Design Practice and Functionalism

RELATED TERMS: Co-Design; Creative Thinking; Critical Thinking; Design History; Design of Narrative Environments; Latour; Modernism; Modernity; Ontological Designing; Philosophy; Postmodernism; Practice; Product Design and Industrial Design; Theoretical Practice; User-Centred and User-Driven Design; Utopia and Utopian Thinking;

Design practices lie at an intersection. They intersect social practices taking place within, while re-shaping, public space; commercial practices taking place within, while re-shaping, global and local marketplaces; spatial practices taking place within, while re-shaping, natural, urban and digital environments; and academic disciplines, taking place within, while re-shaping, the interdisciplinarity of the university.

Being transformative in character, design practices also lie at the intersection of the actual and the virtual, so they are well positioned to incorporate explorations of the changing terrains emerging from the increasing ubiquity of digital technologies that continue to shift perceptions of the boundaries among the real, the artificial and the natural, a condition that requires not just (critical) reflection but also heightened awareness of the consequential outcomes of reflexive action and interaction.

Buchanan (1998: 64) considers the development of design practices in the 20th century to have had three distinct periods,

“Design began as a trade activity, closely connected to industrialization and the emergence of mass communication. After a period of time, professions began to emerge, with traditions of practice and conscious recognition of a distinct type of thinking and working that distinguished our professions from others. Professional practice diversified in many forms – in a process that continues to the present. However, we are now witnessing the beginnings of the third era of design, marked by the emergence of design as a field or discipline.”

It is through and against this emerging field or discipline that design practices may be developed with theoretical, political, and philosophical cohesion. Design practices might then be capable of mediating, as Lohtaja (2021: 2) puts it, “fundamental concerns about the human condition and ways of being together; issues traditionally associated with political theory and political philosophy.”

Design practices, as they developed in an Anglo-Saxon context, are closely tied to the development of functionalism and the Modern Movement (Burkhardt, 1988: 145-146). In this tradition, the design of objects was conceived on the model of architecture. Specialisation within the field of design did not take place until the latter half of the 19th century in England and, subsequently, in Germany, followed progressively by France, the USA, Scandinavia, Italy and Japan.

At the time of its rise to prominence, the notion of functionalism served a particular purpose. The above-mentioned Anglo-Saxon tradition involved a certain ethical project: to restore to the object its ‘truth’ and ‘honesty’. That was interpreted to mean that it had some ‘intrinsic’ value in this world (this-worldly-value), and was not just a cipher for a value in an other world (other-worldly-value). This was a reaction to prevalent historicist ideas which relegated objects to the realm of appearances (accidence) rather than reality (essence). The leading advocates of this position, who effected functionalism’s rise to pre-eminence, were Webb, Lethaby, Voysey, Ashbee in England; Muthesius and Riemerschmid in Germany; Wagner and Loos in Austria; and Sullivan in the USA (Burkhardt, 1988: 146).

[Aside: From another perspective, such notions as ‘truth to materials’ and ‘intrinsic value’ might be understood as a rejection of the reduction of the ‘object’, or the output of design, to its commodity status with an emphasis on its exchange value to the detriment of its use value, to use terms that Marx introduced in order to articulate the ‘revaluation of all values’ taking place through the emergence of the industrialisation of production and urbanisation of social living conditions under capitalism. The question here concerns criteria for ‘valuation’ and ‘revaluation’ within specific historical periods, with due attention, first, to the potential slippage between the use of the term value in political economy, on the one hand, and in ethical and culture, on the other hand; and, second, to the role of design practices in facilitating this potential slippage.]

These thinkers considered the relationships among form, function and material, insisting that they be interpreted in a cultural perspective, taking into account contemporary life-styles and aspirations. They were also closely linked to the leading artistic movements of the time and therefore had an aesthetic orientation.

With the growth of specialisation, the relationship between design and architecture became more tenuous. Design came to see itself linked to systems of industrial production and economic growth. It therefore took on a very pragmatic approach, a form of industrialised, instrumentalised, econo-pragmatism. Design began to assume a key role in economic policy, as an instrument in the quest for market share and for the satisfaction of national ambition in the display of sovereign power.

Thus, design came to mean a commitment to mass production, with an industrial logic. Ironically, in the context of the forms of contemporary design where, technically, each category of product is much the same, design enters as a means of differentiating products at the level of appearances, in the form of brand identity.

Design, in this phase, is reduced to styling and designers to employees in companies within which they have little autonomy. To break with this situation, they would require greater institutional autonomy and the necessary conceptual equipment. Early examples of attempts to break free from the constraints of functionalism and econo-pragmatism include the ecological and pacifist movements in the USA in the 1960s, the Des-In group in Germany, the counter-design movement centred on the work of Ettore Sottsass and the Florentine Archizoom group. Later developments include the creation of the Alchimia group in 1978 by Ettore Sotsass, Andrea Branzi and Alessandro Mendini and Sottsass’s Memphis Group in 1980.

Nevertheless, these remain minority tendencies. For the majority tendency,

“ …this notion of an everyday culture, of culture as a means to emancipation, allowing people to distance themselves from the world and take a critical look at it – this barely exists at all in the Anglo-Saxon world, where designers are closely linked with industry, and where design associations occupy themselves not with critical discussion but merely with business problems.” (Burkhardt, 1988: 149)

What remains, then, in part, is to strengthen the case for the notion of an everyday culture which permits critical distancing; and for a critique of functionalism, not as such, but to combat its hegemonic ascendancy and assumptions concerning its instrumental simplicity. In this way, as Burkhardt (1988: 151) expresses it,

“Any object can be an object of design, and their multiplicity of evocations should correspond to the multiple possibilities which our society offers of identification and identity.”

References

Buchanan, R. (1998). Education and professional practice in design. Design Issues, 14 (2), 63–66. Available from http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/1511851.pdf?acceptTC=true [Accessed 14 January 2012].

Burkhardt, F. (1988). Design and ‘avant-postmodernism’. In: Thakara, J., ed. Design after modernism. London, UK: Thames and Hudson, 145–151.

Lohtaja, A. (2021) Designing dissensual common sense: critical art, architecture, and design in Jacques Rancière’s political thought, Design and Culture. Routledge, pp. 1–20. doi: 10.1080/17547075.2021.1966730.