Why is design "Made in the USSR" invisible in design history? Abstract

Why is design "Made in the USSR"
invisible in design history?
Margareta Tillberg
School of Design, Linnaeus University, Växjö, Sweden
[email protected]
Abstract
The invitation text to this conference asks whether the "core activities" of design and designing
have changed over time. But is there even any common platform shared by design historians
from where such a question can be asked? In order to find out this out, we need to look closer at
what constitutes that very canon of design history.
This presentation will explore why design made in the USSR has hitherto been little visible in the
literature of design history. Is the exclusion of design made in the Eastern Bloc from the design
history canon due to a belief that little existed apart from inept copies made from blueprints of
western originals, thus not interesting enough to analyse? Or is the reason for the due to a
concept that design did not play an important role in the Soviet Union?
Founded in Moscow in 1962, VNIITE, the Russian abbreviation for the All-Union Scientific
Research Institute for Technical Aesthetics, quickly expanded to include thousands of
collaborators into what became the biggest institute for industrial design worldwide, and
promoted a new attitude towards industrial production. Thus with design then obviously having
implications in the Soviet Union, - what tools would be required to make this design as it was
developed in the USSR, visible on its own terms? And could it even be so that there is something
for us to be learned from the design experience from behind the iron curtain?
KEYWORDS: design history canon, Soviet Union
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Introduction
The invitation text to this conference asks whether the "core activities" of design and designing
have changed over time. But is there even any common platform shared by design historians
from where such a question can be asked?
For this presentation I will explore why design made in the USSR has hitherto been invisible in
the literature of design history. Is the exclusion of design made in the Eastern Bloc from the
design history canon due to a belief that nothing existed apart from embarrassingly inept copies
made from stolen blueprints or reversed engineering of western originals, thus not interesting
enough to analyse? Or licence-made technology such as Lada by Fiat, or ingenious ad hoc
solutions for everyday life on a do-it-yourself basis? Or is it because design from the USSR is
considered to be no more than some isolated experiments by the remote avant-garde of the
1910s-1920s who were more concerned with the abstract principals of "industrialness" than the
demands from industry? Or is the reason for the exclusion from design literature due to a
concept that design did not play an important role in the Soviet Union?
In my research I have found that design did play a crucial role in the Soviet Union. Actually, the
biggest research institute for design worldwide was founded in Moscow in 1962. It organised
regular national and international exhibitions, produced its own monthly journal Tekhnicheskaia
estetika with a circulation of more than 20,000, and organised the ICSID world congress in 1975.
Thus with design then obviously having implications in the Soviet Union, is the reason for the
exclusion rather that the tools most commonly used to describe design miss the point of making
design visible as it was developed in the USSR? This is what I will explore in this paper.
The model used from the inception of design history as an academic discipline in the UK and US
in the 1970s made design visible only in the affluent countries in Western Europe, North
America, and the Far East. This model has primarily been interested in commercial production
(which includes icons of artifacts and mass-produced goods) in an expansive market situation. I
see this model as a narrative of exclusion where only wealthy countries with a lifestyle focused on
consumption can participate. Design strategies which deviate from this model are seen as
"lacking design", as described by Lisa Banu in her article "Defining the Design Deficit in
Bangladesh", Journal of Design History (2009). Banu shows how the non-profit organisation Design
without Borders, with its aim of making use of design skills in humanitarian aid, denied the local
jute production in their 2003 report because, she argues, its the local efforts did not conform to
what she terms the "normative design history".1
Although the USSR, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, during its existence between 19181991 was by far the largest nation in the world, twice the size of China, and a population of
1
Lisa S. Banu. "Defining the Design Deficit in Bangladesh." Journal of Design History vol. 22
(2009): 309-323.
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almost 300 million, its cultural identity and local efforts has also hitherto been dismissed as a
design strategy. Today there is a growing literature from various fields of study that present cases
of great interest for the design historian from the countries behind the Iron Curtain (which
include the states that were obliged to accept the Soviet system after 1945). As I argue, these
studies have not really revised the premises for the "normative design history".
By contrasting some axioms that are taken for granted in design history writing with some
concrete cases from the Soviet everyday, this paper explores the exclusion of design made in the
USSR from the literature.
