V.

History

Before the Industrial Revolution, goods were handmade by artisans, who were usually involved in the whole process of creation, took pride in their work, and often sold their wares directly to the customer. The development in the 18th century of the factory system, with mass production and specialization of labor and the appearance of middlemen, changed the situation. Factory workers tending machines had little involvement with a product and felt no responsibility to the buyer. Factory owners were often chiefly concerned with profits. As a result, although many products, such as cast-iron stoves and building units, were functional, many more were ugly and badly made. Applications of machine-made ornament in hopes of disguising low quality and pleasing a mass market were usually an aesthetic failure. A few late 19th-century reformers, such as the English designer William Morris and members of the Arts and Crafts movement, protested and advocated a return to the standards of medieval handicrafts. They influenced art nouveau style and the Vienna Secession (see Sezessionstil) movement, but these attempts at improved design had little effect on mass production at the time.

A.

The Bauhaus

The concept of industrial design did not really take hold until 1919, when the German architect Walter Gropius founded the Bauhaus, an artistically revolutionary school of design in Weimar, Germany. The Bauhaus became a center for artists trying to combine aesthetic concerns with new industrial materials and techniques, in what became known as the International style. They generally advocated simplicity of form that was adapted to the object's function.

B.

Scandinavian and Dutch Designers

In the prosperous years that followed World War I, industrial design also became important in Scandinavia and the Netherlands. Backed by a long craft tradition, such designers as the Swedes Erik Gunnar Asplund and Sven Markelius, the Finn Alvar Aalto, and the Danes Arne Jacobsen and Hans Wegner created simple functional designs in furniture and other goods. In the Netherlands, under the influence of the movement known as De Stijl , such men as J. J. P. Oud and Gerrit Thomas Rietveld advocated clean, sharp, geometric design.

C.

American Designers

In the U.S., manufacturers turned to industrial design as a means of competing in the welter of postwar consumer goods. Many inferior products were characterized by superfluous decoration, imitation materials, haphazard and nonfunctional juxtaposition of components, crude color, and easily marred finishes. The art deco style, in attempts to capture machinelike qualities in design, was too often used superficially. In the 1920s the designers Norman Bel Geddes, Henry Dreyfuss, Raymond Loewy, and Walter Dorwin Teague established the first important industrial design studios. They all emphasized beauty in functionalism and stressed the elimination of unnecessary decoration and the simplified rearrangement of components. Among the first products to reflect aesthetic planning were automatic refrigerators, designed by Loewy; cameras and optical instruments, designed by Teague; and telephone equipment and clocks, designed by Dreyfuss. Following the unqualified success of these first designs, many other designers entered the field, notably Egmont Arens, Harold Van Doren, and Russell Wright.

The closing of the Bauhaus by the Nazi government in 1933 resulted in the flight of many staff members, who spread the principles of functionalism throughout the Western world. Mies van der Rohe, Marcel Breuer, and others went to the United States. The Hungarian-born designer László Moholy-Nagy became director of the New Bauhaus in Chicago and later founded his own school of design. In 1944 a group of leading industrial designers founded a nonprofit association now called the Industrial Designers Society of America to promote the study and practice of industrial design. Inclusion in design collections, such as the prestigious one in the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, has brought deserved recognition to outstanding designers and their companies.

D.

Industrial Design in the 1980s

By the mid-1980s there were several hundred industrial-design offices in the U.S. and thousands of designers employed by manufacturing firms. Industrial designers were also firmly established in the economies of Europe, Japan, and many developing countries; Italian and Japanese designers, in particular, exerted a powerful international influence. Numerous schools offered courses in industrial design. Many national design societies and government councils on design belonged to the International Council of Societies of Industrial Design, founded in London in 1957. A common concern of the profession was how to adapt new technology, with its benefits and hazards, to human needs.