The Industrial Design Reader
Edited by Carma Gorman. New York: Allworth Press, 2003. 244 pp. Softbound, $19.95. ISBN 1-58115-310-4.

Designing for People
By Henry S. Dreyfuss. New York: Allworth Press, 2003. 286 pp. Softbound, $21.95. ISBN 1-58115-312-0.

Industrial Strength Design: How Brooks Stevens Shaped Your World
By Glenn Adamson. Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2003. 220 pp. Clothbound, $45.00. ISBN 0-262-0127-3.

Reviewed by Roy R. Behrens, Department of Art, University of Northern Iowa, Cedar Falls, IA 50614-0362, U.S.A.

ballast@netins.net.

These welcome, useful books came out at about the same time, and it may be of value and interest to look at all three together. Their shared subject is Modern-era industrial design, a profession that grew out of the Industrial Revolution and the often insidious marriage between machine manufacture and Capitalism. Like most categories, its parameters are not always obvious, so that, while we typically think of industrial design as product development (appliances, vehicles, tools), it also often overlaps with interior design (such as furniture design), and with technological and mechanical invention. Industrial design has a long history, but one commonly hears that its halcyon days (at least in the U.S.) began in the 1930s, and resulted from the efforts of a small number of pioneering designers, most notably Walter Dorwin Teague, Raymond Loewy, Norman Bel Geddes, Donald Deskey, Harold Van Doren and Henry Dreyfuss; and, from the following generation, a brusque but prolific practitioner named Brooks Stevens. Throughout their careers, each of these men tried to deal in their own way with the question of what should be emphasized in the design process. Is money-making more important than honesty?—Or functional efficiency?—Or sturdy, enduring construction?—Or safety? One of the earliest arguments was associated with the use of aerodynamic surfaces on vehicles, increasing their efficiency because they were less resistant to air or to water. But when it was determined that such "streamlined" surfaces dramatically increased the sales of any product, even immobile objects like toasters, radios and pencil sharpeners were designed to look as if they flew like rocket ships.

Carma Gorman's Industrial Design Reader is a collection of sixty-two brief and readable texts about industrial design that begins in 1852 (with an essay about the Crystal Palace) and ends in 1999 (with a warning from Donald Norman about the dangers of discounting function in favor of appearance). In her preface, Gorman explains that she put this book together because she could not find a comparable text for a course that she was teaching on the history of industrial design. The result is a wonderfully varied account of the social evolution not just of industrial design, but of a larger, more inclusive field that includes graphic, interior and architectural design. I thought it was also of value to find that she has assembled not only excerpts from the works of prominent designers and design critics (e.g., Christopher Dresser, Adolf Loos, Robert Venturi, Victor Papanek, and dozens of others) but also influential texts by politicians, social activists, and other non-designers (e.g., Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, Richard Nixon, and Ralph Nader, even the Americans with Disabilities Act). If anything, in light of the range of its contents, the book's title (implying that it is restricted to industrial design) is misleading, as it could serve as an excellent resource for any course on design history.

One of the readings in Gorman's anthology is an illustrated excerpt from a famous book by Henry Dreyfuss (1904-72) on anthropometrics and ergonomics called Designing for People. First published in 1955, then revised and reissued in 1967, it has now been issued again, this time in a format that echoes the look of the original edition. It is enriched by the author's fluid cartoons (in brown ink) in the margins, his diagrams of the measurements of the average man and woman (called Joe and Josephine), and vintage photographs of the countless industrial products he made (e.g., his John Deere tractors, the standard black desk telephone, a Hoover upright vacuum cleaner, and an RCA television). It is of particular interest to look at his predictions about technology in the first edition, in a section called "An Appraisal," as compared with his subsequent (greatly revised) reappraisal in the second edition.

If Dreyfuss's attitude toward design was based on "designing for people," that of an outspoken designer named Brooks Stevens (1911-95) was regarded as almost the inverse. In 1944, Stevens was invited to be a charter member of the Society of Industrial Designers, but unlike his fellow big-leaguers, he chose to live throughout his life in his hometown of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. In part perhaps because of that, his name was never a household word, but as amply documented in Industrial Strength Design (based on research material in the Brooks Stevens Archives at the Milwaukee Art Museum), many of the things he made were ubiquitous in American homes, and at least one of his phrases ("planned obsolescence") was widely adopted and argued about. Indeed, with the disclosure of that concept in 1957 by Vance Packard's The Hidden Persuaders (a best-selling expose of American advertising), Stevens was thereafter typecast as "the crown prince of obsolescence" and "the enfant terrible of industrial design"—an infamy, as this book claims, that "he obviously enjoyed." But assessed for his resourcefulness, his inventions were many and major: He developed the steam iron, the snowmobile, the outboard motor, and the electric clothes drier. He designed the 1940 Packard, the 1950 Harley-Davidson motorcycle, the 1959 Lawn-Boy power lawn mower, and the 1980 AMC Cherokee. On the other hand, it was Stevens who also developed the decadent Excalibur (a tacky roadster for the rich), and the Oscar Meyer Wienermobile (1958), in which a wiener-shaped cockpit was nestled in the cleavage of the bun-shaped chassis of a car. Not without a sense of humor (however acerbic), Stevens's favorite comment on that infamous project was that "there's nothing more aerodynamic than a wiener."

(Reprinted by permission from Ballast Quarterly Review.)