The Conran Directory of Design, 1985

From Aalto to Zanuso

I wasn’t much prepared to like this book. Dr Penny Sparke, the Royal College of Art’s design history guru and a specialist on Memphis and all movements Italian, says she was called in by the publishers to rewrite Stephen Bayley’s prose; nevertheless she has pulled her name off the finished product in disgust. Instead, the Editor has himself been edited by Stephen Adamson and Sarah Bevan, and no less than four pictures people, plus a design consultancy, are responsible for the look of the finished product. With hyperbole and ungrammatically mixed singulars and plurals evident in the dust-jacket blurb, all the omens suggest that a dog’s dinner lies in store.

But in fact the book is pretty good. The writing is crisp and unpretentious, from Sir Terence’s foreword and Bayley’s introduction, through the seven historical chapters, to the A-to-Z of designers and designs. There is a little repetition but few typographical errors. Some of the pictures are a bit too familiar but many are a pleasure, whether large (the paintings that preface each chapter) or small (the sensationalist cover to Vance Packard’s 1960 attack on planned obsolescence, The Wastemakers (1960). The blue, dropped-in quotations on design are fresh.

Altogether, the book gives intelligent newcomers to design a commendably succinct overview of the subject. Compared with the Penguin Dictionary of Design and Designers and Edward Lucie-Smith’s A History of Industrial Design (Phaidon), the Directory is modern in focus, which is a relief. Compared with the Macmillan’s £50 Dictionary of Contemporary Designers, all microdot print and monochrome photographs, Bayley and designers Mel Petersen Associates have turned up trumps. It is customary to savage books such as these for their subjective preferences and for the people or things they leave out. However, the directory says at the outset that it is biased and not comprehensive.

There is little here on interiors. Though the book is mainly about the industrial design of consumer products, interior designers and architects should still read it. The historical section is well organised: broadly, there are three chapters on England before the First World War, then one each on Germany in the 1920s, America in the 1930s, post-war Italy and 1980s Japan.

Nevertheless the book is open to two criticisms. First, the 20th century’s great shift from mass production to mass consumption is presented too baldly. It is true that in the post-war boom the West entered a situation in which design became a tool for expressing consumer lifestyle; true, too, that as a result design became part of the manufacturer’s marketing mix. But mass consumption has always had its limits in the Third World. Today it is also reaching its limits in the West.

Anyway, most consumer products operate in the context of female domestic work in suburban interiors. The directory ignores the fact that most ‘mass consumption’ is in face mass unpaid production by women, and the fact that domestic appliances have failed to cut down the hours spent in domestic work. A problem with the book is that although the entries for `Taylorism’ and `Fordism’ overlap, there is nothing on home economics, the largely unsuccessful application of these theories in the house.

The other problem with the book is of a piece with this. There is too little attention to capital goods, and little coverage of office equipment. The discussion on typewriters is weak on function, there is but one reference to computers, and Bürolandschaft does not receive a mention. These are the products and principles that facilitate `mass production’ today, and they need to be looked at in greater depth.

A good thing about the book is that London’s Central School of Art & Design is given an entry of its own: ‘it remains one of Britain’s leading industrial design schools’, the text reads, which is true and, given all the hype about RCA industrial designers, needs saying. Odd things about the book? Russian Constructivism is held to have ended in 1921; Memphis and Studio Alchymia to have begun in the late 1970s. Marx gains a one-line plaudit for having systematised political economy, whereas he thought he had destroyed it; on another page, Saussure wins a full plug for his contribution to linguistics – surely a discipline less relevant to design than economics?

On page 99, my late father, Lewis, is credited in a picture caption with designing the corporate identity of the Royal Bank of Scotland. He did no such thing. I suspect that this is the only serious error in the book.