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History Of Design

The period from 1770 to 1914 saw European society change profoundly. Industrialisation and urban living made access to fashionable styles much more universal. Indeed the new industrial society was driven by aspiration, which was in turn driven by style and the designers who created it.

Style has a long history. Randy White of New York University has studied the abundance of beads and other body ornaments that suddenly appeared in France, Belgium and Germany 28,000 years ago. and found that ornaments had a definite style that remained uniform. (P326 The Neandertal Enigma by James Shreeve) From that time on fashions came and went, and were often adopted by the rich to demonstrate their difference from run of the mill society. Some of these fashions could be as fun and silly as anything produced today. In the court of Richard the Second, for example, it became the fashion for shoes to have long protruding points on the toes, a style introduced from Bohemia, by Richard's wife Anne. The crucial difference between this kind of styling and modern methods is that there was no separate person designing the products, and there was no planned modification of style. Designers and planned changes only came about with the arrival of industrialisation. From the 1760s the Lyons silk industry introduced twice yearly collections to enhance differentiation between products, to stimulate trade, and to combat copying. By 1800 patterns in printed cotton for dresses changed routinely with each season. For furniture fabrics new patterns were produced every two to three years. In the 1840s the Journal of Design estimated that "There are upwards of six thousand patterns for callico printing registered annually." (Quoted The Oxford History of Western Art ed Martin Kemp, P380)

Whereas fashion had once been the preserve of the rich, mass production allowed style to be produced cheaply. A division of labour meant that the designer of a product and its builder were usually separate people. Before the Industrial Revolution this had hardly ever happened. Only in exceptional cases, such as in the work of Leonardo Da Vinci (1452 - 1519), did a person draw a design and have other people make it. Design is really a product of mass production, and you might say that design was set free only when industrial processes took over. Not everybody agreed. William Morris feared that industrialised production would deny individual creativity and dehumanise the working lives of millions of people. He helped set up the Arts and Crafts movement as a remedy. In the event hand made products were too expensive to produce, except for the wealthy. And it soon became apparent that industrialised production was not actually incompatible with either creativity or beauty. It was design that would demonstrate this. Initially, however, there was a lack of design experience, since this was the first time it had really been seen as an individual skill. The first president of the Royal Academy Of Art, Joshua Reynolds, thought that excellence in the fine arts would somehow trickle down to the lower levels of product design. Inevitably this did not really happen. When the lack of competitiveness of British goods became apparent in the 1820s and 1830s attitudes changed. By the 1840s a national system of publicly funded design schools had been set up. When the Great Exhibition of 1851 again showed shortcomings in the design of British goods, the schools were given a further boost.

 

A year after the Great Exhibition the Museum of Manufacturers, now known as the Victoria And Albert Museum, was founded by civil servant, designer and writer Henry Cole. The museum's aim was to promote art and design, and to contribute to the improvement of British goods. The museum's original collections were centred around objects acquired from the Great Exhibition, and the aim was to represent the main branches of production in metalwork, woodwork, textiles, ceramics and glass. Although the utilitarian aim of the Victoria and Albert was quickly toned down, there was a marked improvement in the design of British goods at the London International Exhibition of 1862. This encouraged other countries to set up similar institutions to the V and A, and by 1890 almost every European capital had a similar museum. In Germany about thirty such museums were founded in major cities.

 

 

 

All this effort at developing design moved the discipline away from its largely decorative beginnings, towards a preoccupation with function. Functional design had its advocates in the nineteenth century, with Horatio Greenough and Gottfried Semper leading the way. By the beginning of the twentieth century, as the Arts and Crafts movement died out, design became more associated with functional beauty. The American architect and designer Frank Lloyd Wright believed that industrialised production was "capable of carrying to fruition high ideals in art" and "ultimately to emancipate human expression." Meanwhile new groups such as the Deutscher Werkbund, founded in 1907came together to develop high quality designs for mass production. The First World War turned some people against mass production for a while, with its connotations of mechanised slaughter. Even the great designer Walter Gropius felt like this temporally. But by the 1920s the commitment to rational mass produced design had returned.

 

A Renault Formula 1 car at the Design Museum

Today the idea of mass production stifling creativity still lingers, perhaps most strongly in association with the Green movement, which has an instinctive distrust of industrialised society. In reality as Frank Lloyd Wright and Walter Gropius and many thousands of designers have realised, creativity can actually be enhanced by modern industrialisation. And of course this method of making things remains the most efficient. It is interesting that the vast furniture concern Ikea, puts such emphasis on its designers in its promotional literature. Photos of the designers appear in the catalogues, along with short quotes about their work. You could look upon this as a gimmick to make cheap mass produced goods look more human. But the fact is these goods are human, designed by people, and then produced as economically as possible by machines.