21. mai 1998 Oslo -- 11.600 words
Lasse Brunnström, red.
Svensk industridesign: En 1900-talshistoria.
Stockholm: Norstedts, 1997; 428 pages, bound.
This new book entitled Swedish industrial design: A 20th century history elicits two different responses depending on where we want to put our sights. On one level it commands true respect and admiration, not least because no book of this breadth devoted to industrial design history alone has been published in Sweden before. Its editor and prime mover, Lasse Brunnström, deserves much praise. Here sixteen authors in twenty articles with some 400 illustrations on more than 400 pages give a many-faceted picture of the Swedish industrial design culture in the 20th century. The book contains a great lot of valuable material between the covers, in terms of both verbal and visual information, and some of the articles are very good.
The book is unique also in the broader Nordic context, being the very first book of this scope in Scandinavia in its concentration on the history of industrial design alone. In Norway first and last detailed accounts of Norwegian industrial design were published in the eighties, first by Alf Bøe in two last volumes of Norges kunsthistorie, and later by the late Fredrik Wildhagen in his book Norge i form, although in both cases industrial design was presented together with applied arts. Neither Finland has a design history publication comparable to the present Swedish one among its many design-related books. The most recent volume, Finnish Modern Design, does cover industrial design history, though on a minor scale, and as a part of a broader panorama of applied arts. As to Denmark, it has many promotion-oriented publications on industrial design but not historical ones comparable either to Norwegian or Finnish volumes not to speak about the present Swedish one.
On a more demanding level, however, after close reading and after taking time to reflect about its makeup, the present book as a whole still leaves much to be desired, both editorially and in terms of level of contributions. If the following review is at times fairly forthright about the book's shortcomings, it is not to detract from the achievements it does bring home as it is, but to make clear where things could or should be done better, as others will certainly follow this pioneering achievement. Beside giving a sometimes ample outline of the content of the articles, the review aims also at providing the non-Scandinavian audience with some important or interesting facts the book presents, and, last but not least, at raising some design related issues of general theoretical interest.
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As Lasse Brunnström informs us in his editorial preface, the content of the book is largely a result of two design historical conferences in 1991 and 1994. These were organized by the editor and hosted by the then new Institute of Design at the Umeå University in northern Sweden where Brunnström was in charge of design history teaching. Recently, he was appointed director of the largest applied art and design museum in Sweden, the Röhsska Museet in Gothenburg.
According to my schematic classification the team of authors consisted of eight industrial designers, five design historians, two cultural historians, and a historian of ideas; two of the authors are women. The articles are grouped into five main sections containing between two to five articles each. The book opens with the editor’s foreword and his long introductory article, and is concluded by a short article (which, not quite logically, figures as section six) on the present state of industrial design in Sweden. The core of the book consists of presentations of the three main areas where contributions of Swedish industrial designers are obviously felt to have made a difference. These are Design of consumer goods (section III), Workplace and safety design (section IV), and Transport design (section V.). These sections are preceded by presentation of the five men considered the founding fathers of Swedish industrial design in Section II called Pioneers and Pioneer Consultancies. Section one is entitled Roots of industrial design; in three articles two neighboring professions are discussed: those of engineers and of applied artists.
The editor’s preface mentions, without specifying, that some additional material was appended to the bulk of conference papers. There is no information about the editorial aims here, apart form a short remark that "the reason behind the book is an evident lack of textbooks and documentation on the Swedish design history." (8) I presume the objective was to produce a body of texts more coherent and more instructive than the somewhat accidental conference contributions tend to bring. If this was the aim, the result is only partly successful. Taken as a whole the book still reminds more of a conference proceedings volume than a textbook or a book for a wider public. This shows in an uneven format of the articles, in uneven levels of information as well as in omissions of some important issues. The spectrum of contributions varies from most astute to unimpressive. There is strikingly little explicit theoretical refection in the book and what is there is too often ambiguous or downright unsatisfactory. It would have improved the pedagogical impact of the book and given it considerably more unity, had the editor summarized and commented at the beginning of sections, or perhaps in his introduction, on the content of the articles.
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Before reviewing the content of the volume, let me talk first about this book as a provider of information. In this sense the book presents, both visually and functionally, a fairly high standard, though the level of creative attention given to its visual side is plainly higher than the degree of inventiveness and care spent on its functional aspects. Visually the book, with its less than A4-size, is nicely balanced, with several playful elements. The pleasantly compact layout is typographically enlivened by combining serifts in the body text with sans-serifs reserved for the rest of the texts (i.e. article titles and subtitles, illustration texts, notes, references, index). The inviting impression the book gives is further enhanced by subtle and witty use of color pages; divisions between sections are marked by pastel-colored double-pages; each section is given its own color which re-emerges from time to time as colored backgrounds on several illustration-only pages of the section articles. Also the cover design featuring some dozen products in black and white on white background, with orange lettering and orange spine, is delicate and inviting.
That the functional treatment of a book of this kind is less inventive and less scrupulous than the visual one is something we as readers have learned to expect, though it is certainly paradoxical in a book where functionality is praised and styling frowned upon. It may appear pedantic to comment, as I am going to, on what may be considered mere details, since none of the problems is really grave. But unless such particulars are pointed out in reviews, there is little hope of changing this state of affairs (here the addressee is above all the publisher). After all excellence in design resides not only in the treatment of visual details but also of the functional ones.
• The book opens with a foreword of five pages set in surprisingly large type. This is refreshingly unconventional and amusing on a purely visual level but it creates a collision on the level of meaning. The message of the size – we tend to read ‘large’ as ‘important’ – contrasts rather unfavorably with the flimsiness of this less than carefully formulated text.
• The ease of navigation is enhanced by providing the upper right corner of each right-hand page with the title of the particular article. But it is not really helpful that the upper left corner of left-hand pages keeps reminding the reader, some 200 times over, that the book’s name is Svensk industridesign. What one of course would prefer to be reminded about is the name of the author of the article, not the title of the book one is reading.
• The book is furnished with some 400 illustrations (about 50 of them in color), many of them quite unique. All are provided with fairly extensive caption texts, something which enhances their value, beside making the pages lively and the book extra inviting to the reader. The illustrations, however, are unnumbered, and as it is difficult to use page numbers for cross-referencing because there is usually more than one illustration on the page, very few cross-references are used in the texts. This precludes making the best use of the illustration material.
• It is most commendable that the book is equipped with an index not only of names but also of subjects. On the other hand, not very much is made out of this important extra entrance to the book, as an index really is. Page numbers behind names or subjects do not distinguish between verbal references and illustrations, and when many page numbers are listed behind an entry (as behind Electrolux, Husqvarna, or Sason) there is no suggestion of the context in which the word appears.
• The book provides also a list with information about the contributors but the texts are of uneven information value.
