• 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)

• Nazi Germany Design
• Collected signature artworks from around the country that represented the “degeneracy” of German culture. Exhibition was called “Entartete Kunst”
• “Coordination” – ideology of totalitarianism ~ everything keyed to the ideological objectives of the state. What design language do you use?
• Volkswagen – the people’s car. 1936 Porsche develops the beetle – not put into production until after war
• Table Radio created by Kirsting. Device assisted in the proliferation/reinforcement of Nazi ideals. Messages from the Fuhrer.
• 1936 – World’s Fair in Paris – Russian pavilion. Massive monolithic pavilion with statue of man/woman with hammer and sickle in hand
• Right across from the Russian pavilion – the German Pavilion – design by Albert Speer. Massive tower of classical architecture
• Albert Speer, began working with Hitler in is early 30’s – his title was Inspector General of Buildings for the Renovation of the State Capital, in the Office of the Beauty of Labour
• Speer first developed plan for the complete re-building of greater Berlin. Build a new capital for an empire that will last for a thousand years. A very theatrical design based on the spectacular. Planned a Pantheon-like building with a 220 foot domed building to accommodate 100,000 people for rallies.
• Speer: “My buildings were not solely intended to express the essence of the National Socialist movement. They were an integral part of that movement.”
• Built review stand for the parade ground at Nuremberg
• Walter Benjamin – Nazis achieved complete aesthetic composition of a nationalist state
• Nuremberg rallies and the staging of a spectacular events. The audience is overwhelmed by a sense of becoming part of something greater
• At night, anti-aircraft guns were angled upward creating a cathedral of light.
• Stephen Heller’s book – Swastika – Symbol Beyond Redemption

In the United States, the CIA and Information Design
Visual Presentation Branch of the OSS

• Raymond Leowy – developed information visualizations (ex. space-time diagrams)
• Dreyfuss and Associates designed the White House War Room – it was never built
• Designed the courts for the Nuremberg trials and built visuals to assist with trials and display evidence, etc…
• OSS group also designed all materials for the first United Nations meetings (in San Francisco), with particular attention to neutrality. McLauglin designed the UN symbol – made it power blue because it was a color that was not used on any national flags in 1945.

HfG ULM
A Design School started after the war.

• The goal was democratic re-education through design
• The intention was to engage the population at the most fundamental levels. The goal was to rebuild the German civilization from new foundations
• 4 departments: Product Form, Information Design, Industrial Building, Visual Communication
• An all-star designer faculty, and many distinguished guests visited
• Max Bild(?) – first director of the school
• Feeling: need to go back to basics. Developed a science of design. Revisit geometry, grid theory, group theory, apart from mathematical studies, they also included many cultural studies: anthropology, semiotics, psychology, etc… (mobilize the spirit of the culture)
• Pursuit of a precision of understanding of what a thing “is about”
• Many experiments – collapsible modular office set. (M125 furnishing system) ship furniture is flat boxes to be assembled on-site, ala IKEA
• Lindenger – modular home entertainment system, 1962 – based on work done from Braun
• Max Braun – hired Peter Eichler as head of design, handed off to Dieter Rams – defined a hi-fi audio system. It is not apiece of furniture. It possesses an instrumental, technological character
• Dieter Rams article “Omit the Unimportant”
• Other Braun products:  shaver, clock, coffee maker, calculator The non-aesthetic becomes the aesthetic. Black and White color only
• While West Germany is re-establishing its cultural  relevancy  in the world through design, products/design were stagnant is East Germany
• Durant automobile from East Germany – 2-cylinder, 25HP, Duroplast body (far outlasts the car’s engine).
• Design flourishes in a market-driven environment (requires market competition). Graphic design seems to require an advertising industry.

• Harley Earl introduced styling to the automotive industry – colours and interiors (worked for GM)
• 1903 – Fords starts company with 28K startup cash. Model-T using mostly all preexisting parts – created the “horseless carriage”.
• 1903 – the Wright Flyer, the flying machine built off knowledge from bicycle making // precursor to entirely new industry.
• Horseless carrier/flying machine becomes automobile/airplane through process of industrial design. A new category of object – a coherent design artifact
• Wireless telegraph (manufactured artifact) – 10 years to become a designed artifact – with its own design language.
• Typewriter + Television – a coherent design language for a computer has yet to be defined
• *Objects in transition* The development of a new design language

Scale, Power, Speed: Machine-Age America height and bulk of skyscraper, the speed of the locomotive, influenced design of Electrolux vacuum cleaner, etc…
New Materiality – Plastics: The materiality of invention

• 19th century: first celluloids
• Evolution of the use of celluloid materials from use as imitation, to substitution, to invention.
• Imitation – thought of as replacement for ivory, tortoise shells and other natural materials\ Leo Bakeland – invents bakelite. FIrst commercial polymers. Realized that plastics offer control that allow us to create forms/objects that were not possible previously.
• Invention: We can do things that mother nature is incapable of creating: “The material of a thousand uses.”

Buckminster Fuller: Dymaxian Chronofile (collected all his ideas and thoughts within this filing system from 1927 onwards).

• Plans for a new mass-produced house

October 1929 – Stock Market Crash, start of global depression

Birth of the Industrial Designer
Introducing the two most prominent designers of the time: Raymond Loewy, Henry Dreyfuss.

