Designing for Socialist Need

Industrial Design Practice in the German Democratic Republic

Katharina Pfützner

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317284192
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

How does industrial design operate outside of capitalist consumer culture? Designing for Socialist Need assembles a detailed picture of industrial design practice in the socialist German Democratic Republic (GDR). Drawing on much previously unexplored material from a wide variety of sources, it not only maps out some of the ideological, institutional and economic contexts within which GDR design functioned, it also critically reconstructs the designers' aims and perspectives in order to argue that they shared a profoundly socially responsible approach to design. By focusing on their ideas and approaches, this volume attends to the previously unacknowledged intellectual and practical richness of GDR design culture and demonstrates that it can provide pertinent insights not only for scholars of GDR history or German design, but also for contemporary design practitioners, theorists and educators with an interest in sustainability in design.

Part 1
The fundamentalsof GDR design

1 Aims and priorities

At the very core of the unique design culture in the GDR lay a shared understanding of design as an activity carried out for the benefit of mankind. Contemporary discourse shows that GDR designers were acutely aware of the fact that manufacturers operating under regular market economy conditions primarily employed industrial designers to increase sales or profit margins, and thus saw in their own country, where manufacturers were not oriented on profit, a significant opportunity to prioritize the perceived interests of individual users and those of society as a whole. As a result, they adopted a socially responsible design approach that aimed for solutions that maximized the satisfaction of widely held, so-called ‘genuine’ user needs with a minimum investment of resources. This key aim informed a wide variety of more specific ideas and beliefs that can be distilled down to four core priorities as follows: a concern for practical functionality and usability, a focus on product longevity, an affirmation of economical mass production and an opposition to formalism – understood by GDR designers as a preoccupation with form at the expense of function. These priorities will be given more detailed consideration in this chapter. This approach was articulated widely and consistently (Stam, 1950; Michel, 1962; Kelm, 1971, p. 82), especially in the 1950s and 1960s, when GDR designers, as part of their efforts to establish their profession and gain more influence over production, published a spate of articles explaining the role played by design and their specific vision of design, in particular – in the socialist society. It also had an enormous impact on GDR design practice, as illustrated by the vast majority of professionally designed GDR products. Virtually all of these, from simple plastic objects to more complex technical assemblies, were highly functional and user-friendly; capable of being mass-produced in large quantities and using materials economically; able to achieve long life-spans in use and production; and devoid of modish or historicizing decorative detailing – provided they were reproduced accurately at production level.¹

The primacy of functionality

Chief among the designers’ concerns was functionality. This was unequivocally articulated in their talks and writings, for example by Martin Kelm, industrial designer and future director of the State Office for Industrial Design, when he proclaimed in 1963 that ‘the most important design consideration is a product’s function, its intended use, its purpose’.² This focus on functionality encompassed both primary and secondary usage considerations. Thus when the ceramicist Hans Merz argued for a better integration of industrial design into the ceramics industry in an article published in the art magazine Bildende Kunst in 1961, he outlined the principal considerations for ceramics designers as follows:

In addition to the primary function of a coffee pot – to hold coffee and pour it into cups – there are a number of other functions. Most important among them: good stability, a good steady coffee flow, a good grip of the handle at the vessel’s centre of gravity, sufficient distance between handle and vessel body to avoid burns, a good retaining mechanism for the lid, good cleanability.³

In relation to domestic furniture, products should ‘first and foremost be objects of utility: variable, easy to transport, capable of being complemented at any point in time and of answering their actual purpose: to facilitate storage on a minimum footprint’, according to the industrial designer Jürgen Peters, also in Bildende Kunst.⁴ And when the freelance industrial designer Karl Clauss Dietel outlined what he deemed the most important considerations in the context of passenger car design in an interview with the design journal form+zweck, he mentioned the minimization of a car’s footprint on the road, while maximizing its carrying capacity; adaptability of the interior for the transport of passengers, luggage and leisure equipment; ease of access; ease of operation; and ease of maintenance and cleaning. Consequently he argued that the design of ‘socialist cars’ should accommodate four passenger doors, rather than just two, and be based on an estate instead of a saloon body type (Dietel, 1971, pp. 30–35).

Such an explicit championing of function as primary design consideration was not new, of course. A tradition of functional design, manifesting itself mainly in vernacular and technical objects, has been traced back several centuries (Lindinger, 1964a, 1964b; Schaefer, 1970). However, an even closer antecedent – because it was motivated by a similar conscious social engagement as GDR design – was the design approach advocated in Modernist circles in the early twentieth century, particularly at the Bauhaus during the second half the 1920s, and later widely referred to as functionalism. Adherents of this approach also prioritized both practical purpose and usability. Thus Marcel Breuer, head of the Bauhaus furniture workshop and former student of the school, justified his groundbreaking use of tubular steel in the construction of domestic furniture (Figure 1.1) as follows:

A chair made of high-grade steel tubing (a highly elastic material) with tightly stretched fabric in the appropriate places, makes a light, completely self-sprung seat which is as comfortable as an upholstered chair, but is many times lighter, handier and more hygienic, and therefore many times more practical in use. Tubular chairs with wooden seating are also light, manageable and durable.