With its motto “Workers of the world, unite!” the Soviet Union built a society during its roughly
70 years of existence that so differed from the Western capitalist model that even the most basic
notions of design do not apply. The Soviet Union made its own rules. Not even the word
"design" is directly translatable as Russian design terminology is quite different from the English
meaning. The term for designer is translated as “artist constructor” bearing connotations to the
avant-garde in the art and architecture of the 1920s and the term technicheskaia estetika, Russian for
'industrial design', was introduced in 1954 by the Czech design theorist and graphic designer
Peter Tuchny, as the “scientific theory of artist construction developed in the socialist
countries”.2
For some time I have studied a design institute called VNIITE, the Russian abbreviation for the
All-Union Scientific Research Institute for Technical Aesthetics. Founded in Moscow in 1962,
VNIITE quickly expanded to include thousands of collaborators into what became the biggest
institute for industrial design worldwide. For some decades VNIITE had branches all over the
Soviet Union, in addition to councils for design at factories and enterprises, that made proposals
and redesigns for the reorganisation of everything from pocket-knives to entire industrial
branches.
In this presentation, rather than showing examples of what VNIITE produced, I want to explore
some of the basic premises of how design history is usually written and what criteria tend to be
chosen for case studies. I will examine some axioms which render design made in the USSR
invisible, and give examples of the different directions associations can take, depending on the
context. And no matter how self-evident these axioms seem to be for "us", I think it is important
to spell out these preconceptions, because they govern how we think about design and what we
are able to see. Finally I will give some examples of recent writings on design history presenting
case studies from behind the Iron Curtain, and discuss them against the background I have
presented.
Larisa Zhadova, “O terminologii i poniatiakh v sfere promyshlennogo iskusstva”. (“On
terminology and concepts in the sphere of industrial arts”), Tekhnicheskaia estetika 1964/7.
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Axiom 1: Design is what makes sales curves point
upwards.
The literature on design uses capitalism as the intrinsic model for its investigations. The success
story of the application of design means increased sales curves and the promotion of rivalling
moneymaking companies on a competitive market. For design to have any impact it needs
backing up. And it needs a commissioner or client. As we all know, visualising the future and
executive decisions for real change take place at board meetings. Firms like Apple, Sony and
Volkswagen prove this case.
After World War II, USSR Inc. faced a severe crisis. As it learned that other countries like
Germany and Japan had managed to avoid negative reputations of being "cheap and bad" by
applying design, the Soviets now wanted to do the same.
The best way to understand the complex Soviet system from a design perspective is in terms of a
gigantic firm. Economics historian Philip Hanson calls this a country-wide and all-embracing
corporation USSR Inc. 3 USSR Inc. was officially called "socialist" and "planned". Socialist meant
that private enterprise was prohibited, and almost all employment was state-run and centrally
controlled. All natural resources were state property.4 The fact that the economy was planned
meant that every organisation, be it for transportation, research, education, industrial enterprise
or construction, was governed by instructions that were part of one single centralised national
plan.5 Ultimately, the whole country was controlled by the Communist Party, the only party
allowed. The Politburo as the governing top, is comparable to a board of directors in a private
company. With their enormous power, the leaders (most famously Lenin, Stalin, Khruschev, and
Gorbachev as the last Soviet leader; Putin is only leader of Russia), can be almost be described as
owners of this 'company' which constituted the entire Soviet Union.
Although comparable to a company, the USSR 'corporate culture' differed in many ways from its
capitalist counterparts. First of all, the profits in the planning system did not flow in the same
way as in the capitalist system and secondly, the state-governed planning system in the Soviet
Union involved itself in much more of its citizens’ lives than did the liberal economies. In this
way one of the systems will fall short when directly compared.
Philip Hanson. The Rise and Fall of the Soviet Economy. An Economic History of the USSR from
1945 (London, New York, Toronto: 2003).
3
Private property was household content, houses (mostly in the countryside or city outskirts;
urban housing generally belonged to the state), cars, and savings in the state owned banks.
4
For a more detailed acount on the Soviet planning system in connection with design, see
Margareta Tillberg. "Collaborative Design: The Electric Industry in Soviet Russia 1973–79." In
Focused. Swiss Design Network (SDN), (Bern: 2008): 233-253.
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Axiom 2: Design strives for welfare which is
measured by individually consumed, privately
owned, artifacts.
The prime example is the car as it on such a massive scale moves mass-production forward.
