{"id":10443,"date":"2025-11-26T09:40:12","date_gmt":"2025-11-26T10:40:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/rutha.org\/?p=10443"},"modified":"2025-11-28T12:22:47","modified_gmt":"2025-11-28T12:22:47","slug":"industrial-design-should-have-dropped-its-messianic-claims-long-ago","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rutha.org\/index.php\/2025\/11\/26\/industrial-design-should-have-dropped-its-messianic-claims-long-ago\/","title":{"rendered":"“Industrial design should have dropped its messianic claims long ago”"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Glasses<\/div>\n

It’s time to recognise that design’s status as a force for social change was only ever a blip and instead embrace its role as applied art, writes John Jervis<\/a> as part of our Performance Review<\/a> series.<\/span><\/p>\n

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The cult of design \u2013 and of the designer \u2013 first ignited in the 1950s and still burns strong.<\/strong> Yet, as persuasively argued by Edwin Heathcote in a recent Financial Times article<\/a>, an existential crisis is currently taking place. Young designers cling uncertainly to the edges of an industry complicit in the planet’s destruction, or retreat into academia and art, vainly hoping to overcome through passion alone their chosen metier’s lack of relevance as a moral or practical force.<\/p>\n

In truth, however, such doubts arose almost as soon as the cult itself. Confidence in industrial design<\/a> as a progressive undertaking was never much more than a glitch, given brief credibility by modernist<\/a> architects’ efforts in the 1920s and 1930s to harness mass-production to furnish their housing estates and institutions. In seeking qualities of hygiene, lightness, functionality, affordability and technological innovation, they spurned ornament for what was felt to be a rational, honest aesthetic, appropriate to modern buildings and lifestyles.<\/p>\n

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The tension between ethical ambitions and corporate realities rapidly became evident<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

After the second world war, both those qualities and that aesthetic were widely adopted as state-sanctioned objectives. Designers were cast as heroic figures with the power to reconceive materials, products and lives, integral to rebuilding shattered economies and developing welfare states. Yet the tension between ethical ambitions and corporate realities rapidly became evident, culminating in such heated confrontations as the occupation and abandonment of the 1968 Milan Triennale<\/a>, and the farcical final day at Aspen’s 1970 International Design Conference<\/a>.<\/p>\n

This dwindling of postwar optimism is encapsulated by the short-lived “golden age of design” in Finland<\/a>. Bent-wood furniture designed by architects Alvar and Aino Aalto<\/a> in the 1930s had already established the newly independent country’s reputation for a humane modernism, incorporating Nordic ideals of “beauty for all” and “design for everyday life”.<\/p>\n

But it was the Milan Triennales of 1951 and 1954<\/a> that elevated Finland to the status of poster child for industrial design, as both aesthetic proposition and transformative force, credited for its phoenix-like recovery from wartime destruction. Curated by Tapio Wirkkala<\/a>, the displays were curiously packed with products that were far from everyday or egalitarian, including his own highly crafted plywood sculptures and limited-edition art glass, inspired more by nature than rational form.<\/p>\n