• The book was evidently conceived for the Swedish market only, as it has no foreign language summaries or captions. The predictable fact that a publication like this will be sought after and read by design students, designers and interested public in the rest of the Nordic countries as well was apparently not taken into account. The problem with neglecting this fact is that while Swedish is fairly easily read both in Norway, Denmark, Finland and Iceland, peculiarities and contexts of Swedish life and institutions are not as readily understood – unless the publisher and/or editor sees to it that they are spelled out. It would have been enough to ask the contributors to write with non-Swedish readers in mind (this would no doubt make the book better for the Swedish public as well). At any rate, a list of abbreviations ought to be a standard part of publications like this one.
• The feature which does raise the functional value of the book substantially is the academic reference apparatus which follows, in one form or another, at the end of almost all articles, either in form of end-notes, a bibliography, or at least a general comment on sources. Such features are of course very helpful for all those who want to learn more about the discussed themes, in addition to making an incomparably better starting point for further research. Admittedly, the use, and usefulness, of notes, references and bibliographies varies from article to article, as the authors were apparently left (too) free to account for their sources as they saw fit. Still, behind the presence of these academic features one can perceive the beneficial hand of the editor, who, not surprisingly, is the most efficient note-producer.
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I am now going to review the individual texts, starting with section one. The critical discussion of the editor’s longer introductory article will be postponed to the end of the review. The body of the book opens with the first section called Roots of the industrial design. As mentioned, neither this nor any other section is provided with an editorial introduction, which would outline the aims of the section, recap the main points of the articles, and bind the sometimes disparate themes of the articles together. We can, however, presume that the title of the section as well as the theme of the first two articles, refers to the editor’s thesis suggested, though not elaborated, in his introductory article, namely that Swedish industrial design has some of its important roots in the world of Swedish engineering.
All the same, the first article of the section, by the Umeå historian of ideas Bosse Sundin, on "Science and art: Two themes in the development of the technique and the technician" belongs to the best written and most interesting articles of the whole book. The theme provides a fascinating insight into the relation between technics, traditionally referred to as art, on the one hand, and science on the other. One of the author’s points is that science and technics, which we today tend to regard as two sides of the same coin, have been until very recently, two separate activities, and two separate cultures, mainly due to the fact that technique was seen as manual activity while science was considered an intellectual one. As a consequence of traditionally low esteem of manual work as compared to the intellectual one, the two activities came to be practised by two socially very different groups or classes with very different views. The author argues that only in the 19th century, when engineers started to receive a higher, theoretically and scientifically oriented education, the bridge between the two areas was built. The only trouble with this engaging article is that its bearing upon the question of roots of industrial design is far from obvious.
As the title of Gustaf Rosell’s article "The engineer of the turn of the century, seen as inventor and aesthete" suggests the author has set himself two tasks of which he succeeds in the first and fails in the second. He manages to tell us many interesting things about engineers as inventors, while his treatment of notion of machine aesthetic leaves the reader in confusion. He opens with a useful list of six important Swedish companies which, as he says, all started around 1900, all basing their activity on one or several brilliant inventions. He goes on to describe in an intriguing way some of these inventions and the men behind them. We get insights into the inventions they launched and the way they worked. One is grateful to Rosell for making his information about some key Swedish businesses clear and explicit, as the book does not provide any overview of the Swedish business landscape, probably because such knowledge on the part of the reader is (wrongly) taken for granted. The author’s discussion of the aesthetic dimension of engineering is much less helpful, though. He connects engineering to "machine aesthetic", a term which he takes for granted, never explaining why he chooses to use that term, what he understands by it, or what the historical background of the term is. The notion is used in one context as a name for the aesthetic appeal of ‘naked’ technical forms such as ball bearings, i.e. something that emerges apparently without the engineer’s intentions, in another context as a term for the conscious visual organization of technical forms by engineers (as in locomotives), and in the third as a term for the style in the modernist architecture which consciously imitated the ‘naked’ technical forms. The notion therefore remains a nebulous journalist term, failing to throw light on the aesthetic dimension of engineering.
The third article in the section, Gunilla Lundahl’s text "Artist as industrial designer: Form in the service of society" does not live up to the promise of both its title and its subtitle. In most parts it is a rather uncommittal and somewhat tired essay, loosely structured and rich in predictable opinions. It is unclear not only what its contribution really is, but what it is the author really writes about. It certainly does not cover in any pedagogical manner the art-related developments in Swedish industrial design. Not that Lundahl does not mention interesting ideas or does not come with interesting problems. For example the notion of ‘logic depth’ as applied to design, and sketched at the end of the article seems like a promising concept. But she undermines the information value of her text because of a general absence of focus, often vague data or vague formulations, adding a somewhat expendable note apparatus with few seemingly casually chosen references. Considering the title of the article it is strange that Gunilla Frick’s seminal piece of design history, her book of 1986, Konstnär i industrin ( Artist in industry), is not mentioned at all; one would expect the article in a publication with textbook aspirations to include all the most important titles pertaining to the theme. Obvious oversights remain uncorrected: Lundahl claims for example that 19th century introduced a sharp distinction between art and technics, although, she adds, "the Technical College in Stockholm [KTH] put both words on its emblem". She goes on to explain that there the word art stood for knowledge while the word technique stood for the rational and objective in the natural sciences. But there was no such thing as "art and technique" in the school’s emblem at all; the emblem, reproduced some ten pages earlier in Bosse Sundin’s article reads in fact "SCIENCE AND ART", and Sundin argues cogently that art here in fact stood for technique. While Lundahl claims that 6-7000 years ago "art and technique were intertwined in the goddess cult", Sundin shows that the two were in fact "intertwined " as late as 1820s, using the KTH emblem as an evidence.
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To summarize our critique of section one: none of the articles make it in any way clear in what sense the Swedish engineering can be seen as a root of Swedish industrial design, apart from the obvious one: that in a sense industrial design grew out of product development. Nor the roots of industrial design in art or art industry are clarified, or chronicled, in any memorable manner. The editor does not lend us helping hand here, as there is no introduction to the section which would make these questions clear.
There seems to be two immediate reasons why this section devoted to roots of industrial design fails to unearth its foundations. The first is that both Rosell and Lundahl, despite some verbal indications to the contrary, seem to be still unwilling to face the fact that whatever else design is about, it is always about manipulation of forms to achieve stylistic results. Or to put it even more offensively: that design is always about styling. As the authors’ somewhat reverential approach to notions such as ‘machine aesthetic’ and ‘engineering art’ indicates, they seem to be still too respectful of the old ideas that design is, or ought to be, about some sort of unmanipulated, intrinsic, virginal forms.
