100 IDEAS THAT CHANGED DESIGN

100 IDEAS THAT CHANGED
DESIGN
C H A R L O T T E & P E T E R F I E L L
Excerpts and commentary by Dr Ricardo Sosa ricardo.sosa@sydney.edu.au

Charlotte and Peter Fiell are the authors of over 20 books on design and the visual arts,
including The Story of Design, Designing the 21st Century and the bestselling 1000 Chairs.
https://www.laurenceking.com/products/100-ideas-that-changed-design

•“These are the big ideas in design that have
improved our lives immeasurably”
•“There are certain types of design where
the primary function is to act as a vehicle
for conveying concepts, opinions or
propaganda”
•“Designs also embody the spirit of the time in which
they are created”

• “When we look at an object, we can read it as a veritable sign of the
times, an encapsulation of the ideas and ideals of the society that
created it”
•“A big idea must not only have had a
substantial impact when it first emerged but
also a certain ‘stickiness’, which means that its
influence has left an enduring legacy on the
practice of design”

• “[Future designs] will be premised on existing ideas and try to build
on them, or they will reject the status quo and seek radically new
approaches”
• “We need more intelligent design thinking to enable us to
solve the biggest problems we face, from global warming to
clean energy generation and overpopulation”
•“We also need innovative design ideas to
ensure that design remains the vital civilizing
force it has always been”

Innovation
• The concept of innovation has long motivated designers to believe
that there is always a better way of doing things. Innovation in
design is also often driven by entrepreneurship –the belief that
monetary gain can be achieved by coming up with a new invention
•Design is what gives their product offerings the all-
important differentiating ‘wow’ factor, and
engenders an owning lust among potential buyers
and brand loyalty among existing customers.

Luxury
• Although the early pioneers of the Modern Movement
were primarily concerned with democratic design and
utility, in certain circles modernity was eventually
connected to luxury with the furniture and interiors by
Le Corbusier and Eileen Gray, among others,
epitomizing this modish appropriation.

Design education
• By the early XIX century there were a number of design-led
trade schools in Continental Europe, and this prompted the
establishment in Britain of the country’s first dedicated
design-teaching institution in 1837, the Government School
of Design, originally located in London’s Somerset House.
Eventually the school was moved to South Kensington and
renamed the Royal College of Arts.
• The founding of the Staatliches Bauhaus in 1919 pulled
design education into the modern age.

Design reform
• William Hogarth’s book ‘The Analysis of Beauty’ (1753) argued that
functional considerations should guide the design of objects rather
than the use of applied decoration. The 1851 Great Exhibition in
London became a veritable showcase of overblown decoration –
fussily decorated domestic products
• The concept of an instructive good-versus-bad design museum:
• Marlborough House in Pall Mall in 1852 → V&A Museum in London
• Deutscher Werkbund in Munich in 1907
• Deutsche Museum fur Kunst in Handel und Gewerbe → Museum der Dinge
in Berlin

Morality
•There is nevertheless widespread general agreement
about what constitutes good design, which is based
on a set of ethical principles
• Augustus Pugin’s ‘Contrasts, or a Parallel between the Architecture of the 15th and 19th
Centuries’; the idea that a design style could have a moral underpinning was strengthened by
John Ruskin. It was William Morris who sought through a design reform ‘a holy crusade against
the age’
•The One Laptop Per Child is perhaps the best
contemporary example of how morally driven design
can make a hugely positive impact on people’s lives.

Design rhetoric
•All designs express innately the beliefs,
aspirations and values of their creators
• Design rhetoric is focused on the idea of how a design can
pose a form of argument based on its persuasiveness
•Through the act of acceptance –by means of
use or purchase- you are ultimately casting a
vote for those values

Vernacularism
• Different places have evolved their own particular language of design for
objects of everyday use
•‘Provincial’ in the truest sense of the world.
They are not driven by commercial imperative
or even necessarily aesthetics
• One of the first to realize the worth of such designs was William Morris. Scandinavian
designers often sought inspiration from their indigenous folk-design roots, as well as
those of other countries
• Designers are now reassessing the inherent values found in local craft
production and attempting to channel these principles into their own
contemporary work

Gesamtkunstwerk
• First coined by Karl Friedrich Eusebius Trahndorff in 1827 describes
a ‘total work of art’ that seeks to bring together elements of various
artistic disciplines
• Richard Wagner believed that the fragmentation of the arts since
Ancient Greek times had been a stultifying influence and that the
only remedy was the synergetic integration of the artistic disciplines
• Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen integrated music, singing,
costume, set design and drama into a revolutionary new and
monumental art form

Ornament and crime
•Adolf Loos in ‘Ornament and Crime’ in 1908:
decorative embellishment equated to criminality
• Loos famously ranted ‘the modern man who tattoos himself is either a criminal
or a degenerate; the tattooed who are not in prison are latent criminals or
degenerate aristocrats’
•Louis Sullivan ‘Ornament in Architecture’ an article
for The Engineering Magazine in 1892

Purity
• The purification of form through the purging of any superfluous
ornament and, as a result, objects that display a structural purity
•The purity of form found in Japanese design
had a major influence on the early foundations
of the Modern Movement
• Christopher Dresser, the first to create Western designs intended for
mechanized production based on Eastern purifying aesthetics. Minimalism in
the early 1970s most notably in the furniture of Donald Judd

Rationalism
• Views scientific reason as the only true source of knowledge;
one of the main driving forces behind the Modern Movement.
Vitruvius ‘De architectura’ c.27 BC laid out the arguments for
why the status of architecture should be raised to that of a
scientific discipline
• In America during the 1910s rationalism took off within the realms of design
and manufacturing thanks to the adoption of Taylorism and Fordism. The New
Objectivity movement in Germany in the 1920s, a rationalist approach as a
means of building a better and fairer society. Italian Rationalism typified by
state-of-the-art materials and strict geometric vocabulary of form initially
favoured by the Fascists

New objectivity
• Walter Gropius explained the intention to ‘provide artistic services
to industry, trade and craft’. As a way of achieving this goal, the
Bauhaus innovatively unified the teaching of art and technology
• The Russian Constructivists and the De Stijl group, these avant-garde design
groups produced work that expressed a new form-purifying aesthetic based on
geometric abstraction which would go on to become a defining characteristic
of the Modern Movement
• New Objectivity’s political radicalism and utopian goals
would go on to shape the Modern Movement ideologically
as it transitioned into the International Style

https://failedarchitecture.com/le-corbusiers-visions-for-fascist-addis-ababa/

https://www.versobooks.com/en-gb/blogs/news/2010-le-corbusier-s-architectural-fascism

100 IDEAS THAT CHANGED
DESIGN
C H A R L O T T E & P E T E R F I E L L
A VERY SPECIFIC, HEGEMONIC TYPE OF
Excerpts and commentary by Dr Ricardo Sosa ricardo.sosa@sydney.edu.au

100 IDEAS THAT CHANGED DESIGN

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