Design_and_culture

design and cultureDesign and CultureNow that “design” is understood from Tokyo to Moscow, from Buenos Aires to Montreal, it is obvious that each country according to its politics, its economics, its sociology, its industry, uses “Design” in a different w ay; but one must add that a universal language is being constructed daily. The word “culture” is used throughout the text in its most democratic sense, that is , as a concept which embraces the ideas and values expressed by modern society as a whole, rather than one which only touches one level of human endeavor. In parallel, design is understood here as a phenomenon which affects everybody.The definition of culture has to be considered within a broad context which subsumes economics, politics and technology as these are the forces which have determined the dominant cultural patterns in modern society. Design is also formed and sustained by these forces and, as a result, designed artifacts act as culture ciphers. In this book, I have set out to examine both the way in which culture has influenced design in this century and the manner in which design has, in its turn, played a part in creating culture through the objects, institutions, personalities and the patterns of behaviour and thought that have accompanied it. Since 1900, design and culture, in this wide sense, have become increasingly interdependent and the implication of this relationship will re-merge constantly in the following chapters.My main thesis is that, within the framework of industrial capitalism which created it and continues to dominate it in contemporary Western society, design is characterized by a dual alliance with both mass production and mass consumption and that these two phenomena have determined nearly all its manifestations. Like Janus, design looks in tow directions at the same time : as a silent quality of all mass produced goods it plays a generally unacknowledged but vital in all our lives; as a named concept within the mass media, it is, however, much more visible and generally recognized. In this latter guise design becomes an extension of marketing and advertising. The “designer-jeans” phenomenon, which persuades us to by a product because it has been designed, is, culturally speaking, totally distinct from the activity of the anonymous designers within industry who resolve the problems of the cost, appearance and use in consumer products. The way in which design as an adjunct of marketing has grown out of design as an aspect of mass production is a major theme within the story of modern design and the focus of this book.It is a change which directly mirrors the way in which the model of mass-production industry, as presented by Henry Ford, which dominated American ideas about industrial organization in the early twentieth century, has been challenged by an alternative model which stresses batch production, a smaller scale of operations (or set of operation), and, at times, a fair amount of hand or skilled word. This latter model –best expressed by Sloane‟s work at General Motors in the USA in the 1920s and by contemporary development in Japan and Italy-puts the demands of the marketplace above those of the logic of mechanized mass production and tends, as a result, to value the diversification of products rather than , or as well as, standardization. These two models of industry coexist in this century and have different implications for the meaning of design. An important sub-theme is the way in which the aesthetic of designed artifacts has swung repeatedly backwards and forwards from production to consumption as sources of metaphorical inspiration.While the book concentrates on design as it has come to be defined and understood since the advent of mechanization, and emphasizes those themes which have made it part of recent history,it is also important to remember that the concept has an earlier history which is largely responsible for the way we comprehend it today. Design has always been one aspect of a larger process –whether of manufacturing, in the craft or mechan ized sense, or, from the consumer‟s point of view, of participating in social or economic life –and its definition has, from the moment the word entered the English language, been in a state of constant flux due ,primarily, to the changes in the social-economic framework which has sustained it.Thus the difference between a seventeenth-century-pattern maker and a modern industrial designer is less one of the nature of their respective creative activities than of the economic, technological and social constraints within which the activity is performed. What have remained constant are the visualizing and humanizing aspects of the design process as even today the designer‟s input into the manufacture of an electronic calculator, for example, focuses on the aesthetic and ergonomic aspects of that product.The most significant and powerful constraining factor on design in the last two centuries has, however, been its growing alliance with mass production and mass consumption. This, more than any other historical event, has determined the special characteristics we associate with its role in modern society. In recent decades, manufacturing industry has removed design from its original, humble and largely anonymous backstage position as an element in the production process and push it into the limelight as an important aspect of the sale ability and desirability of consumer products. The French Marxist writer, Laurent Wolf, explains that it has become merely “a new way of elaborating products linked to the …profound mutation‟ of the production process”. Design, in the “old” sense, has not disappeared however. It remains as central to the process production as it ever did but tends , at least in terms of its cultural image, to be overshadowed by the more