The second reason for the failure, closely related to the first one, is that there is no discussion in this section that would draw attention to the foundations of industrial design in commerce, and, generally, in the Western phenomenon of fashion. (Rosell’s and Lundahl’s articles make no mention, not even in passing, of the fact that products are commodities made for sale.) This omission suggests that, editorially speaking, the book is still steeped in traditional modernist attitudes towards industrial design which have always tended to deplore, without very much realism or logic, its commercial dimension.
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The second section called "Pioneers and Pioneer Consultancies" is much more about the industrial design proper, besides being more informative and – in most cases – much better written. It presents, mainly in the form of reminiscences by former colleagues, five personalities which are considered central in the development of the Swedish industrial design: Ralph Lysell, Alvar Lenning, Sixten Sason, Sigvard Bernadotte and Rune Monö. The fifth, closing article of this section outlines the history of the professional organization of Swedish industrial designers, SID.
The two most senior personalities of the Swedish industrial design, Ralph Lysell and Alvar Lenning, are presented by Hugo Lindström who belongs himself to the doyens of the profession. Lysell and Lenning, two very different personalities, are coupled together here because the author at different times worked closely together with each of them. Lindström provides most lively, and at times very witty portraits of both men, as well as pictures of the times, balancing in an admirable fashion reminiscences of his own career with his larger task.
The flamboyant and adventurous Ralph Lysell (1907-1987), is best known today mainly for his participation, in the early 1940s, in the development of the Swedish innovative single-element telephone Ericofon, known later as Cobra. He spent the interwar period mainly in the USA, and immediately after the war became the prime propagandist of industrial design as well as streamlining in Sweden, though his design career proper was fairly short. Alvar Lenning (1897-1980) was a much more permanent presence in the history of Swedish design. Lenning, who was civil engineer, had also a prolonged working experience in the USA in late 1920s. His best known design is the very successful Electrolux-produced kitchen machine named Assistent which Lenning designed back in 1940, and which is still in production (redesigned among others by the author of the article). According to the author Lenning was also a successful author of some 150 technical patents, and an important design propagandist and polemicist. Lindström’s reference list consist of several articles by the two designers published in the 1940s and 1950s.
Sixten Sason (1912-1967) seems to be the Swedish industrial designer most beloved and at the same time most respected by his colleagues of all ages. He died at the top his career, 55 years old. Björn-Åke Sköld based his well-written article "Sixten Sason: Design legend and model" on materials printed in newspapers and magazines, as well as on interviews with Sason’s family and former colleagues, some twenty of them altogether. As he tells it Sason was as a teenager apprenticed to his sculptor father who had a stonemasonry. According to Sköld’s article Sason appears to have had no formal technical education apart from a correspondence school course, and not very much formal artistic training either: he is said to frequent a Stockholm private school for painters in the early 1930s, and, to his great distress, failed entrance examination for the Stockholm Art Academy in 1940. In this light his achievement is all the more staggering. According to Sköld, Sason was something of a prodigy: an exceptionally talented person both artistically and technically, who in addition was possessed of a warm and outgoing personality. When the war began he started to work as head draughtsman for Saab (or Svenska Aeroplan Aktiebolaget as the abbreviation reads in Swedish), the 1937 established company for production of fighter planes. After the war the factory decided to diversify into civilian production and besides a plane for civil traffic they decided also for car production. This was the background for the development of Saab 92 car with Sason as designer. Sason had responsibility for its yearly model changes, and also for the next model of Saab 99 but died before the new car was presented for the press. Another of his well-known products was professional single lens reflex camera Hasselblad 1600 F with replaceable lens and magazine. Marketed in 1949, it was a redesign of a wartime air force reconnaissance camera launched by the Hasselblad company in 1941. Besides, he worked as a consultant for other large companies such as Husqvarna and Electrolux, designing products such as chain-saws, sewing machines, waffle-irons, vacuum-cleaners and others.
Sigvard Bernadotte (1907) is the fourth designer presented in the pioneer section. Hans Sjöholm’s article "Bernadotte design: Large consultancy and a ‘nursery’" is well-structured, interestingly written and rich in facts, based in addition to published sources and personal interviews mainly on the author’s own experience as a later employee in Bernadotte’s design office. Bernadotte’s place in the Swedish design history is exceptional also due to the fact that he was a Swedish prince, a son of Gustav VI Adolf who became Swedish king the same year Bernadotte & Bjørn opened their consultancy. The author relates that Bernadotte (just as Lysell and Lenning) spent several apparently formative years in mid 1930s in the USA, in his case mostly in Hollywood. It was Bernadotte’s initial interest in film-directing and film sets that brought him there , but at the end of his stay he became very interested in the New York phenomenon of industrial design. He visited most of the leading industrial designers, Loewy, Deskey, Teague and Dreyfuss, and this changed the direction of his career. After the war Bernadotte became the art director in the Copenhagen silversmith firm of Georg Jensen, but in 1950 he set up in Copenhagen together with Danish designer Acton Bjørn an industrial design consultancy Bernadotte & Bjørn Industridesign, In 1958 he opened his own Swedish branch in Stockholm. This became in 1964 Bernadotte Design AB, which according to the author at the time grew to be probably the largest design consultancy in Northern Europe with up to 15 employees. In late 1960s Bernadotte’s office became a part of Allied International Designers (AID) and came to an end in 1972 together with the British owners.
Sjöholm comments at the end of his article on the changes in perception and practice of industrial design: he says that industrial design which in the 1950s had to do almost exclusively with styling of consumer products, came since the 1970s to include notions of user-friendliness and ergonomics; besides, designers succeeded in entering the development process in much earlier stages. Also capital goods, in addition to consumer goods, became an object of the designer’s attention, and design for old people, for the sick and for the disabled became something of the hallmark of Swedish industrial design.
In contrast to the previous four designers presented mostly by their one time collaborators, Rune Monö (1920) was not given (or did not choose) the privilege of having his design career presented by someone else than himself. Unavoidably, his text (###"@@@@TEXT TEXT TEXT) becomes part memoir, which upsets somewhat the so far unified format of the pioneer section. Monö, although junior to all the other four designers presented as pioneers, has been a central figure in the history of Swedish design, both as practising designer, a consultancy, organization man, design thinker as well as teacher. It is, however, difficult to get all these things across for the designer himself without appearing boastful, something which Monö carefully avoids. That is why it feels somewhat unjust, both to Monö himself and the reader, that the presentation of his achievement was not done by a third party. The most interesting part of Monö's text are his explicit reflections, comments and insight around how a designer and design office really works; how design work is divided, how one gets assignments, how one bills the clients, what are the best ways to communicate design results, what is the ratio between design work and construction work, how important is a personal relation to the client. He also shares his insights about various tricky situations a designer can be confronted with, such as when his views are elicited in connection with an almost finished product.
The last part of his text called "The semantic design" is a disappointment in view of Monö’s status as one of very few designers explicitly interested in design theory. Here the reader finds an admixture of autobiographical remarks and theoretical observations presented in all too a noncommital way to invite any critical response. Surprisingly, the author gives no reference to any of his texts on the subject, nor even his most recent publication in English.
