Abstract

"“Don’t Streamline Mother While I’m Gone”: Industrial Aesthetics in the Post-War United States"

Ai Hisano, University of Tokyo (aihisano@iii.u-tokyo.ac.jp)

This article explores how the expansion of new types of design—so-called industrial design—changed sensory factors of products in the United States during the post-World War II era. Industrial design as a profession was born during the Great Depression in the United States. In the following two decades, design became a part and parcel of business activities in various sectors, including electronic appliances, furniture, and consumer products. The post-World War II period was the beginning of a new era for industrial design as the second generation of industrial designers began to emerge, and the profession expanded substantially.

Historians have explored how new technologies and new consumer products changed people’s feeling as well as lifestyles. But few have delineated how the makers of these technologies and products envisioned consumers’ new way of feeling about themselves and about the goods. This paper seeks to unpack the inner working of business strategies that created new commercial culture and products that altered people’s sensibility. I analyze how industrial designers sought to understand the influence of design on people’s sensory experience by asking the following two-interrelated questions: (1) How industrial designers envisioned and created new aesthetics in product design; and (2) How, or if, this new aesthetics altered business strategies and people’s sensibility in mass consumer society. Here I use the term “aesthetics” to refer to wholistic human perception and sensation, following the original definition derived from the ancient Greek word Aisthesis. Because design influences almost every aspect of human life, the aesthetics of design should be understood not merely as the appearance of objects but as a significant element concerned with entire sensorium of the human body.