Design: The Key Concepts

Catherine McDermott

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• eBook ISBN: 9781134361793
• Topic: Diseño
• Subtopic: Historia y crítica del diseño

This is the essential student's guide to Design – its practice, its theory and its history. Drawing from a wide range of international examples, respected design writer Catherine McDermott explores key topics including:

• international design – from Europe to Africa
• design history – from Art Nouveau to punk
• sustainable design, recycling and green design
• design theory – from semiotics to gender, to postcolonialism
• design technology, graphic design and the web.

Fully cross-referenced, with up-to-date guides for further reading, Design: The Key Concepts is an indispensable reference for students of design, design history, fashion, art and visual culture.

DESIGN

The Key Concepts

ADVERTISING

The highly visible sign of a modern consumer culture promoting the sale of goods and services through a range of media, including newspapers, radio, television and the Internet. It has its modern origins in the development of the Industrial Revolution. Using advertisements to sell goods can, however, be traced back to Roman times: in Pompeii there are surviving images and text on the walls advertising products and services to a Roman audience. In the late 18th century pioneering British industrialists such as Josiah Wedgwood understood that simply producing goods was not enough; you had to market and advertise your products successfully. From the 1760s Wedgwood set in place most of the key elements of modern advertising we would recognize today. He used press ads and commissioned leading designers to design his catalogues so that customers could look at and order his ceramics in the comfort of their own homes. In the 19th century manufacturers understood the power of the single arresting image, and signs painted on to buildings became commonplace. These were followed by temporary paper posters and then purpose-built billboards, structures that have become more and more elaborate, so that in the Bund district of 21st-century Shanghai the sides of huge skyscraper buildings host advertisements for international companies.

By the beginning of the 20th century the use of magazine ads had become a key element for marketing campaigns, and the first experimental cinema advertisments had also come into play. The modern commercial world of advertising had begun. Cities now displayed an impressive amount of commercial visual imagery for which manufacturers had started to recruit some of the best-known artists of the day. Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Aubrey Beardsley and John Everett Millais are good examples of this trend, and some artists, such as Alphonse Mucha, were even destined to become better known for their advertisements than for their art. The term ‘commercial art’ came into being to describe the new importance of such advertising commissions. Perhaps the most important commercial artist of the 20th century was Adolphe Mouron Cassandre, whose streamlined posters of French ocean liners remain some of the most innovative graphic images ever created. His work epitomized advertising’s shift away from being simply a source of product information to a new realm of aspirational lifestyles and the dream of escape. The key ideas underpinning this can be traced back to the revolutionary work in psychoanalysis of Sigmund Freud. Targeting the subconscious with powerful, and often sexual, marketing images became crucial to advertising. In this context, the ads made by the leading Surrealist artist of his day, Salvador Dalí, were groundbreaking and inspired many imitators. Dalí’s work explored images that delved into the hidden desires of the viewer and removed objects from their usual context to produce in the viewer a shock that would facilitate the release of subconscious thoughts and desires. The lobster telephone is a classic example of this technique. In this way, Surrealist experiments were a blueprint for the emerging advertising industry, which now set out to promise much more than the commodity it tried to sell. The complex and sophisticated world of contemporary advertising therefore owes much to the Surrealist exploitation of the power of the erotic as a human impulse. Technology is the other key determiner of advertising, from the potential of neon signs, to the radio, cinema and television, to mobile phone messaging and the Internet. Advertising in the 21st century has come to be an entertainment industry in its own right.

Further reading:

Gibbons, Joan, Art and Advertising. London: I.B. Tauris, 2005.

Weill, Alain, Graphics: A Century of Poster and Advertising Design. London: Thames & Hudson, 2004.

Williamson, Judith, Decoding Advertisements: Ideology and Meaning in Advertising. London: Marion Boyars, 1978.