The last chapter of the pioneer section is devoted the outline of the history of the Swedish organization of industrial designers (SID), which is said to count 440 members in 1997. It is not quite obvious why the chapter is placed here, and not for example in the last section which consists of one short article only. The chapter is actually made of two parts. The first one is written by Rune Monö, who was the organization’s first head between 1957 and 1960. Monö describes the circumstances surrounding the founding of SID as well as those around the very first International Council of Societies of Industrial Design (ICSID) congress which took place in in Stockholm in 1959. Monö goes on to present a useful overview of other ICSID congresses as well as Inter-design seminars initiated in 1971. He also briefly describes the tensions which developed early in the organization’s history between members of SID and those++- many younger designers who felt to have been kept in the cold by their established elders, often as mployees, as the membership functioned in reality as an approval of the designer’s qualifications. This tension theme is enlarged upon in interesting details in the second part of written by Torstein Dahlin and Hans Sjöholm, two of the designers who at that time were kept waiting outside.
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The next three sections discuss Swedish design achievements divided into three categories of objects: Consumer Goods, Capital Goods, and Transport Design.
The Consumer Goods section begins with Gunilla Lundahl’s second article about "The beautiful goods for daily use: an ingredient of the good society." Many of the critical remarks made in connection with the author’s previous article in the first section apply here as well. Here too the problem seems to be that her text vacillates between two formats which should not be mixed: a design history proper, where the writer presumes ignorance on the part of the readers, if only in order to be as articulate as possible about facts, notions and contexts concerned, and a causerie, where many facts, terms, institutions and contexts, tend to be taken for granted as the public is presumed to be familiar with them. Also this article is too often of the second rather than first kind. Still, there is much more of design history proper here than in the previous article, especially the informative part on the versatile design practice of Carl-Arne Breger and on the architecture office AOS working also in the area of industrial design. As a whole the article still gives impression of being a mixture of odd themes without a clear uniting line. Often it is also rather vague in presenting hard facts (when was the person mentioned born; is he or she still alive?), and its rather limited bibliography and absence of any note apparatus will not make it an easy starting point for further inquiry.
More positive things can be said about the rest of the articles in this consumer design section, which deal, it turn, with three specific design areas: Swedish refrigerator design, outboard boat engines, and home electronics.
Hugo Lindström (1920) describes in his article "Refrigerator design: Variation on a white box", again in a reader-friendly, lively and witty manner, the development of Swedish as well as foreign fridge design as experienced by himself in his career as a foremost Swedish fridge designer. In an admirable manner, he manages to present autobiographical facts in terms of concrete design-related problems. In the description of his career first with the Bolinder and later Electrolux companies, two Swedish fridge manufacturers, Lindström repeatedly provides candidly realistic and illuminating descriptions of the problems a designer faces in his day-to-day work. He describes for example his design tactics in his work for Bolinder’s first fridge with the competion’s (i.e. Electrolux’) fridge as the starting point. The problem was to produce imitation of an Electrolux fridge without making a copy of it. Lindström recounts in some detail how he in his design inverted most of the outer features of the imitated fridge, changing horizontal visual elements to vertical ones, thick features to thin, etc. Lindström also records the growing awareness of designer’s contribution on the part of the company: from a lone in-house designer, to a small design section, to a large department. He mentions that in the 1960s when Electrolux has some 8 to 10 designers, the German AEG had 50 employees in their design department; today Electrolux has some 80 design-related employees in the company’s design departments around the world.
In a subchapter on "Production methods and fashion trends" Lindström contrasts what he sees as two types of influence on fridge design. This is the only instance when Lindström distrust for a while his own sound common sense and succumbs to the rumors of technological determinism. He suggests that the rounded angles of fridge shell tops in the 1950s ("U" upside down) were determined by the US developed, highly economic bending machinery called tangent bender, with the result that fridges produced by companies in different countries which acquired this technology, such as the German Bosch, Italian Zanussi, American Sears, or Swedish Electrolux, all had a distinct family likeness. Although not making an explicit theoretical point, Lindström contrasts this allegedly technological influence with what he sees as fashion-based influences later on, such as Frigidaire’s angular Sheer Look of later fifties) hinting that technology and fashion were two separate formative influences in industrial design.
But do we really have here to do with two distinct formative forces – or rather with two faces of the same fashion influence? There is no doubt that the new bending technology was not only very economic, but also strikingly well adapted to the ‘streamlined’ stylistic trend which by the time this technology was launched in mid-1940s, had been in for more than ten years. We should ask whether a new cost-saving production technology would have been employed if its impact on form had been in conflict with this dominant aesthetic trend: for however economic the method of bending plates, it would have be hardly seen as economic if the end products would not get sold as a consequence of the same technology. Besides, it is evident from the extensive discussion of fridge design contained in the 1954 book by the US designer Harold van Doren, that tangent bender technology, was not an answer to the question of how fridge shells can be produced most economically. The question seems to have been rather how to produce most economically the currently fashionable forms of fridge shells. That the cheapness of this technology and its subsequent wide use among manufacturers locked designers in one stylistic mode, making variations within that style difficult, is probably true. But tangent bender is hardly a case of a fashion-independent technology determining forms, as Lindström suggests, and as van Doren, surprisingly enough, argues as well. On the contrary, the tangent bender is probably an example of a design fashion which opened for an exceptionally efficient production technology that would not be possible with other types of design fashions. Even today designers often wish to believe – and want their public to believe too – that they respond to ‘pressures of technology’ while in reality they invariably press technology in the direction of their aesthetic choices. After all, Lindström himself confirms it indirectly when he writes that the dominating stylistic reference in fridge design has been car design.
The second article of the consumer design section gives an outline of an almost 70 years long history of a very successful Swedish product type: the outboard motor, i.e. engines developed as additional source of power to propel small leisure boats. The article informs that "Sweden was in certain periods, at least in relation to the number of inhabitants, the world’s largest manufacturer of boat engines" (213). Its two authors, Lars Biström and Bo Sundin, give a well-structured, richly illustrated history of design efforts, different manufacturers,, buyouts and mergers, since 1910s until the end in 1979. The article as a whole is, however, perhaps too object-focused. The wealth of information about the consumer commodity contrasts starkly with absence of information about the consumer: it is a pity that nothing at all is said about users of motorboats, whether domestic or foreign, or about this particular kind of leisure activity, or its popularity, nor any reflection about why Sweden of all countries developed an outstanding production of outboard motors. Was perhaps the fact that most of Swedish coastline faces the fairly quiet Baltic Sea, the Mediterranean of Northern Europe as it is sometimes called, a contributing factor here? On the other hand, the design dimension of outboard motor design is discussed in intriguing detail, both in terms of aesthetic, design process, designer participation and design cooperation. The reader will learn about the key designers engaged in this area, such as Rustan Lange, Björn Karlsson or Peter Maddock, and follow the development of the key Swedish outboard engine makers: Archimedes, Penta, Husqvarna, Electrolux, Monarch-Crescent, and finally Volvo Penta which, after becoming the monopoly Swedish manufacturer, terminated, to the chagrin of many, the outboard motor development in Sweden.
