The crisis of the object resulting from the industrial revolution

• one-off hand-crafted objects to industrialized mass-production

The modern synthesis (form and function) begins to crumble in the 1970’s

• complexity and contradiction based on the richness and ambiguity of modern day life. Messy vitality o
• The vision of the modern city
• Paris, 1925 “A machine for living” – LeCorbusier,  highly functional, clearly designed
• 1950’s – architect Yamasaki (also designed NYC World Trade Towers). Built the Pruit Ego Housing Complex. 
• Complex became crime-ridden, high unemployment rates
• Why didn’t the Modernist dream work? (clean, rational, straight-lined design)
• St. Louis, 1972 “A machine for dying” – City blew up the towers – a terrible failure of modernism. The symbolic date for the end of modernism, if not the end of Modernism, at least a new questioning.
• “Less is more” ~ Mies van der Rohe vs. “Less is a bore” ~ Robert Venturi
• Problem: these beautiful, refined modernist objects/designs do not connect with the richness of human life.
• “Form follows function” vs. “Form follows emotion”, “Form follows fiction”
• “Clarity of meaning”, Otto Aischer vs.  “Richness of meaning” April Greiman (one of first people to use computers as a tool for self expression)
• “Ornament is crime” ~ Adolph Loos vs. “I am for messy vitality over obvious unity” ~ Robert Venturi

19th century – steam, market capitalism, realism
20th century – electricity, monopoly/capitalism, modernism (highly abstract)
late 20th century – microprocessor, multinational capitalism, postmodernism (collision of disparate elements)

microprocessor and macroprocessor (production facilities). Technologies dedicated to the abolition of time and space.
1978-1980, new designers arrive in Silicon Valley

1980’s – Design Semantics Movement – how do we interact with digital devices?

Growing complexity of interactions with our objects

McDonough Braungart Design Protocols

1. Waste equals food
2. Use current solar income
3. Respect diversity

The Whole Earth Catalog – Access to Tools (Fall 1968)