sales-oriented concept.The ambiguity created by the co-existence of these two faces of design has been the greatest stumbling-block in a satisfactory analysis of it. It is a difficulty which is exacerbated by the confusion and ideological assumption which have been mad e by many of this century‟s critics and historians of design. It was those critics, among them Nikolaus Pevsner, Lewis Mumford, Herbert Read and Siegfried Gieldion-all of whom supported the functionalist ideals of the Modern Movement in the interwar years –who helped to perpetrate the myth that society was to come to associate with that particular design movement, and who thereby turned design into a heroic rather than an everyday concept. The critical tradition established by these writers has been hard to supersede and it is only recently, as a result of the growing dissatisfaction with the Modern Movement, that their views have been questioned.It has become increasingly difficult also to extricate the propaganda of design from its real manifestations and to separate sales talk from fact. One way of avoiding these impasses is to move beyond the Modern Movement critics and to consider design within the context of social life. From this perspective, design simply becomes one of the forms of mass communication in modern society as much as it plays a fundamental role, both practical and psychological, within daily life. In understanding many of the changes in the meaning of modern design it is important to grasp the modifications that have been effected by the changing social patterns to which the designer , like everybody else , can only respond as best he or she can.. The changing role of women in this century , for example, has influenced the appearance and image of the so-called labor-saving devices in the home needed to minimize housework. Conversely, design initiative can modify socially behavior, as is the case, for example, with the Sony Walkman, the miniature tape-cassetteplayer which has encouraged a new attitude towards such solitary activities as jogging and traveling on the underground.While the relationship between social change and design change remains a chicken and egg problem it is equally difficult to decide whether economic necessity, public taste, available technology, or social need came first as causes for design innovation. For example, the emergence in this century of new materials and production techniques, such as die-casting in plastics manufacture, has been highly influential in determining the appearance of many of the products which surround us but , at the same time, those object would never have entered the mass environment if they did not fulfill an earlier need, whether practical, economic, political, social or psychological.In many ways the stories of design “failure”——such as that of the Ford Edsel in the early 1950s——reveal more about the meaning of design in contemporary society than those of the “success” depends upon an inextricable combination of forces.The social and psychological necessity for design is easily justified by the fact that we only need to buy , for example, one set of plastic crockery which would last us a life-time. That we continue to buy expendable products made of fragile materials, and often, indeed, to invest in duplicate examples which only vary stylistically, because of the demands of social status or ritual, emphasizes the fundamentally symbolic role that design plays in our consumption and use of objects. While this tendency may be minimized at the more technical end of the spectrum——most of us do not, for example, need more than one micro-wave oven——even in goods of this nature there are signs that pluralism is increasingly the norm. The socio-cultural argument is reinforced by the economic demands of industrial capitalism which depends on the constant consumption of goods. Together they locate design in the center of the picture as it is design that provides the variation that is so essential to modern society.Design decisions are constantly being made everywhere, whether by designers or consumer s. They all focus on the aesthetic of the product whether, in the designer‟s case, defined as a creative resolution of the joint demands of technology, price, or as the fulfillment of the requirements of taste, practicality and social and economic needs.Design is, more often than not, therefore, manifested in a tangible and visible form and objects are, therefore, an important point of entry for the design critic or historian. They are not always, however, the final words as design is, ultimately, a cultural phenomenon whose effects are as abstract as they are physical. Objects play a significant role in this book – particularly those like the Italian Vespa motor –scooter which encapsulate many of the important aspects of modern design and culture – but most of them are included as examples or illustrations rather than as the main substance of my text.As Patrix implies in the quotation at the beginning of this introduction, it is the nature of design in the modern world to be international as it depends increasingly on the structure of the world market for its very existence. The English words “design” is currently used widely in countries such as Japan, Italy, France, the Scandinavian countries and the USA, a fact which indicates that its meaning in contemporary society has moved away from its definition in previous centuries when it was interchangeable with the Italian il disegno and the French Le dessin.The fact that these countries have abandoned these native terms in favor of “design” suggests that more than just a mere shift in meaning has taken place and that what has occurred is, in fact, the emergence of an entirely new concept. It is the nature of this concept and the way in which it has evolved in this century that I am to explore.。