Ivan Peciva’s article "Home electronics at the beginning of the IT-revolution" is in my view the most impressive design historical article in the collection. Not that it is spectacular in any way: it is a disciplined, matter-of-factly written and well-structured text, but very rich in both facts and observations, and reader-friendly all the way. Peciva is himself an industrial designer with working experience in the area. Together with Monö’s first and Lindström’s second article he provides the best glimpses into the many-faceted concerns of an industrial designer. Although the article theme in itself is fairly narrow, Peciva manages to make it captivating by bringing in different background information which the designer must take into account during his work. He traces the development of radios, gramophone players and TVs, as well as various combinations of these, from technical and design perspective, including societal contexts pertaining to the different types and versions of products, their development and sales. The article has a nice progression, from predominant weight on technical circumstances in the case of radios, to growingly more societal contexts in gramophones and TVs towards the end discussing more the design dimension of this kind of consumer electronic, including designers in the field and the problems of design management. After mentioning that sale of then new colour sets started off with the Olympic games of 1968 (the sale of the black and white one was kicked off with World Competition in football in 1958) he gives an intriguing description of new problems design of color TV sets brought with it, both technically and stylistically: the colour set tube was much clumsier, deeper, heavier and more sensitive than the established black-and-white tubes, and due to high prices of colour sets the style had to appeal to older users with good economy and conservative taste. Peciva also draws attention to design consequences of the fact that growing standard of living since the late 1950s made young people for the first time in history an increasingly important consumer group. This was a time when FM-radios, LP-gramophone plates and singles, together with transportable gramophone players appeared on the market.
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The fourth section dealing with Workplace and safety design, opens with Rune Monö’s article called "Product design for work life"’. The article is curious. Over one third of the text is occupied by introductory, seemingly critical but not readily understood deliberations of somewhat unclear bearing. The rest of the chapter is devoted mainly to a biographical presentation Swedish designers of capital goods, enumerating some of their products. Although we do learn interesting and sometimes surprising facts about the designers CVs, as well as their general views of design, this person-oriented approach seems misplaced, as almost no room is left to discuss either the characteristic types of products in this design category or key problems pertaining to their design, something which Monö is the supremely qualified person to elaborate upon. He does mention, though barely so, interface design and design semantics as two issues, expending on them not more than one or two sentences, which in addition amount to somewhat enigmatic hints. This curtness is difficult to understand, not only because the author claims in his conclusion that vackrare vardagsvara ("more beautiful everyday things"), the Swedish slogan launched in late 1910s, has been replaced by a new aim: to make products comprehensible for the user. It is baffling above all because Monö is the foremost Swedish propagandist for the mentioned semantic theory of design, and one would expect him to give here at least a short exposition of its main principles, especially in view of the fact that he has just published the mentioned book in English on the theme .
Lasse Brunnström’s article on "Tools for a safer and more equal life" on the other hand is a well structured, very informative, engaged, and sometimes even moving close-up story of the Swedish ergonomics-based achievements in safety design and design for the disabled. Brunnström begins with the American achievement of Henry Dreyfuss, the first industrial designer who established a systematic ergonomic research under the notion of human engineering, and who made its results accessible to other designers. The author shows that Dreyfuss’ work was well known among Swedish engineers and designers of ergonomic orientation; this goes above all for Rune Zernell’s (1921), whose contribution as in-house designer for Atlas Copco, a large Swedish industrial company producing construction machines, tools and hydraulic equipment, Brunnström discusses in some detail. He goes then on to outline the probably best known Swedish contribution to car user safety, the three-point safety belt for cars. Although Brunnström’s chronology of the safety belt invention and application is somewhat vague in details, it can be probably summarized in this way: The three point belt was an improvement on both the standard two point fly-seat type belt as well as the diagonal belt type developed in mid-1950s in Sweden by the Vattenfall company. The development was conducted largely by the Volvo car company in late 1950s, under its first safety engineer Nils Bolin who worked earlier as catapult seat designer for the Saab fighter plane company. The development of the three point belt was probably encouraged by company’s decision to market their American exports as safety cars. It became a standard equipment in Volvo cars since 1959.
Here a short comment is due. Brunnström seems to consider the Swedish concentration on safety design as unquestionably positive, writing in his opening paragraph rather proudly, almost with a promotional air, that it gave Sweden "an international reputation of being a stronghold of purposefulness and safety". (297) Although it is easy to share his admiration for the Swedish safety efforts, a text which has pedagogical objectives should make the reader aware, at least in a note, that also the safety concept has its detractors. Some writers, mainly in the American context, have drawn attention to possible drawbacks of excessive safety provisions, asking important questions such as: can safety devices in cars contribute to less careful driving, which makes traffic less safe for others? Even in case one considers such and similar misgivings groundless, they are all the same a part of the safety design discussion; as we know, every design solution generates its own unwanted consequences.
Another car safety device discussed is the backward-facing front chair for children [for oversetteren: kan barnbilstol oversettes slik?], marketed since the mid-1960s. It was developed by Bertil Aldman, a physician who earlier took part in Volvo’s development of the three point safety belt. Also here were acceleration considerations important, and use was made of the experience of the American Mecury project astronauts who were placed on their back both when starting and landing. Brunnström discusses in some interesting detail also development of safety and ergonomics in cabins for van drivers by two competing Swedish coachwork makers, as well as radical improvements in tractor cabins.
The last part of the article is devoted to design achievements since late 1960s in the area of design for the disabled. Brunnström mentions that already Henry Ford put serious effort into integrating disabled workers into the working process. He goes on to chronicle mainly the development and success of the best known Swedish disability-oriented design consultancy, Ergonomi Design, established in 1969, and Ergonomi Design Gruppen as the consultancy was renamed ten years later after its fusion with Designgruppen. Brunnström comments several times on the beauty of the tools for the disabled designed by the consultancy, and points out that these are exhibited in design museums all over the world . He finds it "remarkable that a large part of the world-wide export is conducted through mail order from the Museum of Modern Art in New York" (321) – but not so remarkable that he would ask whether the usually monochrome, patternless, abstract aesthetic of these ergonomic products appeals perhaps more to non-users such as design critics and design museum directors that to the disabled users themselves, of which probably only a fraction belongs to those enamored of the less-is-more aesthetic. It would certainly be most interesting to know the ratios of disabled buyers to the design and architecture professionals and students at the MoMA. Given the international fame in design circles of the Ergonomi Design Gruppen one may suspect the ratio would be pretty much in favour of those with no functional need for such tools. But this is only a surmise.
