Cody Tyler Schueller

‘Design’ in The Economist 1973-1993

What do airplanes, IBM, wafer chips, Ericsson, the Soviet Union, Sara Lee and the European Economic Committee all have in common? (No, this isn’t the start to a bad joke, or maybe it is...) This seemingly random list of companies, objects and government institution are all written about in terms of ‘design’ in the London magazine style newspaper, The Economist, between 1978 and 1993. The tri-decade period sees the shift of design from objects to networks and systems to governments and financial markets. This period sees an increase in efficiency, a call for optimization and increased productivity via metrics, as the business world looked to claim ‘design’ for themselves in their own terms, divorcing the word from creativity and transferring it to control. Control by way of the computer and network connectivity, to devoid humans from each other, from spaces, from everything. A controlling device, to tailor business to be streamline, faster, more modern. The need to assimilate and perpetuate capitalism, signals design’s full relinquish of creativity in service of the machine-like business world, where you can design any system of control. The trajectory of the word is evidenced in three distinct periods within the fifteen years, each building and progressive upon the previous, culminating in an advertisement fit for the contemporary signaling design, from the business side, fully relinquishing the word of creativity in service of the machine-like business world, where you can design any system of control, be it networks, people or politics. Because the real goal of capitalism is not the production of goods, it is the reproduction of the working force.1

1. Gabriele Mastrigli lecturing on Superstudio. This was in contextual background to political milieu of Italy in the 1960s, promoting Superstudio to produce the work they were.
UIC School of Architecture, “Gabriele Mastrigli (April 4, 2018)” YouTube Video, 1:39:08, May 29, 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y2O1dh7ey6E

Spring 2020
Full text available upon request