twin focus informs sustainable design practices. Just as the industrial
revolution had its correlative in the consumer revolution, so green design
initiatives are accompanied by the
promotion of green consumption
principles. The Good Consumer Guide, and its offshoot
The Green
Consumer Supermarket Guide, show how reducing consumption, reusing
goods and
recycling can help to offset the environmental damage caused by
industrialization (Makower, Elkington and Hailes
1991). Sustainable
consumption practices have perhaps been more effective in fostering a
global sense of
responsibility for the wellbeing of our planet than they have
for ameliorating the damage sustained by the ozone
layer as a result of
industrial emissions. Design practice needs to change to achieve greater
sustainability in
the manufacture and consumption of goods and services
(Fry 2008; Fuad-Luke 2009). Sustainable design practices
span the gamut of
human activity and ingenuity, ranging from indoor food farms to meet the
global food deficit,
to the sharing economy. The latter is gaining credibility
as companies such as BMW launch car-sharing services
following
successful bike-sharing schemes, and as digital technologies enable
consumers to rent out their spare
rooms using Airbnb, their services as a taxi
driver using Uber and their
parking spaces with justpark.com (Szmigin
2014).
Figure
37.2 World Revolution Day,
September 17, poster download, occupywallstreet.org. Retrieved
January 31, 2015 from www.adbusters/occupywallstreet/
Source: occupywallstreet.org.

These latter enterprises point to the increasing extent to which producers

and consumers merge in the experience
economy, the sharing economy, the
wider digital economy and in today’s global consumerist societies.
Following
Alvin Toffler’s coinage of the term ‘prosumption’, Ritzer has
pointed out the extent to which consumers are asked
to perform functions
previously carried out by service providers, from self-service restaurants and
supermarkets,
to online banking and content delivery within Web 2.0, the
read–write web (Ritzer and Jurgenson 2010). Those we
still refer to as
consumers are not only making purchasing decisions of their own but are
also blogging, vlogging
and otherwise gaining a voice that may impact upon
the production, consumption and mediation of others
(Lees-Maffei 2013:
192). For design, we could add consumer manufacturing through desktop
publishing and 3D
printing, and the manufacture and sale of designed goods
through craft marketplace Etsy, and the resale of
‘curated’ goods through
eBay and Amazon. Craft activists or ‘craftivists’, hacktivists (computer
hackers for a
cause) and fixperts, who mend things as an expression of
ingenuity and as a way of avoiding waste, are just some
of the groups,
amateur or otherwise, for whom design practice, variously defined, is a
channel for political
engagement and a critique of contemporary
consumption within the context of globalization.
Anti-capitalism and anti-Western feeling extends to the extremist radical
Islamic groups, such as the terrorist
organization al-Qaeda, which attacked
the World Trade Center and the Pentagon military headquarters in the US in
September 2001 and claims to have attacked the satirical magazine Charlie
Hebdo in Paris
in January 2015. These attacks and the discourses that
surround them show how consumption and its ideological
correlative,
capitalism, are dividing the world as much as uniting it.
The range of critiques of the apparently otherwise unchecked twin
processes of consumption and globalization
suggests that their future is not
assured. The ecological damage wrought by largely unregulated
manufacturing and
consumption processes provides another compelling
argument against the continuance of the double-edged sword of
consumption
and globalization. Those who practise design, and those who are interested
in design, including
students and scholars of design studies and design
history, have the capacity to aid the current situation
through engaging with
the politics of consumption and globalization, as activists and engaged
stakeholders to
influence policy and practice (e.g. Cader 2013; Teasley
2015). In this way, we can respond to the dynamic and
profound intersection
of globalization and consumption during the past one hundred and sixty-five
years.

References

Adamson, Glenn (2014) ‘Portland Vase, UK (Josiah Wedgwood, 1789)’ in Grace Lees-Maffei (ed.)
Iconic Designs: 50 Stories about 50 Things, London, Bloomsbury.
Adamson, Glenn, Giorgio Riello and Sarah Teasley (2011) (eds) Global Design History,
London,
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 38

DESIGNING AND CONSUMING

THE MODERN IN TURKEY
Meltem Ö. Gürel
 
 
The materiality of interior space reveals a celebration of some ideas, values,
beliefs, visions, and even
ideologies, while suppressing others. Its reading
provides an intriguing social history and serves as a tool
through which we
can make sense of dominant design concepts, inclinations, and preferences
floating around
globally at a historical moment in a society. Although never
fully in command of how interiors are shaped, all
actors responsible for
their creation, such as owners, users, decorators, interior designers, and
architects,
contribute to the discursive formation of certain concepts such as
modernity (Gürel 2008: 230). This chapter
discusses the production and
consumption of design and modernity through design practices in Turkey.
From
late-nineteenth-century Ottoman palaces to twentieth-century
domestic spaces, the chapter shows how design served
as a mechanism for
constructing and consuming modern identities associated with
Westernization.

The nineteenth century: building Western identities and

opening up liminal
spaces

Nineteenth-century Ottoman palaces, such as Dolmabahçe (1842–56) and

Beylerbeyi (1861–5), were seminal examples
of architectural, interior, and
landscape design representing the convoluted notions of contemporary and
Western
identities during late-Ottoman rule. These buildings were different
from the Topkapı Palace, which had been the
main residence of the sultans
since the 1470s, during the rise of the empire. Building Dolmabahçe not
only
demonstrated Sultan Abdülmecid’s interest in the process of
Westernization, which started at the beginning of the
eighteenth century, but
also reflected the new state protocol introduced by the administrative
reforms
(Tanzimat Fermanı) of 1839. Dolmabahçe Palace (the design of
which is widely attributed to
Garabet Balyan and Nikogos Balyan) was
planned to meet the new diplomatic requirements, such as those established
during the Congress of Vienna in 1815, which Topkapı Palace’s spatial
arrangements could not fulfill (Ortaylı
2006: 92). Ceremonies and
receptions that would have been held in the interior rooms and exterior
courtyards of
Topkapı were held in the wholly interior world of
Dolmabahçe’s stately halls. Their monumental mass, adorned on the
exterior with a mixture of Neoclassical, Empire, Baroque,
and Rococo
elements, was organized in a symmetrical and axial composition resonating
with Beaux-Art architectural
conventions. The impressive interior spaces
displayed Baroque features, characterized by carved, gilded, and
painted
applications created by a number of notable artists, craftsmen, and
designers. Among them was Séchan, the
decorator of the Paris Opera
House, designed by Charles Garnier (Hellier 1993: 166). The ceiling
decorations
resembled European precedents, and coexisted with intricate
ornaments of traditional Ottoman artistry and the
Islamic tradition of non-
figurative decorations (Gautier 1990).
Symbols of Ottoman Westernization, the residential and state halls of
nineteenth-century palaces were filled with
eclectic Western-style furniture
and artifacts, such as paintings, sculpture, and crystal chandeliers. Their
materiality displayed an ideological shift from the golden ages of the
empire and a divergence from the customary
fittings of Topkapı Palace,
characterized by traditional built-in interiors with closets, shelves, and low
seating units dressed with cushions and textiles, tiled surface treatments,
traditional ornaments, and
non-figurative embellishments (Gürel 2009b:
48). While this shift arguably indicates the changing perception of
the West
as economically, politically, and militarily superior to the late-Ottoman
state, it also signifies its
ties with Europe. The word ottoman as a piece of
furniture, and the use of the Turkish
terms sofa and divan in Europe, mirror
the other side of this
influence and exchange.
Westernization in forms of design also showed itself in the homes of the
late-Ottoman elite, especially
bureaucrats and the wealthy non-Muslim
population of cosmopolitan cities, such as Istanbul and Izmir. The
materiality of their homes helped construct new social identities associated
with the Western world. European
furniture coexisting with traditional
elements was a significant component of this materiality. For example, a
piano, often associated with the female members of the household, was a
new object in the elite home; it
displayed the socio-cultural stance of the
family as much as educating female members of the household did
(Dumont 1993: 284; Gürel 2009b: 47–67). After the War of Independence,
this agency of the piano specifically, and
design generally, stayed firm in
the homes of the early Republican elites, whose family structures and
lifestyles
reflected the social transformations and political changes
implemented with the foundation of the Republic of
Turkey in 1923.
The injection of European design elements and objects into traditional
Turkish living spaces and everyday
practices created hybrid environments
that simultaneously accommodated Western with local or traditional
concepts, spaces, objects, and materials. These surroundings opened up
liminal spaces,
which could not simply be explained through the binary
oppositions of East and West, new and old, or customary
and uncustomary.
They existed in between these oppositions (Gürel 2007: 261–74; Gürel
2011a: 185).

Constructing a Republican identity and seeing domestic space

as an agent of renewal

Western representation, whether played out by the presence of furniture

(such as a piano exposing social reform
in the domestic sphere) or by the
architecture of the new capital’s state buildings (representing revolution in
the political structure), was important to the founding ideology and
modernization project of the new secular
state that replaced the monarchic
structure of the Ottoman Empire. During
the early Republican era, foreign
architects and planners, mostly from Germany and Austria, were invited to
Turkey to construct the new capital, Ankara, and its governmental
buildings. Among them were Clemens Holzmeister,
Paul Bonatz, Ernst
Egli, Bruno Taut, Martin Wagner, Martin Elsaesser, Franz Hillinger,
Wilhelm Lihotzky, and
Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky. These architects also
greatly influenced the Turkish architecture schools, bringing
with them
prominent European concepts of design and steering the education of
emerging Turkish architects. Ernst
Egli, for one, took over the head position
in the architecture department of Istanbul’s Academy of Fine Arts, the
first
school of its kind in Turkey, established by the well-known art historian and
artist Osman Hamdi Bey in
1882. Egli’s term followed the resignations of
Giulio Mongeri in 1928 and Vedat Tek in 1930—two “masters” of the
First
National Style. Under Egli’s direction, the curriculum underwent a major
transformation. Egli was assisted
by Arif Hikmet Holtay, Sedad Hakkı
Eldem, and Seyfettin Arkan, who became prominent and influential Turkish
architects themselves. Bruno Taut succeeded Egli in 1936.
International faculty also joined the interior design program at the
Academy. In 1929 Philip Ginther, an Austrian
professor, was appointed to
establish an interior design atelier as a branch of the
Academy’s
Department of Decorative Arts, which had been launched in 1923. Ginther
also taught interior design to
architects (Cezar 1983: 23–4). In 1939, the
French artist Marie Louis Süe, known for his work in the Art Deco
style,
became the director of the decorative arts department. Süe had a profound
influence on students during his
tenure (Fer 2005). While European
designers were invited to Turkey to teach, Turkish artists and designers
were
also sent to Europe to learn about the state of the arts. For example,
interior designer Nizami Bey was sent by
the Academy to the Ecole des
Arts Appliqués in Paris; he also worked at the Gaumont and Paramount
studios for a
while. As published in a 1932 issue of Mimar (later Arkitekt),
his
drawings show the enthusiasm of introducing to Turkish designers not
only the latest European ways of design, but
also how stylish interiors
should look (see Figure 38.1). They portrayed living spaces,
domestic study
rooms, and an executive office with modern furniture
reverberating with
Bauhaus designs, and a woman’s bedroom in Art Deco style.
Figure
38.1 Decorator Nizami Bey’s
sketches show how contemporary interiors should look. Mimar,
no. 5, 1932, p. 145.

Chamber of Turkish Architects with the permission of Eren Savcı Sayar.

Foreign architects also left their mark on Istanbul Technical University,

the other major institution of higher
education in Turkey. The institution
was established as the Civil Service School of Engineering in 1884, and
renamed in 1944. It underwent modernizing reforms through the efforts of
Emin Onat, who invited Clemens
Holzmeister and Paul Bonatz to teach
there. Holzmeister was given the responsibility of designing the
administrative district in Hermann Jansen’s 1927 master plan for Ankara. In
the early Republican era, the
government commissioned foreign architects
to design important public buildings, while Turkish architects’
practices
were mainly limited to residential architecture. The latter saw themselves as
educators and cultural
leaders responsible for modernizing the country and
training people in contemporary ways of living and Western
lifestyles
through architectural, interior, and furniture design. As one early
Republican architect put it in
1936, architects were missionaries of
civilization, responsible for “introducing beds to those who [were] used to
sleeping together on earthen floors, to teach those who [sat] on the floor
how to use chairs, to provide tables
for those who [ate] on the floors, to
revolutionize lifestyles” (Sayar 1936: 47; Nalbantog˘lu 1997: 202). This
role had a profound impact on Turkish design culture. Architects and
designers sought to design the modern home
conceptualized as appropriate
for the citizens of the new nation-state (Bozdog˘ an 2001).
Outlining the architect’s role as an “intellectual leader” in charge of
guiding social life and defining
contemporary interiors, architect Aptullah
Ziya, in the first issue of Mimar (1931),
stressed the importance of
producing plans that would facilitate Western modes of living yet
accommodate Turkish
families’ cultural priorities rather than copying
European ones. An apartment plan he proposed in that issue is
worth
analyzing, as it represents some of the prevalent concepts of 1930s
architectural culture. Ziya’s proposal
reflected the changes that had taken
place in the family structure, especially the emphasis on the nuclear family
as the smallest unit of society, and also displayed new lifestyles shaped by
contemporary modes of living. Ziya
(1931) stated, “Apartment life is the
life of the twentieth century. The konak and
kös,k [mansions and villas] era
in which brides, grooms, fathers and mothers all lived
together is over.”
Gender segregation was no longer a consideration in planning, and women
were promised equality
in the domestic space. The woman was assigned a
space in the study, and her everyday activities were given
primary
consideration. The piano – a symbol of Westernization in Ottoman elite
homes – was still given a
prominent location, and a library accompanied it.
Both these inclusions showed and idealized the education of the
Republican
family. Furniture, such as dining room sets, study tables, and sewing tables,
with layouts and
suggestions for use, portrayed the Republican family, with
the husband and wife sharing space and working and
entertaining together.
What had been rooms of unspecified function in traditional houses were
now planned for
different activities, such as dining, sleeping, sitting, and
studying (Batur 1998: 219). In earlier homes, spaces
were simply referred
to as rooms; exemplifying plans of the 1930s, Ziya’s plan labeled rooms
according to their
designated function, such as living/reception, study, and
bedroom. The architect emphasized function and
considered privacy an
important cultural issue. Spaces were compartmentalized into rooms either
by permanent
walls or by temporary dividers, such as folding screens and
curtains. Large windows were included to let more
sunlight into interiors. In
line with the tenets of the Modern Movement, these windows suggested
healthier
environments but were dressed with curtains, showing a
sensitivity to the
cultural issue of privacy. In general, traditional domestic
layouts emphasized introversion and segregation; the
high walls of the
courtyards were used to keep the gaze of outsiders away from the
household.
The perspective drawings that accompanied Ziya’s proposed plan
depicted sleek interiors dressed with unadorned
planar furniture in tune
with Bauhaus designs, simple curtains, abstract art, and modern lighting
fixtures.
Comparable to Nizami Bey’s illustrations of interiors mentioned
above, they were a strong contrast to the
eclectic Western interpretations
and cluttered interiors with porcelain bibelots, crystal and silver accessories,
textiles, and lace cloths. Such interior design proposals, characterized by
plain and shiny surfaces, clean
lines, airy and well-lit spaces, and equipped
with comfort systems such as electricity and hot water, followed
the
precepts of the, so-called, Cubic architecture of the time and promoted a
new taste for the new home
embodying new concepts of living. In this
spirit, Republican intellectual Ismail Hakkı Baltacıoglu asked,
addressing
furniture in Turkey, “Isn’t new taste born out of new life?” (Baltacıoglu
1934: 211). Celal Esat
Arseven (1931) declared, “New furniture in a new
house,” suggesting the use of functional furniture in his
seminal book New
Architecture (Yeni Mimari), in which he welcomed
the general principles of
the Modern Movement, German Functionalism, and Le Corbusier, and
introduced them to a
Turkish audience of architects. Arseven, Ziya, and
other contemporaries conceptualized interior design not only
as a
significant task of the architect, but also as a measure to portray
“civilization.”
However, modern designs were not always well received by consumers
or intellectuals. In fact, many did not want
to part from their inherited
furniture (Bozdoğan 2001: 212). Some considered the Cubic architecture
and interiors
of 1930s houses and apartment buildings cold, bare, and even
alien (Karaosmanoğlu 1997 [1934]: 141; Bozdoğan
2001: 212, 193–7;
Uzunarslan 2002: 102–11). Distaste towards this style in general is well
depicted in the
writings of intellectuals such as Peyami Safa, and in
literature, such as the well-known novel Ankara by famous novelist Yakup
Kadri Karaosmanoğlu (1934). Yet, beyond consumer preferences,
architects’ and designers’ promotion of modern and functionalist home
designs helped form a discursive field
around concepts of the new home.
They prompted the questions: How should a contemporary Turkish home
be? How
should a contemporary home be furnished? How should
contemporary cities take form? Domestic space was
conceptualized as a
reflection of Republican modernity, and contrasted non-functionalist,
eclectic, ornate, and
lavish late-Ottoman elite homes with Western
influences, as well as traditional homes lacking contemporary
comfort
systems and lifestyles. In this way, the domestic space was seen as an agent
of renewal.

Modern domicile, modern women

The separation between the Republican and Ottoman home was politically
charged and embodied changes in social and
family structures, idealizing
and promoting the nuclear family (Göle 1997: 74; Bozdoğan 2001: 63,
193–7).
Republican intellectuals, including Safa, Baltacıoglu, and Muhittin
Birgen, emphasized the Republican family as
different from the Ottoman
family (Yaman 2013: 87). In the new family model, women were pledged
equality, based
on the Republican revolutions that transformed women’s
status in society. Women were granted the right to vote
and to stand for
election in 1930 and 1934, respectively, and polygamy was
abolished with
the adoption of the Turkish Civil Code in 1926. Women’s new social status,
their presence in the
public domain, and their Western look were important
to the process of nation-building and the project of
modernization (Arat
1997). They were given the role of representing the nation as a Western,
democratic, and
secular state. Women became key figures in separating
Republican modernity from Ottoman traditionalism.
As mothers or care givers women were tasked with shaping Republican
youth and, as homemakers, with shaping modern
domestic interiors. This
discursive formation of women can be followed through oral histories,
books, newspaper
articles, advertisements, and popular magazines depicting
women’s contemporary roles, such as how they should
look, dress, and
create new homes. Even though Republican women were represented and
promoted as educated public
figures working in the public sphere as pilots,
doctors, lawyers, and teachers in urban and rural areas alike (in
stark
contrast to Ottoman women), their responsibilities at home remained solid
(Gürel 2009a: 708; 2011b).
Women’s social roles as mothers, wives, and homemakers were
glamorized in the post-World War Two era, when women
were
“domesticated” and turned into “Mrs. Consumers,” managing the house in
the dynamics of Cold War geopolitics
(Hayden 1984; May 1988; Ross
1995; Sparke 1995; Gürel 2009a; 2011b). Feminine images of the ideal
housewife
positioned happily in the hygienic surroundings of a comfortable
home, equipped with modern household goods and
appliances, spread from
the United States to the rest of the capitalist world, where America came to
be
recognized as a powerful symbol of modernity. Articles in popular
magazines and newspapers, posters, the film
industry, radio programs,
television where available, and advertisements helped disseminate these
images. In the
US advertisements depicting idealized women in a graphic
style, which became characteristic of the post-war era,
appealed chiefly to a
white, middle-class mass market (Harris 2007: 242). In Turkey, where
foreign policy firmly
identified with the post-Second World War Western
sphere, these images also filled the media (see Figure 38.2). Popular
magazines—such as Hayat (1956–78), which translates as
Life and was
modeled after the American Life magazine, its
forerunner, Resimli Hayat
(1952–5), translates as Life with
Pictures, and Yedigün (1933–51), translates
as Seven
Days—portrayed the notion of the modern woman as a Western
persona. Catering largely to a female readership,
these publications worked
similarly to women’s magazines elsewhere, not only in constructing a
gendered identity
for women first and foremost as homemakers, but also in
playing a role in spreading and normalizing state-led
modernization efforts.
The modern Turkish woman, like her Western counterpart, was widely
presented as a clean,
well-dressed, well-groomed, and soignée figure
representing the family and the nation on the domestic front
(Gürel 2009a:
709). The materiality of the home was an extension of her gendered identity
as a homemaker and
displayed her and her family’s modernity in the same
socio-cultural background and economic strata (ibid.). Even
the famous
Turkish architect and educator, Sedad H. Eldem, who was well-known for
his interior schemes and
furniture design, recognized women’s important
role as decorators defining the modern domicile, and wrote that
“cultivated
and tasteful families wished for a new style in their life and were able to
accomplish this” through
able young housewives (Eldem 1973: 10).
For the housewife modernity was signified not so much by the style of
decor as by the comfort systems that eased
everyday household tasks and
living conditions. Many women were glad to move from older houses to
apartments
because the latter offered spatial arrangements that were “easier
to maintain than the old houses with multiple
layers and nooks,” as stated
by a woman who convinced her husband to move to a new apartment from
their
nineteenth-century house in the late 1950s (Gürel 2009a: 714).
Apartment buildings, especially those for the
upper-middle class, were
usually designed with central heating by radiators (as opposed to stoves,
which could
only heat a single room) and had bathrooms and kitchens with
hot water and modern fixtures, and well-lit and airy
interiors. Moreover,
apartment living provided the inexpensive services of a kapıcı, a
serviceman responsible for maintaining the building. His duties also
included managing the heating and hot water,
collecting the garbage,
cleaning the building, looking after the grounds, collecting the maintenance
fees, and
providing security for residents. The kapıcı helped with small
market shopping, easing
women’s daily household chores (Gürel 2009a:
716). As an affordable form
of modern living, new apartment buildings and
their interiors, which had been viewed as symbols of modernity
since the
nineteenth century, increasingly started to replace older houses.
Figure
38.2 Advertisements for
radios.

Yedigün, October 30, 1948.

One of the most important spaces of the modern home was the bathroom,
composed of a bathtub, sink, water closet,
and sometimes a bidet. As
cultural leaders early Republican architects had already incorporated such
fixtures
into modern domestic plans in the form of a combined bathroom,
also using the traditional squat toilet (referred
to as the alaturca toilet) and
the kurna, a container from which
water was poured with a cup on to the
body for bathing. Their explanations reflect a sensitivity to cultural
norms
and their views about the new bathroom as a comfort zone embodying
contemporary lifestyles (Ünsal 1939: 61;
Ziya 1931: 18–19). By the second
half of the twentieth century, modern bathroom fixtures became the norm in
Turkish home design (Gürel 2008: 230). As I have discussed elsewhere,
these fixtures contributed to forming a
modern consciousness. The
materiality of the bathroom signified modernity. “A shift from traditional
fixtures to
‘modern’ ones indicated a desire to belong to a universal world
civilization” or “the industrial West.” While
propagating Western codes of
hygiene and lavatory habits, this shift also exemplifies the translation of
bathroom
practices. A bathtub or bidet was rarely used as intended. A
(telephone) shower was welcomed because it was
compatible with
traditional ways of bathing (ibid.: 226–8). As I have also argued, “the
bathroom work[ed] as a
modern space in which not only traditional
practices [were] transformed, but also an environment where new
concepts
[were] negotiated” (ibid.: 231).
Arguably, the widespread use of modern bathroom fixtures was a result
of the proliferation of apartment units
with new bathrooms and their
operation as agencies of modernization, development, and hygienic living
conditions
(ibid.: 220–4). A celebration of apartment buildings as such can
be followed through the advertisements of the
era. For example,
advertisements for prize houses and apartments offered by different banks
populated newspapers
and magazines. These often paired the home with a
contemporary female figure, the happy “Mrs. Consumer” making
the
modern home (Figure 38.3). Apartments were featured as a way to a
healthy and happy life
for the housewife, who could engage in
consumption. They were also conceptualized as the opposite half of the
dichotomy of old and/or ramshackle houses, and the new squatter
settlements which proliferated as a result of the
rapid urbanization that
occurred with migration from rural areas. This situation was caused by the
mechanization
of the countryside, when foreign aid in the form of
agricultural machinery arrived as a means to promote
democratic
capitalism. As part of post-Second World War American politics, this aid,
delivered under the Marshall
Plan from 1947, was meant to prevent the
spread of Communism.
Home technology products, such as radios, refrigerators, and washing
machines, were a showcase of modernity, and
often domesticated with
homey accessories, such as decorative cloths placed on top. Another
signature space of
the modern home was a kitchen equipped with
contemporary amenities. Kitchens of the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s were
too
small to accommodate refrigerators, which, being imported, were also
expensive. So when they were obtained
they were placed in the hall or the
living area. Until they became more common, with the production of the
Arçelik brand in the 1960s, refrigerators usually had no assigned space in
home plans. Home designs starting from
the latter half of the 1950s, such as
the Ataköy apartment blocks, provided space for refrigerators in the
kitchen
(Gürel 2012: 122). Kitchens with US-made refrigerators displayed an
American influence, which can be
traced not only to advertisements in
popular magazines, but also to Arkitekt, the
country’s only professional
periodical in the 1950s, in which the American kitchen featured as an ideal
form of
contemporary domestic life. As a reflection of this influence, some
architects experimented with open kitchen
layouts. However, these designs
were not picked up by the masses because they were not compatible with
Turkish
food preparation and living room practices.
Figure
38.3 A bank’s advertisement for
prize apartments.

Hayat, June 28, 1957.

If modern equipment, such as bathroom fixtures and appliances, was a

significant indicator of the modern domicile
in an urban context, furniture
was another. Interiors in the first half of the 1950s were usually
characterized
by neoclassical furniture accessorized with decorative
textiles, lace table covers, vases, and bibelots.
Well-made furniture in a
classical style, antiques and their replicas, perhaps helped their owners
express a
connection to late-Ottoman aristocratic taste (Gürel 2009b: 51).
Production of such furniture was limited and
expensive, however, as noted
by Zeki Sayar, publisher of Arkitekt. He viewed providing
quality furniture
to the masses as a national problem that required the government’s
immediate attention, and
according to him and many others, modern
designs were an inexpensive and quality answer to this problem (Sayar
1950: 61–3). Yet, architects and designers promoted modern furniture
designs not only because they were
functional and could be mass-produced
at affordable prices, but also because they suggested a reform in public
taste. Arkitekt featured designs by famous international and Turkish
designers.
Mid-century modern designs, characterized by a sleek look,
planar elements, and new materials, were custom-made
and sold in up-
market stores (Gürel 2009b).1 Together with the use
of new materials,
including plastics, Formica, vinyl, and nylon, in the second half of the
1950s and throughout
the 1960s, modern furniture designs suggested a
connection to post-Second
World War ideas and ideals of the new Western
sphere, in which the US emerged as a symbol of modernity. Modern
designs
were consumed as a strategy of distinction, conveying Western acquired
taste or “cultural capital” in
Bourdieu’s (1984) terms, as well as modern
identities (Gürel 2009b).

Displacement of living room practices

Whether decorated in modern or classical styles, a home’s materiality,

ranging from furniture to appliances to
bathroom fixtures, was a showcase
of a family’s position. The living room as center stage where guests were
entertained, worked as a status space representing its occupants’ cultural
capital, individuality, and
distinction, even though it was usually composed
of mass-produced items (Davis 1990). As Orhan Pamuk (2003) wrote
in his
novel Istanbul: Memories and the City, living rooms (historically called
reception
or guest rooms) were like museums, filled with eclectic furniture,
textiles, accessories, and knickknacks, all of
which were kept in mint
condition, waiting for guests. This function and cultural practice changed
widely in the
1970s, when television sets entered the home. Television
became the center of attraction in the living room, not
only bringing the
world into the domestic realm, but also changing and displacing concepts of
entertainment and
established social practices. Before television, radio had
had a prominent role in connecting the domestic space
to the world outside
and, along with the record player, was a major means of entertainment.
Attendance at movies,
nightclubs, and gazinos, which were important sites
of live music and entertainment in the
Turkish context, was also
transformed. Visiting friends, neighbors, and/or relatives who owned an
early
television set and gathering in front of it to watch a popular show in
the evening, after the television
broadcast started, widely replaced
conversing over food and beverages. Television not only rearranged social
interaction, but also furniture layout; because it became the focus of the
living room, it dictated the
arrangement of seating units. Also given spatial
prominence before television was the architectural element of
the fireplace,
which sometimes appeared in home plans of the 1950s and 1960s for an
urban middle- to upper-class.
The fireplace was used as a focal point,
guiding the furniture arrangement of the living room. As architect Nejat
Ersin (2006) stated, during the 1950s and 1960s domestic designs with
fireplaces rented out more easily.
Moreover, American officials residing in
Turkish cities constituted a considerable market for rental apartments
at the
time, and they preferred fireplaces (Gürel 2011a: 181). Usually detailed
with local marble in white and
black, a fireplace was more of a symbolic
and decorative element than a functional one, representing social
distinction
and belonging to a socio-cultural group associated with the Western world.
The entrance of television
shifted the symbolic meaning and spatial role of
fireplaces as well, and consequently, their appearance in urban
apartment
plans ceased. However, they continued to appear in summerhouses, or
vacation homes, and suburban
villas, which multiplied in the 1980s.

Final words

This chapter has discussed how design concepts and practices operated in
transforming and constructing social,
cultural, and civic identities and how
this construction was instrumental
for consuming contemporary designs
associated with the convoluted notions of Westernization and
modernization. I
have argued that design worked as a means to build
contemporary lifestyles and visions of the ideal home, and
that it would be
a fallacy to read the contemporary home, from the palatial architecture of
the nineteenth
century to the domestic space of the twentieth century, as
Western imitations. Likewise, it would be a mistake to
interpret the
architects, interior designers, and amateur decorators—the last usually
housewives—as imitators of
the prevalent design concepts and, so-called,
Western trends disseminated through the media including (depending
on the
historical period) popular magazines, professional journals, movies, radio
programs, television shows,
advertisements, posters, etc. Rather, domestic
space is suggested here as a site of modernity, where prevalent
concepts,
forms of inhabitation, technological developments, and objects are picked
up and mediated, and through
mediation are meaningfully translated,
reproduced with shared values and the common meanings of a culture, and
consumed as such. Even technological imports and/or new domestic
objects, such as radios, gramophones, record
players, stereos, refrigerators,
washing machines, vacuum cleaners, dishwashers, microwaves, televisions,
video
players, CD players, DVD players, MP3 players, computers, laptops,
plasma TVs, and the newest digital entries are
culturally worked to find a
meaningful social and physical space in the domestic domain in different
social
strata. For example, radios and televisions accessorized with lace
doilies are a vivid manifestation of this
translation in a domestic landscape.
Referring back to my argument at the beginning of the chapter, we can view
the hybrid domestic interventions discussed here as spaces of modernity
existing in between the familiar, the
customary, the traditional, the new, the
foreign, and the modern.

Note

1 The designers included: Sadi Özis¸, I ˙ lhan Koman, and S¸ adi

Çalık who formed Kare Metal;
Azmi and Bediz Koz who formed Butik A; Yıldırım Kocacıklıoğlu and Turhan Uncuoğlu
who
formed Interno; Nezih Eldem, Turgut Cansever, and S¸ evki Vanlı who designed furniture for
Selçuk Milar’s
Galeri Milar.