Societies have been organized around it. City-planning and leisure time -- entire lives circle
around the car which demands infrastructure in the form of motorways, petrol stations and
motels, amongst other things.
The problem with this assumption is that it emanates from a model where private consumption
is the ideal. In this way the car has become the fetish per se in design history. Following this,
when we measure welfare by the number of cars per capita, we see where the USSR falls short in
comparison with the United States. In 1977, only 21 of every 1,000 Soviet residents owned a car,
and the price of the little family car Lada-2101 from 1973 was equivalent to three and a half times
the annual wage of the average Soviet worker.6
Seen from another angle, this militant pro-car attitude produces a lack of other alternatives. The
focus on the private car does for example not encourage public transportation, car-pools and
eventually leads to a lack of space for other vehicles like bicycles and pedestrians. But if we look
at the different ideologies and local cultures of the systems, the picture changes. Early Soviet
society actually endeavoured to become a society "without possessions"7, which tried to move
away from the Marxist-criticised fetichism for objects and where the planning of goods should be
manufactured based on need. Women’s strength should not be exploited in the nuclear family’s
kitchen but utlilised and paid for in public canteens, and collective transport was given priority
over the individual car.
The Soviet leader Nikita Khruschev (1954-64) was actually against private ownership of cars. As
the chief organiser of the construction of the Moscow subway-system in the 1930s, he preferred
to expand the public transportation system, and to organise a system for rental cars in a society
Lewis H. Siegelbaum. Cars for Comrades. The Life of the Soviet Automobile (Ithaca & London:
2008): 239-240.
6
See Christina Kiaer's interesting study Imagine No Possessions. The Socialist Objects of Russian
Constructivism (Cambridge Massachusetts: 2005).
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where the communal rather than the private household was the ideal. Both work and leisure
should be carried out on a collective level with as few privately owned possessions as possible.
Nikolai Miliutin, the chairman of the government commission for the construction of new cities,
presented a vision for socialism in 1930, which included a communal commitment, gender
equality (women should no longer be "household slaves"), collective education of the children,
and public health.8 Many of these ideas were immediately put into practice. Already by 1935, 1.6
million people (more than half of Leningrad’s population) ate ready-made dishes daily that had
been cooked in the 20 'kitchen factories' and served in cafés and canteens in Leningrad (St.
Petersburg)9.
Axiom 3: Design progress materialises with new
objects and innovations.
Design progress, defined as novelty and innovation, is what makes a product unique and that is
what the media, including the design canon, registers. This axiom is based in the fact that the
object is something we can see and therefore show as a picture in a book. The new object is
easier to describe as an example than a system, and so occupies more space in general design
overviews. Novelty is of course what distinguishes one artifact visibly from another, so when I
teach the basic course in design history, I use pictures of objects as markers to signify various
movements, be it the Valentine typewriter for Italian Bel Design, or Baby Björn baby-carrier for
the gender-conscious welfare system in Scandinavia. I use this technique to give an image to a
whole epoch, which hopefully does not end here.
In the Soviet Union, however, where big changes were to be quickly fixed, the design schools
taught the subject "analogue construction", which meant learning by the method of scale
modeling from examples of Western products. This method can be compared to those of the
traditional art academies, where it was previously a normal process to visit the major museums
and learn from copying works by the great masters. The problem in art is when the scale of the
copies become identical with the original, because then it is forgery, and in technology and design
when the model is directly transferred to be implemented in industrial production, then the
learning process is rather to be described as industrial espionage.
N.A. Miliutin. Sotsgorod: Problema stroitel'stva sotsialisticheskikh gorodov. Moscow-Leningrad
1930. English translation as Sotsgorod: The Problem of Building Socialist Cities. MIT Press 1975
8
Jukka Gronow. Caviar with champagne : common luxury and the ideals of the good life in Stalin's
Russia (Oxford: 2003). Public canteens were a privilege: out of 1,631 canteens only 86 were
open to the public, others were connected to a workplace, a school, or such.
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The statement "Virtually all design must be regarded as re-design", taken from the invitation text
to this conference stream, is thus only partly true. The successive improvements made to artifacts
to increase their functionality is one immediate association to this statement. New functional
materials, new clever solutions, the 'natural' evolutionary course is a development from
„primitive“ to „sophisticated“, and most often this 'evolution' leaves behind a primitive past for a
more sophisticated future. But there is a limit to what "we" accept as re-design, and not copying,
stealing and industrial espionage, and this is something which needs to be addressed more in
detail, if our concern is design from the USSR.
