Full Description
Designing Modern Norway: A History of Design Discourse is an intellectual history of design and its role in configuring the modern Norwegian nation state. Rather than a conventional national design history survey that focuses on designers and objects, this is an in-depth study of the ideologies, organizations, strategies and politics that combined might be said to have "designed" the modern nation's material and visual culture. The book analyses main tropes and threads in the design discourse generated around key institutions such as museums, organisations and magazines. Beginning with how British and continental design reform ideas were mediated in Norway and merged with a nationalist sentiment in the late nineteenth century, Designing Modern Norway traces the tireless and wide-ranging work undertaken by enthusiastic and highly committed design professionals throughout the twentieth century to simultaneously modernise the nation by design and to nationalise modern design. Bringing the discussion up towards the present, the book concludes with an examination of how Norway's new-found wealth has profoundly changed the production, mediation and consumption of design.
Contents
List of illustrations
Introduction
Chapter 1: Organizing a National Design Culture
Chapter 2: New Nation: Institutional Visions
Chapter 3: Class and Culture: Design Reform Upstairs and Downstairs
Chapter 4: Design on the Home Front
Chapter 5: Reconstructing the Nation
Chapter 6: On Display: Crafting 'Scandinavian Design'
Chapter 7: Unravelling Utopia: The Demise of the Applied Art Movement
Chapter 8: Design with Care: From Consumer Activism to Environmentalism
Chapter 9: Re-designing Discourse: from Ardent Advocacy to Amicable Advice
Epilogue
Bibliography
Notes
Index
