MYP Design Past, Present and Emerging Design Notes

Design Movements Are Answers to the Question Their Time Asked

1. A design movement is a group of designers who share a view of what a good object looks like and why, usually because they are all reacting to the same new machine or the same social problem.
2. Two forces push a movement into existence: the technology available, meaning what can now be made cheaply, and the values people hold, meaning what they think an object should say about them.
3. Steam powered factories made thousands of identical goods possible from the 1830s, and almost every movement since has been an argument about whether that was a good thing.
4. Movements overlap and argue rather than replacing each other in a tidy line, so a chair and a teapot made in the same year can belong to completely different worlds.
5. This is the MYP related concept perspective in practice: the same object reads differently depending on who is looking at it and when.

Arts and Crafts Against the Bauhaus: One Machine, Two Verdicts

1. The Arts and Crafts movement ran in Britain from about 1860 to 1910, led by figures such as William Morris, and it rejected the factory outright.
2. Its designers wanted visible handwork, honest timber joints and patterns drawn from British plants and birds, because they believed machine made goods made the worker bored and the buyer careless.
3. The contradiction was price, since a hand block printed wallpaper took days to produce, so a movement about ordinary life ended up decorating the houses of rich people.
4. The Bauhaus, a German design school open from 1919 to 1933, reached the opposite verdict: the machine was welcome, and the designer's job was to give it forms worth repeating a million times.
5. Bauhaus objects strip ornament away and show the material doing its job, like Marcel Breuer's Wassily chair of 1925, built from bent tubular steel borrowed from bicycle frames with leather slung between the tubes.
6. The slogan attached to this thinking is form follows function, meaning the shape of an object should come from the job it does rather than from fashion or status.

Streamlining and Mid Century Modern: Selling Speed, Then Selling Home

1. The streamlined look arrived in the United States in the 1930s, borrowing teardrop shapes that engineers had actually tested in wind tunnels for aircraft and locomotives.
2. Designers then applied those shapes to objects that never move, so pencil sharpeners, radios and refrigerators all gained rounded corners and three horizontal speed lines.
3. That is styling rather than engineering, and it sold because a country in economic depression wanted its purchases to look like the future arriving.
4. Mid century modern followed from roughly 1945 to 1965, when wartime factory techniques came home: moulded plywood, glass reinforced plastic, foam and thin steel rod.
5. The Eames moulded plywood chair of 1946 came directly from leg splints Charles and Ray Eames had made for the US Navy, and it kept the thin curved shell and the splayed tapered legs.
6. The look is light, low and open because postwar homes were smaller and one room often had to work as dining room and living room at once.

Postmodernism Broke the Rules Modernism Had Just Finished Writing

1. By the 1970s form follows function had produced a great many grey rectangles, and a group of designers decided objects were allowed to be funny again.
2. Postmodern design puts ornament, clashing colour, strange proportion and jokes back in, treating a product as something to be read as well as used.
3. The Memphis group, formed in Milan in 1981 around Ettore Sottsass, is the clearest case: bookshelves in pink and lime plastic laminate with legs that lean and shapes that quote 1950s cafes.
4. Philippe Starck's Juicy Salif lemon squeezer for Alessi, from 1990, stands on three aluminium legs like a spider, squeezes lemons poorly and sells by the hundred thousand.
5. The idea that survived is that function includes meaning, so how an object makes its owner feel counts as part of what it does.

Contemporary Sustainable Design Puts the Ending Into the Brief

1. Since the 1990s the strongest movement has been designing around what happens to a product after its first owner has finished with it.
2. Its visual signatures are single material construction, screws instead of glue, replaceable batteries and cells, recycled content and labelling that admits how repairable the thing is.
3. Fairphone, launched in the Netherlands in 2013, sells a phone whose screen and battery come out with an ordinary screwdriver, which is a direct refusal of the glued sealed assembly.
4. Patagonia's Worn Wear scheme repairs and resells the company's own jackets, so one garment earns the business money more than once.
5. The strategies behind this movement, and the way a whole product life gets measured, belong to your sustainable design and life cycle analysis articles; here it counts as a movement with a date and a cause.

Reading a Product as Evidence of Its Period

1. Treat an unfamiliar object as a fossil, because its material, its joints, its decoration and its selling points all record the decade it came from.
2. Ask what it is made of, since materials arrive on a timeline: Bakelite from 1907, moulded plywood from the 1940s, ABS from the 1950s, carbon fibre in consumer goods from the 1980s.
3. Ask how it is held together, because visible screws point to a product that expected repair while glued and ultrasonically welded seams point to cheap one way assembly.
4. Ask what is decorated and what is left bare, since ornament tells you whether the designer was arguing for or against the machine that made it.
5. Ask who could afford it, because a 1955 radio in walnut veneer and a 1975 radio in orange plastic were aimed at different rooms, different ages and different wages.
6. Record these as evidence in your Inquiring and analysing work rather than as opinions, so every claim points at a feature you can photograph and label.

Emerging Technology Is Changing Who Designs, Not Only What

1. Desktop 3D printing removed the tooling cost that used to make short runs pointless, because an injection mould costs thousands of pounds and a printed part costs pennies of filament.
2. Generative and parametric software lets a designer set the loads and the fixing points and have the computer produce hundreds of candidate forms, which is why aircraft brackets now look like bone.
3. Smart materials put the behaviour inside the material, so a shape memory alloy spring can push a greenhouse vent open as the air warms with no motor, no sensor and no power supply.
4. Microcontrollers such as an Arduino Nano now cost a few pounds, so a school project can sense and respond in a way that needed an engineering team twenty five years ago.
5. Open source design shares the drawing files rather than the finished product, so a repair workshop in another country can print the broken clip instead of importing the whole assembly.

What This Means for Your Own Project

1. Naming a movement your product borrows from gives a marker something concrete to follow, so write "low tapered legs and a moulded shell, after the Eames plywood chair" rather than "a modern look".
2. Every existing product you analyse was solving its own period's problem, so say what that problem was before you call the design dated.
3. Your own design will one day be read the same way, and the material and the fixings you choose are the evidence you are leaving behind.