"Industrial design should have dropped its messianic claims long ago"

It's time to recognise that design's status as a force for social change was only ever a blip and instead embrace its role as applied art, writes John Jervis as part of our Performance Review series.

The cult of design – and of the designer – first ignited in the 1950s and still burns strong. Yet, as persuasively argued by Edwin Heathcote in a recent Financial Times article, an existential crisis is currently taking place. Young designers cling uncertainly to the edges of an industry complicit in the planet's destruction, or retreat into academia and art, vainly hoping to overcome through passion alone their chosen metier's lack of relevance as a moral or practical force.

In truth, however, such doubts arose almost as soon as the cult itself. Confidence in industrial design as a progressive undertaking was never much more than a glitch, given brief credibility by modernist architects' efforts in the 1920s and 1930s to harness mass-production to furnish their housing estates and institutions. In seeking qualities of hygiene, lightness, functionality, affordability and technological innovation, they spurned ornament for what was felt to be a rational, honest aesthetic, appropriate to modern buildings and lifestyles.

The tension between ethical ambitions and corporate realities rapidly became evident

After the second world war, both those qualities and that aesthetic were widely adopted as state-sanctioned objectives. Designers were cast as heroic figures with the power to reconceive materials, products and lives, integral to rebuilding shattered economies and developing welfare states. Yet the tension between ethical ambitions and corporate realities rapidly became evident, culminating in such heated confrontations as the occupation and abandonment of the 1968 Milan Triennale, and the farcical final day at Aspen's 1970 International Design Conference.

This dwindling of postwar optimism is encapsulated by the short-lived "golden age of design" in Finland. Bent-wood furniture designed by architects Alvar and Aino Aalto in the 1930s had already established the newly independent country's reputation for a humane modernism, incorporating Nordic ideals of "beauty for all" and "design for everyday life".

But it was the Milan Triennales of 1951 and 1954 that elevated Finland to the status of poster child for industrial design, as both aesthetic proposition and transformative force, credited for its phoenix-like recovery from wartime destruction. Curated by Tapio Wirkkala, the displays were curiously packed with products that were far from everyday or egalitarian, including his own highly crafted plywood sculptures and limited-edition art glass, inspired more by nature than rational form.

This failure to fulfil democratic ambitions was a constant of the golden age. Wirkkala had been trained as an ornamental sculptor at Helsinki's traditional Central School of Arts & Crafts in the 1930s. Yet, tellingly, on the back of this Milan success he became the go-to guy as Finland's relatively low-tech industries sought to harness modernist design to update product ranges and grow export markets, usually involving premium price tags. He was soon commissioned to create light bulbs and switches, televisions, toilet seats, shampoo and ketchup bottles, bank notes, coffee cups, airline cutlery, vodka bottles – you name it – and appointed artistic director at the Central School, hastily renamed the Institute of Industrial Arts.

But despite design's prominence in Finland's postwar efforts to build institutions, infrastructure and industries on Western models, its standing as a commercial and social panacea became increasingly shaky. Concerted top-down efforts to propagate modernist "good taste" among the wider populace were only partially effective.

Designers such as Wirkkala, Timo Sarpaneva and Ilmari Tapiovaara achieved celebrity status, but domestic markets for decorative products remained robust, with folk and art nouveau trends in full swing by the late 1960s, echoing historicist revivals across Europe. Cheaply produced but genuinely affordable retro furniture outsold modernist products, and found export markets in the Soviet Union.

Despite its moral sheen, modernism's key role was to facilitate capitalism by fetishising style

It became clear that named designers added limited value to everyday items, in functional or commercial terms. "Finnish design" might attract orders from high-end consumers, posh restaurants or showcase embassies, but it was not enough to protect mass industries from economic slowdown, international competition and reduced tariffs, leading flagship companies to cut ranges, output and staff in the 1970s.

Paralleling the clashes in Milan and Aspen, education was in turmoil. A younger cohort (ironically now boasting industrial training but frozen out of practice by a superfluity of ageing stars) criticised design's consumerism, sexism, exclusivity, and negative social and environmental impacts.

Curriculums shifted to equality, ecology and safety, in a manner unlikely to appeal to industry or government. The unrest came from a place of disillusionment – a realisation that, despite its moral sheen, modernism's key role was to facilitate capitalism by fetishising style and servicing an elite for profit.

As the golden age ebbed, Finnish designers employed pop, plastic and postmodernism to critique design's aesthetic, intellectual, practical or spiritual shortcomings, but their efforts merely hastened fragmentation. As elsewhere, big-name designers worked with luxury brands to style fashionable novelties for capital-owning classes, a process turbocharged by the 1980s economic boom.

Others engaged in anonymous backroom activity for big corporations, often providing cladding for consumer and industrial goods conceived and given shape by engineering and technology. Still others retreated to smaller-scale craft production, or to an introverted and angry academia, positing design as a potent critical tool, yet speaking to an elect audience, serving more to further design's insularity than to remedy its problems.

Which is largely, as Heathcote points out, where we are today.

Design should be proud of playing a contributory role in multidisciplinary teams

In truth, industrial design should have dropped its messianic claims long ago. The association with welfare states and social reform was rapidly pushed aside by corporations and profit in the postwar years.

Maintaining that illusory relationship today bolsters design as a consumerist tool, a convenient puppet for marketing unnecessary products. It flatters customers that their fashion choices are of critical importance to society, whether "driving change" or "experimenting with new ways of living". And it also props up a fragile academic ecosystem, salving its conscience by overblown rhetoric and underwhelming spectacle in sponsored environments, reaching few and changing little in practice or essence.

Honesty would involve accepting the reality of being a service industry, all too often enmeshed in and compromised by capitalism – just like the rest of us – and similarly lacking in agency.

However, design should be proud of playing a contributory role in multidisciplinary teams, say in healthcare or renewable energy, rather than demanding top billing. And it should also recognise its role as an applied art, in continuity and sympathy with predecessors that have reflected and shaped our artistic and intellectual life for centuries, responsible for many of our most enduring cultural creations, packing our houses, museums, libraries, and imaginations.

Ultimately, modernist design ended up as a decorative proposition, despite consistently portraying its (undeniably attractive) aesthetic as a byproduct of some greater ethical undertaking. It is specious to pretend that Braun's monochrome audio equipment from the 1960s exists on a different moral or functional plain from JVC's exuberant boomboxes a decade or so later, or that an Arne Jacobsen soup spoon is any better than a Victorian one.

All should be cherished for communicating beauty and joy, while doing their job. If those admirable qualities are insufficient in your quest to change the world, then transfer to technology, engineering, science or, better still, politics. Place your abilities at the service of activities that are impacting on society and the planet urgently and immediately, in ways that decades of prototypical mushroom seating or inventive spoons never will.

John Jervis is a writer, editor, project manager and ghost writer who has written for Icon, Frame, RIBA Journal, Apollo, ArtAsiaPacific, Thames & Hudson, ACC, WePresent, Laurence King and others. His first book, 50 Design Ideas You Really Need to Know, was published in 2024.

The photo is courtesy of the Aalto University Archives.

Performance Review

This article is part of Dezeen's Performance Review series interrogating the problems plaguing architecture and design, from difficult working conditions to ethical dilemmas.

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