British Design and Industry

Illustration: United Crafts Joiners, 1902.

Britain during the nineteenth century was one of the few heavily industrialised European economies with no real design infrastructure. The country was still largely running on the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century industrial model, with the philosophy of profit over everything, which included workers wages, accident prevention, advertising and design. All were seen as added complications to the simple task of making money.

Design was seen particularly as an indulgent luxury. Many companies treated the consumer with open contempt, seeing the general public as a passive flock of sheep that were happy to consume whatever the company decided to produce. Therefore, there seemed no real reasoning in which there was a need to hire expensive professional designers when badly trained in house ones would more than suit their needs

Henry Cole and the Reform Movement of the mid-nineteenth century wanted to create a suitably strong and create relationship between industry and design. It was thought that the best way to achieve this would be through education. Therefore, design colleges were founded across the country, usually in or near major centres of industry. These were then given syllabuses which were used in order to produce generations of professionally educated designers that would be able to enter industry in order to influence and raise standards within general British design and decoration. It was a bold and comprehensive plan, that admittedly needed the good faith of industry to make it work, but the Reform Movement were patient and understood that it was a long term-plan.

Illustration: United Crafts rush seat workers, 1902.

However, William Morris who was part of the expanding middle class and was of independent means (his family owned shares in copper mines in the West Country), approached the dilemma of design within British industry from a different angle altogether. He decided to withdraw from any interaction with industry and was adamant that he could either replace, or challenge it with hand production. Although the relationship concerning Morris and industry is more complex than this and was at least partially concerned with his exacting standards and disappointment with the level of finish produced by industry, in many ways it was seen by many as an indictment of the fatal flaws of mass production when Morris dismissed the industry.

Admittedly, this was a personal philosophy, but unfortunately for the fate of design in Britain, Morris was extremely influential, particularly with other middle class young men and new generations of designers, many of who took this philosophy on as their own. The Reform Movement struggled to make any headway due to a combination of factors including the general long-standing lack of enthusiasm from industry, the hostility of the Arts & Crafts movement, but probably more importantly and decisively was the lack of any form of realistic funding from central government for the design education system. This has always been one of the major obstacles to any formalised network plans in Britain, politicians' combination of miserly funding and the general cycle of enthusiasm and indifference, that is the curse of endless and consecutive British governments.

In Europe the Arts & Crafts movement took on a number of different philosophies. Some followed the British, while others saw different ways of approaching both hand production and industry.

The Wiener Werkstatte took on a pragmatic view of hand-production. They understood that Arts & Crafts inspired products were labour intensive and costly to produce. However, they were prepared to supply the wealthy of Vienna with expensive status goods. They did not try to compete with mass production and saw hand production and industry as two separate markets that were not competitive.

The Glasgow School, which influenced, and was influenced by Vienna, and was really much more of a European style Arts & Crafts movement rather than a British, also took a more pragmatic stand than the rest of Britain. They, like the Wiener Werkstatte, produced labour intensive status goods for the wealthy merchant class of Glasgow.

Illustration: United Crafts leather workers, 1902.

Germany seemed to take the approach that was favoured by Henry Cole and the Reform Movement in Britain. They intrinsically understood that the philosophy of trying to influence the result of mass production was the only viable option in a world where hand production was fast becoming if not obsolete, then a small specialised section of the market. Germany has had a long and relatively comfortable relationship between industry and the design world, with largely beneficial results.

The US also, to a certain extent, has benefited from a relationship between industry and design, though the emphasis was much more on producing deliberate obsolete styles to increase consumer consumption, rather than the German idea behind function and design.

Britain has struggled to find a solution to the traditional antagonism between craft, design and industry. Many of the best and most talented designers have been obscured by the Arts & Crafts movement. Many of these designers could have helped to mould or at least temper British industries into bastions of thoughtful, well-crafted and well-executed mass production. They could well have helped to limit the worst excesses within mass production. Admittedly, that would have entailed approaching the industrial world with a pragmatic and realistic outlook, with a well-funded educational system that fed the industry. However, a much more muddled and probably very British affair was used instead. This in no way means that Britain did not learn eventually the merits of good design within an industry setting, but it was long after the point where the initial framework should have been set up as it was in Germany. 

The fact that an indigenous British public design strategy was achieved and produced relatively good results, despite and continually against the odds, should not have had to have been a factor, but inevitably was.

It is a difficult and knife-edge path to take, marrying the creative with the mass produced. The consumer market has no real time or interest in the well designed unless it helps sales. Many who leave art and design colleges as creative graduates are disappointed at how blunt and ruthlessly focused on profits industry and the retail trade really is, and how casually many treat the creative input. It is disappointing that elements that made the British Arts & Crafts movement such a creativley unique and positive experience, could not have been incorporated into British industry. The call for excellence by the movement has been largely ignored by contemporary producers who can only tell us how many units they shift per month rather than the excellence of their design and decorative teams. Although this is by no means a universal reflection of the contemporary world, it is a depressingly familiar one.


Further reading links:
Artisan or Artist? A History of the Teaching of Art and Crafts in English Schools
The Arts and Crafts Movement in Britain (Shire History)
The Arts & Crafts Movement
Arts and Crafts Movement (World of Art)
Textiles of the Arts and Crafts Movement
The Arts and Crafts Movement in Europe and America: Design for the Modern World 1880-1920
Design in Britain
The Tyranny of Taste: The Politics of Architecture and Design in Britain, 1550-1960 (Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in Britis)
Industrial Design in Britain
All Things Bright and Beautiful: Design in Britain, 1830 to Today
A Bibliography of Design in Britain, 1851-1970
1966 and All That: Design and the Consumer in Britain 1960-1969