Editor’s Introduction

This special issue of Design and Culture explores the widespread influence of Scandinavian design outside the Nordic countries. It demonstrates the international reach of the subject and augments the standard design history narrative by demonstrating how both Scandinavian attitudes to modern design and the designs themselves have had a deep and penetrating impact on design culture and material life internationally. It seeks to identify how qualities that have long been associated with Scandinavian design, including such familiar and rather clichéd attributes as a focus on human comfort, organic form, and the use of natural materials, as well as Scandinavian approaches to design, have been disseminated and assimilated abroad. While recent scholarship has debunked myths of a design culture exclusively based on these ideals, the mythmakers were highly effective, and Scandinavian design’s promotional engines have successfully transmitted these principles internationally, where they were widely embraced.¹ The articles in this issue draw upon both Scandinavian and American archival sources in order to articulate these dynamics of exchange more fully; some also employ unconventional design historical approaches and sources in order to show the extensive international reach of the subject.

Standard design histories have typically emphasized the role that western and central Europeans played in disseminating ideas about modern architecture and design, but have neglected or under-acknowledged the international impact of Scandinavian design and its role in shaping design history. For example, some of the early seminal histories of design, such as Sir Nikolaus Pevsner’s Pioneers of the Modern Movement (1936) and Reyner Banham’s Theory and Design in the First Machine Age (1960) exclude Scandinavian architecture and design entirely, while Siegfried Giedion’s Mechanization Takes Command (1948) considers Alvar Aalto, but none of his Nordic counterparts. It is not until the 1980s and 1990s with publications like John Heskett’s Industrial Design (1980) and Jonathan Woodham’s Twentieth-Century Design (1997) that Scandinavian designers begin to appear in design history survey texts.

Compounding this problem, scholarship on Nordic design topics published in Scandinavian languages has rarely been translated into English, and so has not been accessible to the full audience of design historians, practitioners, and students. However, important inroads have been made in the last several decades to make this research more available to a broad readership. Mirjam Gelfer-Jørgensen, then Chief Librarian at the Danish Museum of Decorative Art (now Designmuseum Danmark), established the English-language Scandinavian Journal of Design History in 1991 and served as editor until it folded in 2005. She explained in the first issue that “the primary task of this new journal is to promote and animate research in design history in the Scandinavian countries”, continuing that:

another important goal is to make the results of this research available to readers who do not have a command of the Scandinavian languages in the hopes of promoting a dialogue in a field which itself is not especially large internationally speaking” (Gelfer-Jørgenson 1991, 5)

During its run, the journal published several articles about the influence of Scandinavian design abroad.

The author/editors of Modern Swedish Design: Three Founding Texts took a different approach, translating and annotating three important historical texts that had never been available in English. In their book, which includes Ellen Key’s “Beauty in the Home”, Gregor Paulsson’s Better Things for Everyday Life, and acceptera, a book-length treatise written by a group of Swedish architects following the 1930 Stockholm Exhibition, their intention was “to make these texts available to teachers and students who do not read Swedish, but who want to understand the role of Swedish architecture and design in the general and international development of modernism” as well as “to stimulate scholarship on the history of Swedish architecture and design – on both its specifically Swedish development and its international relationships” (Creagh, Kåberg, and Miller Lane 2008, 14). More recently, Kjetil Fallan, a contributor to this issue, has made several efforts to make scholarship on Scandinavian design more accessible to English readers. In Scandinavian Design: Alternative Histories, a book of essays in English by thirteen scholars based in Nordic countries, he “proposes a different format and approach” compared with the prevailing literature of historical surveys and individual monographs by “allowing critical, in-depth analysis of the material while also providing a scope beyond the individual cases” (Fallan 2012, 1). And efforts such as his translation of an excerpt from ethnologist Siv Ringdal’s Det Amerikanske Lista: Med 110 volt i huset (110 Volts at Home: The American Lista) published in the Journal of Design History extend this goal (Fallan 2014). Furthermore, a wide variety of scholarly journals such as the Journal of Design History, Design Issues, Business History Review, and this journal have published articles on Scandinavian design topics in recent years.

Often considered a post-Second World War phenomenon, Scandinavian art and design was well known abroad before 1945. In the early decades of the twentieth century, Sweden hosted several exhibitions that were extensively covered in the international press (such as the 1917 Home Exhibition and the 1930 Stockholm Exhibition), and sent a highly influential pavilion to the 1925 L’Exposition internationale des arts décoratifs et industriels modernes in Paris. Meanwhile, both the Swedish and Finnish glass and ceramics industries, through such companies as Orrefors, Gustavsberg, Iittala, and Arabia maintained a prominent position on the world stage, participating in world’s fairs and supplying goods to both the domestic and international markets. And as scholar Erin Leary traces in this issue, several exhibitions of art from Sweden and Denmark toured the United States in the second and third decades of the twentieth century.

Following the Second World War, the Danish furniture industry gained international prominence and the four countries of Denmark, Sweden, Finland, and Norway joined forces to promote their designs beyond their borders, culminating in several major traveling exhibitions that were well-attended and received extensive press coverage: Design in Scandinavia was shown at twenty-two museums in the United States and Canada in 1954–57; Formes Scandinaves appeared at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris in 1958; and a subsequent version of Design in Scandinavia traveled to several Australian venues in 1968–69.

