Recipes for Systemic Change - Helsinki Design Lab

28 Chapter1—Sparke, Penny. ‘Consultant Design: The Historyand Practice of the Designer in Industry’While the scale of our challenges requirestrategic improvements, our current systemsof decision-making are often only ableto entertain minor upgrades to existingelements and processes.ties of a product could roll off the production line, a plan ormaster object had to be created by someone with both thetechnical understanding of manufacturing and the aestheticand cultural understanding of the marketplace—a role filledby early designers. 1 As the development of technology acceleratedaround the turn of the 20th century, a different kind ofdesign need emerged: entirely new products demanded newidentities. Designers balanced the functional requirements oftechnology with specific form and1700sTextile and ceramic patterns1900sProducts1930sBrandsshape to express the spirit of the day.Especially in the wake of widespreadaccess to electrical power, appliancessuch as toasters, refrigerators, radiosand televisions became householdfixtures and industrial designershelped domesticate these new categoriesof objects.As industrial productionincreased with more and more kinds of products enteringthe market, some intrepid designers pioneered branding as away to build coherence across large sets of objects and media.As corporations grew larger and operated across diversecontexts, the design of branding offered a way to retain asense of unity among otherwise disparate actions. Eventuallythese branding efforts also created new notions of nationaland regional identity, with the industrial and commercialoutput of different countries offering a productised, packagedand tangible example of the waylife is lived in a distant land. Eventoday it is hard to think of Germandesign without conjuring up imagesof sleekly engineered precision, or to1950sNational identities2000sServices and interactionsNowSystems and strategies