Nick Bilton would need to look no further than his own backyard to find a blueprint for his recent post in the New York Times’ Bits blog, which claims that tech companies are increasingly leveraging design to gain a competitive edge. Bilton summarizes: “[T]he look and feel of the software is what allows a competitor to leap ahead of the competition.”
This perspective is markedly similar to that of a Times article published on January 3, 1950, entitled “Packaging Viewed as Vital to Sales.” “This emphasis on the selling effectiveness of packaging,” the unnamed author writes, “is expected to become more intensified during 1950 as new ideas and designs further transform containers into a potent competitive weapon.”
Perhaps design is to tech in 2013 as packaging was to manufacturing in 1950?
Bilton quotes designer Yves Béhar, who has noted the difference in executive and investor attitudes toward design. Meetings, Béhar says, have shifted toward discussion of user experience and interface as well as the look and feel of products, reflecting increased knowledge on the part of management. The author of the 1950 article also substantiates claims with an inside scoop from the postwar design world: “Edmont Arens, president of the Society of Industrial Designers, cited the increasing number of leading industrial designers who are called on for packaging counsel while solving major product and interior design problems, as one expression of management’s growing awareness of the importance of packaging as part of the sales plan.”
These similarities would seem to suggest a long and complex engagement between corporate America and design - though, perhaps more crucially, it reflects the development of a complex capitalist discourse positioning design at the juncture of aesthetics and technology. One might look back to American reactions to the London Exhibition of 1851 to locate the origins of this discourse; Carroll D. Wright’s annual report of the Massachusetts Bureau of Statistics of Labor in 1886, for example, was chiefly concerned with monitoring the state’s ability to compete with foreign imports in the wake of an increased focus on aesthetics in European industry.
Or we could simply look to the definition of design that Vilém Flusser advanced 100 years later: “Hence in contemporary life, design more or less indicates the site where art and technology (along with their respective evaluative and scientific ways of thinking) come together as equals, making a new form of culture possible.”