Axiom 4: Military research and production
furthers the development of design.
Many historical cases show that the defence industry served as a resource for innovation from
which design for civilian purposes has profited immensely. Military research resulting in radar,
automated missiles and artificial intelligence had implications for what eventually became the
personal computer. Another example is designer couple Ray and Charles Eames and their hightech chairs made of new materials developed for the U.S. navy during World War II such as
moulded plywood and highly durable plastics. A widespread notion in design studies is therefore
- and rightly so - that research and development within the defence industry is productive also for
the development of design. Also in the Soviet Union, chairs and other consumer goods were
made as by-products in the production plants, but here the similarities with the US end.
If the Eameses chairs became highly desired icons of modernism, representing desirable and
cool, in the Soviet Union, by contrast, furniture and other consumer goods produced by the
military-industrial complex (where the greater part of research for developing new materials and
technologies was done) were so disliked that the Russian word for consumer goods - Shirpotreb –
tovary shirokogo potrebleniia, the term a typical Soviet pot-pourri of abbreviations, literally “goods for
broad consumption" -- gradually became a swearword. Forced upon the factory directors from
above, mostly leftover materials and machines not allotted for "more important purposes" were
used for consumer goods for civilians that were not prioritised.
In the USSR most factories had two faces. In Udmurtia, the main site for Kalashnikovproduction, the Votkinsky Machine Building Factory mainly produced heavy guns, anti-aircraft
guns and even nuclear missiles, but also "Votkinskaya", the best known Soviet stroller for babies.
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The Rubin and Temp factories in Moscow, whose main products were defence industry
electronics, produced inferior-quality television sets for the people. Amazingly, one out of five
TV-sets had to be repaired even before it was sold!10 Not only were many of the products not
even usable, they were extremely cost- and material intensive to produce. To put it bluntly, Soviet
production in many cases meant destruction of material resources. Reminding us that these
realities concerned people’s lives, their ingenuity to survive in the system is worth all admiration.
The culture of shopping and queuing for shortage goods was so sophisticated that it deserves a
separate study.
Wrapping up:
I began this presentation by asking whether design historians share any common understanding
of what the "core activities" of what we study could be. I structured my presentation around four
basic axioms implied in design studies, elaborated from what Lisa S. Banu called the "normative
design history" and illustrated them with concrete examples from the Soviet Union. My aim with
this method was to reveal some problems which cannot be solved if a market-driven system is
taken for granted.
Recently, there has been a rapid expansion of publications on the former Soviet Bloc of interest
for design history. To mention only a few, the catalogue exhibition Cold War Modern: Design 1945–
1970 shown at the V & A in London in 2008, is one spectacular example.11 The Cold War battle
over "alternative utopia"—consumerism vs. Communism—was the point of departure for the
curators, who thus continue the traditional reception of the Russian avant-garde, whose projects
have largely been dismissed as utopian. The same applies to the limitation of including only what
was exhibited but not produced, which is Greg Costello's method in his Cold War on the Home
Front: The Soft Power of Midcentury Design (2010), in spite of the relatively well-known fact that much
of the furniture for the west was produced in Hellerau outside Dresden. The "utopia"-model
which coincides with the method of only describing exhibitions, is merely a blackboxing of
problems. This method to avoid relevant information has also resulted in grave
misinterpretations of the incremented Russian avant-garde, despite abundant literature on the
subject. Showing fantastic paper projects and unique one-piece furniture is visually effective and
simultaneously a clever way to disregard the material culture, which more often than not was
tedious and difficult. In few countries has the disparity between the expressed utopian ideal and
the muddling, everyday actualisation of that ideal been as vast as in the Soviet Union. This means
10
Ia. Orlov. "Garantii, kotorye ne garantiruiut." Tekhnicheskaia estetika 1964/ 4.
Crowley, David & Pavitt, Jane, eds.. Cold War Modern. Design 1945-1970. London: V & A
Publishing, 2008.
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that quite a big chunk of complexity is omitted. The complications of the materialised world are
discussed in the edited MIT-volume Cold War Kitchen, by Ruth Oldenziel and Karin Zachmann
(2009), with its focus on the kitchen in everyday culture from both sides of the Cold War border.
