How 160 Years of Design Changed Our Lives: A Shanghai Exhibition Covers It All

Every ism and every principle has a reference point somewhere in these 160 years.

In the 1880s, in the thick of the Second Industrial Revolution, no one had yet built a reliable drive chain, so the only way to make a bicycle go faster was to enlarge the driving wheel. That threw the ratio between front wheel and back wheel badly out of balance and gave the whole machine a distinctly odd shape. At the time, though, both the 58-inch penny-farthing and the hand-cranked tricycle made for women in skirts counted as thoroughly modern things.

After all, Henry Ford's assembly-line mass production did not yet exist, and handmade cars were still far out of reach for ordinary people. Move the clock forward another two or three decades and the way people lived would still strike you as a little "primitive" and "comical."

Brass car headlamps looked just like carriage lamps. Car horns were shaped like trumpets, with eight sound holes, three pistons and a rubber bulb. Aluminum portable typewriters were not all that portable, and they were still a status symbol for businessmen — ordinary people could not yet afford one...

There are plenty more such odd and entertaining pieces of industrial design in the 160 years counting back from now. Among them you can find origins — the Bauhaus style, for instance, which gave rise to minimalism. You can see contests of ideas — the Arts & Crafts Movement, which began in Britain in the late 19th century and tried to undo the split between design and making that the Industrial Revolution had created. And you can find intriguing connections — Germany's Rimowa suitcases, for example, whose design was inspired by the grooved surface of aircraft, which cuts weight while greatly improving stability.

The oft-repeated line that "design changes life" finds plenty of proof in "Spirit of Creation: 160 Years of Industrial Design," a special exhibition at the Shanghai Auto Museum.

The 160 years are cut into five stages: from the end of the First Industrial Revolution to the eve of World War I; from the start of World War I to the eve of World War II; from World War II to the 1960s; the 1960s to the 1980s; and the 1980s to the present.

Using this familiar way of carving up the decades, the curatorial team from the Shanghai Auto Museum's Cultural Research Center set out to show how industrial design — starting with the mechanized mass production of the First Industrial Revolution, through the first stirrings of industrial design before World War II, the hardships of the war and the revival and prosperity that followed, and on to today's intelligent, pluralistic era — has shaped the way people work, travel, furnish their homes and entertain themselves.

Curator Shen Danji says no exhibition in China has ever traced industrial design across such a long span of time. For the Shanghai Auto Museum, this is also the first relatively complete themed exhibition it has staged since opening to the public in 2007.

In the past, the museum's first three floors held only standard displays on the history of the automobile; the occasional piece of industrial design would be shown alongside cars from the same era, just to evoke a sense of the period. Ten years after the museum opened, following a small temporary F1 racing show in 2015, and as transport in Jiading District improved and visitor numbers grew, Shen Danji said, they wanted to try something new.

After consulting professors at Tongji University's College of Design and Innovation who study the history of industrial design, the curatorial team settled on the 160 years of fastest industrial growth, to tell the story of the industrial design most closely bound up with everyday life.

The newly opened fourth-floor gallery covers more than 700 square meters. It is split into five sections, each using a different color scheme to echo the design style of its era. Shen Danji said the gallery followed a German designer's plan, aiming for simplicity so the exhibits themselves would stand out. The way the pieces are displayed is, in her words, "fairly bold": quite a few are left "exposed," with no protective barriers.

A third of the exhibits were already in the museum's collection; the other two-thirds were bought from abroad over the course of curating the show. The buying went less smoothly than one might imagine — with some of the older pieces it was hard to tell genuine from fake, and a few classic pieces of furniture had to be given up because the asking price was too high.

After weighing how representative each piece was, its condition, the variety of types, and how close it sat to everyday life, the more than 100 pieces of industrial design finally put on display still offer plenty worth seeing.

1851-1914: Caught Between Hand and Machine

Christopher Dresser is said to have been the world's first independent designer. In the second half of the 19th century he designed silver-plated tea sets for many companies. The Dresser silver-plated tea set on display here was designed in 1887; its spare form is very different from most handmade pieces in the classical style — and for an industrial age it was undoubtedly far easier to produce.

Mass production brought people plenty of benefits, but the fascination with the feel of handmade things was hard to give up. That feeling is still with us: handcraft takes more time and labor, and it does not necessarily mean higher quality, but it is still tied, to some degree, to uniqueness or even luxury. A good example is this Thonet No. 14 chair (a reproduction). This piece of bentwood furniture is a classic case of industrialized mass production in its day. Still, the woven rattan seat and the curve of the solid wood give it the look of something made by hand.

Not until Henry Ford first launched the Model T in 1908 did people really feel the magic of mass production. Cars that had once been custom-built by hand, and only for the rich, were now designed to be simpler, sturdier and easier to repair — and, most important, ordinary people could begin to afford one. The assembly line would later draw plenty of criticism, but in that era no one could deny it was a maker of miracles.