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 39

THREE DUTCHNESSES OF DUTCH

DESIGN
The construction of a national practice at the
intersection of national and international dynamics
Joana Meroz
 
 

Introduction

What is Dutch design? Does the term refer to design in the Netherlands
(material culture
produced in the country irrespective of the maker’s
nationality), design of the
Netherlands (material culture conceived by Dutch
citizens irrespective of their location in the world), and/or
design for the
Netherlands (material culture consumed in the Netherlands irrespective of
provenance)?1 As this chapter considers, depending on the different
constellations of national and international interests, Dutch design has been
all these—and more.
In studies on Dutch design there is often the underlying belief that there is
such a thing as design typical of
the Netherlands. These histories have often
been conceived in national terms, which is to say, as contained by
the
borders of the nation-state. Thus, Dutch design discourse explains the, so-
called, hallmarks of Dutch design
artifacts (e.g. sobriety, conceptualism, and
irony) as natural consequences of the, so-called, characteristics of
the
Netherlands (e.g. Calvinism, the artificially constructed and densely
populated Dutch landscape, the
political polder model, social responsibility,
commerce, and a shortage of natural resources and industries).
Social science scholars call the tendency to limit the explanation of
phenomena to the horizon of the
nation-state, “methodological nationalism”
(Amelina et al. 2012). They observe a number of
shortcomings associated
with this approach; of particular relevance to national design histories is that
the
formation of nation-states is deeply entangled with developments that
transcend national borders. From this
perspective, understanding the
development of nations and national canons—such as Dutch design—
requires taking
into account not only national dynamics but also their
connectedness with international and transnational
dynamics.
Above I referred to Dutch design as a canon. What does that mean? Here,
it refers to the artifacts, processes,
and practices that have been explicitly
construed as typically Dutch and as Design by a discourse comprising the
specialized media, national and international policies, design
criticism,
exhibitions, and historiography. In other words, in the context of this
research, the term Dutch design (as opposed to design from the Netherlands)
is a discursive
construction.2 The basic premise, then, is that neither design
nor
Dutch national identity have transcendental meanings and essences but
are products of multiple, historical, and
contingent factors. This is to imply
not that designed artifacts do not exist as material objects outside of
discourse, but that they only become examples of Dutch design once they
have been explicitly construed as such by
the canonical discourse about
Dutch design.
This chapter examines how the idea of Dutch design, as defined above,
has been constructed and reconstructed at
the intersection of national and
international interests. To do so, it focuses on the discursive construction of
the idea that there is a corpus of design practices and artifacts that represents
and materially embodies a
quintessentially Dutch national cultural identity
by Dutch international cultural policy (ICP). ICP is a form of
government
policy “aimed at the role of culture in foreign relations and the presentation
of the nation abroad”
(Minnaert 2012: 2). Being the contested remit of the
ministries responsible for Foreign Affairs and for Culture,
ICP acts as an
interface between national interests and diplomatic imperatives (Minnaert
2009), both shaping and
being shaped by developments and practices in the
Netherlands and abroad. By tracing how ICP has discursively
construed
Dutch design between 1970 and 2012, and by positioning the development
of this discourse in changing
multiple contexts, this chapter sheds light on
how the construction of the idea of Dutch design as a
fundamentally national
practice is intimately tied up with both national and transnational
developments.
 Public design as cultural diplomacy

In the Netherlands government intervention in cultural life has always been

controversial; the organization and
financing of cultural activities, including
those representing the country abroad, have historically been the
responsibility of civil society. This began changing with World War Two.
With the escalation of the Cold War,
government started regarding culture as
integral to national defence, as a “moral weapon” (Bogaarts 1992) against
the spread of communism at home and as a means to propagate Western
values abroad. So how, specifically, did
design become an object of Dutch
cultural diplomacy and a representation of Dutch democracy abroad?
The Dutch government’s increased involvement with international cultural
relations in the post-war period was
part of the rise of cultural diplomacy
between World War Two and the collapse of the Eastern Bloc in 1989.
Particularly during the Cold War, culture emerged as a powerful element of
foreign policy worldwide. As is
generally recognized, the Cold War was
largely a psychological war, where winning entailed converting foreign
peoples to the “right” political ideology by appealing to their cultural
identities. One outcome of the global
post-war revolutionary wave was that
the people now had unprecedented influence upon their governments,
meaning
that public opinion could no longer be dismissed (Coombs 1964:
11–15). This prompted governments to deploy
culture as an instrument of
foreign policy; unlike traditional forms of diplomacy that entail
communication
between governments, culture allows governments to “talk
right past foreign governments to their people in the
hope of influencing the
policies of those governments” (ibid.: 14). In this battle for hearts and minds,
it was
vital for Western countries to profile themselves as being as socially
progressive and revolutionary as their communist adversary.
Autonomous, experimental, and progressive cultural manifestations were
seen as ideal representations of Western
countries’ democratic values (Vuyk
2010). Not surprisingly, the designs promoted as Dutch to foreign audiences
were precisely those that expressed these principles. In the context of ICP, an
explicit discourse on Dutch
design emerged in the 1970s with three
government-commissioned, internationally travelling exhibitions:
Dutch
Design for the Public Sector I (1973), Dutch Design for the Public
Sector II
(1978), and Design from the Netherlands (1980).
The first two focused on the institutional design that the Dutch
government implemented in its public services.
Unlike consumer goods, the
forms of which result from competition among manufacturers for consumer
preference,
institutional design is a category over which consumers have
(basically) no influence, including trains and
metros, wayfinding, banknotes
and coins, postage stamps, street furniture, and medical equipment (Kras
1987: 30).
However, rather than providing representative overviews of
Dutch public design, the curators focused on projects
that showed
humanitarian and environmental concerns, employed innovative
technologies, humor, subjectivity, and
expressive creativity to downplay
authority. Tactile banknotes for the blind, public transport facilities and
pictograms for what the curators called minorities (according to them: the
elderly and children, the sick and
physically handicapped, immigrants and
“guest workers”) and the corporate identity program from Tel Design to
make the National Railways friendlier and more approachable (see Figure
39.1), all exemplify
the curators’ approach.
Design from the Netherlands similarly selected projects in which
creativity, autonomy, and
subjectivity took center stage; however, it mostly
focused on consumer goods manufactured as unique or in small
series. To
exhibition designer and curator Gijs Bakker (1984), modern design had
become morally bankrupt because
its aesthetics ensued from the logic of
profit maximization rather than from its use and cultural values. In
Bakker’s
view, restoring design’s social relevance required reconceptualizing design’s
functions and aesthetics
from the designer’s and the user’s perspectives,
independently of industrial and commercial considerations. Hence
Bakker’s
designation of designers working in this fashion as Fundamentalists, and his
paraphrasing of the
modernist motto as “form follows concept” (Bakker
1980: 2; 1984). Maria Hees’s jewellery made from
semi-manufactured
products, Henk Lampe’s sculptural chairs, and Bruno Ninaber van Eyben’s
products under the
motto “There can’t be less, there needn’t be more,” can
all be clearly labelled as Fundamentalist
design.3
How do the exhibitions above conceptualize the Dutchness of design?
Although they do not explicitly discusses
this, the very implicitness of this
question points to a civic understanding of Dutch identity. In the ideal of
civic nationalism (as opposed to ethnic or cultural nationalisms discussed in
the following sections), the nation
is defined in political terms, meaning that
membership of the national community is open to all those based in
Dutch
territory committed to the political principles of freedom, tolerance, and
equality regardless of one’s
ethnicity, gender, religion, or class (Muller 2008:
20). This sharply contrasts with commonplace understandings
of national
identity, which we tend to associate with a community united by ties of
blood, language, or faith.
However, under the label of Dutchness, all three
exhibitions presented designs selected not because they
supposedly
represented ethnic or cultural groups but, on the contrary,
because they
supported democratic political ideals: designs that celebrate individual
autonomy and creativity;
acknowledge all citizens as equals; and are critical
of tradition and authoritarianism. In sum, in this
articulation of Dutch design,
Dutchness is closely identified with how the West defines
itself.4
Figure
39.1 (a and b) Critical and
humorous cartoons by Gert Dumbar, working at Tel Design, for
inclusion in NS train timetables between
c. 1971 and 1977. (a) An animated
train in the form of a bird picks at the
pictograms introduced by the new
house-style designed by Tel Design for the NS. (b) An animated train
reminiscent of a dog is force fed the NS logo, also designed by Dumbar as
part of the new NS house-style. Tel
Design (Gertjan Leuvelink, Gert
Dumbar) (1978) Spoorboekje’77–’78. Nederlandse
Spoorwegen, pp. 8–9,
28–9.
Photos courtesy: Collection Het Spoorwegmuseum, Utrecht. With kind permission from Gert Dumbar,
Gertjan
Leuvelink and Tel Design.

Trade in tradition

As the 1980s drew to a close, the opposition between the “free” West and the
“totalitarian” East began to
crumble. The weapons used in ideological
warfare—in the West these were autonomous and progressive cultural
expressions, as considered above—were no longer politically necessary and
state support for them no longer
self-evident (Vuyk 2010). With neo-liberal
capitalism emerging as the dominant ideology, justification for
government
support of culture was sought in the economic sphere; culture’s economic
dimension was now what
mattered. At the same time, impending European
integration triggered soul-searching about the nature of Dutch
national
identity and its position in national and international cultural politics.
Accordingly, the 1980s
witnessed wide-ranging reforms in cultural and
international cultural policies in the Netherlands; culture not
only needed to
become financially self-supporting, it was also expected to act as “lubricant”
for economic and
political foreign relations (Brinkman 1985). Then Minister
of Culture Elco Brinkman referred to this new policy
of more aggressively
profiling the “typical” national culture abroad in support of Dutch economic
interests as
“cultural Holland Promotion” (ibid.).
Between the mid-1980s and well into the first decade of the twenty-first
century several exhibitions on Dutch
design took place in the spirit of
Holland Promotion. They were to act as a corrective for the fact that design
from the Netherlands was still relatively unknown internationally and did not
possess such a strong and clearly
identifiable national image as
Scandinavian, Italian, or German design (Visser and Rodrigo 1990). In 1987,
the
massive manifestation Holland in vorm: Dutch Design 1945–1987,
comprising six simultaneous
exhibitions, was held by five Dutch art
museums. Each focused on a type of design (institutional, engineering,
graphic, interior, jewellery, and contemporary) that together illustrated the
post-war development of the
discipline in the country. Holland in vorm was
in turn part of a larger cluster of
large-scale international cultural events
taking place in the Netherlands that year (e.g. Amsterdam European
Capital
of Culture and Design 87), the purpose of which was, according to Brinkman
(1985),
to use culture “as a calling card of a country that not only supplies
good products and services but which is
also good for enjoying a cultural
holiday.”
Two years later, a selection from Holland in vorm was compiled into an
exhibition that
toured the United States and Europe called Rietveld’s Heirs:
Contemporary Dutch Design.
Its aim was crystal clear: to create an
authoritative and well-defined image of contemporary Dutch design for
international audiences by rooting it in the lineage of well-known national
icons and traditions—incidentally, a
strategy Brinkman himself suggested as
part of Holland Promotion (ibid.). Guest curator Martin Visser explains
that
the purpose of doing so was both plainly commercial and to clearly define a
Dutch design identity so as to
protect it from dissolving into an overarching
European identity (Ouwendijk 1989). Thus, Rietveld’s Heirs showed a wide
variety of types of design, ranging from well-known classics
(such as
Rietveld’s Red-Blue Chair), high-tech
engineering projects (such as the
Delta Works, Philip’s electric appliances, and Ahrend’s office furniture), to
experimental interior and furniture design (such as Mart van Schijdel’s Delta
Vase, then
Amsterdam-based Czech Bor ˇ ek Šípek’s expressive chairs, and
Rob Eckhardt’s postmodern Pouffe
Garni). According to Visser, what unites
such wildly disparate designs is their “authentic Dutch character”
(ibid.: 17),
which he describes as “precision, reliability, discretion. Form, function and
materials represent a
solid unit, showing that the theories and imagination of
the architect Gerrit Rietveld have, still and always, a
current importance to
Dutch designers” (Visser and Rodrigo 1990).
In these exhibitions we find the first traces of a different conceptualization
of the Dutchness of design, ethnic
nationalism. The essence of ethno-
nationalism is the conception of the nation as a community of people who
share
ancestry, heritage, language, and religion (Muller 2008: 20). Here,
national identification is often expressed in
symbols and narratives of
common origin and descent. The extent to which the Dutchness of design is
articulated
in ethno-nationalist terms in Holland in vorm and Rietveld’s Heirs
is clearly expressed, both in the former’s logo, a thumbprint in the shape of
the Netherlands (see Figure 39.2), and in the rhetorical positioning of
Rietveld as a sort of Adam of Dutch
design.5 In this respect, the inclusion of
Czech designer Borˇek
Šípek as heir to Rietveld seems odd to say the least;
yet, as Walker Connor has observed, the delineation of
ethnic boundaries is
based not on objective but on subjective criteria, not on “fact” but on
“perceptions of
fact,” so that ultimately “it is not what is, but what people
believe
is that has behavioral consequences” (1994: 75 original emphasis).
The narrative of the unique ethnic origins of Dutch design was perfected
and disseminated by the foundation
company Droog Design in the 1990s.
Although Droog was not officially mandated with the international
promotion of
design from the Netherlands, it did tacitly take on this role. As
design historian Damon Taylor (2010: 438) has
shown, Droog’s co-founders,
Renny Ramakers and Gijs Bakker, argued, especially cogently in the book
Droog Design: Spirit of the Nineties, that “the products disseminated under
the Droog banner in some
way embody the Dutch national culture and
values” (Ramakers 1998). Commentators agreed that, although Droog
designs “did not necessarily have much in common” (Antonelli 1998: 14),
they were nevertheless the result of a
common “typically Dutch” (ibid.)
approach to design since they were all “firmly welded to the Dutch
mentality”
(Ramakers 1998: 30). This particularly Dutch mentality,
according to Ramakers in her contribution to the volume,
can be traced to
the experience of the densely populated and artificially made landscape, the
fight against
water, and the culture of consultation and collaboration this
gave rise to, as well as to a tradition based on
Calvinism, bourgeoisie,
tolerance, openness, and democracy. As such, Ramakers reiterates the well-
known cliché
that the Dutch environment supposedly shaped the Dutch
psyche and its cultural expressions, from De Stijl through
to Dutch design.

Dutchness as a mentality

If in the 1980s ICP had turned to the economic potential of culture, by the
turn of the twenty-first century it
started focusing on culture as the very
motor of the national economy. This heralded the rise of the creative
industries as a pillar of cultural diplomacy. In 2005 the ministries of
Economic Affairs and of Education, Culture and Science (2005: 3–4)
launched the program for the Creative
Industries to encourage cross-
fertilization between culture and commerce. A year later, the ministries of
Education, Culture and Science and of Foreign Affairs made this program
central to the new ICP. Government chose
to encourage those disciplines
with an already established international renown, “particularly where it
concerns
the collective success of a sector, such as Dutch design” (Laan and
Nicolaï 2006: 6). When the Program concluded
in 2008, the activities
collectively referred to as Dutch design were prioritized for further
development as a
specialty of the Dutch creative industries abroad (Plasterk
and Timmermans 2008).
 The logo for the
exhibition Holland in vorm was a thumbprint in the shape of the
Figure
39.2
Netherlands, an
unambiguous sign of the mobilization of an ethnic conceptualization of
Dutchness for promoting the
Netherlands. Anthon Beeke and Swip Stolk, Holland in
vorm logo (1987).
Photo courtesy: Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. With kind permission of Anthem Beeke and Swip
Stolk.

Dutch Design Fashion and Architecture (DDFA) was established as a key

instrument in the implementation of this
policy. A collaborative project
between the ministries of Education, Culture and Science, of Economic
Affairs,
and of Foreign Affairs, as well as a number of public and private
organizations between 2008 and 2012, it had a
budget of twelve million
euros to strengthen the position of the Dutch creative industries in four focus
countries: China, Germany, India, and Turkey. DDFA operated according to
four principles: disseminating abroad a
clear image of Dutch design;
reinforcing networks to facilitate exchange between Dutch designers and
local
partners; creating market opportunities in the focus countries for Dutch
creative industries; and creating
sustainable collaborations between the
design sector and governments in the Netherlands and in the focus
countries
(Staal 2010: 12).
A cornerstone of DDFA’s strategy was to market Dutch design as a
mentality and to use that as a unique selling
point for the Dutch creative
industries. As can be observed in its many projects and exhibitions, DDFA
defined
this Dutch mentality along much the same lines as Droog had. A
representative example of this is the travelling
exhibition Connecting
Concepts, a key instrument in DDFA’s “toolbox” (DDFA1). Connecting
Concepts was commissioned by Premsela: The Netherlands Institute for
Design and Fashion,
Capital D: Design Cooperation Brainport, and the
Netherlands Architecture Institute, and implemented by DDFA
(DDFA
2011). On its worldwide tour, the exhibition focused on “the mentality
behind the designs as common thread”
(Sigler et al. 2011: 49), “rather than
on the objects themselves” (Staal et al. 2012: 8). As the catalogue explains,

every square metre of [the Netherlands] has been designed at least

two times over … This may partly explain the
open minded
mentality of many Dutch creative professionals … They share a
tendency towards simplicity and
rather look for the essence of
 whatever question they want to answer, than pursue a certain
technique or style
just to be different.
(Van Hinte 2011: 14)

This definition of the Dutch design mentality clearly echoes Droog’s

definition discussed above.
However, there is a crucial difference in how this typically Dutch
mentality was mobilized by Droog and DDFA.
While the former held that
the Dutch mentality was something one inherited, in the latter
it is
articulated as something that can be learned and assimilated.
Integral to the
exhibition concept was the inclusion of local designs, at each stop, that
supposedly displayed a
similar approach to design. For example, the
exhibition in Istanbul was complemented with work by Turkish
jewellery
designer Burcu Büyükünal and architect Emre Arolat, while German
designer Stefan Diez’s Chassis Chair was added in Berlin (DDFA2;
DDFA3). This not only
means that works by designers who had been born,
raised, trained, or were professionally based in foreign
countries were
included as examples of Dutch design, but also that the composition of the
exhibition—and thus
also of Dutch design—literally mutated as it migrated
from one location to the next.
To understand the seemingly counterintuitive logic behind this, one must
keep in mind DDFA’s policy of
strengthening Dutch design’s international
market position by connecting it with urgent local needs in the four
focus
countries. Unlike former iterations of ICP that aimed to export Dutch design
off-the-peg, DDFA sought
instead to co-create Dutch design with local
partners, customizing it according to “topical issues and local
demands”
(DDFA 2011). Hence, the aim of the exhibition was not so much to sell the
products on show as to
function as a platform for dialogue between Dutch
designers and potential local clients. The inclusion of local
designs in the
exhibition can thus be interpreted as a means to highlight commonalities
between Dutch and local
cultures and, as such, to facilitate doing business.
This change in the conceptualization of Dutch design mentality from
something that must be inherited to something
that can be learned attests to a
more dynamic concept of national identity when compared with civic and
ethnic
nationalisms. In cultural nationalism, the nation is defined in terms of
“a common encompassing culture” (Nielsen
1999: 125). In principle this
implies a notion of the national community as open to anyone willing to
assimilate
the culture in question—irrespective of one’s ancestry, political
affiliation, or geographical location. As I
read it, this notion thus offers a
model with which to conceptualize the mobility and mobilization of national
culture in times of globalization. It encapsulates both processes of
deterritorialization—which happen as
traditional ties between culture and
place are weakened and, in this case, Dutch design objects, subjects, and
identities previously contained within territorial borders start transcending
them—and processes of
reterritorialization—where people from other
localities start appropriating and relocalizing Dutch design,
thereby
producing hybrid cultural formations. Both processes are clearly at play in
the exhibition Connecting Concepts.

Conclusion: towards a hybrid Dutchness?

Since DDFA’s conclusion in 2012, Dutch ICP has increasingly moved

towards implementing its goals in collaboration
with partners abroad. The
ministries of Education, Culture and Science and of Foreign Affairs
commissioned the
Creative Industries Fund NL to implement the Creative
Industries Internationalization Programme 2013–16. The aim
of the fund is
to couple Dutch supply with international demand (Stimuleringsfonds
Creatieve Industrie). As local
partners gain a more prominent and decisive
role in the concrete implementation of Dutch ICP, they gain more
leverage in
pushing forward their interests and more scope to counteract or redirect
ICP’s nationalist agenda.
Perhaps this means that Dutch design will continue
to become increasingly hybrid, dynamic, and open.
However, all is not exactly well. Reflecting on DDFA’s run, then-
Programme Director Christine de Baan urged Dutch
designers to not

forget that there is an element of truth [in the s]tereotypical

perceptions of the Netherlands abroad … [Hence]
designers from
the Netherlands should not fear their own Dutchness nor
their
country’s assets … Embrace the cliché … This is who we are and
what we are capable of. We have to want to
be strong in areas in
which we are already strong in order to contribute to the most urgent
social problems of
today.
(DDFA1: word order modified for ease of reading)
A clear-cut national brand is an asset in the international cultural market, as
it differentiates between and
adds value to otherwise often indistinguishable
products and services. So paradoxically, concurrently with the
increasing
global reach of Dutch design there is a petrification of its core identity
narrative into one that
largely corresponds with the closed Dutchness of
ethno-nationalism.
We should not forget that, ultimately, the aim of ICP is not to promote
Dutch mentality for its own sake, but to
strengthen the Netherlands’ cultural,
political, and economic positions. So it remains to be seen in which
direction
the Dutchness of design will go, both in principle and in practice.
This chapter has sought to explore changes in the conceptualization of
Dutch design, and how these changes came
about in the context of ICP.
Shifting the scope of the research from national contexts to the intersection
of
national and transnational dynamics has revealed how the construction of
the idea of Dutch design as a
quintessentially national practice has been
closely implicated with dynamics that go far beyond the borders of
the
nation-state. In the case of Dutch design, this perspective has proved useful
to transcend methodological
nationalism and dominant but traditional
interpretations of Dutch design. As such it also hopes to contribute to
the
ongoiang debate on the position of national design history generally, as it
seeks to come to terms with
globalization.

Acknowledgments

This research has been financed by the Netherlands Organisation for

Scientific Research (NWO) program Mosaic. All
translations are the
author’s. Parts of this chapter have been published previously in: Meroz
2016 (forthcoming),
Ozorio de Almeida Meroz 2014a, 2014b, and Ozorio de
Almeida Meroz and Griffin 2012. Many thanks to the editors,
Jan Warndorff,
Timo de Rijk, and Javier Gimeno Martínez for their comments on earlier
drafts of this chapter, and
to Ilse Koks for editing the images.

Notes

1 This categorization is inspired by, even if it departs from,

Livia Rezende’s (2014) distinction
between Design in Brazil, Design from Brazil, and Design for Brazil.
2 This definition of Dutch design as a discursive construction is
informed by Kjetil Fallan’s (2012)
distinction between Scandinavian Design as an actor’s category and
Scandinavian design as an
analytical category.
3 There were, however, inconsistencies between the curatorial
premises and the selection of
artifacts, which also included commercial, industrially produced items (Hompe 2011;
Ozorio de
Almeida Meroz 2014b).
4 This is how civic nationalisms is defined in principle;
however, Kai Nielsen (1999: 127)
convincingly argues that civic nationalisms, as all other forms of nationalism,
“are cultural
nationalisms of one kind or another. There is no purely
political conception of the nation, liberal or
otherwise.”
5 In an interview with the author, designers of the logo Anthon
Beeke and Swip Stolk (2015)
explained that it was absolutely not their intention to portray the Netherlands in
such ethno-
nationalist terms.

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 40

THE STAGING OF INDIAN

NATIONAL IDENTITY THROUGH
EXHIBITIONS, 1850 TO 1947
Tanishka Kachru
 
 

Introduction

This chapter considers the construction of a national identity for colonial

India through the staging of
exhibitions in India and Britain from 1850 to
1947. It looks at the use of exhibitions as part of the process of
constructing
an Indian national identity under imperial rule. The first part looks at the
staging of colonial
exhibitions and coronation durbars developed in the
second half of the nineteenth century by the British
colonialists to create
popular support for colonial empires. The colonial exhibition provided a
controlled space
where objects and people were arranged to generate a
narrative of empire that sought to justify the merit of
empire through the
presentation and arrangement of objects and people in a certain choice of
settings. Saloni
Mathur has analyzed the mechanisms of social control
behind the spectacle of the colonial exhibitions held in
Britain (Mathur
2007). Around the same time colonial exhibitions started to be staged in
India as well, and a set
of exhibitions of Indian art accompanied each of the
three Delhi coronation durbars in 1877, 1903, and 1911,
where the grandest
spectacles of the British Empire were staged. It was before the 1903 Delhi
durbar that Indian
nationalists retaliated by staging a competing exhibition of
Indian art at the opening of the eighteenth Indian
National Congress (INC) in
Ahmedabad. E. B. Havell, an art educator and historian, noted at the time
that the
Congress exhibitions provoked the colonial administration’s fears
that industrial development would be given a
political purpose by the
nationalists (Havell 1907: 59).
The early twentieth century saw the dramatic rise of an anti-colonial
movement against the British colonial
government in India. It took shape in
the heart of its administrative center at Calcutta and was made visible
with
the rise of nationalist newspapers that debated the policies and critiqued the
decisions of the British
colonial government. The decision of the colonial
government to partition the eastern state of Bengal in 1905 was
a turning
point that led to a change in how the British were perceived in the country. It
fueled the Swadeshi
movement which took shape around Calcutta, the
colonial capital built by the British in the state of Bengal.1 The movement’s
call to boycott British goods was complemented by the promotion of locally
made goods, including those produced
industrially. This search for an
indigenous modernity was carried out intensely in the field of art education
at
the art school, Kala Bhavan, with prominent Bengal School artist
Nandalal Bose as teacher.2 The art school was part of the experimental
Visva-Bharati University,
located in Shantiniketan, in the countryside
outside Calcutta, founded in 1919 by Rabindranath Tagore. This is
the same
year in which Walter Gropius founded the Bauhaus in Weimar and art
historian R. Siva Kumar goes as far
as to suggest that they both developed
similar approaches to art education which encouraged the use of craft
(Siva
Kumar 2012). In 1936 M. K. Gandhi, the leading figure of the nationalist
movement, invited Nandalal Bose to
contribute to the design of exhibitions
held during the Congress conference. It seems that artists and designers,
especially those from Shantiniketan, were actively involved in the process of
constructing a counter-narrative
through the Congress exhibitions. This
chapter examines a number of questions that arose in response to the
Congress exhibitions. Did they aim to construct a competing vision, or to
show an entirely different story
through objects on display that supported the
idea of India as an independent nation? Did the counter-exhibition
by Indian
nationalists become a moment for exploring Indian nationalist identity
formation under imperial rule?
And in what way did the interactions
between the local and the global that took place through the exhibitions
affect colonial nationalism and its global perception?

Imagined communities
Benedict Anderson’s concept of “imagined communities” (Anderson 1991)
is useful when looking at the rise of
nationalism as witnessed in these
exhibitions. Anderson coined the term specifically to talk about nationalism
and believes that a nation is a socially constructed community, imagined by
people who perceive themselves as
part of that group. He defined a nation as
“an imagined political community—and imagined as both inherently
limited
and sovereign.” We can use this concept to understand the competing images
of nationhood created by these
exhibitions. According to Anderson, the
creation of imagined communities became possible because of “print
capitalism.” Capitalist entrepreneurs printed their books and media in the
vernacular (instead of exclusive
script languages, such as Latin) to maximize
circulation. As a corollary, exhibitions also used print and other
media that
would bring together audiences with vernacular perspectives to become part
of a common discourse, as
expressed in the overall narrative of the
exhibition.

Colonial exhibitions and coronation durbars

Towards the end of the nineteenth century a type of international exhibition,

known as a colonial exhibition, was
developed with the intention of
improving trade and creating popular support for expanding colonial
empires. At
the same time, in India, the largest and richest colony of the
British Empire, exhibitions of Indian art
complemented each of the Delhi
coronation durbars in 1877, 1903, and 1911, where the grandest spectacles
of the
Empire were staged. The intention of these exhibitions accompanying
the durbars and the colonial exhibitions staged in Europe were clearly
linked, as is evident from the fact
that the art exhibition held by Lord Lytton
during the 1877 Delhi durbar became the basis for the India section
at the
Paris International Exposition of the following year. As we will see, the
durbar exhibitions were not the
only colonial exhibitions to be held in India.
One of the earliest colonial exhibitions was the 1886 Colonial and Indian
Exhibition held
in a collection of purpose-built buildings designed in an
Indian style in South Kensington, London. The
exhibition was opened by
Queen Victoria on May 4, 1886 and is recorded to have attracted over five
million
visitors. The exhibition provided a controlled space in which objects
and people were arranged to generate a
narrative of empire that sought to
justify its merits through the presentation and arrangement of objects and
people in a certain choice of settings. Saloni Mathur analyzes the “visible
ethnological display of native
artisans staged in this exhibition” in her book
India by Design: Colonial History and Cultural
Display (2007). Large-scale
illustrative representations of colonial landscapes and maps of the world in
the
exhibition space (see Figure 40.1) were used to reinforce the power of
the British Empire
and “although the stated objective included the ‘industrial
development’ of the colonies, industrial machinery
was de-emphasized and
use of newer production methods discouraged” (Chattopadhyay 1997, 2).
Reminiscing about the
1886 Exhibition, Frank Cundall wrote that the
sparseness of machinery was partly due to

the fact that the colonies, still trust, in great measure, to the mother
country to make finished articles of
their raw produce. The necessity
of displaying the wealth of the colonies and their lack of modern
technological expertise had to be emphasized in the exhibitions.
(Cundall 1886: 2)

One remnant of the Indian-style setting of this exhibition is the Jaipur gate
now installed in a park in
Brighton. Although carved and assembled by
Indian craftsmen, the gate is a hybrid construction designed by two
Englishmen, Colonel Samuel Swinton Jacob and Surgeon-Major Thomas
Holbein Hendley, combining elements found in
Mughal and Rajput
buildings of India. The gate marked the entry to the Rajputana (now the state
of Rajasthan)
section of the exhibition. It bears inscriptions in Sanskrit,
Latin, and English. The inscription on the front is
the motto of the Maharajas
of Jaipur, who paid for the making of the gate: “where virtue is, there is
victory.”
The Latin inscription on the back reads “from the east comes light.”
This kind of hybrid design was not endorsed
by many colonialists. A few
years before the Colonial and Indian Exhibition, an economic and industrial
exhibition was held in Jaipur in January and February 1883. The exhibition
was documented in a publication titled
Memorials of the Jeypore Exhibition
1883 by Major Prideaux, British resident in the
princely state of Jaipur and
chairman of the exhibition committee. In it he states that the purpose of the
exhibition was to instruct and amuse the common people; to present to the
craftsman selected examples of the best
artwork in India, in the hope that
they would profit thereby; to bring together specimens of local manufacture,
so that strangers could see what could be obtained in their neighborhood;
and to form a collection of raw produce
of the state and surrounding districts
so that the native government might benefit from the natural resources of
the
country (Prideaux 1883).
Figure
40.1 Frontispiece from the
Art Journal regarding the Colonial and Indian Exhibition of 1886.
The entrance to the
exhibition is dominated by a large-scale map of the world showing
British colonies. Print. London, England,
1886.

© Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

Along with photographs taken by students from the technical school in

Rurki (now Roorkee), and hand-painted
drawings of objects on display, he
also added to this publication some hybrid designs as examples of what he
thought should be avoided since, he claimed, “what mischief has already
been done by contact between Oriental and
European art” (ibid.). The hybrid
design of the Jaipur gate made for the 1886 exhibition in Britain shows that,
only a few years later, not much heed was paid to the cautionary advice
issued by Major Prideaux. Like the later
1886 exhibition the setting of the
Jaipur exhibition was specially constructed for the purpose in the style of a
large Indian palace. The most valuable exhibits included the jewels and
silver table of the Maharaja of Alwar,
which were displayed inside a great
hall with gas chandeliers. Also on display were copies of paintings from the
Ajanta frescoes, walls hung with old carpets or reproductions made in prison
factories, and objects loaned by the
Viceroy and other Rajputana chiefs. The
exhibition was showcased in the first issue of the Journal of Indian Art and
Industry, edited by colonial art educator John Lockwood Kipling, and its
popularity can be gauged by the fact that a quarter of a million people were
reported to have attended. The
overtly stated purpose of both the exhibition
and the journal (Kipling 1884) was to create demand by shaping the
tastes of
consumers and producers and to facilitate the supply of Indian art goods
through commercial trade
agencies. The 1883 exhibition in Jaipur can be
seen as an attempt to show the best artwork of India, while
finding ways of
converting this into an economic opportunity for the colonial empire. It can
also be seen as an
early manifestation of the preservationist tone which a
section of the colonial administrators influenced by the
British Arts and
Crafts movement continued to use in referring to Indian handicrafts.
The coronation durbars can also be seen as a hybrid form based on feudal
traditions of paying homage to the
strongest ruler by acknowledging their
authority. The British colonial government used the durbars to legitimize
their rule in the form of cultural continuity based on tradition, and to
manufacture the myth of Britain being
the natural inheritor of the Mughal
legacy. All three durbars were therefore held in Delhi, the historic capital
of
the Mughal Empire. The first durbar was held twenty years after the end of
the Mughal Empire and the formal
transfer of power from the East India
Company to the British government. Organized by Lord Lytton, its purpose
was to formally announce the elevation of Queen Victoria as the Empress of
India. George Birdwood’s Handbook (1878: 59) provides one of the earliest
critiques of the declining state of handicrafts in
India, for which he holds
British commercialism and negligent government policy responsible. Lord
Lytton himself
was a medievalist and insisted that, for the durbar, no Indian
decorations or images be used that would deviate
from the theme of
medievalism (Codell 2012: 21–2). The 1904 coronation durbar included the
Exhibition of Indian
Arts directed by Sir George Watt who held the post of
reporter on economics products to the British colonial
government. The
exhibition building erected in Kudsia Bagh was called ajaibghar by the
“natives.” A letter to the local governments in March 1902 instructed, “The
main test to be applied in each case
will be that of artistic merit, the
handicrafts selected being those that have already attained a certain pitch
of
proficiency and are capable of further development” (see Mann 2011).
The exhibition building was a hall two-hundred-and-twenty by eighty feet,
with four rooms assigned for special
exhibitions given to the Schools of Art
in Madras, Bombay, the Punjab, and Burma. In an outer verandah craftsmen
demonstrated brocade weaving, carpet making, silk dyeing, calico printing,
wood carving, and so on. In this way
the exhibition space included both the
traditional arts and the results of British art education in India. Viceroy
Curzon, in his speech for the opening of the exhibition, detailed his
three
conditions for the exhibition:

1. I did not mean this to be an industrial or economic exhibition. I

meant it to be an arts exhibition and that
only, 2. I would not have
anything European or quasi-European in it, 3. I would only have the
best. I did not
want cheap cottons and wax-cloths, vulgar lacquer,
trinkets and tinsel, brass goods and bowls made to order in
Birmingham.
(cited in Wheeler 1904: 87–93)

Curzon used the 1903 coronation durbar as a stage for countering the
“cheap” version of Indian manufactures seen
in the Congress exhibition by
exhibiting only the “best” traditional handicrafts. At the same time, by
referring
to the purity of the style, he was also creating a patriotic narrative
for the purpose of the exhibition as the
true representative of Indian art
unsullied by European influence. Unlike the first two durbars, the durbar of
1911 has the distinction of being the only one in which a British monarch,
King George V, was present in person,
along with his consort, Queen Mary.
The program of the visit to India shows that they attended an exhibition in
Bombay before proceeding to Delhi for the durbar. The durbar consisted of a
constructed landscape of camps,
gardens, modern roads, and processions,
each showcasing the art and architecture of the princely states. It was
like a
mini-tour of India, as remarked upon by some of the visitors, and, as noted
by Nicola Thomas, by
presenting all of India as an exhibition it paralleled
international exhibition spaces (Thomas 1996).

The Congress exhibitions

In the beginning of the twentieth century Indian nationalists retaliated by

staging competing exhibitions of
Indian art that contributed to the shaping of
Indian colonial identity on the global stage. While exhibitions are
known to
have been a part of the Congress meetings, it was in response to Lord
Curzon’s plans for the durbar of
1903 that Indian nationalists retaliated by
staging a competing exhibition of Indian art at the opening of the
eighteenth
INC in the western city of Ahmedabad, about a month before the durbar
exhibition. The Congress in
Ahmedabad took place just as the larger region
of Gujarat, severely hit by two successive droughts around 1900,
was
recovering from the devastation of famine. The Industrial Exhibition
Committee for the Congress collected
exhibits, through agents, from all over
Gujarat and the Kathyawar region. The tasks involved in setting up the
exhibition were held up as an example of the Congress’s ability for efficient
organization by one of the
functionaries:

the registration of exhibits, their classification and arrangement,

their watch and care, and all other details
contributory to a good and
well-ordered show, had to be carefully considered. The erection of
the necessary
pavilion and its internal arrangements were also a
source of much consideration … the exhibition pavilion in
its
simplicity was a thing of joy and beauty and many were the
encomiums passed on to the designer of the
structure.
(Zaidi and Zaidi 1978: 284–6)
 Although the designer of the structure is not identified it is interesting to
note that the “simplicity” of the
exhibition pavilion is held up as a laudable
virtue. To counter the attraction of the “great scenic pageant at
Delhi—the
Durbar and the Arts Exhibition” the Congress opened the exhibition on
December 15, earlier than the
usual practice of December 26 that had been
followed until then. These attempts to see the exhibition as a binary
in its
conception, design, and representation of Indian art and craft is in keeping
with how nationalism in
colonial India at that time defined itself primarily in
terms of its opposition to western imperialism. The
Congress exhibition was
inaugurated by the Gaekwar ruler of the princely state of Baroda amidst a
gathering of a
huge crowd that greeted him on the streets. In his speech
Congress leader Perozshah Mehta praised the Maharaja
and also thanked the
Commissioner for the active cooperation and support he had given to the
exhibition. The
Maharaja of Baroda, a well-traveled man, had recently
witnessed the Paris Exposition, which he described as a
summing up of the
“progress of a century of civilization, industry and commerce” (ibid.: 291–
2). The Congress
president also noted, “the Industrial Exhibition has come to
be regarded as a necessary adjunct of the National
Congress … it may still
further stimulate the industries of this great town” (ibid.: 335). While the
Congress
exhibition sought to create a contrast to the grand spectacle of the
coronation durbar through its simplicity, it
nevertheless aspired to replicate
the organization and spatial arrangements of the colonial and international
exhibitions. On the one hand the anti-colonialists used the exhibition to
identify themselves with simplicity and
industrial progress, while on the
other hand they used it to establish the Congress’s legitimacy as a national
party that could work efficiently to produce results and work with the
cooperation of the colonial government.
The nineteenth Congress was held in Madras from December 28 to 30,
1903, and, as in Ahmedabad, the Industrial
Exhibition preceded it. C.
Sankaran Nair (President of the Amraoti Congress) welcomed the Maharaja
of Mysore, who
opened it in a spacious amphitheater specially constructed in
the Spring Gardens, Teynampet. It was a year of
unusually heavy rains in
Madras and, although the work was slow, a pavilion to contain the exhibits
was
constructed by a graduate of the university. At the opening Nair spoke
of the objective of the exhibition, “to
evoke the interest of the
representatives of the educated classes from all parts of India and induce
them to take
such action as lay in their power to further industrial progress.”
The exhibitions became a regular annual
feature and the next Congress, held
in Bombay from December 28 to 31, 1904, met in a large pavilion on a
crescent
site in the colonial center of the city, with the Industrial Exhibition
opened by Lord Lamington. It also
included a ladies’ section opened by
Lady Lamington, indicating an expansion in the scope of the exhibition. It
was in 1904 when nationalist historian R. C. Dutt’s classic treatise on the
colonial economy, The Economic History of India, was published and it
greatly influenced the Swadeshi campaign in
Bengal to boycott British
goods and promote indigenous products. Dutt was an administrator and
scholar and in
1904 he became a minister in Baroda State. He presided over
the Lucknow session of the INC and the first Indian
Industrial Conference at
Benares in 1905. In the welcome address for the opening of the twenty-
second session of
the Congress in Calcutta, from December 26 to 29, 1906,
Rash Behary Ghose exhorted,

If you want to know what progress we have made, come with me to

the exhibition on the other side of the street,
which I hope you have
not boycotted, and I will show you what this
movement, the
implication of which with politics is a mere accident in Bengal from
which some of us would
gladly dissociate it, has already done for us.
A visit to it, I am sure, will fill the heart of every one of
you with
hope and gladness; for in Swadeshism you see the cradle of a new
India … it
found expression in the Industrial and Agricultural
Exhibition held under the auspices of the National Congress
in
Calcutta in 1901.

The same year, Rai Bahadur Lala Baij Nath, writing in the Times of India in
1906 about
ways of promoting Swadeshi, said:

Exhibitions and shows both agricultural and industrial should be

annually held in each district like what we
have in parts of the
United Provinces. Provincial exhibitions on larger scales for the
display of Indian
manufactures and practical demonstrations as to
how each of them can be improved should also be held every
year.
The all India exhibition held with the Congress every year may be
made more useful by paying attention to
showing better methods of
production by practical demonstrations of various classes of goods
made in different
parts of the country.
These speeches indicate that, within the space of a few years, exhibitions
came to be viewed by the nationalists
as a way of visibly spreading the
ideology of Swadeshi, as well as a useful way of promoting indigenous
industrialization in far-flung provinces.
While the Congress exhibitions gradually went from being presented as a
contrast to coronation durbars, to being
viewed as important vehicles for the
spread of Swadeshi ideology, some nationalists questioned the practical
impact of the exhibitions on the economy. V. Krishnaswamy Iyer, writing in
the Indian
Review in 1905, said,

The exhibitions that have been held in connection with the congress
have been admirable from a spectacular
point of view, but it is
doubtful if they have yet produced any important results except in
drawing attention
to the resources of the country in the industrial
line and to the possibilities of the future … many a
commodity
suited to the tastes and habits of different parts of the country
languishes in the home of
production for the want of middlemen, the
commercial agents and the elaborate devices of advertisement that
will bring it into close relation with markets of demand. The
exhibitions may be supposed to have done some
work in this
direction.

Five years later, at the fifth Industrial Conference in Allahabad in 1910,

Ananda K. Coomaraswamy also produced a
strong critique of Swadeshi,
seen as a way of “erecting factories for naturalising European manufactures”
(Coomaraswamy 1994) that were devaluing local industries by popularizing
imitations of European goods. By this
time, while the promotion of
Swadeshi was seen as a prime objective of the exhibitions, clear doubts were
being
raised about the ability of Swadeshi goods to meet the demands of
consumption and whether Swadeshi was being used
to truly promote
indigenous arts and crafts or was simply imitating western products.

Congress exhibitions and the role of Shantiniketan artist-

designers

By 1915 M. K. Gandhi had become the leading figure of the Indian National
Congress and had begun spreading his
ideas on human dignity and freedom
through his writings in the nationalist publications Young
India and
Navjivan. Rabindranath Tagore believed art should have robust contact with
daily life and the environment at large, but did not share Gandhi’s attitude
toward active politics and
disrupting the traditional caste-based hierarchies.
Partha Mitter believes Tagore may have been partly influenced
by his 1916
visit to Japan, where he saw Japanese artists as keen observers of nature and
designers of functional
objects (Mitter 2007: 65–6). Teachers and students at
Kala Bhavan were encouraged to use craft to re-connect to
traditional visual
culture. R. Siva Kumar proposes that they were not just artists but also
“designers of various
kinds, interested in functional designing and
communication” (Siva Kumar 2012), including books, stage design,
costumes, textiles, furnishings, and shaping public spaces. Nandalal Bose
was deeply influenced by Gandhi’s
Non-Cooperation Movement and took up
the spinning wheel, as Gandhi exhorted all Indians to do, as a path to
self-
reliance. Partha Mitter suggests that Nandalal Bose also believed in Gandhi’s
ideas of equality and
described his “artistic nationalism” (Mitter 2007: 81) as
an attempt to bridge the gap between Tagore’s and
Gandhi’s ideas. M. K.
Gandhi visited Shantiniketan in 1922 and saw the work being done through
the rural
reconstruction program at the university. In 1935 Gandhi formed
the Village Industries Association to revive the
indigenous arts and crafts
that sustained much of rural India, his political power base. In an attempt to
educate
the largely city-bred Congress leaders about indigenous art Gandhi
decided to hold an exhibition of Khadi
(hand-spun cloth) and village
industries at the 1936 annual conference in Lucknow. He invited Nandalal
Bose to
design this exhibition for the Lucknow Congress. In his speech at
the exhibition Gandhi praised Nandalal’s
efforts in bringing to life the local
villagers’ crafts through the use of simple artistic symbols. Then, for the
Congress session in 1937 at rural Faizpur he gave Nandalal the ambitious
task of designing an entire township
with economic, local materials to house
the delegates.
In 1938 the Congress was to be held in Haripura and again Gandhi asked
Nandalal to organize the exhibition, this
time in a way that would allow the
local villagers to look at the exhibits as they went about their work.
Nandalal
responded to this brief by preparing four hundred posters (wall panels) at
Kala Bhavan, of which he
personally produced eighty-one. He adopted a
folk style for this purpose, which he was not very fond of
otherwise, and
embarked on a study of local villagers to achieve an authentic representation
of rural life and
work. Cobblers, carpenters, drummers, barbers, and nursing
mothers were framed by scalloped-arches hinting at a
shared Hindu–Muslim
heritage. Gandhi held this up as an example of the moral purpose of art and
asked delegates
to study the exhibition carefully. Gandhi’s thoughts on the
moral purpose of art are known to have affected
Nandalal Bose and some of
this influence can be seen in his works at Shantiniketan.
Despite his self-professed disdain for art, Gandhi involved artists and
designers for political purposes in the
Congress exhibitions. The scale of the
annual meetings grew to require entire townships to be constructed, much
like the camps that accompanied the durbars, but these were made with
cheap local materials such as mud, bamboo,
and straw. Their simplicity and
economy is in direct contrast to the pomp and splendor of the colonial
durbars. Locating the Congress exhibitions in rural landscapes in a way that
connects to the environment also constructed a counter-narrative of the
moral purpose of local art and craft.
This construction of a self-sufficient
economy through the exhibition of Khadi and village industries, which
Gandhi attempted to use to support the idea of India as an independent
nation, was in direct contrast to the
representation of Indian art and craft as a
desirable commodity for trade in the colonial economy. Gandhi’s
mobilization of artist-designers who were trained in the formal language of
art to represent rural India suggests
that he was attempting to counter the
colonial vision of India given to the world and the colonized elite of
India.
The later Congress exhibitions can also be seen as attempts to create an
alternative vision of India that
could be shared by anti-colonialists, including
city-bred Congress leaders and simple rural folk. This shared
imagination
was fueled by the exhibitions in a tangible, experiential manner to become
part of a common discourse
that was expressed in the narrative of the
exhibitions.

Conclusion

The Congress exhibitions can be seen as part of the growth of economic

nationalism and as a blueprint for
economic revival. Congress leaders such
as Dadabhai Naoroji, M. G. Ranade, and R. C. Dutt, all of them
intellectual
children of British colonial education, provided the ideology for the growth
of economic nationalism
which informed the ideology of Swadeshi. They
were trying to counter the view that British rule had brought
untold
economic blessings to the country and that economic conditions were better
in comparison with earlier
periods of indigenous rule. The exhibitions were
also a way of attracting capital to establish indigenous
industries,
highlighting the new skills and methods required for industrial production,
and were seen as a way of
inspiring and disseminating local innovations.
While the counter-exhibition of 1902 tried to construct a
different story of
Indian art and crafts, it became a moment for the formation of an Indian
nationalist identity
that went against the grand colonial narrative. The later
exhibitions were mobilized by Gandhi’s politics to
create a shared vision for
a reconstruction of the economy through traditional arts and crafts. The
question of
the impact of the colonial and the Congress exhibitions on the
global perception of colonial nationalism can be
thought of as aspects of the
same reality which, according to Ania Loomba, helped reposition each in
more nuanced
ways (Loomba 1998: 209). With political action becoming
more widespread in the 1940s, and the Congress becoming
fractious leading
up to independence in 1947, the focus on exhibitions disappeared until the
need to represent
the newly formed nation re-emerged in the second half of
the twentieth century.

Notes

1 Swadeshi movement: a national movement that arose in reaction

to the Partition of Bengal in
1905; at the economic level this involved the boycott of British imports.
2 Bengal School: Rabanindranath Tagore and his circle of artists
in Calcutta formed the Bengal
School in the midst of the anti-colonial Swadeshi movement and announced it as the
new Indian
art in 1905. The question of national regeneration and the recovery of traditional roots was
important
to this group as they re-defined the “self-image” of the Indian artist.

References

Anderson, Benedict R. (1991) Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of
Nationalism, London, Verso.
Birdwood, George (1878) Handbook to the British Indian Section, Paris Universal Exhibition of
1878,
London and Paris, Offices of the Royal Commission.
Chattopadhyay, Swati (1997) “A Critical History of Architecture in a Post-Colonial World: A View
from Indian
History,” Architronic, Volume 6, Number 1, May, 2. Available at
http://corbu2.caed.kent.edu/architronic/v6n1/v6n1.05b.html, accessed on April 10,
2015.
Codell, Julie (2012) “Photography and the Delhi Coronation Durbars: 1877, 1903, 1911” in Julie
Codell (ed.)
Power and Resistance: The Delhi Coronation Durbars, New Delhi, Mapin: 20–1.
Coomaraswamy, Ananda K. (1994) Art and Swadeshi, New Delhi, Munshiram Manoharlal.
Cundall, Frank (ed.) (1886) Reminiscences of the Colonial and Indian Exhibition, London,
William
Clowes & Sons.
Dutt, R.C. (1956 [1904]) The Economic History of India in the Victorian Age from the
Accession of
Queen Victoria in 1837 to the Commencement of the Twentieth Century, London, Routledge &
Kegan Paul.
Havell, Ernest Binfield (1907) Indian Art, Industry and Education, Madras, G.A. Nateson
& Co.
Kipling, John Lockwood (ed.) (1884) Journal of Indian Art, Volume 1, Number 1: iii–iv.
Loomba, Ania (1998) Colonialism/Postcolonialism, London, Routledge.
Mann, Michael (2011) “Art, Artefacts and Architecture: Lord Curzon, the Delhi Arts Exhibition of
1902–03 and
the Improvement of India’s Aesthetics” in Carey A. Watt and Michael Mann (eds)
Civilizing
Missions in Colonial and Postcolonial South Asia From Improvement to Development,
London, Anthem Press:
65–90.
Mathur, Saloni (2007) India by Design: Colonial History and Cultural Display, Berkeley,
Los Angeles
and London, University of California Press.
Mitter, Partha (2007) The Triumph of Modernism: India’s Artists and the Avant-Garde,
1922–1947,
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 41

EXHIBITING INDEPENDENT INDIA

Textiles and Ornamental Arts at the Museum of
Modern
Art in New York
Elise Hodson
 
 
As design history expands beyond the study of Western subjects, there is a
risk that Western narratives and
methodologies will continue to dominate
(Margolin 2005). New histories will be told about previously ignored
parts
of the globe, but always relative to a Western worldview—an “advanced”
and “modern” West as “silent
referent” for an “underdeveloped” East
(Chakrabarty 2000: 28). Museums, representative of a long Western
tradition of classification and the display of Others, are also criticized for
imposing one-sided, authoritative
versions of history with little room for
debate or discussion. Furthermore, histories of museums often focus on
the
institutions, ignoring the agency of external contributors. Rarely do
accounts of exhibitions present the
views of those on display or investigate
the roles and motivations of those who lend objects or facilitate
exhibition
development. However, in the case of Textiles and Ornamental Arts of
India, an
exhibition that took place at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA)
in New York in 1955, the archives provide a glimpse
into a dynamic,
transnational exchange, illustrating the extent to which Indian
organizations, academics, and
collectors influenced the curation and
presentation. The archives make it possible not only to evaluate the final
exhibition and catalogue, but also to trace the global discussions that led up
to them. American and Indian media
coverage recorded how the exhibition
was received and the impact it made on American taste, fashion, and
commerce, with immediate implications for the Indian export market. These
sources contribute to a more complete
picture of the exhibition, and reveal
tensions specific to that moment and to the US–India relationship, tensions
between the modern and traditional, progress and preservation,
industrialization and the hand made, art and
commerce, design and craft,
colonial and post-colonial, socialist and democratic, East and West.
Duanfang Lu
(2011) questions whether it is possible to move beyond this
type of binary opposition in the context of Third
World modernism to
acknowledge that Western narratives represent only one experience. Indeed,
Textiles and Ornamental Arts illustrates that the concept of modernity was
shifting in mid-century
India, where nation-building and modernization
efforts did not follow the Western-prescribed
trajectory.
Billed as a “large-scaled esthetic communication,” Textiles and
Ornamental Arts was far
more than a cultural and academic exercise
(MoMA Archives [a]). As the first major museum exhibition of Indian
textiles and handicrafts in the US after 1947, the event helped to solidify
images of the newly independent
country in the minds of designers, visitors,
and press, and acted as a vehicle for American and Indian organizers
to
achieve their own political and economic goals. From the American
perspective Textiles and
Ornamental Arts was intended to have political
impact and should be considered within the context of
advancing post-
World War II American interests, and the growing role of culture in
American diplomacy. In 1952
MoMA launched its International Program
“with the aim of promoting greater international understanding and mutual
respect” (Elderfield 1995: 8–9; Franc 1995: 109). MoMA exhibitions
became tools for foreign policy, targeting
places at risk of conflict with the
United States, including China, Russia, and South America. From 1954 to
1955
MoMA curated no fewer than four exhibitions about Japan.
When it came to India, MoMA’s political directive was clear. The curator,
Edgar Kaufmann Jr. (1910–89), wrote on
his preliminary trip to India that:

The purpose of the enterprise was to improve Indian–U.S. relations

by displaying in our country works of
artistry and splendor that
would arouse enthusiastic public approval of Indian
accomplishments. This purpose
was part and parcel of the
Museum’s program of international artistic exchange, newly begun;
and took its point
from the urgency with which India today,
independent and industrially burgeoning, was being courted by both
parties in the cold contest of world-influence—the U.S. and Russia;
 Russia being in fact and psychologically
the nearer neighbor to
India.
(MoMA Archives [b])

Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru (1889–1964) had visited the United States
in 1949, 1956, and 1961, but his 1955
trip to Moscow was considered far
more fruitful in terms of building alliances (Tharoor 2003). That year, just
as
Textiles and Ornamental Arts opened in New York, Asian and African
countries convened at
the Bandung Conference in Indonesia to discuss an
end to colonialism and to unite around Nehru’s idea of
non-alignment
(Guha 2007). Nehru sought an alternative to capitalism and communism,
but his vision for India also
incorporated the best of American and Russian
systems by combining industrialization and centralized welfare
(Prakash
2002). India’s modernization program—based on science, engineering, and
mass-production (including an
important role for design)—fit with
American priorities and, under the Marshall Plan, the US provided over $10
billion in financial aid to India from 1954 to 1964 (Lu 2011). Lu points out
that post-colonialism may have
created new distances between former
colonies and colonizers, but it also allowed new “spaces for connectivity,
reciprocity, and entanglement in the name of development assistance,
commercial exchange, knowledge and
technology transfer, overseas aid,
partnership and collaboration” (2011: 16). MoMA became another site for
the
negotiation of these post-colonial relationships, and Textiles and
Ornamental Arts offered
a middle ground for overcoming animosity and
suspicion between the US and India (Karim 2011).
From the Indian perspective Textiles and Ornamental Arts presented an
opportunity to
showcase Indian culture in New York City—one of the most
important centers of the art world and a gateway to a
potentially lucrative
export market. It was appropriate to represent India
with crafts and textiles
given that they constituted the second largest industry in the country after
agriculture, and continued to hold great political, economic, and cultural
significance. Indian handicrafts
represented thousands of years of tradition
and were tied directly to the Swadeshi movement and India’s fight for
independence. Nehru ensured that textiles and crafts remained at the
forefront of India’s identity by making
their protection and revival focal
points of nation-building projects. Studies of the craft sector were
conducted, museums were established, cooperatives and government bodies
were founded to assist craftspeople, and
state-run craft stores were created
to centralize sales and distribution. Export and foreign revenue were key to
Nehru’s strategy (India, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting 1956).
At the time of the exhibition, India was
exporting less than four percent of
the 1,600 million yards of handloom cloth it produced, and most of that was
to south-east Asia and Africa (Cashin et al. 1957). It was believed that the
US market,
where “total textile consumption [was] measured in billions of
yards,” could easily absorb the same amount
(ibid.). Underlining the
importance of the opportunity with MoMA, the Indian Consulate in New
York opened its own
exhibition of textiles at the same time (MoMA
Archives [c]).
Textiles and Ornamental Arts involved a remarkable group of
institutions, collectors, and
designers from the US, India, and Britain. In
New York, MoMA led the exhibition with the financial support of the
Rockefeller Brothers Fund (Wheeler 1956) and a budget of $27,000
(MoMA Archives [d]). Kaufmann Jr. was curator,
reporting to the Director
of the International Program, Porter McCray (1908–2001); the Director of
Exhibitions
and Publications, Monroe Wheeler (1900–88); and Director of
the Museum, René d’Harnoncourt (1901–68). With their
approval
Kaufmann Jr. developed the curatorial vision, negotiated loans, purchased
objects, directed the
catalogue, and worked closely with renowned
architect, designer, and head of the textile department at Herman
Miller,
Alexander Girard (1907–93), to design the exhibition (MoMA Archives
[e]). Wheeler accompanied Kaufmann
Jr. to India and stepped in to finish
the project when Kaufmann Jr. unexpectedly resigned months before the
exhibition opened. Girard also travelled to India, helped to select objects,
and even loaned some of his own
collection of toys and figures (Wheeler
1956). Designers Charles (1907–78) and Ray Eames (1912–88) were
lenders
too and assisted with object placement, in addition to making a
documentary about the exhibition that was
distributed to schools across the
US, narrated by Charles Eames and Pupul Jayakar (1915–97) (Textiles and
Ornamental Arts 1973).
England, and the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) in particular, had a
strong presence in Textiles and Ornamental Arts. Leigh Ashton (1897–
1983), Director of the V&A, provided Kaufmann
Jr. with whatever loans
and resources he required, including the support of John Irwin (1917–97),
an Indian
textile scholar who assembled hundreds of artifacts and
contributed an essay to the catalogue.
A long list of Indian institutions took part, including the Prince of Wales
Museum (Bombay), the Crafts Museum
(New Delhi), the Calico Museum
of Textiles (Ahmedabad), the Indian Cooperative Union (New Delhi), and
government
departments such as Archeology, Village Industries, and
Education. One of the most important was the All India
Handicrafts Board,
an organization of the Ministry of Commerce and Industry, which oversaw
programs to improve
village economics through initiatives like training,
marketing, and distribution. The Board was represented by
the Chair,
Kamladevi Chattopadhay (1903–88), and Special Deputy Pupul Jayakar,
two pillars of the Indian craft
and textile revival (Wheeler 1956). The Board
negotiated political
situations on behalf of MoMA, securing loans, and
obtaining permission for objects to leave the country. The
Board also
supplied contemporary textiles from its store in Bombay headed by Jayakar
(MoMA Archives [b]).
Kaufmann Jr. remarked that Jayakar’s voice was so
strong in the project that it appeared she and members of the
Handicrafts
Board wanted to curate the exhibition themselves (MoMA Archives [b]).
Wheeler and others have also
acknowledged the extent of the Board’s
contribution (Wheeler 1956; Gray 1958), one press release describing the
exhibition as “produced … with the co-operation of the All-India
Handicraft Board” (MoMA Archives [f]).
Interestingly, Ashoke Chatterjee,
former director of the National Institute of Design (NID) and active in the
Crafts Council of India, indicated that the idea for the exhibition may have
originated with Jayakar and not
MoMA, suggesting that further research in
India might reveal an entirely different history of the exhibition’s
beginnings (Chatterjee 2008).
An advisory group of Indians, Americans, and British provided objects
and guidance. The group included private
collectors like the Sarabhai
family from Ahmedabad; scholars like Dr. Stella Kramisch from Oriental
Studies at
the University of Pennsylvania; American museums including the
Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Chicago Natural
History Museum;
and institutions like the United Nations, the Consul General of India in New
York, and the
American International Association for Economic and Social
Development. The scope of the project was impressive,
with thirty-four
lenders providing close to four-hundred-and-fifty objects (Wheeler 1956),
all organized in less
than one year. Given the large number and variety of
contributors, it is no wonder that there were conflicting
agendas and
differing perspectives on the mandate of Textiles and Ornamental Arts.
For Kaufmann Jr., who had been in charge of MoMA’s Industrial Design
Department and who was known for his work in
modern design and
architectural history (Staniszewski 1998), Indian craft was seemingly
outside of his expertise.
Nevertheless, his knowledge of contemporary
design and consumer products, and his commercial work with retailers,
provided a framework, albeit American, for sourcing and assessing crafts.
His influential Good
Design exhibitions of the 1940s and 1950s placed craft
within the realm of modern design and mass
production, and included the
display of Indian and Asian textiles in the context of American design
(Riley and
Eigen 1994).
Kaufmann Jr.’s vision for the exhibition was ambitious, to “mark a turn
in the way Westerners regarded Indian
design” (MoMA Archives [b]). He
wanted to show Americans a side of India they had never seen before, what
he
described as “modern” (the original title of the exhibition was Modern
Textiles and Ornamental
Arts of India) (MOMA Archives [f]). He predicted
that with the country’s new commonwealth status, “ancient …
skills …
would flourish once again,” and that the exhibition should “celebrate [that]
revival, reminding the West
of old glories and encouraging a new, wider
appreciation of India’s crafts today” (MoMA Archives [g]). Kaufmann
Jr.
selected three themes, the first being the decoration of people rather than
“craft for craft’s sake” (ibid.:
6). Instead of objects to be appreciated on
their own, evaluated purely for technique, design, or material, he
wanted to
show textiles and jewelry in the context of how they were worn, how they
functioned, and how they
related to the citizens of India. His second focus
was to demonstrate the draping of textiles to create clothing
in the “classical
tradition” (ibid.), something considered new for American audiences. Thus,
in addition to the
hanging textiles and cases of jewelry, the exhibition
included ten wax female mannequins modeled with Indian
features, sitting
on tented platforms and standing in the gallery, dressed by women the
museum had recruited from
New York’s Indian community (see Figure
41.1). Kaufmann Jr.’s third objective was to present
objects that illustrated
daily life in India throughout history, not goods for export already familiar
to
Americans (ibid.). Exactly whose everyday life he sought to portray is
unclear, but he was concerned with
“quality,” a term he left undefined other
than that objects would be selected for their “brilliance and
perfection of
craftsmanship” (MoMA Archives [g])

Figure
41.1 Installation view of the
exhibition Textiles and Ornamental Arts of India, April 11
through September 25, 1955.
The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Photographic
Archive. The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York.
Photo: Alexandre Georges, © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/ Art Resource, NY.

