The Genius of Design - Review 1

The Genius of Design - A chaptered documentory that looks at design from the 1900's to the 1970's. It explores the numerous different design styles in this short period of time and examines the developement of the design process. It also looks at how design impacts on and influences peoples lives. 

The first chapter 'The Ghosts in the Machine' looks at the industrial revolution up to World War 1. During this era great advances were made in terms of production. With the advent of mass production ad consumerism on the rise due to affordability, this delivered a blow to traditional methods of manufacturing crafts to which William Morris was an advocate. He tried to resurrect the Arts & Crafts Movement but failed on the basis of cost and simply could not compete. Another aspect to suffer in this era was variety in design. While objects and products were produced in bulk everything began to look the same. This was felt by Henry Ford, inventor of the assembly line. At first this was a great achievement but it didn't take long for other manufacturers, particularly car manufacturers to realise that people wanted variety in products. Unfortunately for Henery Ford, he was late in realising this and his company suffered massive losses due to his short sightedness in this area.

        

Further to this era and more so towards the end of it, it became obvious that design had become a servant to capitalism. Also the American system of design and production had won over their European counterpart.

This has been put down to European designers being 

too 'involved' with their design while for the Americans',

it was all about capitalism, the comsumer and the bottom dollar.