Phil Patton

The rise of powerful manufacturing economies is commonly accompanied by stereotypes: those who make well are mere imitators—clever copiers, not real designers. It was true of Japan and Korea during their rise to industrial power. It was just as true of the United States, as the image played out in Great Britain in the 19th century with the American system of interchangeable parts supplanting craft-based British makers. And it has been true of images of China over the last few years.

“Designed in California, Made in China” read the words on the back of the iPhone. But must design and manufacture be separate? That is one of the questions in the background of China’s Design Revolution by Lorraine Justice. Justice, formerly Director of the School of Design at Hong Kong Polytechnic University, and now Dean of the College of Imaging Arts and Sciences at Rochester Institute of Technology, believes China is on the verge of a design revolution.

The emergence of design in China is tied to the country’s rapid growth, and cultural shifts that Justice associates with the succession of generations in the country. China moved from a focus in the days of Mao on the “four basic goods” that Chinese households felt they could aspire to—the wristwatch, radio, sewing machine, and bicycle—to a new generation aspiring to living space and auto ownership and commensurate achievements.

Justice outlines a generation of workers in their thirties and forties, with “more freedom to create—and to consume—than their parents or grandparents.” They came of age during the economic opening of the 1980s and 1990s and are now dedicated to self-expression in ways that promise to contradict clichés of China as a collectivist society and an imitative economy. But fostering creativity needed by designers as a needed value might seem in doubt as long as artists such as Ai Weiwei face politicial oppression.

Niels Diffrient, the master of design that fits the user, has written a book that fits his character. Best known for his ergonomic research and precepts, Diffrient is a modernist monument as much as Dieter Rams—he even looks like Rams.

Personal more than prescriptive, the book is heavily illustrated and full of fun anecdotes—including how Diffrient, while working on interiors for TWA, ran into Howard Hughes with Jane Russell beside him in his convertible.

Growing up in Detroit and dabbling in car design, Diffrient took many career turns before he became the master of ergonomics. He was born in 1928 in the small town of Star, Mississippi. The family soon moved to Detroit; his father worked on an assembly line and Diffrient never forgot it. He managed to find himself at Cranbrook Academy. He spent five years in the office of Eero Saarinen. By 1954, thanks to a Fulbright scholarship, he was in Italy, imbibing the high period of Italian modern design and learning from the likes of Marco Zanuso, with whom he collaborated on the Borletti sewing machine.

He spent a quarter of a century working with Henry Dreyfuss, as a designer and partner, during which time Diffrient was able to codify the Dreyfuss office’s early research in practical guides to ergonomics. Later, with his own company, Humanscale, he put these principles into practice with the design of office chairs. His years at Dreyfuss provided Diffrient with some of his best stories—how, for instance, for American Airlines he designed an inflight passenger lounge to be installed on the quick. He also worked on ideas for the never-built American rival to the supersonic Concorde, called the SST.

In Diffrient’s memoir, his work makes for useful case studies but also a lively personal narrative.

Norman Bel Geddes Designs America accompanies the first major exhibition about Norman Bel Geddes (1893–1958), at the Harry Ransom Center at University of Texas in Austin.

Bel Geddes began in theater. He became the quintessential industrial designer of the founding generation—the pop apotheosis of the profession—but Raymond Loewy, Walter Dorwin Teague, and Henry Dreyfuss ended up better known and more highly respected. At the height of his career Bel Geddes was already the object of joking New Yorker cartoons and covers.

Curator Donald Albrecht traces Bel Geddes’s career in this first full volume about him. Running through the story is the theme of theater: dramatic effects were the stuff of Bel Geddes’s earliest work, in costumes and sets for stage, and the keynote to his work in products and presentations. His designs for hardware participated in the same melodrama as his dramaturgy. His buildings and technology were more Amazing Stories magazine cover than serious proposals. There were the pod-like cars, thousands of which were deployed in the Magic Motorways of the Futurama display for the General Motors Highways and Horizons exhibit at the New York World’s Fair of 1939–40. There were amazing visionary multi-engine airliners and ocean liners. It turned out that there was a mundane reality behind all of these: the freeway traffic jams and the crowded aisles of Boeing jumbo jets or Carnival cruise lines. But dramatized and futurized, it was technological opera. Bel Geddes’s approach is seen in miniature in the cover of his book Magic Motorways, where the type is shadowed and stretched like figures in a film noir set.

The present book looks behind the wizard’s screen, with never-before-seen drawings, photos, films, and models from the Ransom Center collection. Essays by 20 scholars accompany the images. The exhibition called “I Have Seen the Future: Norman Bel Geddes Designs America” opened in Austin in September and will travel to the Museum of the City of New York in 2013.