The team’s vision of India was crystallized in the exhibition design,

inspired by the travels of Kaufmann Jr. and
Girard, and likely by British
precedents such as the Great Exhibition of 1851 with its tented displays of
Indian
crafts and textiles, or the Royal Academy’s Art of India and
Pakistan, which took place in
London seven years before the show in New
York (Mitter 1997: 228). The catalogue for Textiles
and Ornamental Arts
states that “India itself, appropriately, gave guidance and a prototype.”
Unsurprisingly, that prototype was the bazaar, a classic symbol of tourist
experience and the “chaos” of Indian
streets (Wheeler 1956: 11). Kaufmann
Jr. and Girard had, in fact, shopped for much of the exhibition, purchasing
approximately three hundred new textiles (MoMA Archives [h]: 4). They
also borrowed close to four hundred and
fifty pieces, most of which were
between fifty and three hundred years old, though several were close to two
thousand years in age (ibid.). The installation combined environments
designed to evoke India with more typical
museum cases organized by
material and object type: cotton, fine woven silk and cotton, silk, jewelry,
household
items, ritual figures, toys, braids, clothing, and “costume items”
(MoMA Archives [i]). Kaufmann Jr. had
originally requested large
photomurals but it seems they were never realized (MoMA Archives [j]).

Figure
41.2 Installation view of the
exhibition Textiles and Ornamental Arts of India, April 11
through September 25, 1955.
The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Photographic
Archive. The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York.
Photo: Alexandre Georges, © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/ Art Resource, NY.
 Theater and the simulation of Indian life were defining features of the
exhibition design, with objects arranged
for visual impact. Girard later
described his attraction to artifacts from other cultures based on “design
value”
rather than cultural meaning, function, or manufacture. He preferred
displaying objects in context, not lined up
in cases: “I believe that if you put
objects into a world which is ostensibly their own,
the whole thing begins to
breathe. It’s creating a slice of life in a way. The exhibit becomes alive, it
becomes
theater” (Kent 1983: 60, 88). Wheeler’s vivid account of the 3,000
square foot installation emphasizes this
dramatic effect (see Figure 41.2):

Twelve square gilt columns were set around a fifty-foot pool of

water and reflected in a wall of mirror at one
end. Over the water
were hung informally a bewildering assortment of saris, intricately
woven silks and simple but vigorously designed
muslins, and
dotted tie-dyed turban cloths—a vast palette of crimson, dark red,
yellow, moss green, purple and
sky-blue—many profusely threaded
with gold, as though with sunshine. Near this, the rarest brocades,
tinseled
gauzes, gossamer cottons and Kashmir shawls were
ranged, and on other walls were temple cloths, carpets and
embroideries. In an adjacent room, under a patchwork canopy, and
beside a window adorned with paper kites,
glittered a treasure-trove
of the work of jewelers, gold-smiths, silversmiths and jade carvers:
precious stones
strung as prodigally as beads; mere glass in
miraculous settings; and fire-bright enamels of the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries.
(Wheeler 1956: 11)

What kind of modern-day India did Textiles and Ornamental Arts depict?
Were visitors
witnessing an India of 1955, or an exotic fantasy of old and
new packaged for Westerners? Luxury, opulence, rich
color, fine
craftsmanship, nature, and whimsy were all expressed in Wheeler’s
description and the American press
loved it—the enchanting, mysterious
vistas through the fabrics, the dramatic environment that, in lieu of white
walls, was as Interiors magazine wrote, “in the same mood” as the objects
(MoMA Archives
[p]: 9). The press seemed more interested in the exhibit
design than the artifacts, and some suggested that the
museum’s version of
India was an improvement on the original. The New York Times reported
that the “glitter and gilt dazzle the eye as one enters the native Indian bazaar
… [but] unlike the market place
that might be found in India today, the
museum version contains only carefully selected examples” (MoMA
Archives
[p]). In one of the few critical reviews, Arts Digest declared that
the “installation …
reaches an epitome of pure showmanship more worthy
of a Hollywood set … one has the impression that the Museum
does not
feel these items capable of attracting interest unless they are frantically
promoted by elegant display”
(MoMA Archives [p]: 9).
Saloni Mathur has suggested that the exhibition allowed Indian art to
escape the “overdetermination that has for
too long decided the value of
non-Western art as it enters into the Western museum” (Mathur 2011: 42).
To some
extent this was implicit in Kaufmann Jr.’s openness to show a
never-before-seen side of “modern” Indian
production. However, there was
an unease within the museum as to the status of the Indian artifacts. The
idea
that the objects were not quite good enough, or that the museum did
not know how to assess Indian crafts in
relation to Western standards, were
subjects of debate. Did Indian textiles belong in the same category as
Western art and fine craft, or were they suitable only for the “home
furnishings” market (MoMA Archives [q])?
Revealing something of
Western hierarchies, Kaufmann Jr. was concerned that the objects were
being mislabeled:
“Naturally the show is a show of applied arts (that is,
crafts) and not of art (that is, fine art)” (MoMA
Archives [q]). The question
was never resolved and the terms were used interchangeably in the
exhibition,
catalogue, and media coverage.
Conveying India at mid-century presented other challenges in relation to
the West, like how to celebrate its new,
independent status while explaining
its British colonial history in a way that would not offend in either
country.
MoMA was still a relatively young institution (opened in 1929) and
Kaufmann Jr. had to work hard to
build relationships in India, relying on
representatives of the US government and the All India Handicrafts Board
to open doors and negotiate loans (MoMA Archives [b]: 3). In England, the
interactions were easier, as Ashton and Kaufmann Jr. were already close
friends. The V&A’s expertise and
extensive collection were beyond
question, and London was an obvious first stop for Kaufmann Jr. on his way
to
India. The timing was fortuitous as the V&A’s Indian collection was
about to go into storage. Ashton gave
Kaufmann Jr. carte blanche access, in
addition to offering Irwin’s assistance free of
charge (MoMA Archives [r]).
In a follow-up letter Kaufmann Jr. promised Ashton a balanced, if not
favorable,
depiction of colonial rule. He explained that the V&A’s “loans …
would contribute to a better understanding …
of the English acumen and
sense of responsibility in India, an understanding necessary to any
evaluation of
India’s cultural contribution in the modern world” (MoMA
Archives [k]). At the same time an internal memo
instructed that “it would
be best … to omit the mention of any of the V. and A. personalities,
particularly in
the interest of the project’s effectiveness with the Indians”
(MoMA Archives [l]).
Given Kaufmann Jr.’s position negotiating between the two countries it is
curious that he chose to include
Tippoo’s Tiger at the exhibition entrance
(see Figure 41.1). This controversial object,
which can be wound up so that
the tiger roars and the British soldier screams while raising an arm in
protest,
was seized by the British from an Indian sultan in 1799 (Mitter
1997; MoMA Archives [m]). Partha Mitter writes
that its subsequent
display in nineteenth-century London “vindicated Britain’s ‘civilizing
mission’ by
emphasizing the sadistic nature of the Oriental despot” (Mitter
1997: 223). The historical significance of
Tippoo’s Tiger could not have
been lost on Kaufmann Jr., who reported from England that the “emphasis
[in London
was] on glory,” alluding not only to the treasures in British
museums, but also to the manner in which they had
been acquired. He
justified the tiger’s display in New York as a specialty object, as it had
been, in his words,
“restored to make mad noises” (MoMA Archives [m]).
Was it included simply because it was novel? How did he
reconcile this
object with his goal of showing a modern India? Did its position at the
entrance not set a tone of
the exotic and barbaric? And how was it
interpreted by American audiences who may not have understood its
historical significance?
The ambiguous commentary on British rule was also reflected in the
catalogue, where the negative impact of
colonialism on the Indian textile
industry was attributed simply to the “West.” When it came to post-colonial
production, the Indian, American, and British catalogue authors
unanimously blamed “Western” industrial methods
for the deterioration of
Indian craft (Wheeler 1956). They argued that India was threatened not only
by foreign
influence, but also by modernization itself. The belief that India
was not ready to modernize and should focus
instead on historic
preservation was a prominent theme of the catalogue and part of a wider-
spread concern that
non-industrialized societies were no longer making
traditional crafts due to a flood of foreign, mass-produced
goods.
Jayakar’s essay, “Indian Fabrics in Indian Life,” outlined the debate
about becoming “modern” in more detail, and
in relation to Western ideals
of rationalization, industrialization, and design as indicators of progress
(Jayakar 1956). Jayakar wrote from the unique perspective of Special
Deputy of the All India Handicrafts Board,
one of many important positions
she held leading the preservation and revival of crafts and textiles. In 1950
Nehru had asked Jayakar to “launch a viable [handloom] industry” (Singh
1986: xv). She became Chair of the All
India Handloom Board in 1952,
traveling to remote areas to meet the people whose livelihoods depended on
the
handloom industry. Export and cultural initiatives (exhibitions, trade
fairs, partnerships with international
designers) became a major focus of her
career. Chatterjee summarized the aims of Jayakar’s work as
“understand[ing] the relevance of craft values and skills to contemporary
living, and [identifying] spaces and opportunities for demonstrating the
process of transition between tradition
and modernity” (2005).
While Textiles and Ornamental Arts offered exactly that kind of space
and opportunity,
Jayakar was still struggling with what the process of
transition should look like, arguing against modernity and
ideas about
design that she would later adopt. Just as Kaufmann Jr. was trying to situate
craft in the world of
American design, Jayakar was debating whether design
had any role in Indian craft. Jayakar—the same person who
would later
have Charles and Ray Eames invited to India to consult on the future of
design education in her
country—asserted that two of the principal threats
to Indian craft were mechanization and design. In her essay,
she claimed
that designers and formal education for craftspeople would have no positive
impact in India. In fact,
the “introduction of an alien concept of the designer
as distinct from the craftsman [had] only further destroyed
the craftsman’s
natural response to good form” (Jayakar 1956: 23). For Jayakar craft was a
natural activity, an
instinctual response to the environment in which the
maker was both creator and user, not an independent
profession.
Lu explains that in the mid-twentieth century, nationhood among the
newly independent countries of Asia and
Africa was “generally
conceptualized as being rooted in remote antiquity and grounded in cultural
uniqueness” (Lu
2011: 13). Indeed, Jayakar presented a type of Indian
essentialism defined by history and the difference between
Indian crafts and
Western mass-produced goods. Jayakar (1956) educated the Western reader
about the passion,
color, and symbolism of Indian textiles, the relationship
of the fabric to the wearer’s body, the earth, and
gods. She differentiated
textiles using a hierarchy of Indian arts (court, village, domestic, and export
materials), and stressed that Indian textiles were based in unique social
structures and processes of creation
like court patronage, village life, caste
and guild manufacturing. She divided the country geographically and
tribally, linking creative inspiration to Indian climates and landscapes,
natural and religious rituals and
cycles. According to Jayakar, the evolution
of Indian textiles had nothing to do with the individual or the rapid
turnover
of fashion seasons as it did in the West. Rather, the objects MoMA
displayed were the result of
thousands of years and many generations of
tradition, the manifestations of universal group mentalities and
emotions.
Introducing the designer as rational individual divorced from these contexts
made no sense to her. She
objected to Orientalist descriptions of Eastern art
and craft as stagnant, un-evolving, and imitative of Western
forms. Instead,
she wrote that every Indian creation was “spontaneously linked with the
stream of man’s life,” a
contrast to the highly planned and intentional
methods of Western manufacture (ibid.: 16). She credited Indian
craftspeople as forming an “unbroken tradition,” a continuous link between
past and present, between maker and
consumer (ibid.)—the West had left
this relationship behind with the separation of designer and maker.
Defining what made Indian crafts unique helped to stake a claim in art
history and in the world market, but
Jayakar was describing a national
identity based in the past. Jayakar concluded her essay with an abrupt
warning
about modernization. From the restructuring of society and the
caste system, to major transportation and
communication infrastructure,
much had changed in India during her lifetime, and with serious
implications for
craft. By 1955 Jayakar had observed that machine-made
fabrics had become the norm in villages, and that city life
was dictating
rural fashion. She predicted a future where mechanization would destroy
the link between creativity
and craft as a form of employment.
Unfortunately, the question of “modern” India was never fully explored
in Textiles and
Ornamental Arts. Elements that would have made the
exhibition innovative in comparison with earlier
portrayals of India were
lost. For reasons that are unclear Kaufmann Jr. resigned from MoMA in
early 1955,
leaving a huge void in curatorial leadership. Much of the
modern focus disappeared; in fact the word “modern” was
dropped from the
beginning of the catalogue title (MoMA Archives [n]). Kaufmann Jr. had
proposed for the original
table of contents an essay about ancient textiles by
Irwin; an essay about contemporary textiles by Prithwish
Neogy (Curator of
the All-India Handicrafts Board Museum in New Delhi); an essay about the
connection between
Indian textiles, dress, and culture by Jayakar; and his
own essay about “different ways of looking at Indian
textiles—the Indian
way, the Western way of seventeenth to nineteenth centuries; and the
modern way” (MoMA
Archives [o]). The essays by Neogy and Kaufmann
Jr. were eventually cut, and based on the objects selected for
the catalogue,
less than one third of the exhibition material dated from the twentieth
century, in contrast to
the minimum of sixty to seventy-five percent
contemporary content Kaufmann Jr. had set out to include (Wheeler
1956;
MoMA Archives [s]).
Wheeler proceeded to take over the exhibition. Was it so difficult,
without Kaufmann Jr., to find value in new
Indian production? Was it easier
at the last minute to fall back on old Orientalist tropes? In his foreword to
the catalogue, Wheeler reiterated many of the clichés used to describe
Indian ornament for the previous two
centuries. He summed up all of India
and its handicrafts as “symbolism and playfulness, flamboyance and
poverty”
(Wheeler 1956: 11). On behalf of the Western tourist, Wheeler
wrote about pleasures derived from “the beauty of
the multitudes of people
in their fairy-tale raiment,” and “the extravagant and unforgettable colors
[that] at
first seem to clash before occidental eyes, but … soon assert
surprising harmonies” (ibid.). He spoke of the
“innate” ability among
Indians of all classes to discern and create beauty, their love of color, the
good taste
of women, and the fine craft skills of the poor (ibid.). Wheeler
downplayed the growth in the modern textile
industry that Kaufmann Jr.
had reported. For Wheeler, the way forward was to focus on preserving the
past: “it
[was] too soon to expect much new architecture, painting and
sculpture, but in pride in the national heritage and
in the all-important
preservation of works of art, a renaissance [was] being prepared” (ibid.: 9).
Jayakar also
celebrated history, but she recognized that the past was no
longer relevant to the “new social order” (Jayakar
1956: 23). For her, the
way forward involved:
 cleansing the eye of the craftsman of the corrupt forms that have
blurred his vision, to allow the incredible
creative force that still
lies deeply embedded within his eyes and hands to discern and
create a new tradition
of textile design for the India of today and of
the future.
(ibid.)

Unlike Wheeler, Jayakar was hopeful that the craftspeople of India were
ready to reinvent themselves, on their
own terms.
The opinions of the American and Indian organizers were overlapping
and contradictory but, when assessed
together, the exhibition, catalogue,
and publicity documents conveyed clear, overarching messages: India was
an
intriguing combination of the unknown and the conquered, the primitive
and the highly refined. The textiles were
seen as exotic due to their vivid
colors, symbolism, connection to foreign rituals, as expressions of
emotions,
and as links between humanity and religion. Craft was perceived
to have
evolved slowly in response to nature and the rural maker’s
unconscious, intuitive creativity and desire to
decorate. Indian design was
considered unique because of the country’s landscape, traditions stretching
back
thousands of years, and a production system based on family lineage,
castes, and guilds. Indian textiles were
also legitimized within a Western
continuum. It was emphasized that Indian fabrics had been part of Western
life
for millennia: from the Romans who purchased silks from the Orient
and draped their clothing in a similar manner;
to the British who had been
assimilating Indian culture for hundreds of years; to the use of familiar
words that
had originated in India, such as shawl, pajama, and khaki (Irwin
1956: 26).
The American media and English newspapers in India recognized the
news value of the exhibition and picked up
these messages, sometimes
providing new insight, sometimes exaggerating stereotypes (MoMA
Archives [p]: 2). A
museum report indicated that most “writers tended to
give way to unbridled enthusiasm, extolling the sensuous
beauties of the
show and describing its contents. Except for a few writers in the Indian
press, there were almost
no analytic commentaries” (MoMA Archives [p]:
6). Kaufmann Jr. no longer worked at MoMA but he reacted to the
uncritical coverage, defending the exhibition in Art News:
 An exhibition of Indian textiles such as the one the writer
assembled for the Museum of Modern Art is more than
a large,
delightful jumble of rather intriguing, novel colors, patterns,
textures, sparkles and shapes—it is a
portion of India’s life and
culture from as near the core as material objects can lie.
(MoMA Archives [p]: 10)

The amount of attention the exhibition received in US fashion and interior

decorating magazines may not have been
the result Kaufmann Jr. desired,
but it indicated how quickly American consumers embraced the Indian
aesthetic.
From New York to Los Angeles there were reports of the
exhibition’s popularity and influence, including in the
windows of Macy’s,
the iconic New York department store (MoMA Archives [p]: 3). Jayakar
(1955) took advantage of
the excitement and published an extensive article
in American Fabrics magazine. The
article featured Western fashion
designers creating “entrancing gowns” by adapting Indian textiles to great
effect. Ironically, the textiles Kaufmann Jr. had selected because they
represented daily life in India had
quickly influenced US taste and resulted
in new exports, something the Indian press was happy to report (MoMA
Archives [p]).
Just after the exhibition opened, Life Magazine (1955) published the
article “East
Brightens West” about the impact of the “Orient” on Western
life and fashions, giving MoMA credit for having
influenced this style. A
photograph from the opening reception for Textiles and Ornamental
Arts
shows guests wearing “U-S style saris” beside the seated mannequins in
traditional dress. The author
reported that Americans would soon benefit
from an increase in imports in New York stores. Two-hundred-and-fifty
dresses were being made daily using Indian textiles in New York’s Seventh
Avenue workrooms, and eighty thousand
yards of sari fabric had just been
ordered by Filcol in New York, employing thousands of weavers in India
—“In
mud-floored cottages around the weaving center of Benares, workers
are laboring round the clock to complete the
windfall order” (Life Magazine
1955). The exchange was seen as positive for all, marking a
new era of
international respect and trade. Business people on both sides of the world
were collaborating to
ensure that no one was exploited. The magazine
reassured that though “the
East [had] been inching up on the U.S. for
several years,” and US imports had dramatically increased, the Indian
textiles did not threaten the American clothing industry, but rather, were a
source of “new ideas to American
manufacturers who never left home”
(Life Magazine 1955). The “Orient” had resumed its
place, not only as a
source of goods and materials but also as a source of inspiration for Western
consumption.
In the end, how successful was the exhibition in furthering the objectives
of MoMA’s International Program? It
increased awareness of India in the
United States, but to what extent did it improve international
understanding?
The final messages seem cautious in comparison with
Kaufmann Jr.’s original proposal. The fear of Communism that
marked
Nehru’s visits to the United States (Tharoor 2003) was absent from the
exhibition or its reviews, as was
any discussion of the Independence
Movement or India’s relationship to Britain. Kaufmann Jr. had noted the
significance of handicrafts in sustaining the Indian economy, but the
economic and political roles of craft were
largely ignored. Instead, the study
of materials, techniques, symbols, and rituals was safer than any discussion
of boycotting British textiles or the role of the handmade in the Swadeshi
movement. To some extent Textiles and Ornamental Arts continued the
tradition of colonial Orientalism through what Edward
Said described as a
“muteness imposed upon the Orient as object” (Said 1985: 103). By
reducing the modern scope
and focusing on craft and daily life, the
exhibition avoided political issues and allowed India to appear as a
former
version of itself.
While MoMA was prepared to celebrate a long history of Indian artistic
achievements it did not allow India enough
space or credit to explore what
modernism there could mean. Instead, the exhibition placed India at the
beginning
of a modernization process that offered hope for the future of
India’s crafts, without dealing in any depth with
the challenges of
modernizing a system of manufacture so different from the West. In Lu’s
discussion of modernism
as developmentalism he describes a “modernist
vision of a rationally progressing universal history” that
continued despite
the end of colonialism—all Third World countries were headed for a
common goal but at different
speeds and with their own challenges (Lu
2011: 9). Nehru’s aggressive modernization program, as illustrated by
Jayakar’s essay, was confronted with the realities of a massive and complex
network of cottage industries, an
identity tied to rural life, landscape, and
tradition, and a popular conviction that Western influence would have
a
negative impact. Nehru had asked Jayakar to rebuild the handloom and craft
sectors at the same time that he was
leading the country through a “gigantic,
controlled conversion to industrialization,” meaning village industries
were
competing with both foreign and domestic mass-produced goods (MoMA
Archives [h]: 2). Jayakar’s rejection of
design in 1955 represents a refusal
to accept rationalized production and creation processes central to Western
concepts of modern life. MoMA’s unwillingness to explore “modern” India
limited this debate to the pages of
Jayakar’s essay.
Though the American perspective dominates the MoMA archives and
press coverage there is also evidence that India
was not a “passive receptor”
in the development of Textiles and Ornamental Arts (Karim
2011: 190). The
Indian government, museums, collectors, and the All India Handicrafts
Board shaped content and
informed how Kaufmann Jr. and his colleagues
viewed their country. Jayakar played a significant role, her voice
heard
loudly through the essay and the documentary, her presence in New York,
and the peripheral activities and
publications she produced. Her Indian
viewpoint added substantially to the conversation and, while she presented
a different perspective, she also employed stereotypes similar to those
used
by Kaufmann Jr., Irwin, and Wheeler: the West as rational, logical decision
makers; the East as feminine,
chaotic, colorful, passionate, and spiritual.
Even if the exhibition failed to present contemporary India, it
succeeded in
bringing together some of the best examples of Indian crafts and textiles
from around the world, a
traveling showcase for Indian culture at a time
when Nehru (and Jayakar) were establishing India’s new global
identity.
Sixty years later, it is easy to view MoMA’s portrayal of India as
orientalist, but a recent analysis of
Textiles and Ornamental Arts by Farhan
Sirajul Karim suggests that the museum’s choice to
“revive tropes of a
fabulous, dazzling Orient” was in fact positive (ibid.: 191). By recreating
“exotic” India
and emphasizing its history as a producer of superior textiles,
the exhibition gave India an advantage in trade,
supporting the idea of “a
free India within a free market of consumer goods” (ibid.: 194). Karim
argues that
India purposefully promoted itself as “a model of a non-
industrial material world” striving for “state-controlled
industrialization,”
an alternative to Western trajectories of modernization and capitalism, and
to the ideals and
aesthetic the public was used to seeing at MoMA (ibid.:
190). The story of how the Indian government used
Textiles and
Ornamental Arts to increase trade with the US reinserts India into Western
capitalist history, but from a position of power. The Indian export market
expanded, American consumer
appreciation grew, and new connections
formed that led to other export programs in New York and beyond.
The exhibition was evidence of a post-colonial attempt to engage with
India on a more equal footing, what Karim
describes as a “postwar faith in a
future of open exchange” (ibid.: 193). MoMA provided a venue to debate
the
merits of American and Indian models of production and consumption.
The project secured relationships between
cultural elites in both countries,
making Textiles and Ornamental Arts just the first in a
series of
collaborative projects. Jayakar (1979) would later speak of the significance
of being in New York at
that moment, of meeting Charles and Ray Eames
and establishing a friendship that continued long after. What she
referred to
as their “great conversation” resulted in the Eames’ trip to India in 1958,
their India Report (1958), and their contribution to the founding of the NID
in Ahmedabad in 1961. Other
joint projects included Design Today in
America and Europe, a MoMA exhibition of design
icons that toured to
nine Indian cities in a Buckminster Fuller geodesic dome before they were
given to the
Indian government and the NID. Textiles and Ornamental Arts
positioned India on the brink
of a cultural renaissance, ready for the next
step in becoming modern. By bringing together Indian government and
American designers, MoMA helped to ensure that those next steps would
involve Western design thinking.

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 42

DESIGN BEFORE DESIGN IN

JAPAN
Christine M. E. Guth
 
 
In recent decades historians of Japanese art and design have shown a
propensity to investigate the history of
Japanese art and design through
language. This approach has privileged the identification of the
nineteenth-
century adoption of western terminology as an interpretive frame (Satō
2011). In sum, fine art,
architecture, and design are among a host of abstract
concepts for which, scholars argue, there did not exist a
Japanese
equivalent. The concepts’ adoption in the late nineteenth century was
understood to signal Japan’s entry
into the modern civilized world, a world
defined by scientific thinking and societal progress, and dominated by
the
values of the then world powers: chiefly, Britain, Germany, France, and the
United States. It was part of a
larger redesign of social, legal, political,
economic, and infrastructure systems that followed the enthronement
of the
Meiji emperor as nominal head of state after two hundred and fifty years of
military rule by the Tokugawa
shoguns. But if such formulations allowed
Japan’s bureaucrats and elite academics control over their own history,
they
also inscribed Japanese culture into linear Eurocentric epistemes that were
not always fit for purpose.
Design, of course, is a fundamental human activity, the existence of
which is not dependent on a particular term.
Pluralistic and multiple, it is
ever evolving, and open to reinterpretation, so to consider it from a
terminological perspective, while illuminating, may also be reductive. Even
as such an approach relativizes key
concepts, making them easier to discuss
in a global context, it neglects the contradictions and complexities of
the
semantic fields from which these terms emerged, and risks marginalizing
forms of local design thinking and
practice that do not fit European models.
It also may fail to address how design is connected with lived
experience by
hiding signs of social, political, regional, or gender difference.
In this chapter I want to reflect on the modern and modernist assumptions
that underpin the introduction,
institutionalization, and evolution of
discourse around Japanese design, a discourse mutually constituted by
seemingly contradictory voices from both inside and outside Japan. These
have had an impact on design creation in
Japan, as well as on the curation
and framing of Japanese design (Hiesinger and Fischer 1994). Their effects
on
twentieth- and twenty-first-century design is not surprising, but my focus
here is on their less acknowledged
impact on the representation of the early
modern era, roughly coinciding with the rule of the Tokugawa shoguns
from 1603 until 1867. This I hope to show from the perspectives of print
technology, crafts, and architecture, areas where modern cognitive frames
have ongoing consequences for design
historical scholarship.
First, however, it may be helpful to comment on the context and
historical implications of the creation of a key
modern word for design. Ishō
意匠 , formed from Chinese characters
meaning concept and skill, is one of
many instances of cultural “retrofitting” carried out as part of the
modernizing agenda. According to design historian Haruhiko Fujita, its
modern usage followed from the
promulgation of laws for the protection of
design (Ishō-hō) in 1888, which declared: “The Ishō-hō is a new law
that is
necessary for the progress of things and affairs. Because we do not have any
equivalent word for
design in English, we choose the word ishō” (cited in
Fujita 2009: 11). This
reconceptualization of an ancient Chinese term was
driven initially by the economic and political imperatives of
Japan’s new
internationalist outlook and, over time, by its imperial aspirations. Meiji
government officials and
intellectuals saw modernity chiefly in terms of
superior technological and economic might, but they also
recognized the
value of mobilizing what was understood to be the universal language of
progress as part of their
national and international self-representation.
Through such lexical markers of distinction they aspired to
exercise
symbolic power vis-à-vis not only Europe but also the rest of Asia.
Initially the implementation of this language of knowledge was decidedly
instrumentalist. The term for art,
bijutsu, was coined in 1872 in the context
of the Vienna World Exposition, primarily as a
classificatory tool to ensure
that Japanese goods for the world market would be suitably situated within
the
system of objects that underpinned such exhibitionary practices (Satō
2011: 67–72). Similarly, the dissemination
of the modern lexicon of design
was initially confined to the framework of a small number
of schools or
industries intended as training grounds for the manufacture of goods
destined for the international
market. Following the South Kensington
Museum model, these institutions promoted good craftsmanship and design
through a dual emphasis on copying exemplary models of the past and
making them new through technology.
The disposition to deploy language as a political tool was premised on an
ideology of rupture intended to
promulgate an image of Japan as a country
that had undergone a radical transformation. With the objective of
severing
past from present, it privileged discontinuity over continuity. Among its
most fundamental taxonomic
recodings was the introduction of the
Eurocentric division between arts and crafts. This not only created new
hierarchies in contemporary practice but, by their retrospective projection,
also distorted historical
interpretation by drawing lines between artists and
craftsmen that did not prevail in the early modern era.
Furthermore, it
disregarded the centrality of calligraphy as an art form.

