​Thanks, Joãn

That quote is very interesting.

It also demonstrates that ​Alexandra Szerlip, the author of this biography
of Bel Geddes, may be excellent when talking about the lives of people, but
is really quite ignorant when trying to asses their impact upon a field.
Biographers have to be careful not to let their love of the subject color
their view of the impact upon the profession, especially when they do not
have a good background in that profession.

​Szerlip sates:

The "expansion" from grocery scale to factory would often be sighted (sic)
as yet another example of bel Geddes's impracticality and over-weaning
(sic) ambition. Thirty years later, when he was no longer around to take
the blame, *Fortune* would write that the "oddest aspect" of the profession
was the propensity of designers to expand "a simple request" for a product
face-lift "into the redesign of the corporation that manufactured it".
(footnote 143: Fortune, July 1930. -- 51-57.)


Several comments:

   1. Bel Geddes's redoing of the Toledo Scale Corporation's factory was in
   1928. So Behrens's redesign of AEG in 1907 far preceded that of Bel Geddes.
   2. Personally, redesign of the company is precisely what is needed in
   order to allow design to be most effective. Chapter 10 of my book "The
   Invisible Computer" has the title "Want human-centered development?
   Reorganize the company."
   3. I am surprised that designers had that power in earlier eras. How did
   we ever lose it?
   4. I don't believe any designer today has that power: I wish we did.
   5. (I would be delighted to be proved wrong about statement 4.)

Don


On Tue, Jan 31, 2017 at 1:54 AM, João Ferreira <[log in to unmask]>
wrote:

> From the Wikipedia entry on Behrens:
>
> *In 1907, AEG (Allgemeine Elektrizitäts-Gesellschaft) retained Behrens as
> artistic consultant. He designed the entire corporate identity (logotype,
> product design, publicity, etc.) and for that he is considered the first
> industrial designer in history. Peter Behrens was never an employee for
> AEG, but worked in the capacity of artistic consultant. In 1910, Behrens
> designed the AEG Turbine Factory. From 1907 to 1912, he had students and
> assistants, and among them were Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier,
> Adolf Meyer, Jean Kramer and Walter Gropius (later to become the first
> director of the Bauhaus).*
>
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Behrens
>
> I think I may be running the risk of stating the obvious by bringing
> Behren's name into the thread, but I was convinced his total design
> approach was a breakthrough at the time (the dawn of the 20th century).
>



Don Norman
Prof. and Director, DesignLab, UC San Diego


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