Don,
I forwarded your query to my friend Russell Flinchum. Russell has, among other things, written a couple of books about Henry Dreyfuss. He knows more about the Bel Geddes/Dreyfuss/Loewy era of American industrial designers than any well-adjusted person should. His reply is below.
Gunnar
—————
Gunnar Swanson
+1 252 258-7006
> Begin forwarded message:
>
> From: Russell Flinchum <[log in to unmask]>
> Subject: Re: A question about the history of Design Research
> Date: January 30, 2017 at 6:47:58 AM EST
> To: Gunnar Swanson <[log in to unmask]>, Hampton Wayt
>
> Dear Gunnar,
>
> Here is a brief response for Professor Norman regarding a very involved topic.
>
> Industrial design in the United States really does begin in the late 1920s, and precedes the Great Depression. Most likely it began via two routes:
>
> 1. Donald Dohner's work for Westinghouse, which predates Geddes's. Dohner was already consulting with Westinghouse's engineers as an in-house expert by the late 1920s. There is not much visibility here, because this work begins modestly within a large corporation. Geddes's transition from theater design to industrial design is probably modest by nature, and Geddes was probably trying to extract as much ballyhoo as he could from every project. My buddy Hampton Wayt is the expert on Dohner. I have copied him on this email.
>
> 2. The other beginning (and a substantial one) is when Calkins & Holden hires Egmont Arens to begin consulting in-house on product appearance on behalf of the advertising agency's customers. In brief, the advertisements of the late 1920s appeared more advanced in technique than the products they advertised (I have a doozy of a brochure from Maytag featuring a hideous washing machine--and all imagery is of upper class consumers, who play bridge, ride horses, have tea, and never get anywhere near the damn thing, which had as gasoline motor option for country dwellers without electricity). I would not call myself an expert on this period but the late great Roland Marchand was and I have a student working with his Advertising the American Dream which has a lot of important information that has apparently been forgotten.
>
> I can't believe that Geddes really had the edge on market research over Calkins & Holden (E. E. Calkins was big on the scene in the first decade of the 20th Century) but there is the Geddes/J. Walter Thompson tie-in to investigate. While I have no specific evidence, surely advertising agencies were conducting market research of some sort in the first half of the 1920s. But I cannot provide a specific example of this. I have to plead the mea culpa of an art history degree. Marlene Park was the only art historian to mention advertising in my long career as a student.
>
> I agree with Professor Norman that the Bauhaus does not figure into this. No market research there.
>
> I believe that Victor Margolin is essentially correct to see this phenomenon as a child of the 1960s; however, if you examine Harold Van Doren's Industrial Design: A Practical Guide (1940), there is an image of a woman with what looks like the cigarette tray from a nightclub of the time showing what appears to be cosmetic samples to a customer while standing "on the fly." This was 1940 or earlier. I have to think something like this came much earlier, but the evidence would be in the archives of the advertising agencies, not in some book on industrial design. Marchand was the king of this area and I don't know that anyone has replaced him.
>
> All of this history is being rewritten as we speak because of new sources of information and new vigor in the field of design history. Our "facts" from 1970 to 1990 need to be re-examined. There is some dross among the gold.
>
> I hope this is a good start.
>
> Russell
>
> On Mon, Jan 30, 2017 at 6:08 AM, Gunnar Swanson <[log in to unmask] <mailto:[log in to unmask]>> wrote:
> I thought you might have some insight for Don.
>
>
> Gunnar
> —————
> Gunnar Swanson
> +1 252 258-7006 <tel:(252)%20258-7006>
>
-----------------------------------------------------------------
PhD-Design mailing list <[log in to unmask]>
Discussion of PhD studies and related research in Design
Subscribe or Unsubscribe at https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/phd-design
-----------------------------------------------------------------
|