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The Industrial Design Reader
Edited by Carma R. Gorman
New York: Allworth Press, 2003, 243 pages, $19.95
Copublished
with DMI
Reviewed by Ron Sanchez
Carma Gorman, a professor of design
history, explains her motivation for
putting together this collection of
readings as a desire to bring into one
volume “primary source” articles about
industrial design and related issues from
the second half of the nineteenth century
through the twentieth. To this end, she
presents a compendium of commentary
by “designers, politicians, home economists,
museum curators, architects,
artists, social critics, manufacturers,
advertisers, and educators” discussing
“industrialization, mass production,
machines, commodities, sales, labor,
craft, aesthetics, technology, management,
modernity, gender, race, class, and
nationality.”
The strength of the volume lies in the
diversity of the design perspectives that
Professor Gorman has gathered together.
From this breadth of perspectives
emerges an impressive assortment of
ideas about the purpose, workings, and
effects of design in many forms. Given
the positioning of the volume as an
industrial design reader, the notion of
industrial design that has motivated this
volume is clearly a very broad one that
embraces virtually every imaginable kind
of design activity, including painting,
architecture, industrial engineering, and
social planning. For the reader with a
correspondingly broad interest in design,
the volume is a
treasure of interesting
and even eclectic
reading, much
of which would be
very difficult to
obtain if this volume
were not
available.
In the diversity of articles also lies
the book’s weakness, which is the lack of
a clear conceptual thread linking the
articles into some kind of coherent
(even if composite) view of the evolution
of design ideas through the last
century and a half.
Professor Gorman’s commentary in the volume is limited to a few introductory
sentences identifying the author
and topic of each article. After reading
several of the articles, I was left wanting
to know more about the relationships
between the people and ideas discussed
in the many articles. For example, in
introducing an excerpt from a 1953
speech by President Eisenhower on
“Peaceful Uses of Atomic Energy,” the
editor states that “the prospect of a
future in which energy would be plentiful,
cheap, and safe captured the imagination
of many designers and consumers.”
Rather than spending time
reading Eisenhower’s speech as a “primary
source” article on this issue, however,
I would be more interested to read
about what actually resulted from the
supposed fascination of (at least some)
designers and consumers with the perceived
promise of atomic energy.
The articles are grouped into 25-year
time periods, starting with 1851-1875
and continuing to 1976-2000. This strict
chronological grouping clearly invites
some further commentary from the editor
explaining the main developments in
design concepts during these time periods
and placing those developments in a
larger historical framework. I would
hope that a second edition of this volume
would give Professor Gorman an
opportunity to provide more editorial
explanation that would help the interested
reader place each article in a broader
historical perspective.
All in all, the volume fills a need for a
scholarly reference that samples the evolution
of perspectives on design, broadly
construed, over the 150 years in which
design has become a recognized profession
with an important role in and profound
impact on many aspects of
human life.
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