At any rate this article, because it provides many important details of the best know Swedish design contributions, should be soon made accessible in English (perhaps on the Umeå University Institute of Design home page?).
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The Transport Design section opens with an article on "Swedish vehicles – Swedish forms?" by the architect Björn Linn. The article discusses is some depth the visual aspects of design of Swedish trains, trams, busses and cars during this (and in the case of trains, also during the latter part of last) century, with an eye on the European and American developments in this area. Its important contribution, besides providing good understanding of the main historical lines of Swedish vehicle design, is in the author's consistent view of the discussed objects as something designed consciously and with an aesthetic intent. Linn's clear position on this point is refreshing, and his comments and analyses of vehicle designs from locomotives to Volvo and Saab cars are full of penetrating insights into the complex art of visual design. Not accidentally he does without terms such as 'machine aesthetic', a notion notoriously ambivalent as to whether the aesthetic appeal of machines is produced by design or by its absence. He makes his position clear through his comments on the article’s opening quotations taken from 1920s and 1930, and representing modernist understanding of technical forms. Here it is claimed that locomotives, cars, motorboats and airplanes were beautiful in spite of, or perhaps even because of, absence of any aesthetic intention; the resulting appeal of forms was seen as a natural by-product of technical motives. Linn states unequivocally, thought perhaps still too mildly, that with the benefit of hindsight we can see plainly that such beliefs were mistaken: even if the education of craftsmen and engineers was not expressly artistic, the admired technical forms they produced were without doubt informed by aesthetic intentions. When the previous tradition of technical design, which Linn calls (unfortunately without elaboration) "industrial classicism" , was replaced by the streamlined design in the 1930s it became according to Linn clear that "technology did not direct the form development in any clear-cut manner, choice-situations being there [all the time]"; the advent of streamline design showed that there were simply other choices opened for the visual design than the "industrial classicism". (331) This is a rather elegant reversal of the traditional argument (echoed in Rosell’s text on p. 68) that streamlining was the beginning of 'styling', or, to put it differently, the beginning of the fall from grace of the ‘machine aesthetic’ and ‘engineering art’ where forms were allegedly determined by functional considerations only. Linn’s article should in this context be read as an elucidating supplement to Rosell’s essay on engineers as inventors and aesthetes.
Towards the end of the article Linn asks whether there is any peculiar feature in Swedish industrial design which can be seen as distinctively Swedish. He claims to find such feature most clearly in the practice of Saab and Volvo car designers: in what he calls incremental cultivation of a form through reworking. (350) He perceives in this a contrast to what he sees as American practice of increasing coarsening and vulgarization of the originally first-rate body design, often through application of more and more decorative elements in order to differentiate the year models from each other. But Linn singles out also what he perceives as a strain of bad form-tradition in Swedish transport design. It consists in his view in carrying out the task in an inconsistent manner, abandoning forms in raw state and leaving objects as unarticulated boxes. And he does not hesitate to give examples of such abominations: among other things, he finds it in Stockholm underground trains, and – "worst of all" – in the new trams of Gothenburg.
The article about "Volvo car design: Simple and timeless bodies" by Hedvig Schönbäck goes through the design history of the larger of two Swedish car manufacturers, the Volvo company. (None of the writers in the Transport Design section comments on the peculiar fact that of all the Nordic countries only Sweden produces cars, and that it has not one outstanding carmaker but two of them at that.) The author presents and discusses Volvo models from mid-1920s until beginning of the 1990s, but she chooses to limit her overview to the body design, excluding everything to do with car interiors. Schönbäck follows stylistic changes from the 1920s still boxy forms to the streamlined shapes of 1930s, and points out the US models Volvo cars (especially PV 36 from mid -1930s) followed. The author argues that the US influence grew weaker after the war, and the European approach to body design became predominant: it showed more interest in the form of the whole, at the time when the US car design was dominated by striking individual details. In the mid-1950s Volvo established its own design department now peopled with aesthetically educated designers. Volvo Amazon was developed in mid 1950s designed by the later head designer Jan Wilsgaard. After presenting Volvo’s sport car P 1800 designed in cooperation with an Italian bodycoach designer, the author goes on to discuss body-related safety questions of the Volvo models since 1960s. Just as Brunnström also Schönbäck suggests (without elaborating) that the prominence given to safety considerations in Volvo cars was closely related to Volvo’s aim to establish itself firmly at the US car market. The author’s restriction of Volvo design history only to coachwork, though legitimate in itself, becomes sometimes all to rigorous, as when she discusses the company’s safety car concept without ever mentioning Volvo’s introduction of safety seat belts, obviously because belts are not a part of the exterior. A more regrettable point is that the article does not give even a short outline of the early history of the Volvo company leaving the reader at a complete loss about its beginnings.
Schönbäck’s concluding discussion is devoted to the notion of timelessness in body design, mentioned already in her subtitle. The notion of "timelessness" implies of course changelessness which makes it a rather ludicrous concept to employ in a business that since the 1920s took over from the haute couture fashion the principle of yearly model changes. The author herself is expressly uneasy about the term, and considers it "pretty vague" (373) though she still uses it repeatedly without quotation marks. Admittedly, the term ‘timeless’ is least problematic in the vocabulary of marketing departments which base their work on intentionally vague connotations of words and images. It is also humanly understandable that many designers still cannot fully face the fact that their work unavoidably relates to fashion changes; many still prefer to avoid the fact by embracing words and phrases that suggest the opposite (the old slogan 'form follows function' is perhaps the best known attempt to deny the fundamental connection between fashion and design). But design historians should treat terms such as ‘timelessness’ in gloves, i.e. with visible quotation marks around it. All this, however, is not to say that the term is useless, for, as the author also notes, it sometimes refers to the designer’s strategy of avoiding too obvious references to hot fashions, in order to delay too early visual obsolescence of the product. The paradox here, we may add, is that unless this strategy has itself become an alternative trend, i.e. a fashion in its own right, it cannot work. The so called timeless design must never look old-fashioned; it must look trendy; but then a trendy timelessness is "timelessness" only in quotation marks.
