Symposion: World Design

On June 17 the symposium »World Design« by School of Design at HfG Offenbach takes place in Museum Angewandte Kunst in Frankfurt. It is after 2014 the second edition of the international HfG Design Conference »re/set«.

Design is about making the world a better place. Or so people thought during the 19th and 20th century. The arts & crafts movement wanted to lead mankind back to itself by eschewing industrialised modes of production, as did the Lebensreform-movement in Germany and Switzerland. Following its esoteric beginnings, the Bauhaus accepted a new relation between art and industry; under Hannes Meyer its aim was to make idealised socialism worth living under. Postwar functionalism tried to give meaning to our surroundings by focusing entirely on the use of things, and even postmodernism entailed some form of pedagogical element insofar as design supposedly allowed every human being to express their individual artistic impulses. That design should make people happy and form better societies at the same time was an axiom. Design had also to be universal, it had to be applicable everywhere. Insofar as some motive of enlightenment was still active within the reflexions on design, a cosmopolitan world-society was a major goal.

By now we have become more critical regarding the idea of constructing a world-society through global design. We have become acutely aware of its flipside: the functionalist approach for example has given rise to uniform, soulless and socially highly problematic estates of prefabricated houses across the world. The consequences of a certain brand of global design-ideology are not merely aesthetically questionable, it almost seems as if it has become a cultural hegemony, setting untenable standards in matters of everyday behaviour or social prestige for example. Traditions and local customs were overturned or ignored, so protest became necessary, cultural criticism was needed. Following the critique of global brands, which was still based on Marxism, phenomena like the triumph of apple's design now also called for a cultural reflexion. Surely the idea of a severely reduced form, effective in all cultures and applicable everywhere by everyone to everything – the idea of a smallest common denominator so to speak – is legitimate. Yet it necessarily excludes the idiosyncratic, individual or local forms of design and it ignores traditional means of recognition and understanding.

In the course of these debates it has become apparent that design – understood as the forms things take – is a deeply political topic. The fundamental issue now is how we want to live together and how design influences our ways of life. The issue is how design determines our identities. Whoever casts a glance at the future, be they designer or consumer, knows that these questions touch upon fundamental determinants for all things to come. Should we side with global (world-)design as the agent of enlightenment, or should we face and fight the destruction it accompanies, in theory as well as in life?