by Thomas Etzemüller
The "goal of public interest design", as Heike Delitz postulated, is "in democratically instituted societies [...] the permanent dispute between different positions, which are to be kept free of violence and appear as equals. Neither property, education nor status should predetermine the dispute. [...] A specific architectural mode of collective existence belongs to this political - complex, urban artefact cultures that grant public space" (Delitz 2018: 30). Not the villages, but the cities "provide the framework for the constitution of democracy, integration and participation", she quotes Johannes Busmann (Delitz 2018: 31).
This is a highly normative and blatantly idealistic approach; how such public spheres that are orientated towards the common good are supposed to resolve conflicts without domination - and why only in the city - and what should follow from this is not even outlined. Daniel Feige, on the other hand, has emphasised the latent affirmative character of all design. "Art is criticism, design requires criticism" (Feige 2019: 10), is his thesis. Art can critically examine society; design automatically recognises the status quo - because it compensates for the withdrawal of the state in a solution-oriented manner - and he is referring in particular to the omnipotence fantasies of functionalism of "reshaping society from the spirit of design" (Feige 2019: 45). Social design, on the other hand, has replaced top-downwith bottom-up processes, the functionalist demiurges with emancipated discourse participants - but must be careful not to coagulate into an ideology and "uniform social technology" (ibid.).
Two positions, and as usual you can steer between them - or connect them dialectically. Then one realises that since the garden city movement of the 19th century, experts, the common good, participation and power relations have been inextricably linked in the utopia of a "New Man". Functionalist experts who wanted to rationalise housing, house building and seminar paper were concerned - in a broader sense - with the social question. The world was to be remodelled through design in order to eliminate real or supposed social distortions and, to put it pathetically, to repair the world. At the same time, however, this meant reshaping the people who lived in it, their lifestyles, bodily movements and perception of the world. Design therefore means improving social conditions and reconfiguring power relations or re-subjectivising people in equal measure.
The Swede Ellen Key published a series of essays from 1897 onwards, which were summarised in the programmatic booklet "Beauty for All" in 1913. According to Key, an object is beautiful if it is functional, simple, light, fine, expressive, honest and as perfect as pure nature; in addition, the context in which an object is inserted must be right. The opposite was true of ugly objects that covered up their function with splendour; the architect Adolf Loos had already railed against "ornament as a crime" in 1908, and the art historian Sigfried Giedion denounced the "rule of the upholsterer" in 1948. Beauty, according to Key, resulted from the quality of objects, the ability to unite them in a beautiful ensemble and for reasons of reason. Taste is the feeling for the deep truth of nature. Nature shows itself in a very simple way, without meaningless ornamentation; and beauty is perfection. Modern man, however, has lost his sense of balance and moderation.
Key's text was paradigmatic for the evaluation of beauty in the modern age. Beauty had an existential meaning, it was related to the supposedly lost balance of the world, an alienation from nature. This fits into two standard narratives about modernity that emerged in the 19th century and survived at least until the 1960s, and which we can read in practically all political systems in the Western world. Firstly, in pre-modernity we find society in the form of a socially integrated community. In the 19th century, the atomising society prevailed, which led to excessive individualism and at the same time to mass society. In the future, communities would have to be restored with the technical means of modernity, but not as a nostalgic return to a supposedly golden age, but as a departure into a socially harmonious future that would have overcome modernity without regressing to pre-modernity - an anti-modern modernity, so to speak. And this movement, according to the second narrative, would look like this: from the integrated but lost village community as a role model through the horrors of industrialisation to the modern community of the garden city. However, none of these experts, not even Key, wanted to overcome modernity itself, only its supposedly destructive consequences. The historian Otto Brunner's "whole house", in which farmers and servants supposedly formed an indissoluble organic unit, or Key's open fire, around which the family gathered and where the grandmother quietly talked about the past, merely formed a romanticising backdrop. The vanishing point was always the future.
This is why architects, urban planners and household experts, for example, saw it as their most urgent task to create an ideal habitat. Designed space, subjectivisation, social order and the future were inextricably linked in this way of thinking. If buildings were built incorrectly and subjectivised, there would be no future, only a destroyed social order, i.e. decline. And it was precisely from this that experts drew - and still do today - the legitimisation of their socio-technocratic grand designs. At the same time, this also assigned the masses of people a decisive actor status. Modern man has always had to scrutinise himself meticulously in order to constantly align his own behaviour with the common good. In a way, as in social design later on, we are dealing with the ideal of permanent participation of all people. Some people teach and guide people and allow themselves to be taught by empiricism, while others bring the experts' plans to life in the first place through their everyday behaviour and serve as collective signifiers as to whether or not development is going in the right direction and whether the directional target may need to be corrected. The relationship is therefore asymmetrical, but conceived holistically. The micro level of everyday behaviour and the macro level of the social order, present and future are conceived as an indissoluble unit. In this model, the past has a dual role: as a mission statement of an ideal principle to be restored and as the epoch in which the current distortions to be overcome gradually began. The past and modernity are thus doubly coded, positively and critically: with the means of modernity, one can reactivate the integrative aspects of the past against modernity, whose disintegrative tendencies took their starting point in the past.
In addition to the habitat, everyday objects also played an important role. Beautiful objects for everyone had to be inexpensive and therefore required mass production. They had to be functional and durable so that everyone could afford them and not just a wealthy elite (an idea perverted by Manufactum). And they had to be tasteful. Anyone who had simple, functional and tasteful cutlery and crockery on the dining table every day, who had to deal with functional furniture and kitchen utensils every day, would automatically, unconsciously and, above all, informally learn how to organise their lives rationally and, without being able to refuse, save time that could be used for family or intellectual education, without which there would not be enough "healthy" children and skilled workers. This is why Ellen Key had already called for an alliance between artists and entrepreneurs.
In this proto-form of "nudging", less was prescribed or forbidden. Rather, opportunities were cut off that people would not miss if they had never learnt about them. Anyone who had worked in a "Frankfurt kitchen" every day since childhood or was used to bathrooms and bedrooms - efficiently compressed as in a sleeping car - had no choice but to trim their own movements and daily routine to the utmost economy. In this perspective, modern design meant common sense, because "harmful" behaviour was eliminated from people's consciousness because the function of the appliance made it impossible. By reducing possibilities, people were given meaningful options for variation - freedom through pruning, so to speak, instead of the excessive freedom of liberalism, which in the eyes of many contemporaries made life unstructured and therefore unsafe.
The ambivalence of this form of social planning should have become clear. Planners wanted to educate the planned to educate themselves and in this way condition "new people". This constituted a relationship of power between planners, design and the planned, but not one of domination. Proponents of "social design" today should be aware of this history - so as not to overlook the power effects of their actions.
Literature cited:
Delitz, Heike: The "public interest". On the "public" in public interest design, in: Rodatz, Christoph/Smolarski, Pierre (eds.): Was ist Public Interest Design? Contributions to the design of public interests, Bielefeld 2018, pp. 15-36.
Feige, Daniel Martin: On the dialectics of social design, Hamburg 2019.
Thomas Etzemüller, Dr phil., is Professor of Cultural History of Modernity with a Special Focus on Northern Europe at the Institute of History at the University of Oldenburg.
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