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Sociological Aspects of Industrial Aesthetics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 July 2024

Gillo Dorfles
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Extract

Among the elements in our contemporary civilisation which stand out because of their novelty in comparison with past epochs one must definitely remember the vast field which goes by the name of “industrial design,” which is also connected with the field of graphics (in its various incarnations of advertising graphics, traffic signals, lettering, etc.). Actually the advent of an industrialised society such as our own has brought with it the presence of an “industrial aesthetics,” of a will and an instinctive need to “aestheticise,” to make the “natural” world more pleasant and acceptable since today it is almost turned upside down and subverted by the products of a technological civilisation.

Type
Research Article
Information
Diogenes , Volume 19 , Issue 74 , June 1971 , pp. 111 - 122
Copyright
Copyright © 1971 Fédération Internationale des Sociétés de Philosophie / International Federation of Philosophical Societies (FISP)

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References

1 See my book Il divenire delle Arti, Einaudi, Turin, 1967, and the one devoted to industrial aesthetics: Il disegno industriale e la sua estetica, Cappelli, Bologna, 1965.

2 A likening of industrial design to popular art has been attempted for the first time by Reyner Banham in the essay " Industrial Design and Popular Art," in The Machine Civilisation, 1955, 6. This article had a wide response. In it the English critic claims, among other things, that " the aesthetics of consumer goods is the aesthetics of popular art, or rather it is directed at that group of the public which is most susceptible to stimulation by the symbolic icono graphy of industrial objects." For a discussion of this problem see also my book Le oscillazioni del gusto, Einaudi, Turin, 1970, p. 122.

3 On this problem see also my Artificio e Natura, Einaudi, Turin, 1968, and particularly the chapter called" Artificialità degli oggetti e degli eventi, nei rapporti tra physis e techne."

4 See my article "L'oggetto industriale modificato e il rapporto uomo-mac-china" in Edilizia moderna, No. 85.

5 See the reports at the Biennale of Planning Methodology, "The Forms of Human Ambience," Rimini, September 1970.

6 Insofar as it concerns the problems of mass culture and of its implications see the by now classic work by Dwight McDonald (Masscult and Midcult) and the other essays included in the anthology Mass Culture, ed. B. Rosenberg and D. M. White, The Free Press, Glencoe, and Diogenes No. 68, Winter 1969, devoted to "Mass Communication and Culture."

7 By the term "atelia" I refer to a technique that is void of "telos," an aim, and therefore unintentioned, which almost invariably leads to serious consequences because it deprives Man of any real interest in his work and diminishes his consciousness of the actual mechanisms involved in the work he is doing.