Persuading Image
Richard Hamilton
PERSUADING IMAGE
The ‘fifties have seen many changes in the human situation; not least among them are the new attitudes towards those commodities which effect (sic) most directly the individual way of life – consumer goods. It is now accepted that saucepans, refrigerators, cars, vacuum cleaners, suitcases, radios, washing machines – all the paraphernalia of mid-century existence – should be designed by a specialist in the look of things. Of course, the high power virtuoso industrial designer is not a new phenomenon – Raymond Loewy and Walter Dorwin Teague have been at it for a good many years. William Morris and Walter Gropius realized the potential. What is new is the increased number of exponents, their power and influence upon our economic and cultural life. Design is established and training for the profession is widespread.
The student designer is taught to respect his job, to be interested in the form of the object for its own sake as a solution to given engineering and design problems – but he must soon learn that in the wider context of an industrial economy this is a reversal of the real values of present-day society. Arthur Drexler has said of the automobile “Not only is its appearance and its usefulness unimportant … What is important is to sustain production and consumption”. The conclusion that he draws from this is that “if an industrialised economy values the process by which things are made more than it values the thing, the designer ought to have the training and inclinations of a psycho-analyst. Failing this he ought, at least, to have the instincts of a reporter, or, more useful, of an editor.”[1]
The image of the ‘fifties shown here is the image familiar to readers of the glossy magazines – “America entering the age of everyday elegance”; the image of Life and Look, Esquire and the New Yorker; the image of the ‘fifties as it was known and moulded by the most successful editors and publicists of the era, and the ad-men who sustained them – “the fabulous ‘fifties” as Look has named them. Being “plush at popular prices” is a prerogative that awaits us all. Whether we like it or not, the designed image of our present society is being realized now in the pages of the American glossies by people who can do it best – those who have the skill and imagination to create the image that sells and the wit to respond humanly to their own achievements.
The present situation has not arrived without some pang of conscience. Many designers have fought against the values which are the only ones that seem to work to the economic good of the American population. There is still a hangover from the fortyish regret that things do not measure up the to aesthetic standards of pure design; the kind of attitude expressed in 1947 by George Nelson when he wrote: “I marvel at the extent of the knowledge needed to design, say, the Buick or the new Hudson – but I am also struck by my inability to get the slightest pleasure out of the result”.[2] There has since been a change of heart on both sides; on the part of the designers, the men who establish the visual criteria, towards a new respect for the ability of big business to raise living standards – and an appreciation, by big business, of the part that design has to play in sales promotion. What was new and unique about the ‘fifties was a willingness to accept a new situation and to custom build the standards for it.
There is not, of course, a general acceptance of this point of view. Some designers, especially on this side of the Atlantic, hold on to their old values and are prepared to walk backwards to do so. Misha Black goes so far as to suggest that advanced design is incompatible with quantity production when he says: “If the designer’s inclination is to produce forward-looking designs, ahead of their acceptability by large numbers of people, then he must be content to work for those manufacturers whose economic production quantities are relatively small”[3]. While Professor Black was consoling the rearguard for being too advanced Lawrence Alloway was stressing the fact that “Every person who works for the public in a creative manner is face to face with the problem of a mass society”[4]. It is just this coming to terms with a mass society which has been the aim and the achievement of industrial design in America. The task of orientation towards a mass society required a rethink of what was, so convincingly, an ideal formula. Function is a rational yardstick and when it was realized in the ‘twenties that all designed objects could be measured by it, everyone felt not only artistic but right and good. The trouble is that consumer goods function in many ways; looked at from the point of view of the business man, design has one function – to increase sales. If a design for industry does not sell in the quantities for which it was designed to be manufactured then it is not functioning properly.
The element in the American attitude to production which worries the European most is the cheerful acceptance of obsolescence; American society is committed to a rapid quest for mass mechanized luxury because this way of life satisfies the needs of American industrial economy. By the early ‘fifties it had become clear in America that production was no problem. The difficulty lay in consuming at the rate which suited production and this rate is not only high - it must accelerate. The philosophy of obsolescence, involving as it does the creation of short-term solutions, designs that do not last, has had its drawbacks for the designer – the moralities of the craftsman just do not fit when the product’s greatest virtue is impermanence. But some designers have been able to see in obsolescence a useful tool for raising living standards. George Nelson in his book Problems of Design, states the case very forcibly: “Obsolescence as a process is wealth-producing, not wasteful. It leads to constant renewal of the industrial establishment at higher and higher levels, and it provides a way of getting a maximum of good to a maximum of people”. His conclusion is: “What we need is more obsolescence not less”. Mr Nelson’s forward-looking attitude squarely faced the fact that design must function in industry to assist rapid technological development; we know that this can be done by designing for high production rates of goods that will require to be renewed at frequent intervals.
The responsibility of maintaining the desire to consume, which alone permits high production rates, is a heavy one and industry has been cross-checking. With a view to the logical operation of design, American business utilized techniques which were intended to secure the stability of its production. In the late ‘forties and early ‘fifties an effort was made, through market research, to ensure that sales expected of a given product would, in fact, be available to it. Months of interrogation by an army of researchers formed the basis for the design of the Edsel, a project which involved the largest investment of capital made by American business in post-war years. This was not prompted by a spirit of adventure – rather it was an example of the extreme conservatism of American business at the time. It was not looking to the designer for inspiration but to the public, seeking for a composite image in the hope that this would mean pre-acceptance in gratitude for wish-fulfilment. American business simply wanted the dead cert. It came as something of a shock when the dead cert came home last. The Edsel proved that it took so long to plan and produce an automobile that it was no good asking the customer what he wanted – the customer was not the same person by the time the car was available. Industry needed something more than a promise of purchase – it needed an accurate prophecy about purchasers of the future. Motivation research, by a deeper probe into the sub-conscious of possible consumers, prepared itself to give the answer.