In contrast to the Volvo article, Anders Tunberg’s presentation of the Saab ("Saab’s car design: cockpit feeling and distinctive body") begins where it should begin: with a paragraph giving a brief history of the Saab company. The article gives a solid, information-rich overview of the development of the Saab cars from its inception in mid 1940s and the production start of the 96 model in december 1949 to the Saab 9-5 of 1997. The author discusses the early development of Saab’s cars, beginning with Sixten Sason design contribution. Sason dominated the Saab design until his death in 1967, working for Saab as design consultant (not as in-house designer). Bjørn Envall, became the first in-house head of design in late 1960s or early 1970s, until the Norwegian Einar Johan Hareide took over in the 1990s (Tunberg’s chronology on these points is somewhat diffuse). The discussion of car design is, however, far from person-oriented, giving good close-up descriptions of the developments of among other things of sport cars, the Saab’s cooperation with the Italian bodycoach designer Giorgio Giugiaro, ergonomic aspects of the interior and dashboard design as well as grill design. It is to deplore, though, that the last two themes are inadequately illustrated. Another minor disappointment is the use of empty cliches about functions determining forms ("design for Saab has always been a question of ‘function directing form’..."; pp. 375 and 376) which precede otherwise very concrete and pragmatic discussions of design processes. As is usual with such claims, there is no attempt to face its logical consequences. Apart from the author’s two assertions there is nothing in the rest of his text to suggest that he sees for example the body changes between models 92 and 96, or design of the present strikingly elegant Saab radiator, as a result of functional rather than aesthetic considerations.
The last article in the collection, "Industrial design in the 1990s: expanding capabilities" is written as a kind of postscript by Roland Lindhé, professor of industrial design at Konstfackskolan i Stockholm. Lindhé comes with many interesting factual informations about the state of Swedish industrial design worth reproducing. According to Lindhé there are today (1997?) about 350 industrial designers in Sweden, growing by some 30 new adepts every year. Some 80 % of these work either as owners or employees of design consultancies (there are some 125 of these), while the rest is employed as in-house designers in either Saab, Volvo or Electrolux, the only three companies with design departments withing their own organization. Lindhé compares the situation with that of Japan where the ratio is reverse: about 20% of all designers are part of design consultancies while the rest is employed by large companies. According to Lindhé, the Sony company alone has more in-house designers than there are active designers in the whole of Sweden today, while in Europe and USA is the ratio more like the Swedish one. After having discussed environmental perspective on design, invasion of computers into design offices, and internationalization of design work, Lindhé touches upon the question of design education, coming again with interesting hard facts about the Swedish situation. According to him there are four industrial design institutes on university level: Konstfack (University College of Arts, Crafts, Design and Art Education), in Stockholm, School of Design and Crafts and Design at the Gothenburg University, Institute of Design at the Umeå University in northern Sweden, and a new design education at the Lund University in southern Sweden. In addition there is, still according to Lindhé, an engineering design institution in Skövde, and design courses in several Swedish towns, plus a new design-oriented senior high school in Göteborg, with several more in the offing elsewhere.
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I have postponed the discussion of Lasse Brunnström’s introductory article "From art and technique to industrial design" – the first article of the book – to the very end of this review in order to comment at some length on the author’s theoretical remarks which make the backdrop to his historical introduction. Although the introduction itself provides a useful (if somewhat wordy) overview of the main lines of the history of industrial design profession in Sweden as well as major American and European developments, its value is diminished by what I would argue is a questionable theoretical framework. Admittedly, the theoretical part of the article is both little, sketchy, and ultimately ambiguous, and as such it may seem not to merit much attention. But the theoretical remarks and suggestions the reader finds here are despite their inconspicuousness and ambiguity still the most explicit theoretical pronouncements this book offers. And as these remarks and suggestions are odd, and in a publication with textbook aspirations, I believe they do deserve a somewhat extensive comment.
The author’s starting point for his later theoretical remarks looks pragmatic enough. Brunnström states (without elaboration) that "Swedish design has been considered too little in its relation to engineering art", and he expresses hopes that the present book will bear out that "the roots of Swedish industrial design can be found also in the development work of inventors and engineers.", (14) This sounds like a reasonable thesis. It is only when the author gives examples of what he means by "engineering art" and "engineering aesthetic" (17) that it emerges (if we understand his vague suggestions correctly) that his thesis really is that it is the Swedish industrial design aesthetic that has its roots in the "engineering aesthetic". He writes that new technical products of the time around 1900 such as ballbearings, electric generators or monkey-wrenches, developed, in contrast to decorated consumer goods such as sewing machines, "a formal tradition of their own where the form was dictated more by the purpose of the product." (17) His point, implicit rather than explicit, seem to be that this ‘engineering aesthetic’ – the kind of matter-of-factly forms which in general pertain to technical solutions – represents some kind of true aesthetic, and that all else is a sort of a masquerade.
This is suggested also by his apparently newly coined Swedish term tilläggsestetik, that is "supplement-aesthetic" or "addition-aesthetic" (17) that he uses to describe the aesthetic of decorated consumer goods from around 1900. The author illustrates the notion of "addition-aesthetic " by reference to new iron bridges built in urban contexts. When raised outside cities such bridges were characterized by a "naked engineering-aesthetic", but when built inside cities "they could not find mercy with the city bourgeoisie without some kind of addition-aesthetic"; it became the task of architects to "mask and dress" their construction with traditional forms.
The problem with this seemingly fitting term "addition-aesthetic" is that it implies that there is an opposite kind of aesthetic, namely an addition-free aesthetic, and that such evidently unmanipulated, pristine kind of aesthetic (which for Brunnström is apparently synonymous with "engineering aesthetic") can be practised by industrial designers.
Now, hypothetically one could of course try to develop support for the thesis that designers can produce an ‘addition-free’ aesthetic, and that the modern Swedish industrial design, or perhaps the ergonomically based part of it, is to be seen as an example of this kind of aesthetic. This would be a Herculean task, though. One would have to show, first, that there is hardly any validity in the devastating criticism of the modernist design thinking during the past 30 years or so, which made the distinction between an "addition-aesthetic" and an ‘addition-free aesthetic’ illusory. Second, one would have to substantiate that the Swedish industrial design is the case which illustrates validity of this addition-free idea of design aesthetic. For my part I consider such thesis doubly indefensible. At any rate, Brunnström himself attempts neither the first nor the second step, nor does he refer to anybody who has tried. After all he never formulated this thesis clearly in the first place, and, besides, we are only inferring its existence. Still he does suggest that such kind of aesthetic is feasible.
Brunnström’s article closes with a short reflection about the notion of functional form, a reflection which shows again both the modernist bent and the essential ambiguity of his theoretical statements. Brunnström writes that "History teaches us ... that not everything which may seem modern and rational really is that. One frequently occurring misconception is that a modern and functional form has to be simple, strict and stripped down" (43) The author illustrates this point by referring to the Coca-Cola bottle which has, as he says, a baroque-like but ergonomically very functional form. He mentions also functional failures of functionalism, pointing to leaking flat roofs, and elegant but uncomfortable furniture, submitting that "functionalism can be pretty unfunctional" (43). In other words, he appears to argue that the notion of functional form should be understood as a non-visual category, which is the same as saying that functionalist forms are not necessarily functional forms, since the term ‘functionalist’ is a visual notion while ‘functional’ is not.