Print technology

Much of what has been written about Japanese graphic design starts with
the history of multicolor woodblock
printing (Thornton 1991). The
technological implications of this late eighteenth-century development,
however,
have gone largely unrecognized because prints are discussed
either in the context of their formalist contribution
to the flat coloristic
effects admired by European modernist painters, or else within teleological
narratives
that take the printing press as their measure. Both these frames
are further premised on a generic separation of text and illustration, which
was not the norm in Japan where the use of
Chinese characters, and the
importance ascribed to calligraphy, fostered a more intimate relationship
between
them that also informed technological choices.
Japan already had a rich history of woodblock printing when the movable
type press was introduced by the Jesuits
in the late sixteenth century.
Rejection of this European device was not, as some scholars have argued, a
case of
“technological lock-in” whereby an “established but inferior
technology continues to dominate because of
secondary advantages, that
derive from the consequences of prior establishment,” but rather a proactive
design
choice in the socio-cultural and economic circumstances of the times
(cited in Kornicki 2001: 134). Woodblock
printing was an appropriate
technology in that it met two critical desiderata: the replication of individual
handwriting styles; and the combination of word and image on the same
page. In addition, by comparison with the
capital outlay required to set up
and operate a printing press, it was relatively inexpensive since it could use
readily available hardware in the form of cherry wood blocks, locally made
paper, and vegetable pigments.
Operationally, however, it was relatively
complex, as it involved a division of labor among craftsmen to create
the
designs, cut and print the blocks, and the organizational skills to coordinate
multi-workshop production
efficiently and economically. This indigenous
system of mass printing produced a plethora of maps, packaging, and
advertisements, as well as vast numbers of illustrated books and prints that
contributed to the high literacy
rate in early modern Japan.
The logic of these materials and tools shaped and reflected the emergence
of a language of graphic design that
exploited, in highly creative ways, the
compositional possibilities of both word and image. The design of the
verbal components—in the form of Chinese characters and phonetic
hiragana and katakana syllabaries—was as important in communication as
that of the pictorial components, and
their dynamic interplay gives the
idiom of many woodblock prints a collage-like appearance. It also meant
that
cultural literacy demanded a critical capacity to respond to a mode of
communication that functioned
simultaneously on several registers, often
rich in topical and ironic, visual and verbal allusions and puns.
Modernist discourse has also failed to do justice to the technology of
color printing using multiple blocks, one
for the outline and another for
each of the colors to be applied. This was achieved by use of a simple yet
effective notching device that made possible perfect registration. When the
master or key block was carved,
raised l-shaped and straight notches were
made in the lower corner and left side to guide the printer. Using
these
notches, each individual color block could be aligned, one after the other,
with the paper already
imprinted with the design in black outline. A skilled
printer could produce a print with as many as twenty-five
colors. Speed of
production and economies of scale meant that prints could be priced within
the range of
consumers of all classes (Tinios 2010: 22–37). Nationwide
marketing and distribution of illustrated books,
albums, and individual
prints made color integral to Japanese print culture to a degree that did not
occur in
Europe and America until the development of chromolithography
in the 1860s.

Crafts

Premised on an evolutionary scheme that is fundamental to nineteenth-

century understandings of culture developed
by European historians that
non-Western cultures should be traditional and
authentic, many nineteenth-
century artists and writers situated Japan in a very different social and
historical
space from their own. This outlook was deeply inflected by
colonial and imperialist models of thinking despite
the fact that Japan was
never colonized. Just as the West was not prepared to give Japan coeval
status, so too,
as Japan built its own empire, artists and intellectuals
projected similar chronopolitics on its colonies,
especially Korea, which
was represented as an undeveloped country needing the assistance of
Japan’s advanced
culture. As critical interpretations of Sōetsu Yanagi’s
writings disclose, internalization of this outlook,
mediated by the writings
on arts and crafts of John Ruskin and William Morris, underpins the highly
influential
folkcraft or mingei theories he promulgated in the 1920s and
1930s, the period of Japan’s
rapidly expanding continental empire (Kikuchi
2004; Brandt 2007). Like that of his British counterparts, Yanagi’s
vision
was a reaction to industrialization, driven by a deeply held conviction that
the handmade held both
aesthetic and moral value. Yet, as his inflammatory
assertion that “The Koreans made rice bowls, the Japanese
masters made
them into great teabowls” illustrates, contrary to the apolitical image
presented in much post-war
literature by European admirers, such as
Bernard Leach, his outlook was steeped in racism, nationalism, and
imperialism (cited in Brandt 2007: 35).
Yanagi’s assertion is an example of the construction of the “other” as a
primitive that exists in the service of
a superior culture, a Japan with the
capacity to absorb and transform Korean raw materials into something of
greater value. No less a manifestation of the operations of political power
was the extension to rural Japanese
crafts of an idealized vision of the pre-
industrial world awaiting discovery by Yanagi’s discerning eye. In his
view,
mingei was the creation of “unknown craftsmen” who worked cooperatively
with one
another to create objects of beauty that functioned in their daily
lives (Yanagi 1972). He particularly located
national cultural authenticity in
the “timeless” traditions of rural folk, such as the potters of the small
community of Onta on the southern island of Kyushu to whose sturdy
functional stonewares he attributed the
qualities of simplicity, honesty, and
humility. As anthropologist Brian Moeran has written in Lost Innocence,
however, this ceramic embodiment of Yanagi’s aesthetic ideal of
immutable,
unpretentious beauty only achieved widespread recognition as
part of a post-war international mingei boom that made it part of the very
capitalist consumerism whose deleterious effects Yanagi
sought to resist
(Moeran 1984).
Acknowledgement of the rise of consumerism in sixteenth-century Japan
is also critical to the interpretation of
the tea ceremony, a practice that
unleashed design creativity in the crafts on a scale, and in ways, whose
legacy
is still visible today (Cort 2003). The tea ceremony is a cultural
pursuit that, until the twentieth century, was
dominated by men with the
means to acquire the array of utensils for the preparation of tea and
decoration of the
tearoom. These included articles, old and new, locally
made and imported, whose mixing and matching according to
season,
occasion, literary connotations, as well as form, texture, and other features,
offered the host a means
of displaying his cultural knowledge and personal
taste. Changing fashions in cast iron kettles, lacquer tea and
incense
containers, bamboo baskets, tea whisks, tea scoops, and teabowls, as well as
in the shapes and styles of
dishes for the accompanying meal, made this
practice a dynamic catalyst of craft production across the Japanese
archipelago. The tea ceremony also fostered the rise of professionals who
brought their expertise to the design
and arrangement of the tearoom and to
the choice of the styles of the articles used therein. The creation of
low-fire
hand-molded Raku ware bowls under the supervision of Sen no
Rikyu¯,
founder of the tea ceremony, by potters in Kyoto previously specialized in
tile making, is an instance of
a division between maker and designer that
became prevalent in the culture of tea (Pitelka 2005). Today many
examples
of Raku and other more decorative styles of ceramics produced during the
sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries are appreciated as unique artistic
masterpieces, but archeological excavations in Kyoto testify that,
at the
time, they were popular commodities produced in large quantities (Cort
2003).
Yanagi’s quest for beauty also led him to consider the crafts made for and
used within the tea ceremony in the
early modern era. The approach he
brought to them was a variation of that he brought to the folk crafts of his
own times; in his eyes, tea similarly embodied a unified spiritual culture
that resisted consumer society.
Yanagi, however, privileged only those craft
forms and styles that fitted his particular vision, primarily those
that have
become emblematic of, so-called, wabi or “poverty” style tea developed by
Rikyu¯
and his followers, while ignoring the more colorful Oribe wares or
Chinese porcelains that, in practice, were
equally important (see Figure
42.1).
At the same time Yanagi sought to distance himself from historical
teamasters by choosing the term shibui to characterize the “simplicity of
shape,” “tranquility of surface, mellow soberness of
colouring, [and] chaste
beauty of figure” he championed in tea utensils (cited in Kikuchi 2004: 41).
While this
word had been part of early modern tea discourse, it did not
occupy the centrality that it would have as a result
of its popularization
through Yanagi’s influence in the post-war period. This was especially true
in the United
States, where the August 1960 issue of the popular magazine
House Beautiful, featuring
Katsura Imperial Villa on its cover, promised its
readers they could “Discover shibui: The word for the
highest level in
beauty.” The concept gained further traction through
The Unknown
Craftsman in which Yanagi elaborated that “shibui beauty, the beauty of Tea
ceremony, is beauty that makes an artist of the viewer,” in so doing, holding
out this transformative experience
through the connoisseurial eye to anyone
who engaged with this practice (Yanagi 1972: 124). Thus framed, both
mingei and the world of the tea ceremony were made to speak in an
international language
of art and design with a strong affinity to the
modernist philosophy of art as a secular religion of
transcendence.
Figure
42.1 Serving dish in shape of
overlapping fans, Oribe ware; H × W × D 14.3 × 28.2 × 28.2
cm; c. 1614–30. Freer
Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian
Institution.
© Freer Sackler Museum. Accession number FS7807_04.

Architecture

Proponents of international modernism also helped to transform the Ise

Shrine and Katsura Imperial Villa into
representatives of national
architectural design through the filter of the movement’s prioritization of
functionality and rejection of excessive ornament. Like Yanagi’s
identification and transfer of the spirit of the
nation from the timeless and
untainted rural village, the reconfiguration of Ise and Katsura also involved
a
metonymic process of making the part serve a larger “imagined
community” through decontextualization and
excision. For architectural
modernists such as Bruno Taut and Kenzo Tange, the Ise Shrine figured in
this
construct as the “prototype of Japanese architecture” (Tange 1965) and
the Katsura Imperial Retreat as a model of
“quintessentially Japanese”
tasteful elegance (Taut 1937). They understood both building complexes as
simultaneously looking backwards and forwards, creating, as architectural
historian Jonathan Reynolds has put it,
“a consensus that modern
architectural practice in Japan was inexorably bound up with and could not
be understood
outside of a context of premodern architecture, a position
still prevalent in the literature on Japanese
architecture to this day”
(Reynolds 2001: 316). The formation and dissemination of this dialogic
construct was
mediated by publications combining writings by charismatic
spokesmen with skillful deployment of photography.
Their appearance
often coincided with moments of disciplinary consolidation and
architectural innovation.
The Ise Shrine is the spiritual home of Amaterasu, the sun goddess
progenitor of the unbroken imperial line. The
shrine complex comprises
numerous unpainted wooden structures supported by stout pillars set
directly into the
ground and capped by heavy miscanthus reed roofs, each
situated in a white pebbled field surrounded by three high
wooden fences.
In the Tokugawa period, entry to the shrines was forbidden, and the throngs
of pilgrims who
flocked there directed their devotions to unseen deities
within. Architectural pilgrims today can still only see
each shrine’s massive
roof with its rafters extending beyond the gable and ridge, weighted down
by heavy tapered
logs. This invisibility initially impeded an architectural
study of the Ise Shrine. Its incorporation into
“universal” architectural
epistemes was further confounded by the fact that it did not meet
Eurocentric
expectations of architectural permanence; although the style
and modes of construction of these granary-like
structures can be dated at
least to the seventh century, they have been preserved through periodic
ritual
rebuilding on alternate, side-by-side sites, most recently in 2013. This
practice is premised on an ideal of
cyclical rather than linear time, related to
agricultural and seasonal processes bound up with religious beliefs.
Architect and historian Chūta Itō, writing in the 1920s, turned this
incommensurability on its head by making a
case for Japanese uniqueness
(Reynolds 2001: 322). His assertion was one
of many instances of the
growing anxiety surrounding the formulation of modes of Japanese national
representation
in ways that could not be subsumed by Western modernity. A
decade later the German architect Bruno Taut adopted a
comparative
perspective, declaring that the Parthenon “is the greatest and most
aesthetically sublime building in
stone as are the Ise Shrines in wood” (Taut
1937: 139). Taut’s effusive praise and conclusion that “after the
first visit to
Ise one knows what Japan is” (ibid.: 143) resonated in Japan and
internationally since his role as
spokesperson for Japanese architecture was
supported by a network of local architects and by the government,
which
sponsored publications of many of his lectures and books.
His proclamations arguably laid the foundations for architect Kenzō
Tange’s influential Ise:
Prototype of Japanese Architecture, published in
Japanese in 1962, and three years later in an English
translation issued by
MIT Press (Tange 1965). Its appearance capitalized on the international
celebrity that
Tange had achieved through his design of the sports stadium
for the 1964 Tokyo Olympics. As Jonathan Reynolds has
argued, the text of
this book, combined with the selection, composition, and arrangement of
the accompanying
photographs, articulates a narrative about the creative
bond between tradition and modernity. This underlying
agenda is revealed
in the text’s claim that the unique, Japanese method of wood construction
“created a type of
structural beauty, known as the ‘Mondrian pattern,’
which relies on the interplay of horizontals and verticals”
(ibid.: 202). This
is made explicit in the accompanying photographs by Yoshio Watanabe
whose skillful cropping
makes the rectilinear forms of the ancient shrines
appear to have affinities with abstract minimalism. The
photographic
sequence in this re-presentation of the Ise Shrine additionally served to
deflect attention from its
pre-war association with the worship of the
emperor by focusing on the aesthetic and spiritual aura experienced
in the
pristine natural beauty of the shrine’s setting.
Similar tropes and strategies of cultural retrieval, carried out on multiple
fronts in the pre- and post-war
eras, have also informed representations of
the seventeenth-century Katsura Imperial Villa, located on the
outskirts of
Kyoto (Naito 1977). This complex of buildings in a zigzag arrangement is
situated in a garden with a
pond at its center, landscaped to evoke sites
made famous through classical literature. The hillocky garden
includes four
teahouses strategically situated to afford seasonal scenic views during the
informal courtly
gatherings that were the raison d’être of this complex.
Katsura’s interior spaces are distinguished by the use of
tatami mats,
alcoves for the display of scrolls or other objets d’art, staggered built-in
shelves, and sliding
paper screens, features of the shoin style of architecture
characteristic of the
residences of the court, military elite, and temple guest
halls. The absence of furniture or any other
appurtenances draws attention
to the linearity of this architectural style and to the aesthetic sensitivity
brought to the materials, colors, and textures of the interior (see Figure
42.2). Although
dwellings in the Tokugawa period ranged widely in form,
by framing it as “an elegant Japanese house” modern
writers have tended to
situate Katsura as part of a national tradition rather than a complex of
buildings that
are geographically or class specific (Ito 1969). Bruno Taut
played a considerable role in launching this
interpretation by his assertion
that, unlike European palaces and chateaux, it did not feature “an outer
representation of rank” that emphasized “the larger disparity between court
life and that of the simple people”
(Taut 1937: 281). Even as Katsura was
quintessentially Japanese it was also, in his eyes, an “architecture of
function” because it adhered to the simplicity, clarity of line, faithfulness to
the material, and clarity of
proportion of international modernism (ibid.:
291).

Figure
42.2 Interior view of Katsura
Imperial Villa, c. 1650.

Photo: B. Tanaka, © Getty Images 160269039.

Taut’s essentializing projections bore little relationship to the reality of

Japan in the past or during his
lifetime. Indeed in the 1920s and 1930s,
when he was writing, architect and industrial designer Wajirō Kon was
carrying out a minute decoding of modernity through the particularities of
everyday life with results that were
strikingly at odds with the image of
Japanese minimalism promoted by Taut and his associates. As Miriam
Silverberg has recounted, this “architect turned ethnographer used the work
of William Morris to study the
Japanese farmhouse because he was
dissatisfied with Gropius and Le Corbusier” (Silverberg 1992: 36–7),
revealing
a sensitivity to regional, class, and gender differences absent
among many of his peers. Later he turned his
attention to urban life, where
he surveyed domestic interiors, meticulously cataloguing the contents of
sitting
rooms, dining rooms, and bedrooms to reveal the kinds of consumer
goods deemed necessary by men and women at the
time. He presented his
archeological excavations of the home in cluttered drawings that betray his
anti-capitalist critique of the commodification of culture (ibid.: 39–44).
Kon’s writings also make clear that he
saw that the differences being
constructed in the 1920s were not “between East and West, but differences
within
the Japanese modern present” (ibid.: 50).
Post-war Japanese publications in architectural history for a variety of
audiences have reinforced the sense that
Katsura is the embodiment of a
Japanese culture of material restraint, or shibui, an image
highly appealing
in the context of growing global consumerism. This has been conveyed
through a blend of text and
image that makes viewers believe that what they
are seeing is a true and natural expression of a “traditional”
Japanese
interior. While photographic narratives document the exterior and interior
details of Katsura, they
cannot convey the lived experience of its space in
the early modern era. This was, after all, a villa intended
for occasional use,
largely abandoned in the nineteenth century, and stripped bare in the
process of its
twentieth-century restoration. Nonetheless, by reducing the
interiors to beautiful compositions, the photographs
have helped to
reinforce longstanding stereotypes of the Japanese as artistic people. (Also,
and less often
noted, they have helped to consolidate a modernist ethos of
simplicity and impersonality that, as Penny Sparke has argued in the context
of Europe (Sparke 1995), is highly gendered.)
Like most representations of
Japanese interiors, images of Katsura excise the variety of household goods
that
would have been part of daily life, creating an image of the domestic
interior as a pristine space devoid of
clutter, in so doing denying female
agency in the formation of Japanese culture. Anthropologist Inge Daniels’s
studies of the “untidy Japanese house” testify that contemporary scholars
still struggle to dismantle such
stereotypes (Daniels 2001).

Conclusion

The re-presentation of technologies, crafts, and architecture of the

Tokugawa period through modern and modernist
design discourse means
that these are not just recreated, but also read in a different way, one in
which the West
is taken as a measure, both positive and negative, of Japan’s
development. Not all aspects of Japan’s early
modern material culture have
received the same retrospective degree of attention as the three discussed
here, but
the fact remains that many key manifestations have been
profoundly rewritten through such complex, multi-layered
narratives. The
intent of this critique has been to unpack the complex cultural politics
hidden in this
discourse, which may simultaneously align itself with and in
opposition to Western modernity, and whose legacy it
is impossible to
escape. I am not arguing for a fossilized idea of “traditional” Japan. Design
and its
interpretation, like any cultural phenomenon and practice, change
over time and are invariably mediated by
processes of translation of many
kinds, both verbal and visual, with both intended and unintended
consequences.
Instead, my aim has been to promote thinking with and
through these conflicts to underscore the dilemmas of
representation that
inflect the historical, geographical, social, and gender contingent design
practices and
material culture of Japan (and other non-Western nations).

Note

All Japanese names in the text are in Western order, personal name followed by family name.

References

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Japan, Chapel
Hill, Duke University Press.
Cort, L. (2003) “Shopping for Pots in Momoyama Japan,” in Morgan Pitelka (ed.) Japanese Tea
Culture, London, Routledge: 61–85.
Daniels, I. (2001) “The ‘Untidy’ Japanese House,” in Daniel Miller (ed.) Home Possessions:
Material Culture behind Closed Doors, London, Berg: 202–29.
Fujita, H. (2009) Words for Design I: Comparative Etymology and Terminology of Design and its
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Tange. K. (1965) Ise: Prototype of Japanese Architecture, Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press.
Taut, B. (1937) Houses and People of Japan, Tokyo, Sanseido.
Thornton, R. (1991) Japanese Graphic Design, London, Laurence and King.
Tinios, E. (2010) Japanese Prints, London, British Museum Press.
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Bernard
Leach, translated by Mihoko Okamura, Tokyo, Kodansha International.
 43

THE COLD WAR DESIGN

BUSINESS OF JOHN D.
ROCKEFELLER 3RD
Yuko Kikuchi
 
 

Introduction: The question of Cold War design in Asia

Design formed an important part of political ideology during the Cold War.
At the American National Exhibition in
Moscow in July 1959 United States
Vice President Richard Nixon asked the Russian premier Nikita
Khrushchev,
‘Would it not be better to compete in the relative merits of
washing machines than in the strength of rockets? Is
this the kind of
competition you want?’ The conversation took place in an American exhibit
in a General Electric
lemon-yellow kitchen. Famously known as the
Kitchen Debate, it became one of the focal events relating to
political
propaganda that took place in the context of discussions about affluence,
efficiency, comfort and the
general happiness of society (Oldenziel and
Zachmann 2009). This picture of politically driven design competition
was
further explored in the Cold War Modern: Design 1945–1970 exhibition,
curated by David
Crowley and Jane Pavitt at the Victoria and Albert
Museum in London in 2008 (Crowley and Pavitt 2008). The
exhibition
featured a range of dynamic, imaginative and progressive designs that
reflected the conflicting
utopian and dystopian visions created by the
superpowers. It provided a general overview of Cold War modernity in
design, focusing on scientific advancement and high technology, typified by
the futuristic vision of space travel
that was epitomised in Stanley Kubrick’s
film 2001: A Space Odyssey; enormous television
towers; and moulded
plywood and fibreglass reinforced plastic chairs.
However, Cold War design cannot be characterised only by objects
produced in Europe and the US. In the background
was another ongoing
Cold War that divided Asia, in the form of the Korean War, the Vietnam
War and the genocide
by the Khmer Rouge, all of which are within living
memory. The design developments that took place within this
Asian context
have not yet been explored, but are crucially important for the design
histories of Asia. This is
the period in which Japan had the opportunity to
develop a fully fledged design movement under the American-led
system.
The rest of the non-communist Asian regions also witnessed the emergence
of contemporary design movements
(with an emphasis on craft). While
Euro-American Cold War design can be seen as a linear and steady
autonomous
design movement, albeit under the manipulative influence of
the superpowers, as the pre-1945 design movements experienced further
innovations, Cold War design
in Asia can be described as more of a rupture
or an intervention, as development was not entirely autonomous.
Because
there were not mature and solid enough foundations for modern design in
Asia in the pre-1945 period, the
Cold War marked the beginning of modern
design in that area. Unlike the futuristic, high-tech products that
characterised Euro-American design, Cold War design in Asia primarily
manifested itself in the form of
handicrafts, such as pottery and bamboo
baskets, and low-tech industrial products, such as silk textiles,
clothing and
fashion accessories.
As a contribution to the emerging field of the design history of the Cold
War period, this chapter presents an
aspect of US-driven Cold War design
intervention with a focus on the little known design business of John D.
Rockefeller (JDR) 3rd.

The context of Cold War design in Japan and Asia

Unlike the main narrative created by competition between the two

superpowers (US and USSR), in which they
exercised political and
economic power through ‘grand design’, the Cold War design narrative in
Asia, set by the
US, was primarily economic. It focused on humanitarian
aid in relation to handicrafts in vulnerable and unsettled
power vacuums
which were susceptible to the superpowers (and strategic ‘soft power’ in
accordance with the US’s
general policy of anti-communism). This aid
programme was mostly realised in business terms through the promotion
of
sales of indigenous Asian handicrafts restyled by American designers in
order to increase the national incomes
of Asian countries; in humanitarian
terms, through the provision of jobs and technical training for refugees
(particularly those who had fled from communist-led regions); and through
the preservation of national and ethnic
traditions inherent in the cottage
industries. In Japan’s case, during and after the US and Allied military
occupation (1945–52) that followed the country’s defeat in the Second
World War, arts, crafts and design played
important roles in the restoration
of peace by changing the image of Japan from an inhuman militaristic
country
to a cultural and humanistic one. Also, on a practical front they
helped to increase Japan’s exports and offset
its high imports which
consisted, mainly, of food for the starving population. This had been a
heavy national
economic burden but an economic recovery took place at
this time (Kikuchi 2008). In 1951 John Foster Dulles led
the Peace Treaty
of San Francisco, which was signed between Japan and forty-eight
countries to formalise Japan’s
renunciation of former territories and
redefine its sovereignty. It also embraced the acceptance of the
judgements
of the International Military Tribunal and War Crimes Courts: disarmament
(with a simultaneous
agreement about the Security Treaty established
between the United States and Japan that imposed a US military
presence in
the Far East); and restricted commercial rights and reparation conditions
(Treaty of Peace 1951).
This hard-line, uncompromising peace settlement
was implemented carefully, in Dulles’s words, in support of
restoring ‘the
vanquished to a position of dignity and equality among the nations’ and
with the US’s ‘economic
aid which has prevented the post-war misery
which would have exposed Japan to capture by communism’ (Dulles
1951).
Cultural policy was also emphasised to soften the treaty and JDR 3rd was
assigned as an unofficial
cultural consultant to accompany Dulles’s official
delegation to Japan to discuss the treaty. JDR 3rd recalled
that the
opportunity revamped his life and that he ‘greatly respect[ed] Dulles’ fresh
approach and determination to make the treaty not to be punitive … not be
economically so
burdensome as to unduly affect Japan’s recovery … rather
… constructive and I supposed one might say,
magnanimous’ (Columbia
University 1964: 168).
 This turning point in his life turned JDR 3rd, and his wife, Blanchette,
into Japanophiles and the Asian experts
in his family. The Rockefeller
family had made a fortune through the Standard Oil Company which was
founded by
John D. Rockefeller Senior (1839–1937) who had been
succeeded by his son JDR Jr. (1874–1960). JDR 3rd (1906–78)
was the
eldest son of John D. Rockefeller Jr. and Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, and had
four brothers – Nelson,
Winthrop, Laurence and David. The family business
turned to philanthropic work but, unlike his brothers who were
politicians
and bankers, JDR 3rd was a full-time philanthropist who devoted his whole
energy to social problems
(such as population issues) and cultural affairs.
His main accomplishments were the ‘development of the Lincoln
Center for
the Performing Arts, the founding of the Asia Society and the reconstitution
of the Japan Society,
extensive work in Asia over many years in agriculture
and the arts, leadership generally in philanthropy,
establishment of the
Rockefeller Public Service Awards, and others’ (Harr and Johnson 1988: 5).
JDR 3rd’s
activities embraced Asia broadly, and he was ‘at home in Asia’,
but Japan occupied a special place for him. He
visited almost every year
with his family, in particular with his son Jay, who eventually studied at the
International Christian University and lived in Tokyo. JDR 3rd became
deeply involved in Japan, feeling the more
he visited the more he ‘realised
the importance of the country and of its relationship to the rest of Asia’
(Columbia University 1964: 169). While this interest in Japan – ‘the unique
status of JDR 3rd … the Rockefeller
mystique, the uncanny meshing of his
own personality and temperament with those of the Japanese’ – resulted in
profound friendships, he also got involved with ‘a tangible project’ to ‘build
cultural bridges between Japan and
the United States and gently nudge the
Japanese on the path to new and enlightened relations with the other
countries of the Far East’ (Harr and Johnson 1991: 86–7).
Japan became the strongest ally of the US at the dawn of the Cold War
and, with Japan as a model, the US expanded
its sphere of influence into
east, southeast and south Asia through military, economic and cultural aid.
In order
to promote design business in connection with exports a group of
American designers, together with some
merchandisers, came and
discovered ‘Asia’. Among them was Russel Wright, who made an
important intervention in
Japan’s post-war design history (Kikuchi 2008).
He was commissioned to conduct a survey on hand crafts as part of
the
overseas economic aid programme for the State Department agency, ICA.
He organised many design projects,
restyling and redesigning indigenous
local handicrafts for the American export market throughout east and
southeast Asia. In parallel to Wright’s and other designers’ work, JDR 3rd
also initiated design business with
Asia.

Products of Asia (POA) and Products of India (POI)

JDR 3rd’s business enterprise was called Products of Asia, Inc. (POA). It
was founded in October 1955 and
dissolved in 1967. JDR 3rd served as
Chairman of the Board of Directors of the company, with Austin T. Graves
(formerly President of John Wanamaker Company of New York) as
President; J. Austen Wood as Vice President; John
W. F. Neill as Vice
President and Treasurer; and Donald H. McLean Jr. (an
associate of Mr.
Rockefeller) as Vice President and Secretary. The main office was in
Rockefeller Plaza, 452
Fifth Avenue, New York. There was also a Tokyo
office with a small staff. Products of India (POI) was
incorporated later, in
February 1959. The Board members of the two firms were almost identical.
The economic context of the foundation of these companies was the
decision by GATT (General Agreement on Tariffs
and Trade) to integrate
new countries, such as Japan, into the international capitalist market. Japan
was
admitted to GATT in 1955 after strong lobbying by the US to persuade
other member states – namely those of the
British Commonwealth and
Western Europe – who were hostile to Japan. Prioritising the integration of
Japan in to
the free trade market in order to contain communist powers in
Asia was seen as part of US Cold War policy
(Forsberg 1988). Therefore, it
was primarily aimed at providing economic aid for Japan by opening it up
to the
international free market, trading distinctively Japanese quality
products with the US and allowing Japan to
accumulate economic power. In
a POA company press release of October 1955, this aim of providing aid
was strongly
emphasised:

[The i]mmediate objective of Products of Asia, Inc., is to develop

new products suited to production in Japan,
as well as to adapt
existing products to make them suitable for the United States
market and to find new
markets for quality goods in current use in
Japan but that are little known abroad. The company will provide
distribution for a variety of products to department and specialty
 stores throughout the United States … Mr.
Rockefeller and other
members of the board recognize that if Japan is to achieve
economic progress, she must
find foreign markets. We believe that
there is a wealth of design ideas in Japan that have never been
explored
for purposes of foreign trade and it is our hope that these
may be used to help her get the foreign exchange
that is so vital to
her welfare.

It also noted that the initial focus was on Japan but ‘when this is firmly
established we expect to include the
product of other countries in Asia’
(Products of Asia 1955; Jamieson 1955).
Behind the idea of economic aid and an international free market was a
rationale for the prevention of the spread
of communism. In JDR 3rd’s
view, communism failed to spread ‘unless [the] cost of living and hence
living
standards get out of hand’ (JDR 3rd 1954). He was not concerned
about the trend towards Marxism that prevailed
among academics and
labour leaders in Japan, excusing them as being ‘out of touch with the
realities of the world
for so many years’. Rather, he was concerned with
establishing stable economies that engendered self-respect as a
protection
against communism.
Observing the slow deterioration of Japan’s economic and political
situation after the Occupation period during
his trip in 1954, JDR 3rd
identified the major problems as price competition, lack of confidence, high
interest
rates, old machinery, inefficient methods, paternalism, foreign
exchange rates and lack of strong leadership in
the government. He stressed
the importance of Japan having its own long-term plan and making efforts
to regain
its ‘self respect from standing on its own feet’ while also stressing
the continuing support of the US alongside
the sympathetic cooperation of
other nations, in order to give the ‘Japanese a break on markets and raw
materials’ in the international market (ibid.). So, it was through this
line of
thinking – the need to support the creation of a stable market economy –
that the idea of exporting
designed products from Asia seems to have
developed. It was also down to JDR 3rd’s interest in Japanese art,
which he
had studied under the personal tutelage of Sherman Lee, the chief officer of
the Arts and Monuments
Division in the Occupation force in Japan, who
determined arts policies and was later the Director of the
Cleveland
Museum of Art. Guided by Lee, JDR 3rd and his wife became collectors
with an acquired specialist
knowledge. Therefore, ‘qualities of beauty’
mattered to JDR 3rd rather than price (Newsweek 1955: 8), and he saw it as
important to change an image of Japan that was coloured by
‘cheap and
shoddy goods’ by importing aesthetically beautiful products with Asian
characteristics, and quality
handicrafts such as ‘ceramics, furniture, textiles,
lacquerware, bamboo articles’ (Harr and Johnson 1991: 104).
As evidenced
by his correspondence with Masako Shirasu, the wife of Jirō Shirasu – a top
civil servant who played
a key role during the Occupation – both of whom
were also art connoisseurs, JDR 3rd was interested in vernacular
handicrafts
and he tried personally to help open a New York branch of the KOGEI shop
in Ginza, which was run by
Masako (JDR 3rd 1958). However, the business
of POA and POI developed in a slightly different direction, away
from JDR
3rd’s aesthetic taste.

POA’s products

Although many small products were handled by POA and POI they mostly
worked only up to the point of distributing
samples and exploring market
possibilities. The main products of POA, which continued for some years,
were
Japanese sweaters, silk wares (Dynasty), carpets (Tai Ping and JOTO)
and boats, while POI’s main business was in
shoes (Taj), dresses and
fashion accessories.