These were not simply efforts to stimulate the countries’ economies, but acts of cultural diplomacy. The Scandinavian nations were aligning themselves with the democratic, capitalist side of the Cold War divide by appealing to American and western tastes and associating their products with values of freedom and openness. In the 1960s and 1970s, critiques of the consumer society and concerns for environmental responsibility emerged in the Scandinavian countries and shifted the design dialogue from the production of “more beautiful things for everyday life” (a translation of Swedish design theorist Gregor Paulsson’s phrase “vackrare vardagsvara”) to critical discussions about environmental design, universal design, and design for disability. The promotion of design industries domestically and abroad remains active policy today in several Nordic countries, as evidenced by partial or fully government-funded design organizations such as the Danish Design Centre, the Swedish Institute, the Norwegian Centre for Design and Architecture, the Iceland Design Centre, and Design Forum Finland. The support at the highest levels of government for pan-Scandinavian traveling exhibitions also persists, and includes such projects as the 1982 exhibition Scandinavian Modern Design, 1880–1980, which was organized by the Cooper-Hewitt Museum and traveled to several US venues, and Scandinavian Design: Beyond the Myth, which traveled within Europe in 2003–06.

The articles in this issue trace how Scandinavian design became an integral part of an international design lineage by examining the exhibition and display of Scandinavian art and design in the United States in the early twentieth century; Danish designers who borrowed and reinterpreted historic American designs; the aggressive campaigns to market and export Scandinavian design abroad; the largely shrouded history of armament design, production, and dissemination in Norway and Sweden; and the adoption of a universal symbol that was the result of a complex design process initiated by a Danish design student at an international conference in Sweden.

The implications of this research for design studies today are manifold. The case studies serve as exemplars of the ways that ideas and objects can be disseminated internationally, and the complex way that influence can move in multiple directions, sometimes simultaneously. The articles also reinforce how the exhibition and display of design are often highly politicized acts, with the goal of fostering economic prosperity, engendering policy-based cultural values, or reinforcing the political agendas advanced by the project’s sponsors (this exhibition function remains a tool used by governmental and private organizations). Several of the contributions included here transcend the boundaries of traditional design history by considering objects and phenomena beyond the typical confines of the discipline and relying on sources outside the design historian’s usual arsenal.

In a highly connected and networked world, in which it often seems that national boundaries are less relevant than the shared, global culture, these articles remind us that there remain many localized and geographically specific design cultures and traditions that substantially impact material production, and that these cultures are indicative and worthy of sustained examination. Critical regionalism, “a self-conscious synthesis between universal civilization and world culture”, was first articulated by architectural historian and theorist Kenneth Frampton in reference to architecture (incidentally, he used a Danish and a Finnish building to make his point – Jørn Utzon’s Bagsvaerd Church and Alvar Aalto’s Säynätsalo Town Hall (Frampton 1983). The approach of being cognizant of both universal themes and regional specificities has been applied to the practice of design history, and has been advocated more recently by design scholars such as Victor Margolin, who argues that what is needed is an expanded understanding of design that interrogates “how different cultures have provided for their respective material needs” (Margolin 2005, 239). Furthermore, the articles reflect efforts to address the mounting critiques and intellectual challenges of writing global, universal histories, and in response, the shift toward more sensitive regional or multinational histories that analyze cross-cultural phenomena without making value judgments about the importance of the center and the periphery.² My hope is that this volume will stimulate more research along these lines.

The topic for this special issue began as a session at the 2014 College Art Association conference in Chicago, and I would like thank the participants in that session for their thoughtful and thought-provoking papers. I would also like to thank Design and Culture editor Elizabeth Guffey for inviting me to edit this special issue as an extension of that effort. Thanks are also due to the several anonymous reviewers who generously gave their time and expertise to improve the articles.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Bobbye Tigerman

^{Bobbye Tigerman is Marilyn B. and Calvin B. Gross Associate Curator of Decorative Arts and Design at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, where she is responsible for the collections of modern and contemporary design and craft. She edited A Handbook of California Design, 1930−-1965: Craftspeople, Designers, Manufacturers and has contributed to The Bloomsbury Encyclopedia of Design (ed. Clive Edwards, Bloomsbury Academic, 2015) Knoll Textiles 1945–2010 (Bard Graduate Center and Yale University Press, 2011), California Design 1930–1965: Living in a Modern Way (MIT Press, 2011), the Journal of Design History, and Design and Culture. Her next exhibition is Beyond Bling: Jewelry for from the Lois Boardman Collection (October 2016).}

Notes

1. The most prominent among this recent scholarship are Halén and Wickman (2003) and Fallan (2012).

2. A discussion of the various ways that design history scholarship might be expanded beyond its Eurocentric roots, and an explanation of how it “is not necessarily a singular project or one that requires comprehensive geographical coverage” can be found in Huppatz (2015). Kjetil Fallan and Grace Lees-Maffei have asserted that “writing history today, then, should be less about pitching the global against the local, regional, and national, and more a matter of exploring the interactions and influences between these different scales” (Fallan and Lees-Maffei forthcoming 2016).