Raymond Loewy: The first celebrity designer

• Loewy’s background in illustration
• 3 favorite shapes: the egg, his wife’s figure, a sales curve rising to infinity
• Used clay over wood frame for prototype
• Trope of the era – “BEFORE and AFTER”
• Mimeograph: from industrial machine to office furniture (concealed, protected, integrated, coherent designed object)
• GE Ice Box (Sears selling 65,000/year) -> Refrigerator, 3 years later (275,000 per year)
• Locomotive – redesign the railroad experience. First job was to redesign trash bins in Grand Central Station
• Painted stripes on the locomotive engine (consistent design language of speed and scale)
• From locomotive to pencil sharpener – language extended on symbolic basis.
• Expertise in rendering an object desirable (example Lucky Strike Cigarettes)
• Designed Airforce 1 and the Concorde
• “Never Leave Well Enough Alone”, Loewy’s Published Memoirs. Introduced the MAYA Principle – Most Advanced Yet Acceptable
• Loewy design exhibition of he future of space flight
• SkyLab – 1967 NASA mission – Loewy conducted “habitability studies”

Henry Dreyfuss: The “Conscience of the Industrial Design Revolution”

• Background in theater
• Won industrial design competition for the design of the rotary-dial telephone
• One model, one color (standardized, visually ubiquitous artifact)
• An evolved form, that almost disappears on someone’s desktop
• PROCESS: developed a methodology of design
• Analysis -> Sketching -> Modeling -> Presentation -> Critique
• Brought ergonomics to the field of design
• “Design is for People”, Dreyfuss’ book – introduced the anthropometric figures “Joe and Josephine” – a typical man and woman
• When his wife found out she had terminal brain cancer, they committed suicide together. (wow)

Ray & Charles Eames

• Met at Cranbrook
• Combined idealism of European Modernism with the populism of American Industrial Design
• Developed leg split and shoulder splint – discovered evocative forms through these designs
• DCM – Dining Chair Metal
• Sotsas’ response to this chair – “Eames did not invent a new chair, he invented a new way of sitting down.”
• Hard angles soften to the curvature of the human body

• Harley Earl introduced styling to the automotive industry – colours and interiors (worked for GM) 
• 1903 – Fords starts company with 28K startup cash. Model-T using mostly all preexisting parts – created the “horseless carriage”.
• 1903 – the Wright Flyer, the flying machine built off knowledge from bicycle making // precursor to entirely new industry.
• Horseless carrier/flying machine becomes automobile/airplane through process of industrial design. A new category of object – a coherent design artifact
• Wireless telegraph (manufactured artifact) – 10 years to become a designed artifact – with its own design language.
• Typewriter + Television – a coherent design language for a computer has yet to be defined
• *Objects in transition* The development of a new design language

Scale, Power, Speed: Machine-Age America
height and bulk of skyscraper, the speed of the locomotive, influenced design of Electrolux vacuum cleaner, etc…
New Materiality – Plastics: The materiality of invention
19th century: first celluloids
Evolution of the use of celluloid materials from use as imitation, to substitution, to invention.
Imitation – thought of as replacement for ivory, tortoise shells and other natural materials\

Leo Bakeland – invents bakelite. FIrst commercial polymers. Realized that plastics offer control that allow us to create forms/objects that were not possible previously

Invention: We can do things that mother nature is incapable of creating: “The material of a thousand uses.”

Buckminster Fuller: Dymaxian Chronofile (collected all his ideas and thoughts within this filing system from 1927 onwards).
- plans for a new mass-produced house

October 1929 – Stock Market Crash, start of global depression

Birth of the Industrial Designer. The two most prominent designers of the time: Raymond Loewy, Henry Dreyfuss.

Raymond Loewy: The first celebrity designer

• Loewy’s background in illustration
• 3 favorite shapes: the egg, his wife’s figure, a sales curve rising to infinity
• Used clay over wood frame for prototype
• Trope of the era – “BEFORE and AFTER”
• Mimeograph: from industrial machine to office furniture (concealed, protected, integrated, coherent designed object)
• GE Ice Box (Sears selling 65,000/year) -> Refrigerator, 3 years later (275,000 per year)
• Locomotive – redesign the railroad experience. First job was to redesign trash bins in Grand Central Station
• Painted stripes on the locomotive engine (consistent design language of speed and scale)
• From locomotive to pencil sharpener – language extended on symbolic basis.
• Expertise in rendering an object desirable (example Lucky Strike Cigarettes)
• “Never Leave Well Enough Alone”, Loewy’s Published Memoirs. Introduced the MAYA Principle – Most Advanced Yet Acceptable

Henry Dreyfuss: The “Conscience of the Industrial Design Revolution”

• Background in theater
• Won industrial design competition for the design of the rotary-dial telephone
• One model, one color (standardized, visually ubiquitous artifact)
• An evolved form, that almost disappears on someone’s desktop
• PROCESS: developed a methodology of design
• Analysis -> Sketching -> Modeling -> Presentation -> Critique
• Brought ergonomics to the field of design
• “Design is for People”, Dreyfuss’ book – introduced the anthropometric figures “Joe and Josephine” – a typical man and woman.

Planned Obsolescence