This sounds like a very reasonable conclusion, and one would wish that the whole book was organized around this key element of design understanding. The problem is, however, that if the author’s statements are construed in this way they conflict head-on with his earlier intimations, implied in his notion of "addition-aesthetic". For if ‘functional form’ is a non-visual concept, i.e. if it is a notion related to performance rather than appearance, Brunnström is actually saying that there can be no virginal, unmanipulated, intrinsic ‘addition-free aesthetic’ to be contrasted with the "addition-aesthetic". That would mean in this context that every kind of design aesthetic (including the minimalist, less-is-more kind of aesthetic of, say, Ergonomi Design Gruppen) is in its nature an "addition-aesthetic". The existence of an ‘addition-free aesthetic’ could be postulated only if the author contended, contrary to what he does, that the notion of functional form is a visual category. Only in that case would ‘functional form’ be the same as ‘addition-free form’. It was exactly this possibility that the functionalist designers passionately believed in, and it is this very possibility the author seems to deny here.
But in the last respect we are not sure whether the author does deny that possibility, or does not, as he leaves his back door open, saving himself from self-contradiction by ambiguity. As the above longer quotation from page 43 shows, he marries the notion of functional form to the notion of modern form, suggesting in this way that he takes the two to be synonyms. But the term ‘modern form’ is notoriously used sometimes as a stylistic, i.e. visual category (modern as ‘modernist’) and sometimes as a chronological, i.e. non-visual category (modern as ‘recent’, ‘new’ or ‘latest’). In giving us no clue as to how we should understand his twin notion of "modern and functional form" (43) the author produces a magical smokescreen in which we see him rejecting the functionalist position while embracing it at the same time. And as long as the author’s own standpoint is ambiguous, his theoretical statements are of necessity ambiguous as well, and as such prone to confuse rather than enlighten. It is simply impossible to make very much sense of the author’s design theory informing his introduction, apart from vague modernist sympathies. This concerns as well the author’s idea of "the historical [but] cultivated form" (42-3) introduced in conjunction with the functional form theme. The problem, again, is not only the ad hoc character of the notion (no references to literature, whether the author’s own or others, are provided) but above all that the idea is too vague to merit a critical discussion. It seems to be another castle in the air.
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By way of recapitulation we can say that explicit theoretical remarks contained in the present book represent in most cases its least impressive feature. As I have tried to argue, the theoretical part of Brunnström’s introduction is at best ambiguous and at worst self-contradictory, mostly echoing old modernist preoccupations. Ambiguity characterizes also the theoretical parts of Rosell’s article while both of Lundahl’s articles, as far as theory is concerned, are amorphous. Rune Monö himself gives impression of having a theoretical position but for some reasons he keeps his cards very close to his chest. Of the two other articles with theorizing elements the best because paying most attention to the real world, is Björn Linn’s text. Bosse Sundin’s essay, although a paragon of lucidity, is in a category of its own, as it is not really about industrial design.
On the other hand, several of the non-theoretical, empirically based articles such as those written by Lindström, Sjöholm, Monö (parts of his first article) and Peciva, provide close-up descriptions of how designers work and what type of problems they face, and by implication these descriptions say a lot about the nature of industrial design, and as a rule are also much more interesting than most of the explicit theoretical remarks.
The problem seems to be that the theory-minded writers have a frame of mind of design reformers rather than that of design historians. They seem to be still trying to wish away the fact that design is about styling, and that it always has to do with fashions, styles and tastes. True, design has most of the time been about many other things as well, some of them at times much more imperative than styling. It is also true that styling and fashion should not be the only considerations for a designer. But none the less styling and fashion is design always about. For only when design theory has incorporated the fact that fashions, styles and tastes of the day are central to design practice, can utopian visions of forms beyond taste, beyond styling and beyond fashion be treated as a chapter about a recurring dream in the recent history of design instead of acting as a distorting perspective on design history as a whole.
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The above sins of commission springing from wishful thinking of historians are related to the sins of omission found it this book. One of these has been already mentioned in the discussion of the first section: omission of a discussion about roots of industrial design in the phenomenon of commerce and fashion. Another important omission, or rather desideratum, is related to the absence of explicit awareness, editorially or otherwise, that texts of those who reflect and write about design, whether design journalists, design historians or designers themselves, do not only describe and interpret what has happened but that they in doing so also influence what is happening. To put it differently, designers take words about design as seriously as the material factors of design. Think only of the influence of words, said or written, by Gregor Paulsson in the 1920s and 30s, or of those by Victor Papanek in the 1970s. Therefore an outline of the history of Swedish design journalism, design historical writing, as well as theorizing on design should have been a part of the present book. Sweden has had quite a few distinguished design writers and design historians such as Ulf Hård af Segerstad, Dag Widman, Gunilla Frick, Kerstin Wickman, to mention only very few, with names such as Gregor Paulsson and Gotthard Johansson, or Rune Monö and Jerker Lundequist among those on the theory side.
The third desideratum is related to the notion of redesign. A book on design history should illustrate not only the new in the contribution of an industrial designer, but aim also at making the industrial designer’s paradoxical dependence on past products explicit for the reader, verbally as well as visually. Although the present book has very many illustrations, only a fraction of them makes it clear, that at any given time the new products on the market are in an overwhelming number of cases updated, upgraded, improved and innovated products of yesterday. When both ‘before-pictures’ and ‘after-pictures’ of a product are shown, as when Rune Monö’s describes and illustrates his design of the new ICA logo (151), or when Hugo Lindström gives the story of his fridge design (201), or in case of Volvo’s inspiration by American car models as argued by Hedvig Schönbäck (358, 371), the nature of design as a process of changes in already existing products becomes more evident. Also Lasse Brunnström’s description of development of the three-point seat belt (307-310), and Björn Linn’s concluding reflection about the nature of Swedish design (350) suggest implicitly the same. Designers do design new products but they practically always make those new ones out of old ones, i.e. out of those already on the market, which they might be asked to imitate (if produced by competition) or improve or develop further. The word redesign may therefore describe much more accurately what industrial designers do most of the time. But design thinking of today does not seem to have accommodated the fact that redesign is a rule rather than exception in the work of industrial designers. One reason for this may be the feeling that to see design as redesign detracts from the perception of creativity of the designer, both on personal and promotional level. But from design historical perspective one can argue that the redesign perspective is not only more true but also more just as it acknowledges creativity not only of the most recent person in the line of designers, but also his or her predecessors – while at the same time making the latest creative contribution stand out more clearly.
After all, one of the reasons why a book about the history of Swedish industrial design is relevant for would-be and established designers alike (whether Swedish, Scandinavian, or non-Scandinavian) is exactly because industrial design is practically always redesign: industrial designers are concerned as much with products of the past as with the future ones.
Jan Michl, Oslo School of Architecture
jan.michl@aho.no
Other online articles IN ENGLISH by Jan Michl