PhD Research

Katharina Pfützner

Working Title: “Advocating for the User: Industrial Design Practice in the German Democratic Republic”

Abstract:
This project examines a range of strategies formulated and employed by design practitioners in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) in response, it will be argued, to the particular ideological, social and economic conditions that emerged in the GDR.

By focusing on design practice, it seeks to further our understanding of socialist design, which so far has been informed mainly by accounts that approach it from the viewpoint of its consumption. It will critically reconstruct the designers’ goals and perspectives by drawing on unpublished material, including archived documents and interviews conducted with GDR designers, as well as on published sources, such as contemporary books and journals. In doing so it seeks to complicate the current conception of GDR designers as passive executors of state policy.

Ultimately it is hoped that the reconstruction of the GDR designers’ strategies will enrich contemporary discourse about social responsibility in design.