2.
Motivation
2.2 Defining approaches 2.3 Aesthetic refinement 2.4 Collective memory and behaviour
2.3 AESTHETIC REFINEMENT With the exterior design of products carrying so much weight in conferring status upon them, influencing sales and eliciting emotional responses from people, it follows that a great deal of energy is chanelled into exploring and refining product aesthetics. This section examines the nature of product styling, identifying the influence of scientific and technological progress and revealing contemporary theories used by designers to define languages and nuances of form.
THE RISE OF THE STYLIST Although emerging from theatre design and window dressing, the first industrial designers to practice in America in the late 1920s set up as consultants, taking their lead from the previously established role of the advertising agent. It is perhaps unsurprising, then, that the figure to attract most attention to this new profession became known more for his salesmanship than his integrity. Frenchman Raymond Loewy – once quoted as saying: “The most beautiful curve is a rising sales graph” (1) – beautified everything from a duplicating machine to a spaceship interior via the Coke bottle and the Greyhound bus. In spite of this, the followers of modernism in Europe, considered themselves to be developing a more cerebral approach to design, and so did not hold Loewy and his American contemporaries in high regard, dismissing them as mere “stylists”. These European designers, many of who were trained architects, believed product design should be more than skin-deep and were not impressed by what they saw as a surface-oriented approach. However,
Fig. 1 Kodak Baby Brownie camera, 1928 The forms of Teague’s Baby Brownie are distinctly architectural.
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as the profession has grown and stratified, designers have become able to choose to work in areas (such as tableware, furniture and home accessories) where aesthetic refinement can legitimately be seen as the central aspect of their projects. When functionality and complex components are reduced to a minimum in the design of, say, a fruit bowl as opposed to a camera, the intuitive, formal aspects of design (“styling”) naturally become the focus of the designer’s activity. In the case of the camera, its functional requirements (to be comfortable to hold, clear and easy to adjust etc.) must be considered alongside, and in sympathy with, its form. A surface-based approach would be an abdication of responsibility. It is this that Loewy’s critics sensed. Designers, who primarily deal in the aesthetic refinement of simple, low-tech products, are unlikely to find the label of stylist particularly hurtful. It becomes a derogative when applied to those who have designed products with a degree of functional or technical complexity, where the exterior form appears to have taken undue precedence. By concentrating upon the aspect of the object that is first seen, and not those that are discovered through use, the designer attracts accusations of putting style before substance. As this first viewing often takes place at the point of sale, the stylist has become compared to the pushy salesman, hoping customers will be seduced enough not to ask any awkward practical questions. Loewy, like his present-day heirs Ross Lovegrove and Karim Rashid (who have most appropriately attracted the stylist label) did little to avoid this comparison, displaying considerable charisma but an alarming lack of humility.
Fig. 2 Kodak Bantam Special camera (1936–1948) The art deco detailing of the Bantam Special, like the Brownie, can be seen in buildings of the period, especially cinemas.