Companies. Sobriety, carbon footprint, universal digitization: is the current era an existential test for design? Certainly, if we reduce this term to the multiplication of seductive objects. But on the contrary, it offers it fertile ground, when it is understood as a contribution to new ways of life.
To understand this tension, we must recall a double evolution: on the one hand, that of the thoughts and values that inspired the designers; on the other hand, that of companies which have given design a variable place depending on the technical and strategic issues they encountered.
It is this double evolution that is traced in a special issue of the journal Companies and history (#108, September 2022). The idea emerges that it is no longer just a matter of thinking about a design that would better adapt to the company, but that design and the company must reinvent themselves together to be up to contemporary challenges.
Invisibilization of “heating for all”
One of the originalities of this issue is that it does not take up the traditional history of design: that which goes from crafts to “modern forms” of the 1950s, in resonance with the fashion movements or the counter-cultures of society. Because this history does not take into account the impact of the technical transformations of companies and their commercial strategies.
This is how the article devoted to “design of fire” to the XXe century by Renan Viguié, a doctoral student in history, shows that the classical aesthetic of ” the fireplace “ and ” Corner of the fire “ gave in to the strategy of making the government invisible “heating for all” which responded better to the development of real estate construction.
Likewise, the history of spectacle production in the 19e century, analyzed by Corinne Doria, a history teacher, underlines the precocity of the tension between luxury object and medical object which always crosses the logics of designers.
There are also more structural links between design logic and business logic. Matthew Holt, professor of design history, recalls a genealogy that does not pass through the history of forms, but through broader theories of scientific management, organization or artificial systems.
Limited integration
Thus, modern management is inseparable from the quest for a design that is more integrated into the collective conception of companies capable of embodying, in objects, technical systems or relationships, the values of the time. Has this integration of design taken place? A debate organized by the journal between a designer (Anne Asensio) and two design researchers (James Auger and Armand Behar) recognizes that, in companies, this integration has remained limited, but that the pressure of contemporary societal, environmental and cultural challenges should impose it.
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