Japanese sweaters
POA’s business started with ladies’ sweaters. In January 1956, through the
exporter J. Witkowski and Company Ltd
based in Kobe, POA contracted
with Hiramatsu and Company, which functioned as a cooperative for wool
and cotton
manufacturers in Japan (Mizuhara 1955; Wood 1955). Austin
Graves’s enthusiastic initiative was a timely reaction
to the mainstream
commercial trends of that time in which sweaters and knitted goods were
the top products in
major US retailers’ interest in importing from Japan, as
the Wall Street Journal reported
(Vicker 1955).
At first JDR 3rd was somewhat disappointed with the choice of this
product, saying, ‘I have to admit, [it] was
somewhat away from the original
concept’, but he was quickly persuaded by Graves suggesting that this
‘specially
good opportunity’ was not to be missed. In JDR 3rd’s words:
 the business did move ahead well, in the first two or three or four
years, and then we found ourselves somewhat
frustrated by quotas
established by the Japanese themselves in response to the
unhappiness created in the
United States over the dollar balance
and similar problems.
(Columbia University 1964: 249–50)

This relates to Japan’s self-imposed restrictions on the export of textiles to

the US in 1957, but this incident
was, in reality, much more complex than
JDR 3rd described it.
From the Japanese point of view it was duplicitous of the US and no less
than Japan bashing. On the one hand, the
US was acting as a powerful
promoter of free trade in GATT, but, on the other hand, it was pressuring
Japan to
propose a ‘voluntary’ restriction of textiles to the US to protect
American manufacturers behind the scenes,
while allowing Japan to be
criticised by old GATT members for its policy in respect to the textile
industries,
when it had been obliged to participate in the free trade market.
The seriousness of this incident emerged later,
as it was followed by
decades of US–Japan trade conflict.
POA lost its sweater business during this conflict in the textile trade,
even though the firm received a special
quota from the Japanese
government in recognition of their good business in the past (Minutes
1959). It was
reported in the minutes of a Board of Directors meeting in the
summer of 1961 that the sweater business was not
doing well, and, while
fashion trends seem also to have changed, this line of business appears to
have ceased by
the end of 1961 (Minutes 1961c).

Dynasty
Dynasty was the second major area of Chinese-inspired clothing that POA
started in Hong Kong at the end of 1956.
POA bought the already
established Mandarin Textiles business, which was then developed under
the American–Hong
Kong partnership of Linden Johnson and Jimmy Ling.
The products were predominantly women’s lounge wear, blouses
and
dresses, and some men’s bathrobes and pyjamas. One of the lounge wears
featured by a fashion and beauty
editor was a two-piece ‘silk lounger’ made
of supple pongee with a top over blouse with a slightly Chinese-style
stand-
up collar with small brass ball buttons at the front, coupled with Chinese-
style slim trousers with a short
slit at the side (Evans 1962). The American
designer Dora Sanders was hired to design the products and also to
manage
the business. This business developed steadily and created two new
salesrooms, resulting in a substantial
increase in the volume of the dress
business (Minutes 1961a), and seems to have survived until the end, with
major restructuring in 1963 after radical management changes (Cole 1963).
JDR 3rd seems to have been quite satisfied with the products – as he
noted, Dynasty’s products

the Chinese background, the Chinese design. And it was a very

considerable adaptation of that design to
American demands and
needs. The material, of course, reflects the Oriental beauty, the
colors are based on the
Oriental, and even the cut of the clothes to a
certain extent reflects the Oriental.
(Columbia University 1964: 253)

The original aim of aid also seems to have been realised in this project, as
the New York
Times reported on the ethical aspect of providing cutting and
sewing jobs for Shanghai refugees and good
working conditions for women
at the Dynasty factory in Kowloon (Emerson 1959). However, POA did
make one big
mistake in 1960 by purchasing Imperial House, a company
which manufactured high quality silk dresses in Japan. It
was thought they
would sell well through a separate channel, but this not only caused
competition with
Dynasty within POA’s own business, but also upset
Mandarin Textiles, which
led them to create another business called Empire
House to provide a counter-attack on Imperial House products
(Minutes
1961b, Minutes 1961d).

Carpets
POA’s other major business was carpets. The Tai Ping line (great peace is
the literal translation of the Chinese
characters) was launched by POA in
the spring of 1957 with Hong Kong Carpet Manufacturers Ltd owned by
the
Kadoorie brothers. The Tai Ping business was developed under William
P. Powning. Wool was supplied from Britain
and New Zealand, and ‘hand
made by free Chinese weavers’ who had moved from the Tientsin area of
north China to
Hong Kong, thereby justifying the business as ‘a means of
assisting Chinese refugees’ (Hong Kong Carpet
Manufacturers Ltd 1957;
Products of Asia 1960; Minutes 1957).
As seen in the Tai Ping catalogue, the designs of carpets varied from
European floral, modern abstract patterns,
to Moroccan and Middle Eastern
geometric patterns, but the Chinese designs were limited to the double
happiness
pattern, phoenix and peony (Products of Asia 1960). For that
reason, the design of carpets was of great concern
to JDR 3rd. He expressed
to Powning ‘the desirability of having some styles of Far Eastern origin or
with a Far
Eastern flavour’ (Minutes 1958) and again a year later he asked
‘whether anything was being done to improve the
design of the line’
(Minutes 1959). He recollected this design issue later, saying,

I’ll have to admit I have been somewhat distressed that so many of

the designs, particularly in the Hong Kong
rugs, have been non-
Asian designs. I have said that it seemed to me that the Asian
designs were so appealing
that we were missing an opportunity
with our competitors not to use them more generally.
(Columbia University 1964: 255)

JDR 3rd’s dissatisfaction remained. However, they built a new factory in

1958, and made a successful business
furnishing Sheraton Hotels in Dallas
and New York, and the offices of large corporations, such as Equitable Life,
Chase Manhattan Bank and Time & Life. These big commissions became
effective advertisements for Tai Ping
carpets.
The company was so successful that its competitor V’SOSKE accused
JDR 3rd of using his name to influence clients
to purchase Tai Ping carpets
by ‘compromising decent ethics’ in supposedly fair commercial
competition (Murphy
1960). However, Tai Ping carpets lost its lead against
the competition in 1961, and POA started exploring new
possibilities with
JOTO carpets in Japan and Karma carpets in India to compensate for the
Tai Ping problem. This
resulted in fierce fighting between the Kadoories
and POA throughout 1961. Lawrence Kadoorie accused POA of
breaching
their contract of exclusivity by creating competitors within POA and of not
making sufficient sales
efforts, while POA blamed Tai Ping’s rigid
uncompetitive pricing, high overheads and inconsistent quality.
Kadoorie
demanded a renegotiation of the contract to create more favourable
conditions for Tai Ping, and even
hinted at the communist threat, which
they knew JDR 3rd would not like to hear about, saying ‘few realise the
larger picture … Communism must follow unless there is reasonably full
employment with improving living conditions’ in Hong Kong (Kadoorie
1961; Graves 1961; Minutes 1961c; 1961e).
Eventually the Tai Ping
business was taken over by the Kadoories in 1964, and this brought about
the complete
closure of one POA floor-covering business.

Boats
One of the more unusual product lines, which was not sold in volume, but
rather at a high price to a few wealthy
clients, was handmade pleasure
power boats. Austen Wood started an investigation into the boat business in
Japan
and Hong Kong in the spring of 1957 (Minutes 1957), while he
followed the model of the boat ‘Susie Wong’, which
was designed by
Sparkman and Stevens and manufactured by American Marine Ltd in Hong
Kong (Graves 1960). It
therefore may well have been the Hollywood
Oriental fantasy (Klein 2003) created around ‘Susie Wong’ that
inspired the
boat business in POA, which started in the spring of 1960 and seems to
have acquired a certain
status by 1961 when they started selling Sparkman
and Stevens designed boats. In 1964 the boat business in Hong
Kong was
liquidated, but it continued in Japan, which had established shipyards with
skilled labour, availability
of local wood materials and a high-tech
fibreglass industry (Products of Asia 1964). There were three types of
boat:
the smallest type was the thirteen-foot, six-inch ‘Blue Jay’, a training boat
for youngsters; the mid-range
twenty-six foot ‘Thunderbird’ with basic
accommodation for four adults, suitable for day sailing and overnight
cruising; and the largest type, the forty-four foot ‘Fishers Island’, powered
by a diesel engine with
accommodation for six, alongside a galley and two
enclosed bathrooms.

POI’s products

Products of India, Inc. was founded in 1959 when ‘a spirit of optimism’

pervaded the company’s operations
(Minutes 1959). Brassware was the first
product of POI, and it was initially successful but, as JDR 3rd put it,
‘For
some reasons, which I never really could understand, the price picture
seemed to change to the point where
we were no longer really competitive
on the home front’ and it was discontinued in 1962 (Columbia University
1964: 257).

Taj shoes
The biggest hit for POI was women’s luxury, ‘special occasion’ shoes,
which they started selling in the spring of
1961 under the brand name Taj
(see Figure 43.1). Images of exotically named shoes, such as
‘Pearl Cluster
Palace’ (upturned toes with brass high heels), ‘Wedding Cap Sandal’
(kitten-heeled sandals) and
‘Shish Mahal’ (flat shoes), appeared in the
media and in department store advertisements. The shoes had pointed
toes,
were colourful and glittered with gold and silver embroidery. Their raw silk
uppers were beaded and
encrusted with pearls and their heels were made of
brass. In essence they were fashion shoes for Western women.
Although their appeal was based on a sense of Indian exoticism, these
shoes were, in fact, multinational
products, and only partially manufactured
in India. The materials for the surface of the shoes were made in India
by
the Indian Cooperative Union (ICU); the brass heels were made in Italy and
designed by New York designer Foie
Joyce; the shoe itself was made in
Brooklyn by an Armenian shoemaker named Harry (Columbia University
1964: 259;
de Haven 1963; Sherman 1963). It was described by the
Chicago Sunday Tribune as ‘fashion’s
answer to the Peace corps’ and ‘a
happy collaboration of the Old World craftsmanship of India and the
modern
design and mass production know-how of American specialists’
(Livingstone 1961).
Figure
43.1 Bonwit Teller’s
advertisement for ‘Taj of India’, New York Times, April 24, 1961.
Source: New York Times, April 24, 1961, 3, courtesy of the Rockefeller Archive Centre.

Taj shoes were also put on sale at department stores in Japan and in India
at the Cottage Industries Emporium in
New Delhi, where they enjoyed the
attention of an important customer, Catherine Galbraith, the wife of John
Kenneth Galbraith, the American Ambassador to India under John F.
Kennedy’s administration and an influential
economist during the Cold War
period (see Figure 43.2). She commented, ‘While wearing them,
the ladies
would not forget the jawans who fought for the defence of liberty – the
foundation of manners, culture
and civilisation’. She also expressed the
hope that women would ‘do their best to help the national defence
effort’
(The Indian Express 1963). Taj shoes became a platform for delivering the
American
political message of its support for India’s self-defence and pride
– in other words, shoes became the equivalent
of Nixon and Khrushchev’s
kitchen.

Figure
43.2 ‘Mrs John Kenneth
Galbraith (seated), wife of the American Ambassador, is the first
customer as she opens an exhibition of Taj
shoes on sale at the Collate Industries
Emporium, New Delhi. The sale proceeds will be donated to the
National Defence
Fund’. The Indian Express, January 9, 1963, 8.

Source: I am grateful to Professor Brij Tankha of the University of Delhi and his family for acquiring
this
image.

The irrelevance of the original aim and the company’s demise

Despite the success of Taj shoes, in 1962 the company’s future was bleak.
In November of that year JDR 3rd said,
‘NO’ to ‘questions as to whether or
not Products of Asia and also Products of India should be continued’,
because
‘for the amount of time and money involved, we have not proven
so far that there were compensating results,
results in the direction of our
initial objectives’ (Columbia University 1964: 259). At the exact time of
this
interview the company underwent a major investigation by Harold F.
Smiddy, Vice President of the General Electric
Company, and a
management consultant. The report started with his key question, that is,
whether, given that this
was a trading company, the original concept ‘Aid
Asia … was of limited practical feasibility or whether it ever
was
appreciated conceptually as setting basic dimensions on the implementing
operations’. He observed, somewhat
astutely, that ‘while the motivation to
“aid Asia” was acknowledged by all
concerned, subtle differences of
interpretation and emphasis were early apparent and still prevail’ (Smiddy
1962:
1–2).
As the Smiddy report pointed out, and the minutes of meetings of the
Board of Directors confirm, there were
difficulties in maintaining the
original objective of both aid and commerce throughout the business.
Contradictions had become increasingly obvious. Although their products
had ‘prestige, character and quality’,
remaining competitive in actual
business practice was a challenge (Minutes 1961f). It also became
impossible to
have both the elements of ‘charm’ that came from the non-
uniformity of handmade products yet retain the
standardised uniformity
required by American buyers (Columbia University 1964: 256).
In this series of difficulties JDR 3rd did not take a back seat, but became
deeply involved. He was always
present at the Board of Directors meetings,
and also in daily discussions with Austin Graves. At times he made
strong
objections and intervened in order to pull the focus more persuasively
towards Japan rather than ‘the
British colony Hong Kong’ (Minutes 1956),
or would insist on Asian design, as seen in the case of the Tai Ping
carpets.
After all, the conflict between aid and commercial interests resulted in
boardroom compromises one way
or another, including compromises by
JDR 3rd himself. Eventually Austin Graves, who was highly criticised in
the
Smiddy report for his lack of leadership and management, resigned in
March 1964, and POA and POI were dissolved
in 1967 after twelve years
of business.

Conclusion
JDR 3rd’s business was considered a ‘failure’ after all, with cumulative
losses of around three million dollars,
disappointing him that his original
idea for products representing Asian culture did not work and that his
altruism fundamentally clashed with commercial motives, as Harr and
Johnson have commented (1991: 104–5). This
revealed the practical
difficulties of the American Cold War design project which had intended to
realise the
complex aims of combining aid, business success and artistic
cultural promotion.
The products dealt with by POA and POI were commercial ones. This
was distinctively different from other projects
of American design
intervention, such as that of Russel Wright, who was concerned with small-
scale,
non-commercial handicrafts. It was interesting to discover that
commercially oriented projects were operated by a
philanthropist, JDR 3rd,
who ambiguously positioned himself as neither a public nor an entirely
private person.
Like other American design interventions, JDR 3rd’s design business
represents a ‘soft’ cultural aspect of the
Cold War, offering another story of
Cold War design in Asia. Also evident is what Christina Klein calls ‘Cold
War
Orientalism’, playing with American consumers’ popular images of
Asia, which can be seen in the branding of the
images of opulent Chinese
‘Dynasty’ silk, Suzie Wong’s boat and the luxury of Taj Mahal (Klein
2003).

Note

The research for this chapter was conducted at the Rockefeller Archive Center (RAC). The chapter
was developed
from the research report of 2012 which I submitted after being awarded an RAC grant
in 2011 (www.rockarch.org/publications/resrep/kikuchi.pdf). I am grateful to the RAC and their staff
for
this invaluable opportunity and their guidance.

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RAC.
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Crowley, David and Jane Pavitt (eds) (2008) Cold War Modern Design 1945–1970, London:
V&A
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Star-
Bulletin, 12 October, p. 8.
Dulles, John Foster (1951) ‘Text of Dulles: Address on Tentative Treaty Terms for Japan and Peace
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Emerson, Gloria (1959) ‘Women’s World Abroad: Sleek and Alluring Dynasty Salon One of Many
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 INDEX
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Note: Tables are indicated in bold; figures and illustrations in italics.
 
1stDibs.com 151
3D printing 161, 163
9–11 memorial borders 30, 32
9/11 terrorist attacks 31, 32
$20 Bill, The (painting) 148
100 Chairs in 100 Days (art exhibit) 159
2001: A Space Odyssey (film) 518
 
A. and F. Pears 447–8
A B Alpha 261
Abdülmacid, Sultan 457
Abercorn, Duchess of 95
Aberdeen, Ishbel, Countess of 93, 94, 95, 96, 97
academics and design practice 396–8
Academy of Fine Arts, Istanbul 459
acrylic plastics 108
Action Office, the 273, 274
activist design through greenhouses in Helsinki 383–90, 387, 389, 392; types of design activism 401–
6, 402, 403, 405, 406
Adamson, Glenn 439
Adbusters (magazine) 451
Adbusters Media Foundation 451–2
Adelaide Jubilee Exhibition (1888) 222
Ades, Rose 327n3
Adhocracy (exhibition) 166
Adorno, Theodor 369, 377–8
advertising: design and party political influence 248–9, 251; in Republican Turkey 462, 463, 464,
465; and the shaping of desire 354, 378, 448
AEG 257
Aeron Chair, the 270
aesthetics and taste 126–7, 131, 263, 335
aesthetic standards 27n2, 126
Affluent Society, The 378
‘Africanization’ of design thinking 239
Africar, the 232–4, 233, 238, 239
agentic design 34–5, 36–7
AGI (Alliance Graphique Internationale) 251–2
Ahmedabad INC 487–8
AHRC (Arts and Humanities Research Council) 318, 319
AIL (Africar International Ltd) 232,
233, 238
Akerlund, Isak 216
Albert, Prince 102
Alcega, Juan de 84–5
alcohol consumption 421 see also legislative evolution of the spaces and boundaries of the
nineteenth-century English public house
Alessi 26
Alexandra, Princess 91
Alibaba 332
Allahabad INC (1910), the 489
Allen, Terry 279n3
All India Handicrafts Board, the 495–6, 499
Alphabet de la grande guerre (book) 212, 213
Altair 8800 111, 112
Alternative Design Capital network, the 391
alternative methodologies for design 55
aluminum 103–4, 107, 108
Amar, Jules 83
Amaterasu 513
American Fabrics (magazine) 503
American Modernism 375
American National Exhibition in Moscow (1959) 448, 518
American Radiator and Standard Sanitary Corporation 271
Amies, Hardy 180–1
Amstutz, Walter 244
amusements at exhibitions 225, 227
analogue world, the 158
Anderson, Benedict 219, 483
Andrews, Molly 139–40
Ankara (book) 461
Anker Steinbaukasten (Anchor Stone blocks) 211
Anschauung, concept of 210
Anscombe, Edmund 226–7, 228
Anscombe, Isabelle 187, 438, 440
ANT (Actor Network Theory) 43
anthropological collaboration with design 45,
50–1
anthropology and design 339–40, 342–3, 344–6; and non-design disciplines 340–2, 344, 346–7
Anthropology of Experience, The (book) 341
Anthropology of Magic, The (book) 341–2
Anthropology of Music, The (book) 341, 342
anthropometric studies and object placement 81
anti-colonialism in India 482–3, 488, 489
apparel construction 80, 81, 84–6, 85, 87
apple.com 120
Apple Computer Inc. 111–14, 113, 120, 121, 282, 330
Apple I computer 111, 117, 121n2
Apple Macbook Pro 123
Apple Macintosh 113
applied anthropology 343–4
applied art movement, the 259, 263
Applied Motion Study (book) 83
Arad, Ron 160–1
Arçelik (refrigerator brand) 464
archaeology and socio-cultural anthropology 344–5, 346
Archer, Bruce 3
architectural design at industrial exhibitions 226
architectural design in Japan 513–16, 515
architectural drawing: conventions in the design process 80–1, 87; and the dotted line 80, 81, 82, 86
Architectural Graphic Standards 80, 84
architecture and the copying of interior design 25
Architektur–Migration phenomenon, the 376
archives of promotional material for computing 118–19
Arduino (micro-controller) 163
Are Clothes Modern? (exhibition) 377
Ariès, Philippe 208
Arkitekt (journal) 464–5
Arolat, Emre 478
Arseeven, Celal Esat 461
Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory (book) 341
art and anthropology 341
art and design quality within industry 256–60, 261–2, 261–4, 262; design of the EB-32 telephone
260, 260–1
Art as Culture: An Anthropology of Art (book) 341
Art at Home (book series) 187
Art Deco architecture 459, 460
artefacts as cultural icons 116–17
Art et Industrie Gallery, Soho, New York 147–8
art gallery layouts 226–7
Art History (survey) 436
artistic critiques of materialism and consumerism 159
artivism as critical design 384
Art Journal (journal) 485
art museums and design discourse 256–7
Art of India and Pakistan (exhibition) 497
Arts and Humanities Research Council 55
Arts Digest (magazine) 499
Art-Work of the Future, The (essay) 27n4
Ashton, Leigh 495, 500
As Long as It’s Pink: The Sexual Politics of Taste (book) 187–8
Aspray, William 116
Assessing and Communicating Sustainability: A Manual towards Branding the Vietnamese
Handicraft
Sector (manual) 418
assistive technology 282, 313
associative design 404
Astley Cooper chair, the 209
Ataköy apartments 464
Atkinson, Paul 8
ATM Art Mats and socially responsive design 320–1
Attfield, Judy 187, 357
auction of contents of Wilsford Manor, Wiltshire 202–4
Austin Maxi 232
Austin Reed 180
Australian government and innovation, the 330
Austrian-Jewish émigrés and design for the real world 375–6
Aynsley, Jeremy 11
 
Baan, Christine de 478–9
Bakelite 108
Bakker, Gijs 400, 471, 475
Balcioglu, Tevfik 450
Balla, Giacomo 83
Ballard, J.G. 272
Balloon Dog (exhibit) 128
Balloon Flower (Yellow) (exhibit) 128, 129
Baltacioglu, Ismail Hakki 461
Baltzer, Hans 252
Balyan, Garabet and Nikogos 457
Bandung Conference, Indonesia 494
Banham, Reyner 6, 22, 27n2, 270–1, 437
Baroque architecture 458
Barthes, Roland 214
Bass, Saul 255
Bataille, Georges 366
Bathgate, Chris 70
Bathroom, The (research project) 271, 272, 278
bathrooms in Turkish home design 464
Baudrillard, Jean 22, 25, 144, 149, 154, 163
Bauhaus, the 25, 212, 242, 445, 483
Bauman, Zygmunt 451
bazaar as symbol of tourist experience, the 497–8
BDG (Bund Deutscher Gebrauchsgraphiker) 244,
247, 252
Beaton, Cecil 197, 199, 200, 201, 202, 203, 205
Beaux-Art architecture 458
Bech, Henrich 259
Beckman, Ronald 273
Beeke, Anthon 476,
480n5
Béhar, Yves 269
Behrens, Peter 23, 24, 26, 257
Bengal School, the 483, 491n2
Benjamin, Walter 136
Bennett, Tony 127
bentwood and laminates 107
Berger, Warren 269, 279n2, 344–5
Berglund, Eeva 13–14
Bertram, Axel 247, 250
bespoke men’s suits 172, 173
Betty Boop (cartoon character) 151
Bey, Nizami 459,
459–60, 461
Bey, Osman Hamdi 459
Beyer, Glenn H. 271
Beylerbei, Ottoman palace 457
Bhabha, Homi 449
bidet wand for perineal cleansing 278
Bigwood, Miss 93, 94
bijutsu (art) 509
Bikeoff Project, the 318, 319, 326
billiard ball materials 103
binaristic theory about centre and periphery 449
Bindesbøll, Thorvald 259
biological materials as new class of substance 109
biological/physical anthropology 344
Birdwood, George 486
Birmelin, Robert 148
Bjerknes, Johan Christian 260, 261
black as dress colour in the nineteenth-century 176
Blandford, Sylvia 202
blogs and user experience 335
Bloom, Les 147
Blow, Detmar 199
BMW 452
Bode-Tyson, Susan 147
bodily practices and domestic objects 137–8
Body and Building: Essays on the Changing Relation of Body and Architecture (book)
82
body movement and generation of the dotted line 81–2
Bøe, Alf 263
Bonatz, Paul 460
Bonytt (magazine) 263
Boontje, Tord 137, 161
Booyse, Adriaan 234
Boradkar, Prasad 12–13
bordering and abstract space 30–1, 32–3
‘borderlands’ as forms of ‘design-in-action’ 363
Bose, Nandalal 483, 490
Bouncing Vases (digital design tool) 160–1
boundaries in design 22–7
Bourbon France and military dress 174
Bourdieu, Pierre 123–4, 126–8, 131, 350
Brand, Stewart 400
branding of products 447–8
Branzi, Andrea 404, 405
Braudel, Fernand 437–8
Braun, Marta 82
Breakdown (exhibit) 159
Brett, David 125–6
Bretton James (movie character) 147,
151, 152, 152–3
Breward, Christopher 9–10, 91
Briganti, Chiara 188
Brinkman, Elco 474
BRIO 214, 216
Britain Can Make It (exhibition) 353, 353–4
British Council of Industrial Design 23
British Design and Industries Association 257–8
British exhibitions in India 484–7
British Motor Corporation 232
brochures of computer manufacturers 118,
119
Brolin, Josh see Bretton James (movie character)
Brookes, Desmond 298–9
Brookes, W.G. 298
Brown, Elspeth 294
Bruckmann art publishers 244, 247
brukskunst (applied art) 263
Brunton, Deborah 425
Bryden, Inga 188
BSCI (Business for Social Compliance Initiative), the 417
Buchanan, Richard 54, 61n1
Buckley, Cheryl 438
Buckminster-Fuller, Richard 385
Bud Fox (movie character) 146, 149–50, 153
Burberry trench coat, the 180
Burchartz, Max 252
Burges, William 211
Burleigh Ware (porcelain) 137
business and sustainability 411
business anthropology 343–4
Business of Inclusive Design (book) 311
Butik A. 467n1
Büyükünal, Burcu 477
 
Calcutta INC (1906), the 488–9
Calvera, Anna 450
CaMden anti-theft bike stands and socially responsive design 318–19, 319
Campbell, Colin 106
Canterbury Industrial Association 222
caoutchouc 102
capitalism 392, 483; and the consumer society 352–3, 354–5, 358, 385; and its moral effects 154–5,
204, 364
capitalist aesthetic in the emergence of the man’s suit 178
car as mode of transport in Africa, the 230–2, 238–9; Africar, the 232–4, 233, 238, 239; Mobius, the
235–6, 236, 239; OX, the 236–7, 237, 239; Uri, the 234–5, 235, 239
carbon fiber 109
‘care’ for the environment 371
Car for Africa, A (TV documentary) 232–3
Carpenter, Edward 173, 179
Carpenters’ Arms, The 424
car safety seat as a symbol of design for childhood 216
Carter, Annie Bindon 291, 292–3, 294, 295, 296, 298–9, 300n1
castes and female professions 89
category I and II decisions 66, 69, 69, 70, 71
celebrity culture 203, 269
celluloid, invention of 103, 107, 108
Center for Housing and Environmental Studies, Cornell University 271
center-periphery model of car importation in Africa 238–9
Certeau, Michel de 29, 34
Chadwick, Don 270, 273
Chambre d’enfant (design) 212
Chapman 402
charity for disabled war veterans see Painted Fabrics Ltd.
Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota 118
Charles Booth Archive, the 431n3
Charles II, King 173, 174, 175
Charlie Hebdo (magazine) 454
Charneco, Darlene 151
Chatterjee, Ashoke 496, 500–1
Chattopadhay, Kamladevi 495–6
Cheret, Jules 441
Cheung, Ming 12
Chicago Sunday Tribune (newspaper) 526
childhood and design for children 207–17
Child’s Word, A (painting) 448
Chinese characters in Japanese print 510
Chinese economic transformation 330,
332
Chinese investment in African infrastructure 239–40
Chippendale, Thomas (junior) 194
Christie, Ian 146
Christofle 104
chronocyclegraph method, the 83, 83
chronophotography 81, 82–3
Churchill, Lady Randolph 90
Citroen 2CV 232
Cittàslow movement, the 451
civic nationalisms 479n4
Civil Rights Act (US, 1964) 307
Clark, Petula 127
Clarke, Alison J. 13, 392
Clarke’s Pocket Book for Plumbers 425
class and hierarchies of taste 131–3, 132
Cleveland Museum of Art 522
climate change 364, 370, 385
Clinton-Baker, Adm Sir Lewis 205
co-design as a feature of service design 46–7
Cohen, Deborah 188, 283
Cohen, Marilyn 9
coincidatio oppositorum (coincidence of opposites) 29, 38
Cold War, the 242, 243, 440, 470, 518
Cold War design in Asia 518–19, 520 see also design intervention as aid programme to Asia during
the Cold War
Cold War Modern: Design 1945–1970 (exhibition) 438, 518
Colefax, Sibyl 200
Colefax & Fowler 204
Coleman, Barry 238
Coleman, Roger 306
collective authorship in freely shared production templates 163
Collective Imaginings (book) 388
Colonial and Indian Exhibition (1886) 484, 485, 486
colonial exhibitions in India 483–6
colonialism 440, 441, 448, 482, 500
colonial objects and homemaking 137–9, 138, 139
commodity fetishism 143, 149, 291
complexity of financial instruments 154
computer history design 111–12, 115–16, 118–20; pitfalls in recording of 117, 119, 120–1
Computer History Museum, Mountain View, California 118
computer museums 117–18, 121n1
Computerspielemuseum, Berlin, Germany 118
Comyns Carr, Alice 90
conceived space 34
concept generation through an electronic counter design 74
conceptual design 159–63, 162
conceptual phase of a design project 79
conflation of design with living 25
Congress of Vienna, the 457
Conjunction of Criminal Opportunity 318
Connecting Concepts (exhibition) 477–8
Connerton, Paul 136, 143
Connor, Walker 475
consciousness of use of novelty with materials 102
Conservatives and the licensed trade 422–3
conservatories 195
conspicuous consumption 350
construction toys for children 210–14
consumerism and impact on design 106, 205, 322–3, 352
consumerism in Japan 511
consumption and design practice in the design process 445–6
consumption and globalization 445–6, 448–51; criticism of 451–4, 453
consumption and the four seasons of life 285
Contemporary Art: World Currents (survey) 436
contemporary design, evolution of 398–401
contemporary men’s fashion and progressive design 171
Continuum (design process) 270, 273–4, 275, 276, 276–8, 277
contradictions between aid and commerce in POA and POI 527–8
contributors to the Textile and Ornamental Arts of India exhibition 496
Conway, Patricia 270
Coomaraswamy, Ananda K. 489
Co-operative Design 305, 312
Cornell Kitchen, The (research project) 271, 272
Cornell University research projects see ergonomics as a model of design
practice
coronation durbars in Delhi 482, 483–4, 486, 487
corporate website, the 119
Cosmopolitan Interior, The (book) 188, 193
cost of military uniforms 174
costume embroidered by Irish Girls for the Countess of Aberdeen (dress) 97
Cottam, Hilary 322
counter-culture movement, the 379, 400 see also greenhouses in Helsinki as activist design
counterpoint design 404
country-specific models of products 114
Court Drawing Room season 93, 94
court dresses 93
Cox, Sebastian 403, 403
craft activists (‘craftivists’) 454
craft and design process thinking 55–61, 57, 58
craft and design research 60
craft and dressmaking 96–8, 97
craft practice changes 60
crafts of Japan 511–12
Crane, Diane 91
Crathorne, Roger 231
Creative Commons licenses 156
Creative Industries Fund NL (Netherlands) 478
Creative Playthings 214
creativity and innovation 336
crime and design 317–18
Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design 321
critical craft 56
critical design and design activism 401–2, 402
crowdfunded financing 167
Crowley, David 438, 518
Crystal Palace, the 8, 101, 105, 195, 447
Cuban art and national identity 442
Cubic architecture in Turkey 461
Cuff, Benjamin 285
culinary tourism 450
Culme, John 202
Cult of Beauty: The Aesthetic Movement (exhibition) 187
cultural decline from dissipation of design studies 21
Cultural Exodus phenomenon, the 375–6
cultural inferences about taste 350–1; and surface qualities 128–30, 129
cultural shifts and technological change 156–7
cultural studies and design 5
culture definitions 350–1
Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception, The (essay) 377–8
culture industry and critiques of consumption 377–9
Culture of Design, The (book) 438
Cundall, Frank 484
currency use of manillas in British West Africa (Nigeria) 141, 142–3
Curzon, Lord George, Viceroy of India 487
cycle theft 327n1
cycling as a public assembling activity 326
 