AERODYNAMICS

This is the study of airflow to find shapes which cause minimum resistance or turbulence, factors known to impede the speed of aircraft, trains, cars and ships. Early important experiments in aerodynamics included those of Sir George Cayley (1773–1857), an amateur scientist and a founder member of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, who explored the potential of manned flight. Gustave Eiffel (1832–1925) used his Eiffel Tower (1889) to carry out aerodynamic experiments and published two books on the subject. The first (1907) catalogued his Eiffel Tower experiments, while the second, the most important book on the subject, Nouvelles Récherches sur la résistance de l’air faites au Laboratoire d’Auteuil (1914), comprehensively documented the testing of scale-model aeroplanes in his wind-tunnel. This indicated that the principles of aerodynamic design were well understood by the early 20th century. The third yearbook of the Deutsche Werkbund, Der Verkehr. Jahrbuch des deutschen Werkbundes (1914), shows designs for motor cars, locomotives and aeroplanes as well as airships which demonstrate that aerodynamic principles were being absorbed by a wide range of designers. In the 1920s American commercial designers such as Norman Bel Geddes and Raymond Loewy exploited aerodynamic design in the form of streamlining. In 1932 Bel Geddes published Horizons, which contained a great deal of seductive propaganda in favour of streamlining. He and Loewy often looked to nature to support their theories of aerodynamics, citing, for example, the natural forms of ice floes. Aerodynamics retains a strong influence on transport design not only to improve performance but to enhance the aesthetics of vehicles through styling.

Further reading:

Bel Geddes, Norman, Horizons. New York: Dover, 1977 [1932].

Deutsche Werkbund, Der Verkehr. Jahrbuch des Deutschen Werkbundes. Jena: 1914.

Eiffel, Alexandre Gustave, Récherches expérimentales sur la résistance de l’air exécutées à la Tour Eiffel. Paris: 1907.

Eiffel, Alexandre Gustave, Nouvelles Récherches sur la résistance de l’air faites au Laboratoire d’Auteuil. Paris: H. Dunod et E. Pinat Editeurs, 1914.

Ledward, Kenneth S., The Evolution of the ‘Modern Airliner’: From George Cayley to the Boeing Model 247. London: Salt Oak, 1999.

Loewy, Raymond, Industrial Design. London: Fourth Estate, 1988 [1979].

AESTHETIC MOVEMENT

Term deriving from the title of the book The Aesthetic Movement in England, by Walter Hamilton, first published in 1882. Simon Jervis, an acknowledged authority on Victorian design, deliberately excluded an entry on the Aesthetic Movement in his pioneer Dictionary of Design and Designers, published in 1984. Presumably, he felt the term was too all embracing to be readily definable, encompassing, as it did, a taste for Queen Anne Revivalism, the cult of Japan and the latter-day Pre-Raphaelitism of Dante Gabriel Rossetti. In recent years, however, the Aesthetic Movement has been treated seriously as a term defining a stylistic movement. Designers and architects as diverse as Walter Crane, Lewis F. Day, Christopher Dresser, E. W. Godwin, Kate Greenaway, Thomas Jekyll, William Morris, W. Eden Nesfield, Richard Norman Shaw, Bruce Talbert and even Owen Jones can be accommodated within the category. It can be argued that there are considerable affinities between the early phase of the Arts and Crafts Movement and the Aesthetic Movement. The years 1870 to 1895 can be said roughly to circumscribe the Aesthetic Movement.

Walter Pater (1839–94), in the famous conclusion to his The Renaissance (1868), sums up the ideals of the Aesthetic Movement: ‘art comes to you proposing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass, and simply for those moments’ sake’. Such thinking appears to have its origin in France in the writings of Théophile Gautier (1811–72), poet, novelist and journalist. Oscar Wilde (1854–1900), in the preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) in a series of witty epigrams, similarly rejects the idea that art may serve a moral purpose.

The word ‘aesthetic’ came to have a special meaning for the late 19th century, however, largely through George du Maurier’s cartoons, which satirized the pretensions of smart society types who developed a taste for sunflowers, peacock feathers and Kate Greenaway illustrations. These people were considered to be 19th-century fashion victims and therefore were the subject of much ridicule and press comment. However, London’s fashionable Liberty’s department store marketed a range of Aesthetic clothes for women, and William Morris’s daughter, May, as well as other members of the Arts and Crafts Movement wore these garments. The most high-profile figure was Oscar Wilde, who deliberately promoted himself as the centre of an Aesthetic taste that was slightly exaggerated, definitely exclusive and totally dedicated to the pursuit of art and beauty. Until h...

Table of contents

• ALSO AVAILABLE FROM ROUTLEDGE
• CONTENTS
• LIST OF KEY CONCEPTS
• INTRODUCTION
• DESIGN
• INDEX