2 heroes of the design century
2More that half a century ago, on January 18th 1933, Punch published a menacing cartoon. It showed a figure described as an employer seated at a desk. Standing in front of him was a monstrous mechanical man. In the caption the robot is saying; ‘Master, I can do the work of fifty men.’ The employer replies; ‘Yes, I know that. But who is to support the fifty men ?’
3 The ambivalent answer to the cartoon employer’s question has been the story of the 20th century. Ever since the Industrial Revolution liberated the developed nations from the agricultural economy of scarcity, the prospect of automation has embodied a threat as well as a promise. A threat of mechanised poverty, oppression, starvation and eventually genocide to set against the promise of automated wealth, freedom, plenty and procreation.
4 As we look back over the 20th century, it is clear that one activity above all others has come to dominate the shape of the machine-made world. Reality in the late 20th century is designed, not shaped by use or custom. In this sense it is already correct to call the 20th century the century of design, for design has been its response to the agonised question of the employer in the Punch cartoon.
5 From diffuse and uncertain beginnings design has become the only human activity that can still promise to connect the support of the fifty men robbed of their work by machines to the productive capabilities of the robot. By perpetually extending the mechanical man in the direction of the human economy, the designers of the 20th century created a world that had never before existed in history. They found ways to close the interface between human consciousness and the man-made material world. Where once technology killed, now it fits. Where once the machine was feared, now it is embraced—and both transformations were carried out by design.
6 That the designers of the 20th century really have connected the necessity of support with the abundance of invention is a proposition that requires little proof. Even the most extravagant interpretation of human needs in 1933 could scarcely have included one tenth of the goods and services whose universal distribution has today been rendered normal by the activity of design. The multifarious inanimate energy slaves of the late 20th century city would have struck the employer of 1933 as a nightmare of implied social support. Fifty robots instead of one! Who could support the 2,500 men thus thrown out of work? Nor would the answer to this question have seemed credible: that tasks would be created that sixty years ago did not exist. These new tasks, and the purchasing power they have created, are the engines that power the expanding universe of design and production today. The symbiotic phenomenon of design and economic life now exists at a level far beyond the wildest dreams of the industrialists of sixty years ago. Design now sustains economic activity. Already, sixty years after that Punch cartoon, design has become the key to the new material world that can support fifty times fifty men. Design is the interdenominational networking of form that makes sense of consumption. From the ten-speed racer to the VCR to the cellular telephone to the workstation to the communications satellite, design is the adhesive that binds all to the global economy. In the end it is design that makes the buying and selling of information as intelligible as once was the buying and selling of slaves and cotton.
7 But if the new role of design as the engine of consumption is as evolutionarily important as this, how are we to understand its individual workings? At the level of production economics, designers seem no more than a human sub-species, like bees, who work without character or individuality. Indeed today, in investment terms, it has become possible to see the whole design profession in this way, but this is a very recent development.
8 ‘Design Heroes’ is a series about the individuals who shaped this now homogeneous world of post-industrial design. Men and women who did not resemble the stereotype of today’s designers, but who nonetheless created their world of present possibilities for them. Although they seldom worked entirely alone, these ‘Design Heroes’ established themselves as individual talents, rather than as members of packs like today’s design consultancies; packs that are identified by strings of names, cryptic initials or acronyms. These interchangeable box-suited ray-ban figures driving BMWs may be quoted on the USM or listed on Stock Exchanges all over the world, but they are not ‘Design Heroes’, yet. The classification is reserved for those bold individuals who staked out the first claims in the virgin territory that the corporate designer of today is content to methodically comb and recomb.
9 Who were these prime individuals, the creators of a new genre of creative human being? The question is more difficult to answer than it might appear, not least because it is only in the last few years that the synergetic importance of design and economics has been popularly grasped.
10 In the 20th century design always existed, but for years it was not recognised as an unitary phenomenon and its practitioners did their work under different titles with different degrees of status. Sometimes what we would call designers today were ‘chief draughtsmen’, sometimes ‘engineers’, sometimes ‘inventors’, sometimes ‘craftsmen’ sometimes ‘artists’, sometimes ‘amateur constructors’. In fact the best of them were always Heroes if, consciously or unconsciously, they worked to the dictum of Nietzsche: ‘Need is not the reason for something to come into existence, it is an effect of what has already come to be’.
11 This series of short biographies is an attempt to tell, through the lives of a number of great 20th century designers, how the question posed by the Punch cartoon was, and is, being answered. The ‘Design Heroes’ are men and women who somehow and in some way overdrew on the bank of invention, and in doing so revealed something of the inner mechanism of the creative individual under stress and thus helped to define the elusive modern term ‘designer’. All these individuals have been chosen because, in widely different ways, their lives and their works deliver the essence of design as a vital human activity.
12 We know that it was determination, stamina, endurance beyond the call of reason that created the ‘Heroes’ of exploration; the ‘Heroes’ of warfare; the ‘Heroes’ of speed and flight, design too makes its calls upon determination, stamina and endurance. ‘Design Heroes’, like all heroes, are individuals who have been beyond the point of reasonable withdrawal. They have suffered for their work and their convictions. They have overstepped the bounds of conventional behaviour in order not to relinquish the creative integrity of their work.
13 We know from history that it was not science, but design that created the first engines to pump water; the first mechanical tools to lift rock, bore tunnels and bridge rivers; the first ships that could sail against the wind. Design too created the man-made environment and defined the limits of the dreams of what might still be possible within it. ‘Design Heroes’ is not a series about the great inventors of the 19th century. It is about the generation that grew up with the elements of the modern world, the car, the passenger aeroplane, the spacecraft and the computer. Men like Richard Buckminster Fuller, whose long life encompassed the history of flight and the history of prefabrication. Raymond Loewy, who designed railway locomotives as well as the interiors of NASA spacecraft. Harley Earle, the creator of the surrealistic finned monsters of the postWorld War Two American automobile industry. Ettore Sottsass, who worked on the first Olivetti computers before he broke free from the constraints of Modernism altogether and entered a revolutionary new creative world of furniture design. Colin Chapman, who founded a high-performance automobile legend that he used every resource, even forbidden ones, to keep out of the hands of corporate predators until he died. Tom Karen, who turned a three-wheeled van and a defunct sports car prototype into a hatch-back driven by Royalty.
14 Through the lives and works of designers like these, the series ‘Design Heroes’ will change our understanding of what those men and women did who truly learned how to make more production out of less work—by design.
15 Martin Pawley
16 Series Editor