Although material culture aspects are considered here, there was no mention of shirpotreb, or any
other aspects of peculiar consumption patterns in the Soviet Bloc, nor was the one-family private
kitchen questioned as the anomaly it actually was to the ideals that were current in the Soviet
Union at that time. These studies are no doubt well-written and inspiring. However, I want to
point out some of the broader difficulties we historians of design face, when we are to come to
terms with the vast material necessary to make our case, not to mention the “mental facts”.12 Not
immediately visible and tangible, the “mentefacts” are nevertheless instrumental for how our
material world is organized and therefore also involve design, which I have tried to show through
my examples.
Kjetil Fallan states in his recent book Design history. Understanding theory and method (2010)13 that
design history of today is "no longer primarily a history of objects and their designers" but more
a history of what "constitutes the relationship among things, people and ideas." No doubt, this is
a coveted ideal, albeit a difficult one. If we are to be able to use historical precedence as
instrument and source, we need language skills, and some insight into how historical research is
to be carried out. The design historian is additionally dependent on physical material and
documentation, so accessibility is key. It is hardly surprising that anything which comes close to
the defence industry is classified; that is the same all over the world. But when it comes to the
Soviet Union, and Russia (where most industrial production was placed) such a large part of the
industrial production was serving the military-industrial complex that it turns into a serious
problem for the design historian.14
Phenomena directly influencing design studies are spread all over society, therefore we design
historians need to come to terms with, and glean from, many fields of inquiry. We need insight
The difficulty of not only the material artifacts being “designed”, but also the "mentefacts"
was brought up by John Albert Walker in his classic Design History and the History of Design
(London: 1989). Walker does not mention Norbert Elias when promoting this concept, but is
possibly drawing from him. See Norbert Elias Über den Prozess der Zivilisation. Soziogenetische
und psychogenetische Untersuchungen (Frankfurt am Main: 1939/1978).
12
13
Kjetil Fallan, Design history. Understanding theory and method. Oxford: Berg 2010: viii.
The countries of the former Soviet Bloc which are now members of the EU (such as East
Germany, Poland and Estonia) and even of the intergovernmental military alliance NATO
(North Atlantic Treaty Organization) which used to be the enemy on the other side of the Iron
Curtain during the Cold War, have been forced to go through periods of coming to terms
with the past in order to become accepted as members of these organisations, a process which
is not really taking place in Russia to this day.
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into economics, technology and social life, aspects that together constitute a perspective of a
culture at large. And not only that: we need to bridge the gap between the "two cultures" of
natural and humanist sciences, defined by the well-known C. P. Snow more than 50 years ago.
This is still a major challenge, a challenge where design history is one of the nodes. But as long as
art historians stick to art and architecture, and economists limit themselves to history without
culture and techology-historians stick to the inventions, the burden on the single design historian
will be very heavy, as we are dependent on a multitude of perspectives. Although all these fields
of inquiry are in a process of transformation, there is still a long way to go.
In order to render visible what design meant in the Soviet Union, it will simply not suffice to add
yet another object—be it a car, a kitchen or an electrical device. That would only prove the
inferiority of the system by showing the bleak copies - or the shortage of even those. It would
reveal that two coats of exactly the same make and fabric would sit next to each other in the
crammed underground. Facts like these make us shudder in horror and prove the
unattractiveness of the Soviet system (I do not dispute that the system was ineffective, in many
ways it surely was).
The ethnocentrism of the normative design history does not make the dynamics of the Soviet
period visible, as shown by my examples, nor will the assumption, implied in the norm, that we
are dealing with a democratic society.
The Soviet Union was an entirely different society and therefore requires different tools to make
its design visible. It was not a market economy where the means of payment was money, instead
using a complex networking of priviliges and of informal exchange.15 A military dictatorship
unwilling to share its riches with the everyday consumer had the practical consequences that
when the Berlin Wall came down, the system disappeared with few defendants. Nevertheless,
only if we are prepared to make local strategies tangible and visible on their own terms, only
when cultural identities are considered beyond the norm, only then will it be possible to open up
for an impartial discussion and a non-patronising understanding of cultures strategies alternative
to normative design history. Moreover:
Could there, despite these uncontested memories witnessing how unalluring it was, and despite
the failure resulting in the dissolution of the Soviet bloc with the opening of the Berlin Wall in
November 1989, could there despite all these negative traits be something to be learned for
design practice and research today from the experience behind the Iron Curtain? But where to
start, and what should we be looking for if not for individual artifacts? After all, our concern is
material culture, so we need concrete wares. But how and where to find these objects of design?
