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The Discovery of Industrial Design
The rise of the arts and crafts movement, and the existence of a continually increasing number of artist-craftsmen, obstructed the recognition of industrial design as a key activity during the early years of the present century. Industrialists employed draughtsmen and regarded them as designers; but often they were just men who could wield a pencil and copy a pattern, or with feeble daring invent some limp variation of a familiar form of ornament. The industrial designer, the man who would bring to the study of industrial processes and materials the same sympathetic comprehension that the executant craftsman gave to wood and metal and the methods for working them, had not yet been identified as a technician. Such men existed, but their work was not carried to a completed stage - it was not conceived as one problem, to be solved by trained imagination in association with technical knowledge; therefore, the special aptitudes of many skilled men were thwarted, and the work they often began so well was masked in its final stages by hack draughtsmen who applied the artistic trimmings.
The insistence of Morris and the craft revivalists upon the basic importance of making things by hand deflected attention from the possibility of designing things properly for production by machinery. With few exceptions, the industrial production of consumable goods had until the end of the nineteenth century been imitative: some hand-made prototype was used as a model, and an attenuated or blurred version of it was reproduced by mechanical means. The development of the English tradition of design was arrested, though, like an uncertain and barely discernible ghost, it still haunted the drawing offices of many industrial firms. It was impossible for the traditional gift of sympathy with materials to become re-established while industrialists cherished the belief that it was 'artistic' to imitate old patterns and necessary to disguise industrial materials. There was nothing intrinsically repellent in the nature of those materials; and this was appreciated by the more tolerant and discerning adherents of the movement Morris had started. Writing of 'Cast Iron and its Treatment,' in the Journal of the Society of Arts, W. R. Lethaby had made that clear when he said: 'The easy contempt we feel for iron is the direct result of our unworthy treatment of it.' (February 14th, 1890.) Twenty-three years later, Lethaby was admitting that 'Although a machine-made thing can never be a work of art in the proper sense, there is no reason why it should not be good in a secondary order - shapely, smooth, strong, well fitting, useful; in fact, like a machine itself. Machine work should show quite frankly that it is the child of the machine; it is the pretence and subterfuge of most machine-made things which make them disgusting.' ('Art and Workmanship', The Imprint, January, 1913.)
Such reflections indicated the growth of a receptive mood on the part of critics and writers; very different from the contemptuous indifference to everything connected with machine production which had accompanied the first rapturous enthusiasms of the craft revival in the eighteen-sixties and seventies. But the re-emergence of the Engjish tradition through industrial production was long delayed; and at the opening of the present century ideas about the form and colour of all kinds of products were confused still further by the spread of a flamboyant foreign fashion whose irresponsible vigour alarmed all but the boldest and most eccentric of the modish. Known in England as 'New Art' it sprawled floreated devices over every surface with restless urgency and poured its writhing tendrils into innumerable moulds in iron foundries; while its practitioners inserted slips of brilliant enamel and bands of copper into woodwork and diligently cut heart-shaped apertures in cupboard doors and chair backs. It soon outwore its welcome by sheer anarchic turbulence; but it provided industry with a new label, and for a few years the shops were filled with modified and flimsy variations of those fluent Continental forms which fashionable taste had so swiftly discarded.
'New Art' was for a time regarded as 'modern design' and seriously discredited the word 'modern'. People played for safety and demanded old shapes and decoration so the antique dealers' prosperity was refreshed by a new enthusiasm among consumers, and the imitation of antique patterns was stimulated by the supposed failure of 'modern' design. But industrial design was still undiscovered, though all the time it was making unperceived contributions to the English tradition, and a new machine art was arising, appreciated, apart from engineers, only by observant children and a few exceptional adults: for those people, using their eyes as men had used them a century earlier to appraise the form of ships and coaches and houses and furniture, saw beauty in the trim, untroubled lines of the locomotives that ran on the old Great Northern Railway, and the London and North Western and Great Western lines, and in the shapely hulls and superstructure of those neat and commodious Woodside and Wallasey ferry boats that foamed back and forth across the Mersey.
In such examples of industrial design, the English tradition still lived and continued to grow wisely and well. But there were others which indicated an unsuspected continuity of tradition, representing a national idiom in design. A suggestive introductory study of such characteristic forms of decoration and design peculiar to England was made by J. M. Richards in an article entitled 'Black and White', which was published in The Architectural Review, in November, 1937. He described this idiom 'as one that gets its architectural effect through the disposition of contrasted areas of black and white applied to the surface of an object.' Its origin was almost certainly nautical, and he listed as typical examples, buoys, bathing huts, capstans, lighthouses and coastguard buildings, and in concluding that the design of ships fostered this style reminded us that in the 'pre-steam line-of-battle ships, the black gun ports made a chequered pattern on the white hull'. It is a treatment found on many inns and cottages, and Richards recorded that 'the lock machinery and other accessories of our canal systems are painted black and white; so are railway signals and other railway equipment. The railways have evolved out of cast iron a characteristic style of notices and signs; white letters raised in silhouette on a black background'. Signposts, Belisha beacons, traffic signals and direction signs were added to the list. But such instances of continuity in the English tradition were seldom observed or recorded in the early years of the century. Between 1900 and 1914, there had been many hints that the English tradition in design was beginning to break through again; forcing its way back to contemporary life, not as a result of any conscious effort of resuscitation by industrialists, nor through any artificial craft revival, but because the national capacity for dealing with mechanical problems in a compact and orderly way was finding new forms of expression. That capacity, so vividly apparent in clock-making in the latter half of the seventeenth century, now inspired the design and production of such superb locomotive machines as the Rolls-Royce.
That industrial design was a subject demanding intelligent study and attention was an idea that gained acceptance only after an infinitude of misunderstandings; but in 1914 it had achieved official recognition, for in that year a joint scheme was framed and sponsored by the Board of Trade and the Board of Education for establishing a British Institute of Industrial Art, which was actually launched in 1920. In 1915, the Design and Industries Association was formed, and its founders included men from industry and trade, like Frank Pick, Sir James Morton and Sir Frank Warner; and designers, teachers and critics, like Sir Ambrose Heal, Harold Stabler, B. J. Fletcher and W. R. Lethaby. Industrial design had certainly been discovered and identified by a few far-sighted and exceptional people at the end of the First World War.
Another interesting aspect related with industrial design can be found in nature: industrial melanism is modification of moths colours? or strictly speaking blackening, in some industrial areas for visual protection of theses moths.
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