Current Radical Propositions

Abstract

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This paper is about new perspective on the history of golden age for Industrial Design. It can be a promising approach to correlate Kondratieff waves, especially the dominant technologies in the respective periods; to cycles / periods / fashions / ideologies / ... of design. All along the 20th century the strategies used by economic agents to create competitive products have lead to the evolution and diversity of Design. It was a time characterized by the systematic application of scientific knowledge to the resolution of economic problems, aiming the sustainable growth of the life-standard of people.

The new materials and the new technologies at principle of century XXI are a challenge for designers. They begin to make use of a bigger shared area of action. They provide a very important and accessible operating principle bridging science and history, and their understanding would fill the existing lack to operacionalize the long wave approach as a useful forecasting tool. We consider that there exists indeed a connection between what happens in the global socio-economic realm and the evolution of Design that, as we know, is strongly related to the context of the technologies developed in the corresponding periods. This finding allows alerting Designers to the probably time span involving the entire life cycle of a product, since its conception till elimination of the market; however the variety of products and forms will probably continue to expand. The importance of Design will continue to grow.

Within this general picture of reference, the role of Industrial Design can be synthesized as the activity that relates the technically possible with the culturally acceptable. Such activity allows confronting the set of relations depending of numerous interactions among the aggregation of several elements that connect them, and make them multidisciplinary. It is known that the values of product design are located in between the identities of things and the time at which they are embedded, in the realm of the effective socio-economic systems.

Some recent discoveries are presented suggesting a strong relationship between some socio-economic aspects of the long economic cycles (Kondratieff waves) and the known periods of the history of Design. It was found that amid the apparently random oscillations of the informational content, at least two characteristic periods of 25-30 and 50-60 years were present. We may conclude that there exists indeed a connection between what happens in the global socio-economic realm and the evolution of Design that, as we know, is strongly related to the context of the technologies developed in the corresponding periods. This finding allows alerting designers to the probably time span involving the entire life cycle of a product, since its conception till elimination of the market. The paper is a preliminary exploration of a challenging and difficult topic, linking design history with broad economic and technological cycles..

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