Alena V. Ledeneva. Russia's Economy of Favours. Blat, Networking and Informal Exchange
(Cambridge, UK: 1998).
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Two decades ago, the economic system in the Soviet Bloc ceased to exist. Very rapidly it seems
to fade away and quickly disappear from our collective memory. It is not difficult to understand
why. With its grey and gloomy appearance, it simply did not seem sexy enough to deserve any
attention: so dull in contrast to its more glamorous capitalist consumerist counterparts.
Nevertheless, one of my objectives was wanting to understand what lay behind this different
world which, so loudly and insistently eloquent, promised welfare for its people without being
able to provide even the basics. And then I found this institute, VNIITE, which actually seemed
to try to solve many of these problems in a more or less decent way.
In my forthcoming book I will present some cases of design "Made in the USSR" within its
unique context of a socialist planning system. The great challenge here was to render Soviet
design visible on its own terms. In my research I found that design did play a crucial role in the
Soviet Union. But only if design is defined outside the market model. The "territory of design"
which Clive Dilnot refers to in his article "Some Futures for Design History", Journal for Design
History (2009), is a valuable approach since it opens up tightly bound knots of essentialist
definitions of terminology, to instead ponder over "roads not taken" in addition to what was
"actualized".16
In the USSR there were as many roads not taken as there were alternative routes taken under
circumstances which are unusual in hitherto described design practice.
The re-design and its various contexts can, as I see it, produce numerous interesting studies as to
conditions of production and consumption which have not yet found their way into design
history. The what is what the territory of design as presented by Dilnot is about, which I think
urgently needs to be adduced with the how.
Human dignity as an important quality marker to what constitutes design in circumstances of
deprivation and material poverty is my focus. The aspect of human dignity and human rights
would expand the territory of design to include various aspects of material limitations, be it
solutions of an ingenious ad-hoc do-it-yourself type, and/or designs that are neither new or
innovative, but perhaps even copied and materialised in an inferior way than the original, and
used in a different way. Design defines the interfaces, in a wider sense meaning everything from
the man-machine to human interaction in society at large, that define human welfare, if a
conscious design approach is taken. Design to improve the working conditions for miners and
electricians in Siberia is such a case, office workers in the state ministries and party apparatus
another, not to forget the outlay of classrooms for school children, all with the right to claim
respect and better conditions.
Clive Dilnot. "Some Futures for Design History." Journal of Design History vol. 22/4 (2009):
377-394.
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VNIITE was founded to "invent new design methods": How did it succeed? Finding itself in the
dilemma of the poor country's hunger for material welfare, and a definite agenda to stick to
socialist ideals, the Soviet Union found itself with a rapidly increasing population with an
enormous hunger for consumer goods and a more comfortable life. Design was the magic wand
that was to whisk away the country’s crisis. The institute had to be very creative to solve the
challenge of making consumer goods available in less than two decades, for hundreds of millions
of people, suffering a constant shortage of even the very basics, and a production machine largely
serving the military-industrial complex. So what did VNIITE, as a research institute for design,
do? What methods did it “invent”? When the means are limited, one sticks to the utmost
important. And a realistically pragmatic outlook. The vehicle and simultaneously the obstacle
VNIITE had in order to solve this enormous task was the centralized planning system and a oneparty governed ideology. By reducing necessity to human dignity, the outlook of VNIITE was
that of sustainability. I therefore think we actually do have something to learn from design made
in the USSR.
History is not a static science. The questions I as a historian pose to our past today are different
from those posed yesterday. Accumulative capitalism has so far been the global winner, but now
these times are also changing. Chasing innovations and speeding up production, the goal of a
capitalist economic system is to increase production each year and to have customers come back
for more. A successful plastic of yesterday is a threat to the environment today. Are we back to
Ford and his car for the masses made for eternity as the more sustainable choice?
Successful design attaining quicker results is mostly carried out in collaboration groups. With the
synergy from different professions coming together, this could also be a fruitful path to take for
research within and about design. This is the only feasible path future studies in design history
can take, if results are to be achieved within a reasonable time-frame. Only in this way can design
and its history, which is its most valuable way to communicate as it describes its circumstances,
make a difference in the name of welfare and sustainability.
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