Histories of Design and the Environment

Session Submission Type: Panel

Abstract

In 1976, the industrial designer Dieter Rams published his ten principles of good design. Good design, according to Rams, should be environmentally-friendly, aesthetic, unobtrusive, and honest. Rams is famous for these principles, as well as mass-produced versions of his furniture, shelving, appliances, and stereo equipment (all of which have contributed to the waste stream in industrial society over the past half-century).

Rams’s history represents the complex historical relationship between designers and the environment. As industrial designers, fashion designers, and architects use Rams’s principles as foundations of sustainable design strategies, they have produced intended and unintended changes to the air, land, and water where their designs are sited, rely on extraction of raw materials, consume resources, and disrupt ecosystems. Computers for sale in Chicago’s Michigan Avenue Apple Store have environmental consequences in the nations where they are assembled, where their materials are mined, and where they are disposed. The extent of those consequences relates to decisions in the design of the product and of the systems to produce the product.

This panel uses contributions from design historians and environmental historians to explore aspects of the complicated relationship between design and the environment. Through investigations of how design history discourse relates to the environment, and case studies on industrial design, development of clothing, and the architectural design of Fermilab, we will address the role of designers as agents in environmental history. Doing so, we argue, enriches the conference’s discussion of production of and trade in commodities, and brings historical inquiry to present-day assumptions about sustainable design strategies.

Sub Unit

• ASEH Annual Conference

Individual Presentations

• Appetite for Construction: Design History as Environmental History - Kjetil Fallan, University of Oslo, Norway

• What Grows in the Greenhouse? Herman Miller and Design for the Environment, 1942-2017 - Carl A. Zimring, Pratt Institute

• Layering for the Cold with the M-1943 Field Jacket: How American Military Studies of Climates and Bodies Shaped Popular Style - Rachel S Gross, University of Wisconsin-Madison

• Designing a national laboratory: Fermilab’s grand statement - Eun-Joo Ahn, University of California-Santa Barbara

Chair

• Adam Rome, State University of New York at Buffalo

Commentator

• Steven Corey, Columbia College