Design and Consume to Utopia: Where Industrial Design Went Wrong

Designing Back from the Future

“…To design back from the future is to design with a different understanding of time -no longer empty and homogenous, but filled with things that "have their own time" (duration) and are thus already filling up the future. Bel Geddes had developed an early-stage concept for Shell several years earlier (Andrews 2009). 4.…”

“…The futures envisaged by designers haven't always been smallscale. Consider the scenarios created by designers for the 1939 New York World Fair: Norman Bel Geddes's Futurama, 3 a vision of soaring tower blocks and freeways, seen and desired by the millions who visited the Fair, and materially realized in the US a few decades later (Andrews 2009); or Democracity designed by Henry Dreyfuss, envisioned as a monocultural, homogenized suburbia, which did indeed become the expanded urban field of postwar wealthy nations. Though Bel Geddes, Dreyfuss, and associated industrial designers of the 1930s (Raymond Loewy, Walter Dorwin Teague, Harold Van Doren 4 ) cannot be held solely responsible for the automobiledependent, high-consumption lifestyles that ensued, their scenarios (we could call them "design fictions") played a pivotal role in creating excitement about a particular kind of future: their picturing and narrating made this future appear plausible and desirable.…”

Design’s (Dis)orders: Mediating Systems-Level Transition Design

“…At the other end, designers are prone to a certain megalomania. The European origin story, centered on the Bauhaus (see Findeli, 2001), and the North American version, as expounded by the Streamliners (see Andrews, 2009), argued that modern styles of art derived from new machine forms and materials, when applied to everyday products and environments, could de-traditionalize people, accelerating them into more universal, efficient, and rational ways of living. For this reason, everything should be (re)designed: total design.…”