Dancing Column: On Order in Architecture (book) 82
Dandavate, Uday 343
Daniels, Inge 516
Dant, Tim 137, 140
Darien Taylor (movie character) 146,
149, 150
Das, Santanu 298
Das Deutsche Plakat: von den Anfängen zur Gegenwart (book) 251
Datamuseet IT-ceum, Linkoping, Sweden 118
Daunton, Martin 424
Davidoff, Leonore 187
da Vinci, Leonardo 82
Day, Christopher 403
DDFA (Dutch Design Fashion and Architecture) 477, 478–9
Deakin, Charles 428–9
Dean, Penelope 6
Debord, Guy 154
decision-approvers 75, 76
decision-influencers 76, 76
decision-maker types 67–8, 75–6, 76
decision-making theory 65–8; for designer-makers 68–71, 69
decision points within a design process 72
decision-shapers 75–6, 76
decision-takers 75, 76
decisive decision making 67
defuturing through structural unsustainability 366–7, 370
Delin, Annie 293
demand for individualized consumer choices 26
Demiurgic Lines: Line-making and the Architectural Imagination (essay) 82, 86
democracy and sustainability 365
Denscher, Bernard 251
Department of Trade and Industry (UK) 172,
183
De Pree, Hugh 273
Design (magazine) 115
design, definitions of 22, 397, 508
design, reconfiguration of 363–4
design activism 13–14, 379–81, 383–5, 390–1; and activist design 385–90, 387, 389; in Helsinki
390–2; types of 401–6, 402, 403, 405, 406
Design Against Crime principles 76
Design Against Crime Research Centre, London 317, 318, 320, 321, 325
Design and Culture (journal) 1, 4
Design Anthropology: Theory and Practice (book) 340, 342
design approaches for disabled people 279,
288–9, 289, 306
design as politics 363–4, 367–71
Design as Politics (book) 363
design as serial reproduction 161–3
designation and design exponentiation 24–5
Design Centre, London 214
Design Council, the 43, 47, 67, 318
design culture and market culture 22–3
design decision-making within project management 71–5, 73, 74, 75, 76–7
Design Dimensions (TV show) 378
designer, the: and collaboration with other stakeholders 323, 415; and the enabling
of sustainability
411, 413, 414–18, 416–17 (see also design process, the); perceptions of 269–70, 274, 397
designers and effecting change 307
designers’ perception of the elderly 309
design ethnography 310
design exponentiation through boundaries 24–7
design feeling 327
Design for Download (digital platform) 160
design for social innovation 322, 323
design for the real world 375–81
Design for the Real World: Human Ecology and Social Change (book) 308, 373, 375, 376–7, 378,
400
Design from the Netherlands (exhibition) 471
design history 450, 493; as a curriculum subject 4, 435, 436–7, 438, 439–40
Design History Society, the 5
Design History Workshop Japan 5
designing coalitions 325–6
Designing for People (book) 308
designing networks and social innovation 325
Designing Out Crime Research Centre, Sydney 322
design intervention as aid programme to Asia during the Cold War 519–25, 527–8; and POI
(Products of India) 521, 525–7, 526, 527
Design Issues (journal) 4,
435
Design it Yourself: Möbel für Grundbedarf des Wohnens (furniture for basic living)
(exhibition) 379
Design Journal: An International Journal for All Aspects of Design, The (journal) 3
design practice in academia 396–8
design problems of the mid-nineteenth century 106
design process, the 79, 80, 157, 166, 274, 275, 339; and ethnographic
fieldwork 44–6, 343, 344; in
nineteenth
century English public houses 423–4, 426; and socially responsive design 325, 326–7,
400–7, 403, 405, 406 see also art and industry relationships
design profession and mass production, the 158–9
Design Provocation 310
Design Quarterly (magazine) 274
design relationships with society 11–13
design research 50, 397, 398, 401, 407
Design Research Society 3
design software 159–61; and the open software movement 163–4, 166, 167
Design Studies: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Design Research (journal) 3, 4
design studies history 1–6
Design That Makes a Difference (exhibition) 311, 314n5
design theory debates 2
design thinking 327
design through the industrial ages 157–8, 161
Deutsche Gebrauchsgrafik (compendium) 247
Deutsche Werkbund 257–8, 259
Deville, Henri Sainte-Claire Deville 104
DEWAG advertising agency 248, 253n4
de Wolfe, Elsie 188, 189
DfA (Design for All) 306, 311
Dickens, Charles 176, 446
Dickinson, Emily 188
‘Dictatorship of the Imperative,’ notion of the 369
Die geteilte Form. Deutsch-deutsche Designaffären 1949–1989 (book) 243
Diez, Stefan 478
differential spaces 35–8
Diffrient, Niels 84
diffusion of innovation, the 335
‘Digital Lace’ 70, 71
digital network as the new infrastructure of production 157, 158
digital service innovation and users’ experience of design 330–6, 331 see also service design role in
service development
digital technology and the elderly 310
Dilnot, Clive 30, 117
dining in public houses 427–9
disabled people as designers 292, 293–4, 295–8, 296, 299, 300
Disabled Persons (Employment) Act (UK, 1944) 299
disciplines and approaches within design 6–7
dislike of surveys and focus groups by designers 274–5
Dispatchwork (project) 165
display syntax of objects 283–5, 284
dissensus of design studies 1
dissipation of design beyond aesthetic disciplines 21
Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (book) 126–7, 350
DIWO (Doing It With Others) 384
Doblin, Jay 343
Dodo, environmental organization 390
Dolmabahce, Ottoman palace 457–8
Domain Awareness System, the 33, 35
domestic life after World War II 352–4, 353, 358
Domestic Space: Reading the Nineteenth-Century Interior (book) 188
domestic space as one’s life 136, 137
domestic space in Turkish homes 460–1, 463–7
Domestic Space Reader, The (book) 188
Donegal Industrial Fund, the 96
Dorst 322
DOTT07 (Design of the Times) 43–4, 47
dotted line, the 80, 86–7; in apparel construction 84–6, 85, 87; within a design process 79, 80–1, 84,
87; and fluid movement of the human body 81–4, 83
Douglas, Mary 139
Douglas, Michael see Gordon Gekko (movie character)
Douglas, Susan 452
dress codes during the dot.com boom 182–3
‘dress-down Fridays’ 183
Dress for Success (book) 181
dressmaking and female professions 89–93, 95–6; court dress designs
93–5, 94; and craft embroidery
96–8, 97
Dress Regulations for the Army 179
Dreyfuss, Henry 84, 308, 343, 445
DRM (Digital Rights Management) 164
Droog Design: Spirit of the Nineties (book) 475
Droog Design collective, the 159, 160, 400, 475, 477
Duborgh, Richard 262
Duchamp, Marcel 82
Duckworth, George 426
Duke of York, the 227
Dulles, John Foster 519–20
Duncan, Michael 202–3
Dunedin industrial exhibition, New Zealand (1865) 220, 220–2
durable design and waste reduction 402
Dürer, Albrecht 82
Dutch design 469–71, 475–9, 479n2; exhibitions of 471–5, 472–3, 476, 477–8
Dutch design mentality 477–8
Dutt, R.C. 488, 491
dynamic and static points of the dotted line 81, 87
Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash (book) 83
Dynasty clothing 523–4
 
EAD (European Academy of Design) 54
Eames, Charles and Ray 214, 495, 501, 505
East German graphic design see graphic design in East and West
Germany
EB-32 telephone, the 260, 260–1
ebony sculptures 138
Eckhardt, Rob 475
eco-gastronomy 451
ecological and environmental anthropology 346–7
eco-materials and cultural sustainability 412
e-commerce in China 332
economic, social and cultural capital and taste 126
economic crisis of 2008 153–4
Economic History of India, The (book) 488
Ede, Laurie 146
Edgeworth, Maria 210
educational challenges for craft practitioners 60–1
Egli, Ernst 459
Einstein, Albert 54–5
Eldem, Sedad H. 462
elderly perceptions of design 275
electric current experimentation 102
electrolytic reduction 104
electronic entertainment as a part of childhood 215–16
electroplating 102, 106
Elektrisk Bureau 260,
260–1
elements of service design in digital innovation 334–5
Ellen Terry as Lady Macbeth (painting) 90
Embryological House Project 26
Emmons, Paul 82, 86, 87
emotional sustainability in consumer-product relationships 283
empathy in the design process 275, 278–9, 308; approaches for
disabled people 279, 288–9, 289; in
consumer-product relationships 282–6, 284, 286, 287, 287–8, 289
Empire on Display: English, Indian and Australian Exhibitions from the Crystal Palace to the
Great
War, An (book) 219
emulation and design exponentiation 25–6
endurance of the man’s suit 183–4
end users as designers 159–63, 162, 166 see also ergonomics as a model of design practice
engagement element of digital service design 334
Engineering and Technology Magazine (magazine) 233
Enlightenment, the 210, 398
entertainment element of digital service design 334
Epstein, Jacob 199, 203
Erez, Tal 160
ergonomics as a model of design practice 269–77, 276, 277, 279n2, 308
Ersin, Nejat 466
ethnographic fieldwork 44–6, 343, 345
‘ethnomusicology’ 342
ethno-nationalism 475, 478–9, 480n5
Etsy 454
Euro-American Cold War design 518–19
Eurocentric division between arts and crafts in Japan 509
European adaptations of foreign material capabilities 105
Evans, Robin 81, 84
EventArchitectuur 160
exhibition of Jeff Koons’s work at Palace of Versailles 128–9
exhibitions and business development 56–7
exhibitions and the nation state 219,
226 see also
Dutch design; Indian national identity through
exhibitions
exhibitions of Dutch design 471, 474–5, 476, 477–8
expectancy value theory 336
experimentation with new materials 102–4, 109
exploitation in the dressmaking business 91
Exposition Universelle de Paris (1878) 447–8
Eyben, Bruno Ninaber van 471
 
Facebook 332
Fallan, Kjetil 11, 479n2
Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class (book) 187
fanfare accompanying new Apple product launches 114
Feathers Public House, The 429
Federal Housing Act (1956, US) 272
federal mandate on design of toy guns 215
Feigolva-Prag, Eva 249
female labour and tradeswomen 89
feminine culture and the domestic interior 186–9, 195
feminists and design 187–9, 438; plant and flower arranging and interior design 189–95, 190, 191 see
also homemaking and
the design of domestic objects
Ferebee, Ann 437
ferns as decorative motif 195
Ferry, Emma 187
Fett, Harry 258
Film Till Now, The (survey) 436
Financial Times, The (newspaper) 182, 203
Fingall, Elizabeth 91, 92
‘finishing’ processes on surfaces 124,
125
firearms or war toys 215
fireplaces as a focal point in the living room 466
Fisher, Arthur 295, 298
Fisher, Fiona 14
Fisher, Tom 124, 129
Fitzwilliam, Countess Lady Maud 291,
292, 293, 294–5, 299
Fixer’s Manifesto, The 165–6
flexible decision-making 67
Flores, Oscar Salinas 443n1
flower and plant arrangements in the nineteenth-century home 189–95, 190, 191
Floyd, Janet 188
Focardi, Ruggero 448
focus groups and design process 274
folkcraft (mingei) theories 511, 513
Ford Foundation, the 271
Fordism 255, 447
Ford Model T 239
Ford Motor Co. 306
Foreningen Brukskunst (Norwegian Applied Art Association) 258
Foreningen Svenska Industridesigner (Swedish Association of Designers) 262
Form (magazine) 242,
256, 262
forms of design 22
Fortune, Robert 195
Forty, Adrian 2, 187, 437–8
Fossan Ivan 307
Foster, Sir Norman 450
four Cs of design, the 69
Fourier, Paul A. 86
Fox Public House, The 428
framework of decision-making classification 69
Frank, Edith 249
Frankel, Bernard 153
Frankfurter Zeitung (newspaper) 357
Frankfurt School, the 377–8
Frasier (TV show) 356
fraud investigation into public flotation of AIL 233–4
Free, Roland ‘Rollie’ 152
Freemasons’ Arms, The 427, 430
Frenzel, H.K. 244
Freud, Sigmund 188
Freund, Dorothea 249
Friedel, Robert 8
Fritzoe, Moss and Bærum (Norwegian foundry) 259
Frobel, Friedrich 210
frock coat, the 177
Frost, Carl 279n3
Fry, Tony 13
Fuad-Luke, Alastair 384–6, 400
Fujita, Haruhiko 509
Fuller, Buckminster 400, 505
Fuss, Diana 188
Future Craft programme of MIT 60
 
Gage, Marty 343
Galbraith, Catherine 526–7, 527
Galbraith, John Kenneth 378, 526
Gambler, Wendy 90
Gamman, Lorraine 12
Gamper, Martino 159
Gandhi, M.K. 483, 490–1
Gardening for Ladies (book) 189
Garland (digital design tool) 161
Garland Thomson, Rosemarie 293, 294, 295, 299
Garnier, Charles 458
Gate, Simon 259
Gatens, Moira 388
GATT 449, 521, 522
Gebrauchsgrafik in der DDR (book) 251
Gebrauchsgraphik: Monatsschrift zur Foerderung künstlerischer Reklame (periodical)
244, 245–7,
246, 248, 249
Geffrye Museum of the Home, the 446
Gell, A. 341
gender issues and taste 127–8, 129–31, 356
Gentlewoman, The (magazine) 92, 96
geopolitics in the Asia Pacific 364
George V, King 487
Gerard, Frances 92
Gheerawo, Rama 12
Ghose, Rash Behary 488–9
Ghost in the Looking Glass: The Victorian Seamstress, The (book) 91
Giant Moon (Light Blue) (exhibit) 129
Giedion, Siegfried 436
Gilbreth, Frank and Lillian 83, 83, 86
Ginther, Philip 459
Girard, Alexander 495, 497, 498
Girouard, Mark 423
Gladwell, Malcolm 269
Glenconnor, Edward, 1st Baron 199
Glimcher, Arne 148
Glimmer: How Design Can Transform Your Business, Your Life, and Maybe Even the World
(book)
269
global brands and consumerism 450–1
Global Design History (book) 439, 440–1
globalization 14–16, 445–6, 448–54, 453
gold discoveries in New Zealand 219,
220–1
Goldsmith, Selwyn 308
‘good and bad’ design 214–15, 256, 282
Good Consumer Guide, The (book) 452
‘good design’ dictum of the MoMA, New York 256, 377
Good Design exhibitions 214, 496
Goodenough, Elizabeth 207–8
Goodyear, Charles 102
Google 330
Gordon Gekko (movie character) 146–7, 148, 148–9, 150, 151, 153
government intervention in cultural life in the Netherlands 470–1, 474, 475–7
Government Normal School of Design 256
Goya, Francisco 152
Grandi Legni (exhibits) 404, 405
Graphic Design: Reproduction and Representation (book) 438
graphic design courses in East Germany 248
graphic design in East and West Germany 242–5, 247–52, 250; and Gebrauchsgraphik 244, 245–7,
246, 248, 249
graphic design in Japan 509–10
Graphis (magazine) 244–5, 248
grassroots design 402–3
Graves, Austin 522, 528
Graves, Michael 279
Graves, Robert 205
Great Depression, the 108
Great Exhibition (World’s Fair) of 1851, the 101–2, 221, 256, 446–7, 447, 497
Greenhalgh, Paul 219
greenhouses in Helsinki as activist design 383–90, 387, 389, 392
Green Imperative, The (book) 380–1
Greenwood, James 179, 341–2
Greve, Knut 255–6, 261, 263
Griffin, John Howard 308
Grima, Joseph 166
Grimsrud, Ragnar 259
Grönroos, C. 41
Gropius, Walter 483, 515
Grosch, Henrik 258
group-participative model of decision-making 67
Guarnaccia, Steven 216
guerrilla gardening 384, 386, 388–9
Gulbrandsen, Nora 259
Gullberg, Elsa 259
Gürel, Meltem Ö. 15
Gursky, Andreas 158–9
Gute Form (good design) 243, 249
Guth, Christine 16
Gutschow, Harald 252
Guttmann, Sir Ludwig 308
GVT (Global Vehicle Trust) 236, 237–8
Gwathmey and Siegel architects 147
  
habitus, notion of 126–7, 131
hackerspaces 163–4
Hald, Arthur 256
Hald, Edward 259
Hall, Catherine 187
Hall, Edward T. 273
Hall, Stuart 355
Hallyday, Johnny 127
Hamilton, Richard 354, 445
Hancock, Thomas 102
Handbook (book) 486
Handbook of Material Culture (book) 143
Hannah, Daryl see Darien Taylor (movie character)
Happihuone (Oxygen Room) 381, 387 see
also greenhouses in Helsinki as activist design
hardware and knowledge transfer 164–6, 165
Haring, Keith 148
Harnoncourt, René d’ 495
Harper, Catherine 131
Harpers and Queen (journal) 181
Hart, Alice Rowland 96
Harvey, John 176
Hatcher, E. 341
Havell, E.B. 482
Hawthorne study of workplace conditions and output 342
Hayat (magazine) 462
Hayek, Friedrich von 121
Hazell, Paul 10–11
HCI (human-computer interaction) 342–3
Hees, Maria 471
Heffernan, Julie 152
Hegel, Georg 366
Heiberg, Edvard 259
Heiberg, Jean 260, 261
Heidegger, Martin 365
Helland, Janice 8
Hellé, André 211–12, 212, 213
Heller, Steven 216
Helsinki and design 385–91, 387, 389
Helsinki as European Capital of Culture 386
Henderson, William 205
Hendley, Surgeon-Maj. Thomas Holbein 484
Hendrickson, Stephen 147, 149, 150
Hennessey, James 379, 380
Henningsen, Poul 259
Hennion, Antoine 351, 356–7
Hepworths tailoring chain 180
Herdeg, Walter 244
Herløw, Erik 262
Heskett, John 437
Hevey, David 29
HHCD (Helen Hamlyn Centre for Design), the 306, 310, 311, 312, 312–13, 314n5
Hibberd, James Shirley 191, 192
Hick 401
Hidden Persuaders, The (book) 378
hierarchic decision-making 67
Highmore, Ben 13
Hiramatsu and Company 522
Hirdina, Heinz 251
Hirst, Damien 56
History of Design: Decorative Arts and Material Culture (book) 439
History of Design from the Victorian Era to the Present, A (book) 437
HMRC (Herman Miller Research Corporation) 270,
272–3, 274, 275, 278, 495
Ho, Karen 154
Hochschule fur bildende und angewandte Kunst, Berlin-Weissensee 245, 252
Hodson, Elise 15–16
Hoffenberg, Peter 219, 222
Hoggart, Richard 131–3
Höhne, Günter 243
Holistic Sustainability Checklist 415,
416–17, 417–18
Hollander, Anne 184
Holland in vorm: Dutch Design 1945–1987 (exhibition) 474, 475, 476, 480n5
Holland Promotion 474
Holm, Arne E. 261
Hölscher, Eberhard 244, 247
Holzer, ‘Baby’ Jane 151
Holzmeister, Clemens 460
Homebrew Computer Club, the 111
home computer market, the 111
homemaking and the design of domestic objects 135–7, 139–40; and the refashioning of colonial
objects
137–9, 138, 139 see also feminists and
design
Hong Kong Carpet Manufacturers Ltd. 524
Horkheimer, Max 377–8
House Beautiful (magazine) 512
House & Garden (magazine) 201
Household Gods: The British and their Possessions (book) 188, 283
Housing Requirements of the Aged: A Study of Design Criteria (research program) 271–2
Howarth, Tony 232–4
How Modernity Forgets (book) 136, 143
How Things Don’t Work (book) 380
Human Motor, The (book) 83
humorous cartoons of Dutch train timetables 472–3
Huppatz, D.J. 5
Hustvedt, Siri 135–6, 141
Hutton, David Con 222
Hyatt, John Wesley 103
hybrid domestic spaces see Western architectural influence in the new
Republic of Turkey
hybridity model of the centre and periphery 449
 
Icograda (International Council of Graphic Design Associations) 252
ICP (international cultural policy) of the Netherlands 470, 475–7, 478, 479
ICSID (International Council of Societies of Industrial Design) 375, 389
ICT impact on design 40–1, 70
ICU (Indian Cooperative Union) 526
ID (Inclusive Design) 306–13, 312
ID (Norsk Gruppe for Industriell Formgivning) 261–2
idea generation 72–3, 73
idealization of the role of the housewife 187
IDEO 311
idiomatic relationship between domestic objects and bodily practices 137, 140–1, 144
IHIP service concept, the 42
imagination and the self 140
‘imagined communities,’ concept of 483
imitation of design themes through use of newer materials 105, 106, 107, 107–8
immersion techniques 308
immigration and social integration 309
Imperial House 523–4
importation of exotic plants and flowers 193
INC (Indian National Congress) 482, 487–91
India by Design: Colonial History and Cultural Display (book) 484
Indian national identity through exhibitions 482, 487–91, 493–5; British exhibitions 483–7, 485; and
the Textiles and
Ornamental Arts of India exhibition 493–9, 497, 498, 500–5
Indian Review (magazine) 489
India Report (book) 505
indigenous Indian industry and arts and crafts 487, 488, 489, 490
Indispensible Eyesores: The Anthropology of Undesirable Buildings (book) 341, 342
individual systems of taste 127
Industrial Conciliation and Arbitration Act (1892, New Zealand) 224
industrial design 373–4, 374
Industrial Design (book) 437
industrial design as architecture 26
industrial designers’ associations in Scandinavia 282–3
industrial exhibitions in New Zealand as design science 219–22, 220
industrialization and design 105–6, 161, 398–9, 441–2
industrial machinery at colonial exhibitions 484
Industrial Revolution, the 40, 143–4, 157, 219, 398, 409, 446
information element of digital service design 334
infusion and design exponentiation 25–6
Ingold, Tim 140, 339
innovation 415, 446; in digital technology 330, 336, 395; in materials and marketing support 108,
447; and sustainability 413–14, 415, 418; through social equality 306, 313, 323 see also social
innovation and design
Insight Bank, the 311
inspiration in craft practice 59
integrative decision-making 68
intention and the redesignation of domestic objects 140
interior design: and the copying of architecture 25, 82; process of 81, 83; use on Wall Street movie
sets 147–52, 148
interior spaces for children 211–14, 212
interior treatment space of an ambulance 312, 313
International Advertising Art (periodical) 244
International Association of Universal Design 306
International Conferences on Design History and Studies 5
international convention for international exhibitions 228
International Ergonomics Association, the 306
International Exhibition, Christchurch, New Zealand (1906–7) 222, 224–5
International Journal of Design (journal) 4
International Military Tribunal and War Crimes Courts 519
Internet, the 119
Internet Archive, the 119–20
Interno 467n1
Interpretations in Architecture (book) 81
Introduction to Design and Culture in the Twentieth Century (book) 437
invention of materials for industrial use 102–4, 107–9
iPod, the 114
Irish International Exhibition 96
Irish Times, The (newspaper) 92, 96
Irwin, John 495, 500
Isaacs, Ken 381
Ise: Prototype of Japanese Architecture (book) 514
Ise Shrine, Japan 513, 514
Isho (Japanese word equivalent of design) 509
Islamic terrorism 454
Istanbul: Memories and the City (book) 466
Istanbul Design Biennial (2012) 166
Istanbul Technical University 460
Ito, Chuta 513–14
Ive, Jonathan 121n1
ivory-substitution through celluloid 103,
107
Iyer, V. Krishnaswamy 489
 
J. Witkowski and Company Ltd 522
Jackson, Joel 236
Jacob, Col. Samuel Swinton 484
Jacob Moore (movie character) 147, 151, 152, 153
Jagger, Edith 294
Jaipur exhibition (1883) 484–6
Jaipur gate, the 484–6
Jan Oelofse Hunting Safaris 235
Jansen, Hermann 460
Japan after World War II 519, 520, 521–2
Japanese art and design 508–11, 512, 513–15, 516, 519, 522; and Katsura Imperial Villa 512, 513,
514, 515, 515–16; and Tea Ceremonies 511–13, 512
Japanese presentations of its colonies as undeveloped 511
Jayakar, Pupul 495–6, 500, 501, 502, 503, 504–5
JDH (Journal of Design History) 435–6
Jennings, Paul 422
Jobling, Paul 438
Jobs, Steve 111
Johnson, Linden 523
Joubert, Jules 222, 224
Journal of Craft Research (journal) 55
Journal of Design (journal) 256
Journal of Design History (journal) 5
Journal of Design Research (journal) 3
Journal of Indian Art and Industry (journal) 486
Journal of Modern Craft (journal) 55
Joyce, Foie 526
judgments about taste 128
Jud Suss (film) 441
Julier, Guy 385, 438
Jürgens, Helmut 246
 
Kachru, Tanishka 15–16
Kadoorie, Lawrence 524, 525
Kåge, Wilhelm 259
Kala Bhavan art school, India 483, 490
Kant, Immanuel 126
Kao (soap brand) 448
kapici (Turkish serviceman) 463
Karaosmanoglu, Yakup Kadri 461
Kare Metal 467n1
Karim, Farhan Sirajul 505
Karrysafe anti-theft bags as socially responsive design 318
Kate Reilly (dressmaking firm) 89
Katsura Imperial Villa, Japan 512, 513, 514, 515, 515–16
Kaufmann Jr., Edgar 25–6, 256; and the Textiles and Ornamental Arts of India exhibition 494, 495,
496–8, 499, 500, 501, 502
Keeble, Trevor 9
Keeping Up Appearances (TV show) 356
Keller, Helen 188
Kelley, Victoria 8, 139
Kendall, Stuart 1
Kentia palm, the 193
Kenzo Tange 513, 514
Khrushchev, Nikita 448, 518
Kickstarter.com 167
Kielland, Thor 259
Kiesler, Frederick 376
Kikuchi, Yuko 16
Kindergarten 210
kinderstoel (child’s chair) 209
King Digital Entertainment 330
Kinkle, Jeff 154
Kipling, John Lockwood 486
Kira, Alexander 271, 272, 276, 277, 278
Kirkham, Pat 146, 187
Kitchen Debate between Nixon and Khrushchev, the 448, 518
Kitchen Stories (film) 275
Kivelä, Kirmo 390
Klein, Naomi 452
Klemke, Werner 245, 252
Knapen, Tim 161
knowledge exchange and ID 311
knowledge-tools-memory (graphic vignette) 164, 165
knowledge transfer and hardware 164–6, 165
KOGEI 522
Kohtala, Cindy 387, 388
Koons, Jeff 128–9
Kracauer, Siegfried 357
Kramisch, Dr. Stella 496
Kritisk Revy (magazine) 259
Kumar, R. Siva 483, 490
Kvaal, Albert 260
 
LaBoeuf, Shia see Jacob Moore (movie character)
labor laws in New Zealand 224–5
lack of a service design model 48–9
Ladies’ Companion to the Flower Garden, The (book) 189
Lady’s Pictorial (magazine) 92, 93, 95, 96
Lake Logan as reclaimed land for exhibition site 227–8
Lamington, Lord 488
Lampe, Henk 471
land reclamation for industrial exhibitions 227–8
Land Rover, the 231
Landy, Michael 159
Langella, Frank see Lou Zabel (movie character)
Langford, Marilyn 271
language as a political tool in Japan 509
L’Artisan Électronique (digital pottery making installation) 161
Lasn, Kalle 451
Latouche, Serge 451
Latour, Bruno 26, 43
La-Z-Boy recliners 273
Leach, Bernard 511
Leatherbarrow, David 125
Le Corbusier 26, 515
Lederman, Diane 151, 152, 153
Lee, Alex 306
Lee, Sherman 522
Lees-Maffei, Grace 5, 15
Lefebvre, Henri 30–1, 34, 35, 352, 354
legal geography 421
legislative evolution of spaces and boundaries of the nineteenth-century English public house 421–3,
424–7, 430–1; and design processes 423–4, 426; and window-screening methods 427–9, 428, 429,
430
LEGO™ 216
Lehmann, Ulrich 124, 125
Lehmann Brothers collapse, the 183
Lehtonen, Jaakko 390
Lehtovuori 391
Leigh, Mike 356
L’enfant et la vie familiale sous l’ancien régime (book) 208
Levy, Steven 117
Lewis, Michael 153–4
l’exception culturelle of France 449
Liberals and the licensed trade 422–3
Licensed Victuallers’ Gazette (newspaper) 430
Licensing Acts, the 422, 423
licensing legislation 422–3, 426, 427, 430
Lifebuoy 448
Life Magazine 503–4
lifestyle activism 451–2
Light, Andrew 126
lighting at art galleries 226, 227
liminal spaces 458
limitations of service design 47–8
Lindgren, Axel 258
Lindström, Hugo 262–3
Ling, Jimmy 523
little-participative model of decision making 67
lived space 34
living rooms as center stage in the domestic space 466
Llewellyn, W.T ‘Taffy’ 295, 298
Lloyd, Genevieve 388
L.M. Ericsson 261
load-bearing structures 8
Locke, John 208
Loewy, Raymond 278, 376–7
Logan, Thad 188
London Bicycle Film Festival, the 326
Londonderry, Theresa, Marchioness of 89,
95
London English Sweated Industries Exhibition (1906) 224
London Exhibition (1862) 102
London Legacy Development Corporation 308
Loomba, Ania 491
Loos, Adolf 6, 24–5, 27n5, 125–6, 171, 172
Lost Innocence (book) 511
Loudon, Jane 189
Louis XIV, King 128–9
lounge suit, the 177
Lou Zabel (movie character) 147, 153
Lovell, Terry 127
Lower Manhattan Security Initiative, the 33
Lowndes Marques, Susan 205
Low-Tech-Kultur 379
Lu, Duanfang 493, 494, 501, 504
Lucknow INC (1936), the 488, 490
Lynn, Greg 26
Lyotard, Jean-François 442
Lytton, Lord 484, 486
 
