13 - Where Is the Artisan?: Post-industrial Alternatives from the Radical Design Movement

Summary

Abstract

Focusing on a few representative projects, this chapter considers how designers involved in the Italian “Radical” design movement managed the contradictions of post-industrial labour. I explore how designers engaged the emerging service economy, artisanal labour, and automated manufacturing in order to consider four distinct topoi: neo-Fordism, worker experience, flexible specialization, and preservationism. These fields help us consider structurally the competing aesthetics and politics of post-industrialism in the long 1960s.

Keywords: artisan; design; manufacture; flexible specialization; neo- Fordism; automation

The term “post-industrialism” has largely dissipated from academic and political discourse. Yet, its embrace of technical over democratic solutions to governance, and simultaneous hostility to working-class interests, continues to inform liberal policy across the Global North and its satellites of influence. From the outset, leftist critics have been quick to dismantle the technophilic utopianism of post-industrialism. Shortly after Daniel Bell's initial lecture “Post-Industrial Society” was published in 1964, Herbert Marcuse warned that “technocratic” administration was collapsing the public and private spheres. His argument proved seminal to the resounding critiques of technocracy from the 1968 student-worker movement. By the 1970s, Marxist industrial sociologists entered the fray, spurring analyses of the service economy and “information,” theses on deindustrialization and its restructuring of the economy, alongside currents that linked economy and culture under the rubric of “postmodernity.” Left-theorists have continually dismantled the social-forecasting ideology of the post-industrial utopians by focusing on its historical implications for labour and capital.

A key testing ground for both technocratic and left versions of postindustrialism lies in the field of design. This includes work by designers oriented toward the labour processes that marked post-industrialism from the 1960s to its height in the 1980s in service design, participatory design, postmodern design, and user experience. This chapter explores the notorious “Radical” or “Counter” design movement based in Northern Italy in these crucial decades. Specifically, I consider how designers dealt with transformations in labour, technology, and politics through the material conditions and formal qualities of their work.

In this context, “radicalism” functioned as a placeholder for the competing ideologies of the New Left, not necessarily entailing a set of revolutionary or progressive intentions and outcomes on the part of the designers themselves. Even if the movement's notional radicalism invoked decolonization, gender equity, worker power, self-management, and much else from the later 1960s onwards, its ideologies allowed for different value projects with various levels of commitment.