Visionary thinking in the history of design
Design is not directed merely to the solution of practical problems, it is also concerned with visions of the future. Design is utopian and visionary.
Social Utopias were close to the heart of the design programs and programmers of classical modernism. After the failure of all-embracing political and economic systems, design Utopias are still informed by concepts of progress and visions of the future, but systematic design is only evident diffusely or in individual formal statements.
In the popular mind design is often connected with the enhancement of an object’s beauty, a value measured in terms of the status, difference, pleasure of possession etc. that it bestows. Designers, on the other hand, tend to view their task in terms of commercially oriented innovative solutions, and to see themselves as industrial service providers. In the infancy of modern design, however, its objects were imbued with far wider, indeed with transcendent meaning, and this transcendence was intimately connected with the visions of a different and better future that form the essence of historical modernism. The classical European movements in the history of modern design bear eloquent testimony to such thinking. The visionary scope of the English Arts and Crafts movement, of Russian constructivism and Hungarian activism, of the Dutch de stijl and German Bauhaus movements reached far beyond the concrete object to embrace a social Utopia. And if, as was increasingly the case, this vision became infused with technology, then the technology itself was seen as a vehicle of social revolution.
Fig. 1: Principles of Dutch De Stijl movement appear in this sketch for an architectural competition. Cornelis van Esteren, 1924 (Nederlands Architectuur Instituut, Rotterdam).
The Dutch exponents of de stijl, along with the Amsterdam expressionists, as well as the German Bauhaus movement, were equally indebted to socio-political ideas, and they also engaged in sporadic attempts to realize them in practice. But it was the Russian constructivists that proved the most radical of these groupings. As an avant-garde they lack any historical equivalent, for their intellectual and artistic program was bound up with the cultural travail of the Russian Revolution. And the all-embracing sweep and cosmic-metaphysical impulse of their utopianism, with its striving for redemption and justice, owes its force to a virtually symbiotic identification with the Russian memory and its quasi-religious expectations of salvation.
Fig. 1: Principles of Dutch De Stijl movement appear in this sketch for an architectural competition. Cornelis van Esteren, 1924 (Nederlands Architectuur Instituut, Rotterdam).
Much of the artistic intelligentsia of the Russia of that era, plunged by Lenin into the great socialist experiment, succumbed to the magic of a mechanist dream that promised to combine constructive purity with usefulness, functionalism, economy and effectiveness beyond the enclaves of social privilege in an atmosphere of collective enthusiasm and universal future harmony. The machine as a purely rational, purposive construct was with the best of intentions elevated – to some extent in the wake of American Fordism – to become a model of social organization, with all the regimentation, subjection to centralized authority, and bureaucracy that this notoriously entailed. The paradoxical dialectic of the constructivists’ mechanized Utopia lay in the inevitability with which the smooth mechanical functioning that was intended to produce an ideal harmony in fact degenerated into ubiquitous state-organized compulsion.
Fig. 3: German Werkbund (German Work Federation) exhibition poster 1929. Hans Leistikow.
The trauma of two world wars imposed an obligation of modesty on the post-1945 generation. Any new beginning must seek moderation, free of avant-garde enthusiasms, despite the inexhaustible future potential inherent in the zero-hour of western Europe as a whole and of Germany in particular: with the past and the present swept clean, never had there been so much pure beginning. Yet, caught between the paralyzing shock of destruction and the whirlwind of a burgeoning economic miracle, the futurist conceptions of the immediate post-war years were simply left behind by the pressures of practical reconstruction.
Aesthetic Utopias of the post-war period include the Danish-Belgian-Dutch COBRA movement, the Independent Group in England, and the many by-products of alternative youth movements, especially of the 1968 student revolts across Europe (above all in Italy) and in the USA. However, these latter-day episodes in the history of Utopian thought represent no more than the final tremors of avant-gardism in art and design.
Today all that is left of the great period of classical modernism is a memory transformed into a myth – a myth marketed with due reverence as an aspect of high culture. For it is the Utopian kick conveyed by the artifacts of this period that makes them so profitable for commercial interests, from corporate and urban identity to the world heritage sites that enhance city rankings and feed the global appetites of tourism.