(Breuer, 1927, p. 227)

Furthermore, although GDR designers also came to embrace other functions over time, as will be discussed in Chapter 3, neither group’s enthusiasm for an object’s various potential purposes was all-encompassing; in fact, both explicitly rejected the same functions. According to the writings of functionalist designers in the 1920s, designed objects were not to function as status symbols, as the reflection – or simulation – of prestige or prosperity was not considered to fulfil a fundamental human need. Taking stock of contemporary domestic furniture available for sale, for example, the Dutch Modernist architect Mart Stam argued against the imitation of expensive hand-crafted furniture for the less well-off:

In the situation of today, at a time when everyone is engaged in a battle for existence, when the majority of the population can scarcely even satisfy their most immediate needs, it is necessary that … instead of corresponding to the bourgeois ideal of prosperity, these furnishings should satisfy the actual needs of the people to the utmost.

(Stam, 1927, p. 227)

Figure 1.1 Marcel Breuer, B 64 tubular steel chair, 1928, Thonet AG

Photo: Die Neue Sammlung (A. Laurenzo); Holder: Die Neue Sammlung – The Design Museum

They also maintained that objects should not function as fashion items – not only because fashionability was seen to address a similarly non-existential need, but also because it conflicted with one of the usage-related object qualities they did embrace: durability. Accordingly, Breuer pro-claimed: ‘We have had enough of the everlasting and arbitrary changes of form, colour and style, and so we are seeking clear and logical forms, based on rational principles’ (Breuer, 1927, p. 226).

Correspondingly, GDR designers explicitly refused to accommodate an object’s potential function as a symbol of status or fashionability, as to do so would consume finite resources that could have been used instead to fulfil what were considered more essential needs. Moreover, the demand for such products was deemed to have been the result of manipulation of consumers by profit-motivated manufacturers in the past and was thus thought to be not genuine (echt). The industrial designer Horst Michel, for example, then professor for interior design at the School for Architecture and Civil Engineering in Weimar, articulated this position when he argued in 1956 in Bildende Kunst that people’s desire to be modern ‘has often been scrupulously exploited, when enterprising business people talked buyers into acquiring yesterday’s ostentation or short-lived, tasteless novelties’.⁵ This led him to proclaim ‘that we reject the showy and sensationalist novelties, just like we reject the grandiose pieces that have grown from an addiction to ostentation. Streamlined furniture and coffee pots are as absurd as lion claws on a writing desk’.⁶ In socialism, they argued, industrial designers were not required to oblige profit-seeking manufacturers by pandering to such wasteful manipulated demands. Instead, they could focus on an object’s capacity to meet the ‘genuine’ (that is, intrinsic, non-manipulated) needs of its end users – a potential often referred to as the object’s use value (Gebrauchswert).⁷ Thus Werner Miersch of the Central Institute for Industrial Design (Zentralinstitut für Formgestaltung) had argued in 1963 in Bildende Kunst that in the GDR industrial design was not about ‘the satisfaction of the needs of a few, but about the optimum satisfaction of the genuine needs of the large numbers of workers’, which he clarified to include both physical and psychological needs.⁸ This was understood as the key difference between the work of industrial designers in socialism and elsewhere, and it allowed GDR designers to discuss their design approach as uniquely socialist and without references to historical antecedents – which, in any case, would have been highly problematic due to the official denunciation of the Modernist heritage, as will be shown in Chapter 6. This is perhaps most striking in the writings of Mart Stam, who had, after all, been a prominent and vocal member of the Modernist avant-garde in the 1920s. In 1950, having resettled in the GDR and taken up the directorship of an art school in Berlin-Weißensee, later one of the GDR’s two major design colleges, he wrote:

Our new way of addressing the problem of the industrial design of our industrial products is not possible in the context of capitalist production, is actually not possible at all as long as the starting point for production is not the satisfaction of needs or the steady increase of the welfare and wellbeing of the populace at large, but profit.⁹ (original emphasis)

These ideas about the primacy of practical functionality also manifested themselves in GDR design practice. Designers often conducted detailed empirical studies that examined all aspects of the intended usage scenario and frequently tested design concepts in mid development with representatives of the intended groups of end users. Informed by the findings of such fieldwork, considerations of function and usability had an overriding influence on the resulting objects. Fashionable detailing or features suggestive of exclusivity, on the other hand, did not characterize such work. A typical example was the hotelware Rationell (Figure 1.2), conceived by the designers Margarete Jahny and Erich Müller of the Central Institute for Industrial Design, a forerunner of the State Office for Industrial Design, in 1969/70 for use in establishments of the hotel chain Interhotel. According to a report in form+zweck, the development was preceded by thorough research carried out in three different hotels of the chain to establish specific conditions and requirements (Hirdina, 1973). Data was collected on processes involved in storage, food preparation, service, cleaning and drying. It was found that the new china would need to be exceptionally compact, due to a constant shortage of space in hotel kitchens; it would need to be robust to resist breaking and chipping in a hectic work environment; and sharp creases would need to be avoided to prevent the trapping of dirt or detergent. The solution to these problems was a s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction
• Part 1 The fundamentals of GDR design
• Part 2 Exemplary ideas and practices
• Part 3 Resistance encountered by GDR designers
• Conclusion
• Index