ARTH243

Description

This course examines objects and buildings that were designed to be the vehicles of social change, and analyzes their aesthetics as well as their ideological agendas: whose bodies are empowered by these designs, considered through the lenses of class, race, gender, health, and ability? whose skills and heritage are celebrated through designs, whose are erased? In our weekly seminar meetings, we will focus on selected movements in the history of modern design in the Western world, including furniture, textiles, appliances, and architecture. Throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, designers have used their work to promote various reformist agendas: reform of working conditions for the industrial laborer, reform for the lifestyles of individual consumers, and reform of the values held by society at large. Ultimately, design is a tool of power that affects lives at the community and individual level. The course begins with the radical Arts & Crafts movement in Britain and the U.S., and then covers selected episodes in design history from the perspectives of power, race, and gender. The course concludes with an analysis of our own contemporary, design-obsessed society, investigating the role of design in enormous commercial empires such as Apple and Ikea, and the potential of environmentally and socially responsible design