Transcript Design History Year Dot

Design History
Year Dot - 2000
Year Dot – 5000BC
• Our ancestors had to design and make all the
things to help them survive
• Skin, bones, sticks and leaves
• Earliest known: stone tools (2.5 million years
ago)
• Stone Age: 30,000 years ago
• Bronze Age: 10,000 years ago
• Iron Age: 3,000 years ago
• By end of last Ice Age Europeans clearly
interested in appearance over function
5000 BC – 400 AD
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Bronze discovered by accident (3600 BC)
The plough: 3500 BC (farming economies)
Neolithic’s responsible for potter’s wheel
The bow lathe: 3000 BC (furniture)
Beginning of trade (1600 BC) – leads to a
need for transportation, book keeping &
writing tools
• ‘Keeping up with the Jones’ – status through
possession
• Mass production? ¾ million Roman nails
found by Hadrian’s Wall (AD 87)
400 – 1800 BC
• Invention of paper and gunpowder (1400)
• Paper – transformed the transmission of ideas
• Johannes Gutenberg (German) (1400):
developed the first movable type printing
method – mass production, the basis of
consumerism
• The first illustrated encyclopaedia – 1493
• The foundations of the industrial age – 1650
• The first successful coal-powered engine – 1712
• James Watt – perfected his design for steam
engines (1769)
• Neoclassical – Chippendale furniture (1718 –
1779)
1800 - 1850
• Michael Farraday designed the first electric
motor in 1821
• Joseph Henry perfected his electromagnetic
motor in 1821
• Frederick William Herschel invents contact
lenses – 1827
• Louis Daguerre & William Henry Fox Talbot –
designed the first cameras (1830)
• 1837 – London School of Design
• Michael Thonet in 1842 perfected a method of
bending strips of laminated beechwood – led to
his mass produced No. 14 chair
1851
• The Great Exhibition (of Industry of All
Nations) – 1st May
• Devised by Prince Albert
• Joseph Paxton designed the Crystal palace in
Hyde Park (pre-fab)
• Exhibited ‘naturalism’ – flowers & leaves
• Demonstrated the gap between design in
Europe & America:
• Europe: usefulness second
• America: mass production to improve
the quality of life
1860 - 1900
• Alexander Graham Bell – invented the
telephone in 1876
• Lewis Edson Waterman – designed the first
fountain pen (1884)
• William Morris – influential craftsman on
European Design, critical of mechanisation
• Birth of Arts & Crafts Movement
• Morris loathed Mass Production but
understood its place – he wanted products to
be made well.
• Art Nouveau (1895 – 1905) – ‘the evocation of
the spirit of the plant’ (not popular in Britain)
1890 - 1910
• Art Nouveau descended over Europe – rich
ornamentation
• Roots in natural forms of Arts & Crafts
• Lasted until about 1914
• Which way to go? No war, improved communication
between artists & designers
• What are the principles of design? Encouraged by Studio
Magazine (1893)
• Henry van de Velde – pioneer of the Deutscher
Werkbund (1907) – believed the need for well-designed
mass-produced goods
• Charles Rennie Mackintosh – straight lines and simplicity
1917 - 1926
• De Stijl was first formed in 1917 as a
magazine
• Led by Theo van Doesburg
• Used primary colours, divided areas
with straight black lines
• Influential designer – Gerrit Thomas
Reitveld (Red/Blue Chair)
• Lasted until 1926
1919 - 1935
• Design school born in Weimar, Germany
• Established by Walter Gropius, a machine
age successor of William Morris
• ‘Truth to material’
• ‘Form follows function’
• Craftsmanship, art & architecture
overlapped
• The Bauhaus