I'm reading a pre-publication copy of Alexandra Szerlip's biography:
*The man who designed the future: Norman Bel Geddes and the invention of
twentieth Century America.*
The book implies that Geddes invented Design Research (although not the
phrase itself). It states that:
In his redesign of the Toledo Scale company's grocery scale in 1928, Geddes:
"sent canvassers out to metropolitan markets and rural areas to talk with
clerks and customers."
and that
"Surveys and public opinion polls had never been conducted from a
*design* standpoint.
Norman decided to change that."
I find it difficult to believe that designers up to that time had not
examined how the products were actually used, although it is also the case
that design was barely an existing field at that time. Industrial Design
seems to have had its beginnings in the early 1900s (1906, for example).
(Unless you want to start with the Josiah Wedgwood and Sons mass
manufacturing of everyday China starting roughly 1760.) In the 1920s, it
was not yet well recognized. The Bauhaus, of course, existed before 1928,
but as far as i can tell, the emphasis was on art and craft, with no
research to determine utility (my biases might lead me to misread history).
The field now named Design Research, according to Victor Margolin, started
around 1960 (although he also points out that the *Japanese Society for
the Science of Design* started in 1954).
M*y question is*: Was it really Norman Bel Geddes who started canvassing
the actual people who used the products being designed? Or is there some
historical evidence for predecessors.
Don
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