Designing for Socialist Need

Katharina Pfützner is Lecturer in Industrial Design at the National College of Art and Design, Dublin, Ireland, where she also contributes to undergraduate and postgraduate programs at the school’s Faculty of Visual Culture. Her primary interest is in socially responsible design. She has a background in design practice and a PhD in design history. Her research on design in the GDR has been presented in numerous conference papers and publications.

• List of figuresAcknowledgementsList of abbreviationsIntroduction Part 1 – The fundamentals of GDR design1 – Aims and priorities2 – Institutional supportPart 2 – Exemplary ideas and practices3 – Designing for complex functionality4 – Designing for appropriate product lifespans5 – Designing systemsPart 3 – Resistance encountered by GDR designers6 – Cultural-political resistance7 – Obstacles in the spheres of production and distributionConclusionIndex

"Designing for Socialist Need allows us to peer behind the iron curtain in an engaging account of how the industrial design profession operated within the planned economy of the German Democratic Republic. At a time when imagining alternatives to the capitalist consumer market as the default setting for design has become more difficult, yet at the same time more pressing than ever, Pfützner’s study is a poignant reminder that the future once held different possibilities - and still does."Kjetil Fallan, University of Oslo, Norway - author of Designing Modern NorwayBy zooming in so closely Pfützner is able, somewhat counterintuitively, to articulate the wider relevance of the GDR beyond the dates of the country’s existence or the narrow sphere of EastGerman or even Cold War culture. As a result Designing for Socialist Need is not a postmortem on a doomedexperiment that survives only in flea markets, but a vital history of industrial design in the GDR that offers freshinsights on the design culture of our own era.Emily Pugh - Principal Research Specialist, Getty Research Institute