It had been realised that the dynamic of industrial production was creating an equal dynamic in the consumer, for there is no ideal in design, no predetermined consumer, only a market in a constant state of flux. Every new product and every new marketing technique affects the continually modifying situation. For example, it has long been understood that the status aspect of car purchasing is of fundamental importance to production. Maintaining status requires constant renewal of the goods that bestow it. As Industrial Design has said: “post-war values were made manifest in chrome and steel”.[5] But the widespread realisation of aspirations has meant that gratification through automobile ownership has become less effective. Other outlets, home ownership and the greater differentiation possible though furnishing and domestic appliances have taken on more significance. Company policy has to take many such factors into account. Decisions about the relationship of a company to society as a whole often do more to form the image than the creative talent of the individual designer. Each of the big manufacturers has a design staff capable of turning out hundreds of designs every year covering many possible solutions. Design is now a selective process, the goods that go into production being those that motivation research suggests the consumer will want.
Most of the major producers in America now find it necessary to employ a motivation staff and many employ outside consultants in addition. The design consultants of America have also had to comply with the trend to motivation research and Industrial Design reports[6] that most now have their own research staffs. This direction of design by consumer research has led many designers to complain of the limitation of their contribution. The designer cannot see himself just as a cog in the machine which turns consumer motivations into form – he feels that he is a creative artist. Aaron Fleishmann last year, in the same Industrial Design article, expressed these doubts: “In the final analysis, however, the designer has to fall back on his own creative insights in order to create products that work best for the consumer; for it is an axiom of professional experience that the consumer cannot design – he can only accept or reject”. His attitude underrates the creative power of the yes/no decision. It pre-supposes the need to reserve the formative binary response to a single individual instead of a corporate society. But certainly it is worthwhile to consider the possibility that the individual and trained response may be the speediest and most efficient technique.
Design in the ‘fifties has been dominated by consumer research. A decade of mass psycho-analysis has shown that, while society as a whole displays many of the symptoms of individual case histories, analysis of which makes it possible to make shrewd deductions about the response of large groups of people to an image, the researcher is no more capable of creating the image than the consumer. The mass arts, or pop arts, are not popular artists in the old sense of art arising from the masses. They stem from a professional group with a highly developed cultural sensibility. As in any art, the most valued products will be those which emerge from a strong personal conviction and these are often the products which succeed in a competitive market. During the last 10 years market and motivation research have been the most vital influence on leading industrialists’ approach to design. They have gone to research for the answers rather than to the designer – his role, in this period, has been a submissive one, obscuring the creative contribution which he can best make. He has, of course, gained benefits from this research into the consumers’ response to images – in package design particularly, techniques of perception study are of fundamental importance. But a more efficient collaboration between design and research is necessary. The most important function of motivation studies may be in aiding control of motivations – to use the discoveries of motivation research to promote acceptance of a product when the principles and sentiments have been developed by the designer. Industry needs greater control of the consumer – a capitalist society needs this as much as a Marxist society. The emphasis of the last 10 years on giving the consumer what he thinks he wants is a ludicrous exaggeration of democracy; propaganda techniques could be exploited more systematically by industry to mould the consumer to its own needs.
This is not a new concept. Consumer requirements and desires – the consumer’s image of himself – are being modified continually now; the machinery of motivation control is already established. At present this control operates through the intuitions of advertising men, editors of opinion and taste-forming mass circulation magazines, and the journalists who feed them. But these techniques are too haphazard, too uncertain – fashion is subject to whim and divergences, to personal eccentricities which squander the means of control. As monopolistic tendencies increase we can expect a more systematic application of control techniques with greater power to instil the craving to consume. It will take longer to breed desire for possession when the objects to be possessed have sprung not directly from the subconscious of the consumer himself, but from the creative consciousness of an artistic sensibility – but the time lag will have distinct advantages for industry.
An industry programmed five years and more ahead of production has to think big and far-out. Product design, probing into future and unknown markets, must be venturesome and, to be certain of success, stylistically and technically valid. As the situation stands at the moment it is anybody’s guess (some guessers shrewder than others) which images and symbols will mean most to the public in 1965. It is like someone in 1945 trying to forecast a specific description of Marilyn Monroe. New solutions in product design need to be as inherently likeable and efficient as MM and be as capably presented to the public by star propagandists. Many successful products attain high sales after several years of low production rates. The market is made by the virtues of the object: the Eames chair and the Volkswagen, best-sellers in recent years, are concepts which date back to the ‘thirties. Detroit cannot wait that long and this impatience is a clue to what we can expect in all the consumer industries. New products need market preparation to close the gap. Industry, and with it the designer, will have to rely increasingly on the media which modify the mass audience – the publicists who not only understand public motivations but who play a large part in directing public response to images. They should be the designers’ closest allies, perhaps more important in the team than researchers or sales managers. Ad man, copy-writer and feature editor need to be working together with the designer at the initiation of a programme instead of as a separated group with the task of finding the market for a completed product. The time lag can be used to design a consumer to the product and he can be ‘manufactured’ during the production span. Then producers should not feel inhibited, need not be disturbed by doubts about the reception their products may have by an audience they do not trust, the consumer can come from the same drawing board.
Within this framework the designer can maintain a respect for the job and himself while satisfying a mass audience; his responsibility to that amorphous body is more important than his estimation of the intrinsic value of the product itself – design has learned this lesson in the ‘fifties. The next phase should consolidate that understanding of the essential service he is providing for industry and consumer, and extend the use of new psychological techniques as part of the designer’s equipment in finding more precise solutions to the needs of society.