For decades, industrial design has cultivated a narrative of messianic purpose, positioning itself as a primary driver of social change and ethical progress. However, as writer John Jervis argues, the time has come for the industry to confront a harsh truth: design’s status as a moral and practical force was never more than a brief historical anomaly, inflated by Modernism’s post-war ambitions and corporate interests. Today, as young designers grapple with an industry complicit in consumerism and environmental destruction, the need to discard these lofty, outdated claims is critical. Rather than clinging to the heroic myth of the social reformer, design must embrace its more humble, yet equally valuable, reality as a form of applied art and a collaborative service, operating within the messy confines of global capitalism.
The Short-Lived Golden Age of Ethical Intent
The rise of the “cult of design” ignited in the 1950s, but confidence in industrial design as a progressive undertaking had fragile roots, gaining brief credibility only through the efforts of early Modernist architects.
In the 1920s and 30s, Modernists sought to harness mass-production to furnish their housing estates, aiming for a rational aesthetic defined by hygiene, functionality, affordability, and technological innovation, consciously rejecting ornament. Following World War II, these qualities were adopted as state-sanctioned objectives, and designers were cast as heroic figures integral to rebuilding economies and developing welfare states. However, this period of optimism was short-lived, as the fundamental tension between design’s ethical ambitions and corporate financial realities quickly became impossible to ignore, leading to confrontations and internal crises within the design community itself.
The Failure of Democratic Ambitions
The decline of post-war optimism is perfectly encapsulated by the short-lived “golden age of design” in Finland, which, despite its ideals of “beauty for all,” never truly fulfilled its democratic promise.
Curated displays at the Milan Triennales in the 1950s—which elevated Finland as a model of recovery—were ironically filled with high-craft, limited-edition products far from the everyday or egalitarian. Figures like Tapio Wirkkala, trained as an ornamental sculptor, became sought-after figures to modernize product ranges for export, nearly always involving premium price tags. Despite concerted top-down efforts to propagate modernist “good taste,” domestic markets for genuinely affordable retro furniture and decorative folk trends remained robust, showing that the modernist ideal had failed to fully penetrate the mass market, instead serving an elite clientele for profit.
The Shift to Style and the Academic Retreat
As the golden age ended, it became undeniably clear that modernism’s primary function had been to facilitate capitalism by fetishizing style and servicing the wealthy, leading to widespread disillusionment among a younger generation of designers.
By the 1970s, a new cohort of designers criticized the industry’s consumerism, exclusivity, and negative environmental impacts. They realized that a named designer added limited functional or commercial value to everyday items. Curriculum shifts toward ecology and equality alienated industry partners, creating a schism. The response was fragmentation: some big-name designers worked with luxury brands to style fashionable novelties for capital-owning classes, while others retreated into an “introverted and angry academia,” using design as a critical tool that spoke only to a select, elect audience, ultimately reinforcing the industry’s insularity rather than solving its real-world problems.
Accepting Reality: Design as a Service Industry
To maintain integrity, industrial design must acknowledge that the association with social reform was quickly superseded by the pursuit of corporate profit, and that clinging to the “messianic” role is now actively harmful.
Maintaining this illusion today is dangerous because it props up a fragile academic ecosystem with overblown rhetoric and, more critically, it strengthens design as a consumerist tool. This narrative flatters customers into believing their luxury fashion or stylish gadget choices hold critical societal importance, thereby enabling the marketing of unnecessary products. Honesty requires accepting that design is, primarily, a service industry, often compromised by its enmeshment with capitalism, and that it lacks the individual agency to drive systemic change on its own.
The True Value: Applied Art and Collaboration
Instead of demanding top billing as a social revolutionary, Jervis suggests design should be proud of two more grounded, essential roles: as a collaborator and as a valued applied art.
Designers should feel pride in playing a contributory role in multidisciplinary teams working on vital issues, such as healthcare or renewable energy, where their skills genuinely support urgent practical goals. Furthermore, design should wholeheartedly recognize its role as an applied art, standing in continuity with centuries of cultural creation that have reflected and shaped our artistic and intellectual life. Ultimately, modernist design ended up as an attractive decorative proposition, and it is misleading to pretend that a highly styled Braun audio system exists on a higher moral or functional plane than any other aesthetic expression that brings beauty and joy.