McBrinn, Joseph 12
McCray, Porter 495
McDonagh, Deana 11–12
McDonaldization 449
McDonald’s 450
Mace, Ron 306
machines as artistic creations 258–9
McLaren, Denham 200
McLuhan, Marshall 378–9
McMillan, Martin 355
MacMillan, Michael 130
Madame Elise (dressmaking firm) 91
Madame La Modiste (caricature) 90, 91
Madras INC, the 488
Maffei, Nicolas 124, 129
Mager, Brigit 49
magic and anthropology 341–2
Maguire, Paddy 438
Maharaja of Baroda, the 488
Maharaja of Mysore, the 488
mainframe computers of the 1940s 115
maintenance and dirt-avoidance in home-making 139
Makasiinit of Helsinki, the 388
Make Magazine (magazine) 164
Maker’s Bill of Rights 164
Mallarmé, Stéphane 23, 24
management studies and the intangible service economy 42
Mandarin Textiles 523, 524
manillas 141–3, 142, 144
Manning, Harriet 92–3, 95
Man of the Crowd, The (short story) 177
manual labourers’ attire 178–9
manufacturing standards in China 449
Manzini, Ezio 322, 325
Marey, Jules Etienne 81, 82, 83
Margolin, Victor 2, 14–15
market culture as design 22–3
marketing strategies for children 215
Marshall Plan, the 464, 494
Marx, Louis 214–15
Mary, Princess 292
Mary, Queen 487
mass production 106–9, 158, 239, 399; and artistic expertise 257, 262–3; as Fordism 255, 447;
through the Industrial Revolution 157, 446, 447, 448
Masters of German Poster Art (book) 251
material choice in design 101–2, 104–5, 108–9; imitation of design themes through the use of new
materials 105, 106, 107, 107–8
material consumption and commodity fetishism 143
Materiality and Society (book) 137
Mathur, Saloni 482, 484, 499
Mau, Bruce 269
Maugham, Syrie 189, 197, 200, 202, 204
Maxim gun, the 440
Measure of Man (book) 308
Mechanization Takes Command (book) 436
media consumption by children 215–16
media pillorying of aspirations of taste 356
media proliferation 448
Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects (book) 378–9
Mehta, Perozshah 488
Meizi, Kathy 188
Melbourne Centennial Exhibition (1888) 222,
226
Memorials of the Jeypore Exhibition 1883 (book) 484
Memphis design collective, the 400
mens’ fashions in the nineteenth century 130
Menuhin, Lady 205
Meroz, Joana 15
Metaform (design system) 270, 271, 275–8, 276, 277
Methodist guidelines for appropriate dress 175–6
‘methodological’ nationalism 469
Methods Cards 311
‘metrofitting,’ concept of 371
migration and design exponentiation 26–7
Milan Biennale, the 245
military dress and the development of standard army regiments 174, 179
military uniforms by social class 179–80
Millais, John Everett 448
millennial generation, the 158
Miller, Daniel 129–30, 143
Millicent, Duchess of Sutherland 92
Mimar (magazine) 459,
460
Mind and the Market, The (book) 154–5
mind map 73
Minecraft 216
mineral resources of New Zealand 221,
228
mischer’traxler 164
Mitchell, David 294, 299–300
MIT Media Lab 216
mitochondrial manipulation technologies 217
Mitter, Partha 490, 500
Mme. E. Durrant (dressmaking firm) 90
Mobius, the 235–6, 236, 239
Mobius Motors 236
models for group and organisational decision-making 67, 69, 69, 71–2
models of interpreting disability 293
model wearing a coat designed by Painted Fabrics Ltd. 297
Modernism and functional design 242–3, 249, 399, 442
Modernism and the Architecture of Private Life (book) 188
modernist assumptions in Japanese design 508–9, 516
modernity and disenchantment 404
modernization of India, the 504–5
modernization of Japan, the 508, 509
Modern Movement of architecture 460–1
modular office systems 273
Moeran, Brian 511
Moggridge, Bill 304
Mollinson, John R. 190,
191
Molloy, John T. 181
MoMA (Museum of Modern Art, New York) 256,
377 see also
Textiles and Ornamental Arts of India
(exhibition)
‘Mondrian’ pattern in Japanese wood construction 514
monetarism and the suit 182
Mongeri, Giulio 459
Monkey Brand household soap 131, 132
Monö, Rune 262
Montague Burton 180
Moore, Gordon 117
Moore, Patricia 275, 278, 280n4, 308
moral laziness through neglect of sartorial appearance 178–9
Morelli 323
Morris, William 92, 105, 511, 515
Mort, Frank 180
Mostafavi, Mohsen 125
‘motatus’ taxi-van 232
motion studies in work environments 83, 83–4
Mouffe, Chantal 385
MPR (Media Perception-Reaction Model) 331,
331, 334, 335–6, 337
much-participative model of decision-making 67
Mughal Empire, the 486
Muller, Jerry Z. 154–5
multinationals and affect of branding design on culture 450
Mumford, Lewis 436, 441
Museum fur Deutsche Geschichte, East Berlin 251, 253n2
Museum fur Kunst und Gewerbe, Hamburg 121n1
museums, criticisms of 493
music and anthropology 342
Muslim geopolitics 364
Muthesius, Hermann 257, 258
Muybridge, Eadweard 81, 82, 83
Myerson, Jeremy 306
 
Nader, Ralph 278, 376, 378
Nair, C. Sankaran 488
Naoroji, Dadabhai 491
Narotzky, Viviana 9
‘narrative’ as a part of life 135
Narrative Imagination and Everyday Life (book) 139
Natalini, Adolfo 399–400
Nath, Rai Bahadur Lala Baij 489
national identity and cultural development 442,
479–80n4 see also Dutch design; Indian national
identity through exhibitions; Japanese art and design
National Magazine (magazine) 104
National Maritime Museum, Greenwich 142
National Museum of Computing at Bletchley Park 117
nation states and exhibitions 219, 226
Nature and Art of Workmanship, The (book) 161
nature in the home 192
Nehru, Jawaharlal 494, 495, 500, 504
Neiswander, Judith A. 188, 193
Nelson, George 25, 273, 274
Neogy, Prithwish 502
NESTA (National Endowment for Science and Technology and the Arts) 43
Nettleship, Adaline ‘Ada’ 90
Network toy, the 216
Neu Bildung 371
Neue Werbung (magazine) 248–9, 250, 252
Neutra, Richard 376
Never Leave Well Enough Alone (book) 376
Nevinson, J.L. 84
new disciplines in craft design 60
New Practical Window Gardener, The (drawing) 190, 191
New School of Research, New York 378
New York Times, The (newspaper) 499, 523
New York World’s Fair (1939) 377
New Zealand and South Seas Exhibition, Dunedin (1889–90) 222–4, 223
New Zealand and South Seas Exhibition, Dunedin (1925–6) 225–6, 228
Ngwane Defence group, the 235
NID (National Institute of Design, India) 496, 505
Ní Dhuchaointigh, Jane 166
Nietsche, Friedrich 365
nineteenth century women and role in the home 187
nitrocellulose 102–3
Nixon, Richard 448, 518
Noble, Greg 140
Nomadic Furniture (book) 379
non-commodity culture as alternative counter-culture 379
non-conformism and dress 176, 177
non-design disciplines and anthropology 340–2, 344, 346–7
Norman, Sir Torquil 237
Norske Brukskunstnere (Norwegian Applied Artists) 263
Norske Kunsthandverkere (Norwegian Craft Artists) 263
Norway and ID (Inclusive Design) 307
Norwegian Design Council, the 311, 314n5
nostalgia for home and the culture of capitalism 153
notching devices for color printing 510
NPD stage gate process 73
Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 (painting) 82–3
Nuremberg toy kitchens 209
nursery at Cardiff Castle 211
NY Civil Liberties Union 33
 
o2 Finland network of design-for-sustainability 386–7, 388
Objects of Desire: Design and Society from Wedgwood to IBM (book) 187, 437, 438
objects to engage a child’s senses 210
obsolescence 402; of computer models
117, 119, 121
Occupy Wall Street encampment as differential space 35–8, 36
Oedipus Eyeglasses 404, 406
Oedipus Rex (play) 406
Ogata, Amy F. 10
O’Keeffe, Georgia 149
Old Manilla Currency postage stamps 141–2, 142
Oliete-Aldea, Elena 153
Ollers, Edvin 259
Onat, Emin 460
One Laptop Per Child project 216
online-based platforms for collaborative design 163–7
open innovation approaches to social challenges 324
openness as a characteristic of society 156–7, 166
open software movement and hackerspaces, the 163–4, 166, 167
open-source electronic boards 163
OpenStructures 166
Open University 4, 437
oral and material history of Caribbean migrants in Britain 355
oral histories of computer design 120–1
oral testimonies of the children of men employed at Painted Fabrics 298–9
Ordnance Tavern, The 426
organisational and social change through service design 50
Oribe tea ware 512, 512
Oriental influence on suit design 173–4
ornamental plant case 191
Ornament and Crime (essay) 125–6
Ortiz, Fernando 449
Otago Museum, the 221–2
Otago region of New Zealand 220, 221
Otago School of Art and Design 222
ottoman 458
Ottoman vest, the 173
ownership and understanding possession 138–9, 140
OWS (Occupy Wall Street) movement, the 35,
452, 453
OX, the 236–7, 237, 239
OXO Good Grips™ 282, 306
 
pace of technological development in the computer industry 119, 121
packaging for the people with arthritis or disabilities 282, 309
Packard, Vance 376, 378
Painted Fabrics Ltd. 291–300, 296, 297
Pamuk, Orhan 466
pandemic events and growing population 364
Papanek, Victor 322, 374, 375, 378–81; and Design for the Real
World (book) 308, 373–5, 377, 400;
status in US design activism 376, 377, 381, 392
paradigm shift in the term ‘computer’ 115–16
Paralympics, the 308
parametric (algorithmic) design 160
Paris Expositions 104, 447–8
Parisian Tailor Complete Instructor and Practical Guide to Ladies’ Tailoring, The (book)
86
Parkes, Alexander 102–3, 106
‘Parkesine’ 102–3
Parthenon, the 514
participatory approaches to design 43–4
Participatory Design 305
partitioning of the state of Bengal, the 482–3
party political influence on advertising design 248–9, 251
Pasila district, Helsinki 390
paternal pre-eminence of design and social problems 323
Paterson, Andrew 387, 388
patron and dressmaker relationships 91–5
pattern identification with femininity 130–1
Paulsson, Gregor 258, 264n1
Pavitt, Jane 518
Paxton, Joseph 91
PCSs (production-to-consumption systems) 410–11, 412, 413, 414, 417
Peace Treaty of San Francisco, the 519–20
Pearson, Samuel 178
Pebble smartwatch 167
Penner, Barbara 11
Pepys, Samuel 174
perceived space 34
perfection and design 159–60, 166
perfect-participative model of decision-making 67
personalization element of digital service design 334
personal narratives and categorical affiliations 136
Pestalozzi, Johann Heinrich 210
Pettersen, Sverre 259
Peugeot 504, 231
Pevsner, Nikolaus 436
Pfüller, Volker 252
phases of the decision-making process 66–7
Philosophy of Money, The (book) 138
photography and the promotion of Painted Fabrics 294, 295, 296, 297
photomontage as variant of socialist modernity 252
piano as a symbol of the Turkish socio-cultural elite 458
Piggly-Wiggly grocery stores 440
Pilotelle, Georges 96
Pioneers of the Modern Movement (book) 436
Pirtola, Papu 387
placement of designers in Scandinavian industry 259
plastics 102–3, 108, 261, 262, 262–3
plastic toboggan 262
Platform21 164
playpens 209
POA (Products of Asia) 520–1, 522–7, 526, 527, 528
Poe, Edgar Allan 177, 181
POI (Products of India) 521, 525–7, 526, 527
police surveillance of OWS at Zucotti Park 37
polystyrene 108
Popular Electronics (magazine) 111, 112
post-colonialism 494
poster design for cultural events in the GDR 244, 245, 246, 251
poster for the Leipzig Fair 244
post-industrial consumer society 449
post-modern sensibilities and the man’s suit 184
Post Office Hotel, The 430
Potvin, John 10
poverty and capitalism 364
Powning, William P. 524
practice-based design research 396, 398, 401, 406–7
prefigurative politics 37
Prendiville, Alison 7
preservation of historical records of the Internet 120
preservation of sartorial traditions, the 180–1
press portrayals of the dressmaker 90,
92, 93, 95, 96
Prideaux, Maj. 484–6
Prince, Richard 151, 152
print culture from the eighteenth century 446, 448, 483
print technology in Japan 509–10
privacy rights of customers and licensing laws 427–30
private sector and design, the 311
problems for an indigenous African car industry 238
process of individual design decision-making 72
Prochazka, Baroness Pauline 95
product design for children 207–11, 215
product design process 71–5, 73, 74, 75, 401
production design in Oliver Stone’s Wall Street movies 146–53, 148, 152, 155
product lifespans and repairs 164–5
product portfolio of Sony corporation 114
product portfolio rationalisation of Apple Computers 113–14, 121
products as symbols 283
professional designer as occupation 21, 283, 285
professionalization of the graphics industry in Germany 244
profitability of the luxury car market 239
Progressive Architecture (magazine) 275, 278–9
propositional design 404–6, 405
Propst, Robert 273, 274, 343
‘pro-social’ 321
prototypes for the Africar 232–3
prototyping 56; in service design 47, 48
Proust, Marcel 188
Prytz, Jacob 258, 259
public assembling activity and cycling 325–6
publication of graphic design in the GDR 249–51, 250
public house urinals 425–6
publicity, theory of 248
public services and design 311
public trust and sartorial attire 183
Pullin, Graham 288
Punch (magazine) 90,
91
Purity and Danger (book) 139
PVC (polyvinyl chloride) 108
Pye, David 161–3
pyroxylin 102–3
 
Quaker dress 175
quality and the creative process of design 54,
256
Queen, The Lady’s Newspaper 89, 92, 93, 95, 96
queer aesthetics see Tennant, Stephen
Quiet Invaders: the Story of the Austrian Impact upon America, The (book) 376
 
RAC (Rockefeller Archive Center) 528n1
racism in design 441, 442
Rademacher, Helmut 251
Radical Design movement, the 399–400
radio design history 116
Raku bowls 511–12
Ramakers, Renny 400, 475
Ranade, M.G. 491
Rancière, Jacques 23–4, 27n3
rapid prototyping (3D printing) 161
Raspberry Pi (computer) 163
ready-made suit manufacture 172–3, 178, 183
reciprocity of space and society 33
RED 43
reframing of anti-social problems through design 322
refrigerators in Turkish homes 464–5
Reilly, Paul 23
Reinventing the Bikeshed (exhibition) 326
Remlov, Arne 263
Remy, Tejo 159
Rendell, Jane 136
repairing and extending product lifespan 164–5 see
also craft activists (‘craftivists’)
Repair Manifesto 164
Reports of the Juries of the Great Exhibition 102
Republican family as new family model in Turkey 461–2
research in service design 50
Restarting Britain 2 (report) 50
retail design 439–40
Reubens, Rebecca 14
Reynolds, Jonathan 513, 514
rhizome, concept of the 418
Rhizome Approach to sustainability in the design process 412–18, 413, 416–17
Riello, Giorgio 439
Rietveld, Gerrit 475
Rietveld’s Heirs: Contemporary Dutch Design (exhibition) 474–5
Riggins, 283
Rikyu, Sen no 512
Ritzer, George 449, 454
Robertson, Sara 70
Robinson, Rick 343
Roche 174, 175
Rockefeller, John D. (JDR 3rd) 519–22, 523, 524, 527, 528
Rockefeller, John D., Senior 520
Rockefeller Brothers Fund, the 495
Rockefeller Public Service Awards, the 520
Rohrich, Carola 235
roles in the decision-making process 68
Rosner, Victoria 188
Ross, Kristin 353
Rotha, Paul 436
Rough and Ready (furniture collection) 161, 162
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 210
Rousseau’s Social Contract 174–5
Routledge, Patricia 356
Royal Commission on Liquor Licensing Laws, the 425, 428, 429, 430, 431n1
Royal Irish School of Art Needlework 90,
95–6
rubber as a material 102
Rudofsky, Bernard 377
Ruskin, John 51
Rustic Adornments for Homes of Taste (book) 191
Rygh, Thorbjørn 261–2, 263
Rykwert, Joseph 82
Rylander, Kjell 264
 
Saatchi, Charles 56
Safa, Peyami 461
Said, Edward 449, 504
Salaried asses: Duty and Distraction in Weimar Germany, The (book) 357
Samarras, Lucas 150
Sambourne, Linley 195
Sampson, Robert 321–2
Samsung 73
Sanders, Dora 523
Sanders, Liz 343
Sarabhai family, the 496
Sargent, John Singer 90
Sarkozy, Nicolas 128
sartorial casualization 182–3
Sassoon, Siegfried 179, 199–200
Satué, Enric 443n1
Saturn Devouring his Son (painting) 152, 152, 153
Sayar, Zeki 465
Scandinavian applied art movement, the 256
Scandinavian design and industrial design 255–6
Schijdel, Mart van 475
Schjødt, Liv 263
Schmalz, Bill 451
Schmidt, Kevin 343
Schmitt, Carl 367, 369
Schnabel, Julian 148
Schnitler, Carl W. 258
Schumacher, E.F. 400
Scientific Management 447
scientific research and new technologies 106
Scott, Capt. Lionel 299
Scratch platform, the 216
SD (sustainable development) 409, 410–12; and the Rhizome Approach in the design process
412–
18, 413, 416–17
Seager, Samuel Hurst 227
seashell decorations at Wilsford Manor, Wiltshire 200–1
Séchan 458
Section Gebrauchsgraphik 247, 248
SED (Socialist Unity Party, GDR) 248,
251
Seddon, Richard 224
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky 298
Select Committee of the House of Commons on Arts and Manufactures 256
Selskab for Industriel Formgivning (Danish Designers) 262
semiotic analysis of culture 117
Semper, Gottfried 446
sense making and socially responsive design 325
Sense of an Interior: Four Rooms and the Writers that Shaped Them (book) 188
Sensible Objects (book) 137–8
service design 399; role in service
development 40–1, 42–7, 48–51; visual processes in 44,
45, 47–8
see also digital service innovation and users’
experience of design
Service Design Manual of UK government 45–6
Service Design Network, the 49
Service Design Research UK Network 48
service design strategies of e-commerce 332
service marketing 41–2
seven deadly sins of the modern bachelor 205
Shahn, Ben 255
‘Shake’ sideboard 403
Shanghai modernism 442
Shantiniketan artist-designers 490–1
sharing economy, the 452–4
Sheen, Charlie see Bud Fox (movie character)
Sheffield Archives, the 300–2, 300n2
shibui (simplicity of shape) 512–13, 515
Shirasu Jiro 522
Shirasu Masako 522
shoin architectural style 514
shower node 276, 276
Siebers, Tobin 293
Siedhoff-Buscher, Alma 212
‘silent design,’ notion of 68, 72
Silk Road, the 446
Silverberg, Miriam 515
silver napkin ring 139, 141–3, 142, 144
silverplate 102
Silver Room of Mulberry House, Smith Square, Westminster 198–9
Simmel, Georg 138, 140, 141
Sims, Mary (Mrs.) 92, 93, 95
Šípek, Borek 475
Site-Writing (book) 136
situationist detournement 452
Sitwell, Osbert 205
Skotte, Sara 264
slavery and the significance of manillas (napkin rings) 142–3
‘Sloane Rangers’ 181–2
Slow Food Editore 451
Slow Food movement, the 451
Small is Beautiful (book) 400
Smiddy, Harold F. 527–8
Smith, Ewert 234
Smith, Jonathan M. 126
Smith, Terry 436
Smithson, Peter and Alison 26
Snyder, Sharon 294, 299–300
Sobchack, Vivian 150
social class and military uniforms 179–80
Social Construction of Technology, the 446
social innovation and design 313, 323, 324–5, 399, 402–3, 406 see also innovation
socially inclusive design 304–6, 305, 307–13, 312
socially responsive design 317–21, 319, 322–3, 324–7, 326, 373; and designing for what the public
wants
320–2, 321; wicked problems as design opportunities
322, 323–4 see also Papanek, Victor;
sustainability and design
social mobility through window gardening 194
‘Socialness’ of Objects 283
Society of Lady Dressmakers, the 89
socio-cultural anthropology 344–5, 346
Sontag, Susan 199, 204
Sony 114
Sophocles 406
Sottsass, Ettore 26, 400
Souls, the 92
South African Financial Mail (newspaper) 234
South Kensington Museum model 221–2, 257, 509 see also Victoria and Albert Museum, the
souvenir of Dutch ‘Tulipmania’ 151, 153
space as triadic entity 34
space within the ontology of design 31–2
Sparke, Penny 9, 131, 279n1, 437, 516
Spaulding, Ernest Wilder 376
speculative design 402
Spender, Stephen 205
Spiel-Gut (Good Play) award 214
Spill, Daniel 103
Spinoza, Benedict 369–70, 388, 392
Standard Oil Company 520
Stankowski, Anton 252
static dotted line, the 80, 81, 82, 84, 87
Stein, Gertrude 200, 201
Stewart, Helen 89, 90
Stilarchitektur und Baukunst (book) 258
stimulus screening and user-perceived aesthetics 335
St Louis Exhibition, US (1904) 224, 225, 226
Stockstad, Marilyn 436
Stolk, Swip 476,
480n5
Stone, Oliver see production design in Oliver Stone’s Wall Street movies
storyboarding 45
storytelling as artisanal craft 136,
139–40
Strangers (book) 200
structural unsustainability and defuturing 366,
368, 370
Structures of Everyday Life: The Limits of the Possible, The (book) 437–8
Structures of Interior Design (essay) 144
study of the history of the poster 251
Stumpf, Bill 270, 273
style innovations and the suit 181
Styles, John 175–6
subjectivities as agents 37
Suchman, Lucy 342–3
Süe, Marie Louis 459
Sugru 165–6
suit and the gentleman’s wardrobe, the 171–3, 175–8, 180–4
Sunday Express (newspaper) 199
Sunday trading 424
Sunlight Soap 448
Superficial Guide to the Meanings of Surface, A (essay) 139
superman, notion of 365
Superstudio 25
surface design and taste see taste and surface design
Surface of Design, The (essay) 23
Suri, Jane Fulton 279n2, 343
surveillance technologies 31
‘Susie Wong’ as inspiration for POA boat design 525
sustainability and design 411, 413, 414–18, 416–17, 452 see also socially responsive design
sustainability in craft 55–6
Sustainment and design 363, 365, 366–71
Svenska Slojdforeningen (Swedish Applied Art Association) 258, 262
Swadeshi movement, the 482, 488, 489, 491, 491n1, 495
Swiftkey 330
Swiss graphic design 244
Switzer & Co. 95–6
symbolism of contemplative objects 404,
405
Synder, Robert 285
synthetic dye 106
synthetic polymers 108
 
Table Stories (porcelain tableware) 137–8
taboo subjects and design 312–13
Tagore, Rabindranath 483, 490, 491n2
tailored khaki as upper class dress in the Army 179
tailoring patterns 84–6, 85
Tailor’s Pattern Book (book) 84–6
Tai Ping carpets 524–5
Taj shoes 525–7, 526, 527
Talbot, William Henry Fox 106
Taobao 332
taste 351–2, 356–7; cultural inferences of 128–30, 129, 351, 356, 357–8; social class and taste
hierarchies 131–3, 132, 194, 350, 355–7, 356; and surface design 123–8, 130–1, 144
Tata Nano 239
Taut, Bruno 459, 513, 514–15
Taylor, Blair 391
Taylor, Damon 475
Taylor, Frederick 342
Taylor, Sarah 70
Taylor, Una 96
Tchelitchew, Pavel 202
tea ceremony, the 511–13, 512
teaching as income for craft practitioners 57–8
Teasley, Sarah 439
technological change and cultural shifts 156–7, 159–60
Tek, Vedat 459
Tel Design 471, 472–3
television as center of attraction in the living room, the 466
Teller, Bonwit 526
Telling Stories (book) 136
Tencent 330
Tennant, Emma 200, 202
Tennant, Pamela 199, 200
Tennant, Stephen 10, 197, 198, 198–9, 203, 205; obsessive redecorating of Wilsford Manor as
queer
excess 197–8, 199–202, 203–4, 205–6
Tepper, Gene 274
Terry, Ellen 90, 91
textiles and crafts in India 501, 502–3
Textiles and Ornamental Arts of India (exhibition) 493–9, 497, 498, 500–5; as commentary on British
rule 497, 499–500
texture and the sense of touch 298
TfL (Transport for London) 318, 326
Thatcher, Margaret 279n1
Third Industrial Revolution, a 156
This is Design Thinking (book) 44
This Must Be the Place (Naïve Melody) (song) 150, 153
Thomas, Nicola 487
Thonet, Gebrüder 107
Thonet, Michael 107
Thorncroft, Anthony 203, 204
Thorpe, Adam 12
Thorpe, Anne 384
Thus Spoke Zarathustra (book) 365
Tigerman, Stanley 279
Times, The (newspaper) 95, 183, 424
Times of India, The (newspaper) 489
tin can radio 373–5, 374
Tippoo’s Tiger 497,
500
Toaster Project (exhibit) 403
Toffler, Alvin 454
toilet node 277
Tokugawa shogunate, the 508, 513, 514
Toorn, Jean van 30
Topkapi, Ottoman palace 457, 458
Toscano, Albert 154
tourism in New Zealand 223, 224
Toyota Land Cruiser 231
toy tea sets for children 209
tracing wheel, the 86
Traganou, Jilly 6–7
training for craft practitioners 61
transculturation 449
transfer of responsibility of home decoration to women 188, 195
transformation design 322
transition of computer design from mainframe to desktop 116–17
Translations from Drawing to Building (essay) 81
transport development and design 440
transport in Africa 231, 238 see also car as mode of transport in Africa, the
Trinidadian fashions as surface display strategies 129–30
triple bottom line of planet, people, and profit 409
Turntable, the 388–90, 389, 392
Twopenny, R.E.N. 222
Tye, Alan 273
Tynan, Jane 179
typisierung (standardization) debate 257
 
Überklebt: Plakate aus der DDR (East German design project) 243
UD (Universal Design) 306, 311, 313n1
UK National Archive for the History of Computing, University of Manchester 118
Ulm Hochschule fur Gestaltung (design school) 242
UNESCO 375
Unfold 161
UNIDO (United Nations Industrial Development Organization) 375, 418
uniform as disciplinary challenge, the 174–5, 179, 180
un-participative model of decision-making 67
Unsafe at Any Speed: The Designed-In Dangers of the American Automobile (book) 378
unsustainability 409–10
upcycling of mixing car components 231
uploads of new versions of websites 120
urban design decision-making 75–6, 76
Uri, the 234–5, 235, 239
US advertising influence in Turkey 462
US Buy Nothing Day 451–2
User-centered design 305–6 see also digital service innovation and users’ experience of design
user-perceived innovation in digital service design 334–5
Uses of Literacy, The (book) 131–3
US-India relations 493, 494, 505 see also Textiles and Ornamental Arts of India (exhibition)
US-Japan relations 519, 520, 522–3
utopian definitions of modernity and the design process 157–8
 
Vackrare vardagsvara (book) 258
Vackrare vardagsvara (Better things for everyday life) (pamphlet) 264n1
Vaio Notebooks 114
Valentine, Louise 7
validity of design 23
Valon Voimat 386
values of design 23
van der Hoorn 341, 342
VBKD (Verband Bildender Kunstler Deutschlands) 247, 248
Veblen, Thorstein 350
Vedel, Christian 214
Veggel, Rob van 45
Velde, Henri van de 257
Verganti, Robert 283
Verlag der Kunst publishing house 252
Vestries and District Boards of London 425–6
Vickery, Amanda 187
Victoria, Queen 484, 486
Victoria and Albert Museum, the 256,
353, 438, 447, 495, 500
Victorian Parlour: A Cultural Study of 2001 (book) 188
Vienna cafe chair 107
Vienna World Exposition (1872) 509
Vietnam War, the 307–8
View from the Interior, A (book) 187
virtual space 82
visibility of alcohol consumption in public houses 426–9, 428, 429
Visser, Martin 474
visualisation maps of craft practitioners 57, 58, 59
visual processes in service design 44,
45, 47–8
Visva-Bharati University, India 483
Vogel, Julius 222
Volksbuhne of East Berlin, the 248
Vormann, Jan 165
V’SOSKE 524
vulcanization 102
 
wabi (poverty style) tea 512
Wagner, Richard 27n4
Waite, Noel 10
Wajiro Kon 515
Walker, Stuart 14, 124–5
Walkley, Christina 91
Wall Street (movie) 146–50, 148, 153, 154, 155
Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps (movie) 146–7, 150–3, 152, 154, 155
Wall Street area of New York and a spatial design studies approach 29–30, 31–3, 35–8, 36
Wall Street Journal (newspaper) 522
Wanganui Art Gallery, New Zealand 226
Wardian cases 189, 191, 194, 195
Warhol, Andy 151
War of Independence (Turkey) 458
Washington Monument, the 104
Waste Makers, The (book) 378
waste reduction and durable design 402
Waters 395
Watt, Sir George 486
Waugh, Evelyn 199
Wayback Machine, the 120
WDC (World Design Capital) 383, 391
weapons development and design 440
wear and tear and the impression of surfaces 125
Weber, Max 449
Wedgwood, Josiah 106, 108, 447
Weigel, Helene 251
Weinthal, Lois 7–8
Weiss, Peterpaul 252
Wellington industrial exhibition, New Zealand (1885) 222
Were, Graeme 130
Wesley, John 175–6
Western architectural influence in the new Republic of Turkey 458–61, 459, 463–7, 465
Western car manufacturers and profitability of mass production for the African market 239
Western car manufacturers in Africa 231–2
Western design identities in Ottoman palaces 457–8
West Indian Front Room, The (exhibit) 356
Wettergren, Erik 258
Weyl, Roman 248
Wharncliffe War Hospital 292
Wheeler, Monroe 495, 496, 498–9, 502
Whiteley, Nigel 2, 322
Whitham, Billy 295
Whole Earth Catalog (book) 400
Who’s Who in Graphic Art (compendium) 243
‘wicked’ nature of societal challenges 322,
323–4, 325
WikiHouse project, the 166
Wilcox, Steve 343
Wild Things: The Material Culture of Everyday Life (book) 357
Wilsford Manor, Wiltshire 197, 202–3 see also Tennant, Stephen
window gardening (parlor gardening) 189–94, 190, 191
window-screening methods in public houses 427–9, 428, 429, 430–1
Winner, Langdon 31
winter garden, concept of 189
Wired (magazine) 236
Wittkugel, Klaus 252
Wolfe, David 285
Woman’s Dress for Success Book, The (book) 181
Woman’s Touch: Women in Design from 1860 to the Present Day, A (book) 187, 438
women and functions of taste 127
women in East German graphic design 249
women in Republican Turkey 461–3, 463, 464
Wood, Austen 525
Wood, Bethan Laura 159
wood as a material for children’s design 214
woodblock printing 509–10
Woodham, Jonathan 438
woodwork and mass production 106, 107
Woolf, Virginia 188
World History of Design (book) 435
world history of design, a 435–42 see also Dutch design
World Revolution Day 453
Wozniak, Steve 111
Wright, Russel 520
writing the design history of a rapidly changing technological artefact 117, 119, 120–1
WTC reconstruction since 9/11 attacks 32
Wunderlich, Sylke 243
www.inthebag.org.uk 318
 
Xiaomi 331
 
Yanagi, Soetsu 511, 512–13
Yedigün (magazine) 462
York, Peter 181–2
Yoshio Watanabe 514
You Can’t Lay Down Your Memories (exhibit) 159
Young, Sarah Fullerton Monteith 91–2
Young & Company 425
 
Zaccai, Gianfranco 270, 272, 273, 274, 275–6, 277, 278
Zakim, Michael 178
Zakreski, Patricia 89, 91
Zea, Kristi 150–1
Ziya, Aptullah 460–1