The document discusses new demands placed on design, including sustainability, efficiency, and aesthetics. It explores tensions between intrinsic and cyclic aspects, and between design for developing and industrialized countries. The evolution of design is reviewed, from craftsmanship to mass production. Form following function is discussed, as well as Bauhaus ideals of design for social masses. Precedents in art and aesthetics around 1800 are examined, including rationalization of judgment and the philosophical disenfranchisement of art. Lessons for designers include facing challenges, incorporating them over time through dialogue and experimentation, and pursuing diverse and flexible strategies rather than single solutions.

1. The New Demands On Design
And Creative Ways To Handle Them
The Future Of Sustainable Products And Services
Essen, Sept. 28th, 2009
Bernd Draser and David Olschewski
ecosign/Akademie für Gestaltung

2. New demands on design
Sustainability
• ecological demands
• economic demands
• social and cultural demands
Making decisions
• efficiency vs. effectivity
• intrinsic vs. cyclic aspects
• aesthetics vs. technology
• design for developing countries vs. design for industrialized countries
Attractive and up-to-date design

3. The demand of form and function
Design was a symptom of industrialization. Designers practiced
• pre-industrial craftsmanship
• applied arts
• engineering

4. The demand of form and function
Form follows function: Louis Sullivan / architect
Whether it be the sweeping eagle in his flight,
or the open apple-blossom,
the toiling work-horse,
the blithe swan,
the branching oak,
the winding stream at its base,
the drifting clouds,
over all the coursing sun,
form ever follows function,
and this is the law.
Where function does not change,
form does not change.
(1896)

5. The demand of form and function
Adolf Loos
• radical anti-ornamental position
• raging iconoclastic anger
The evolution of culture marches with the elimination of
ornament from useful objects.
(German 1908 / English 1913)

7. The demand of form and function
Bauhaus: Aesthetics and Masses:
• design for the social masses
• utopian visions of the „new man“
• political vision of social justice and equality
• design for mass production
• new aesthetics for industrial production
• no reproduction of ornaments from pre-industrial times
• eliminating the gap between artist and craftsman

8. The demand of aesthetics
A negative view:
• Design is sexing up the surface in order to
• persuade customers
• delude from the true character of a product
A positive view:
• Design can sweeten the bitter pill of sustainability
• Design must find a new aesthetics for the purpose of sustainability

9. Is design overburdened?
An ethical view:
• Sustainability as a normative value
• Sustainable design as practical ethics
Consequences
• heavy burdens for the creative process
• keeping designers busy with expertise questions
• restraining the options

10. The precedent: Arts and aesthetics around 1800
Arts before 1800
• mimesis
• Plato and Aristotle
• imitation of reality
• prodesse et delectare
• Horace
• to be useful and to entertain
• function and form
• aesthetic judgements are a matter of taste

11. The precedent: Arts and aesthetics around 1800
Arts and aesthetics around 1800
• Important aesthetic books:
• Baumgarten: Aesthetica
• Sulzer: General Theory of Fine Arts
• Kant: Critique of Judgement
• Main consequences:
• rationalization of aesthetic judgement
• reason, not taste
• arts in the focus of philosophy

12. The precedent: Arts and aesthetics around 1800
Hegel‘s aesthetics: the end of arts
• arts functioned as religion
• arts lost relevance
• Christian religion took over
• philosophy took over
Postmodern view on Hegel‘s aesthetics
• a philosophical disenfranchisement of arts
• aesthetic experience takes place in theory and concepts
• beauty is lost as a valid criteria for arts

13. The precedent: Arts and aesthetics around 1800
German Romanticism
• Only arts is capable of salvation
• religion and arts are not separable
• only arts can redeem a rationalized / industrialized world
Eichendorff:
Songs repose in things abounding
that keep dreaming to be heard,
and the world shall start resounding
if you hit her magic word.

14. The precedent: Arts and aesthetics in the 20th century
(Post-)Modernism
• exploring new dimensions of aesthetic experiences
• transgressing the traditional borders of arts
• incorporating the theoretical subjection
• defining and defending a new autonomy
Three examples
• Walter Benjamin: The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1935)
• John Cage: 4:33 (1952)
• Marcel Duchamp: The Fountain (1917)

16. The precedent: What can designers learn from there?
• It is not an option to ignore the new demands. Designers must face them.
• On the long run, the challenges will be incorporated into design discourses.
• It is helpful to enforce a vivid dialogue. Experiments are indispensable.
• There won‘t be the one great solution. Diverse strategies are necessary.
• Opposing and competing practices and theories are productive, but not obstructive.
• Sustainable design will not succeed as a purely technological strategy.
• Success is only viable for open, flexible and agile discourses.

17. David Olschewski

24. Thank you!
www.ecosign.net
www. davidolschewski.de