Despite the inexhaustible potential for futuristic dreaming inherent in the worlds of science and technology, it cannot be denied that the world of serious contemporary design is tired of theories and Utopias, not least because of the universal failure of such projects in the past. Not even the post-postmodern theories of individual thinkers like Norbert Bolz who envision the endless pliability of a future formed from the building-blocks of matter, the bits, atoms, neurons and genes that are the stuff of modern science can shake off this lethargy. Obstinately and pragmatically contemporary design is focused on fulfilling the commissions passed on to it from research.
Fig. 4: Title page of 1938 brochure on the Volkswagen ‘People’s Car’. Despite its
origins in the Third Reich this vehicle went on to become a major post-war success story.
Belief in the visionary power of design is still firmly anchored in the concept, imported from North America, of creative industries, which in a Münchhausen-like process will, it is hoped, bootstrap the flagging destinies of weak industrial and post-industrial areas, providing alternative forms of work-as-play whose impact will infect and vitalize surrounding work environments. In its more recent political guise this ‘principle of hope’ has, in Germany, taken on a dynamic of its own, and the ‘creative’ recipe is now applied not only to run-down ex-industrial regions like Bitterfeld in the east and the Ruhr in the west but nationwide as a panacea for economic renewal.
A more cautious trend has developed in the context of the discussion of alternative technologies set off by the 1973 oil crisis. Here responsibility for the real future of the planet is at stake. Almost every technological Utopia of the present wears the badge of sustainability on its sleeve, even in the Gulf States themselves, which are already turning their corporate mind to the time when the oil wells run dry (see the emerging eco-city of Masdar in Abu Dhabi). Indeed, concepts of recycling, ecology and alternative technology have been the only source in recent decades of anything approaching a consistent, future-oriented program, connected in Europe with the founding of a new, and (in Germany at least) buoyant political party. The ‘Green’ movement has itself been sustained by the remorseless crumbling of the positive vision of progress accelerated most recently by ongoing climate change and financial and economic collapse. A growing sense of responsibility for future generations has supplanted utopian social and artistic visions, and a multiplicity of individual initiatives with modest concrete aims for resource-friendly, energy-saving products has moved into the space vacated by global theories. Recycling has also taken hold in manufacturing industry, where corporations are now facing up to the problems they themselves have caused in areas like electronic waste disposal and use of resources. The scope of this movement manifestly lies not so much in its visionary breadth as in the public cultural critique underlying its individual activities.
In this diffuse and disparate world scientific and technological research is providing designers with an endless spectrum of opportunities, some of which take up ancient human dreams of mastery. One such is the replacement of man by the machine, where real progress in robotics has rendered the homunculus of medieval myth redundant. At a more superficial level nanotechnology has provided our generation with hybrid, so-called intelligent materials, propelling ‘smart clothes’, ‘smart textiles’, and ‘intelligent clothing’ from fairytale into reality, while at the most radical level of all genetic design is working toward the realization of the age-old dream of immortality, mankind’s desire for eternal youth. Mastery over the universe of artifacts promises (or threatens) to become mastery over the human condition itself.
Fig. 5: Mountaineering jacket incorporating bionically inspired membrane. When the
body emits heat or sweat the textile structure opens like a pine cone (c-change, in: design report 3/08, 42).
Despite today’s abundance of new ideas and concepts, designers rarely succeed in embedding these in wider utopian contexts or in communicating them discursively, bundling them programmatically or organizing them into networks. Future-oriented design research is for the most part applied to the job in hand and frequently conducted in joint R&D ventures commissioned by industry. The spectrum of applications is growing, and can no longer be subsumed even under as comprehensive a motto as H. Muthesius’ “from sofa cushions to city planning”, predicated of the classical period of design history. Nor is design any longer restricted to the individual object, even in serial mass production. It is applied to systems, grids, patterns, networks and non-linear design processes, too. The very fullness of the list, and the remorseless growth and ubiquity of the research fields that feed it, contributes to the widespread disinterest in theory and the weariness with Utopian thought that characterize the modern design age. Where so much must be communicated, so much must be made practicable, more distant horizons inevitably cloud over. Yet new cultural issues such as globalization, interculturalism, diversity, sustainability and gender continue to challenge designers, and what Habermas has called the “unfinished project” of a consistent vision fusing project-based thinking into a thematic system under the impact of these disparate impulses remains as relevant a task as ever.
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