1915-1940: Art Deco and Bauhaus, Side by Side

If you have seen The Great Gatsby, this Auburn 851SC will not look unfamiliar. A big body, loud showy colors and plenty of horsepower were the typical marks of American cars of that era, and Auburn was a quintessential American luxury brand of the time.

Its design was built to turn heads: the exterior was lavish, and beyond the eye-catching color it carried plenty of chrome plating that gave off a nouveau-riche, devil-may-care air. Its performance was outstanding too — plenty of horsepower, and it was said to be able to match racing cars for speed.

American car design of this period followed a loud Art Deco style; European cars, by comparison, were far more conservative in their choice of colors. One man who had a major influence on American car design at the time was Harley Earl, whose work on color gave cars a much wider range of options and drove General Motors' rapid expansion.

Even a child's tricycle got meticulous American design: the same bright colors as the cars, a streamlined body, and curved handlebars modeled on an airplane's control wheel.

In Europe over the same years, the prevailing style was Bauhaus design — understated, simple, focused on function. One typical example is the very ordinary-looking Kandem Desk Lamp.

The lamp was designed in 1934 by an unusual figure: Marianne Brandt, the first woman at the Bauhaus to work in metalwork. Single in color and spare in form, it was made for large-scale industrial production. Paired with that minimal design was outstanding function — the neck could be angled however you liked, while the base stayed firmly steady. Add a low price, and the lamp sold well even through the Great Depression.

This American table lamp from the same period (a Brass Bakelite Table Lamp) is the opposite — still full of Art Deco flourish: a glass shade, a brass frame, a Bakelite base with decorative lines, black paired with gold.

1941-1960: European Design Rises

For industrial development, war was an opening. After it ended, research into aerodynamics spread into car design. Germany's Volkswagen Beetle is a classic example.

World War II hit German industrial design hard. The Bauhaus was forcibly closed, and Nazi totalitarianism not only stifled the free development of German design but also drove the school's leading figures to emigrate to the United States. Germany lay in ruins after the war, but for a German design world freed from totalitarian control, this was the starting point for a fresh start.

After the Bauhaus came the Ulm School of Design, founded in 1953. It inherited the modern design education the Bauhaus had pioneered, pushed principles such as function and ergonomics further into industrial design, and argued strongly for a sense of responsibility toward "good design." The trust and goodwill people feel toward German design today were built up step by step from that period on.

Among the exhibits from these years we can see a good number of household appliances made by Germany's Braun GmbH — record players, radios, electric fans, coffee grinders, cameras and more.

Scandinavian simplicity was also starting to come into its own. Take this Danish-made Lundtofte Coffee Set: the coffee pot, sugar bowl and creamer are all stainless steel, with rattan-wrapped handles — the Scandinavian habit of playing down decoration in favor of usefulness and a sense of quality. Sweden's famous Hasselblad camera is another example of the same spare design.

1961-1980: Going Mainstream

Many new things began to appear — portable televisions, portable radios, Kodak point-and-shoot cameras, Polaroid cameras, the Walkman. Japanese design slowly began to work its way into a market Europe and America had held alone. In 1979, the Sony Walkman, designed by Nobutoshi Kihara, sold briskly the moment it reached shops.

Look closely and you will notice that commercial elements such as logos and packaging start to show up again and again, and brand awareness grows. Materials changed a great deal too. Typewriters that had once been aluminum switched to plastic casings and became more portable; by now they were no longer a businessman's status symbol either — even an ordinary clerk could afford this bright red Olivetti Valentine typewriter.

And the Panton Chair, a plastic chair about as common as they come today, was the world's first chair molded in one piece from glass-fiber-reinforced plastic. The new material made it sturdier, and the curve of the seat was drawn from the shape of the human body.

1980 to the Present: Emotional Design and Styles of Every Kind

Once you reach the 1980s, what the exhibits stir in visitors is probably memory rather than novelty. The rounded iMac that went on sale in 1998, the Motorola handheld phone, the Nintendo console, the Swatch watch — all of these may really have been part of our own lives.

As with design today, styles of every kind began to flourish after the 1980s. Take the spider-shaped juicer from 1990, the Alessi Juicy Salif, designed by the French designer Philippe Starck. Its gleaming metal surface and singular shape give it a thoroughly futuristic feel.

Interestingly, similar "biomimetic" designs turn up often in this period. Take the whistling kettle (the Alessi Whistling Kettle) designed in 1985 by the American designer Michael Graves: the bird-shaped whistle that sings when the water boils is the high point of an otherwise all-stainless-steel kettle.

Or the Happy Boy corkscrew (Alessi Corkscrew AM23) and the Anna G corkscrew (Alessi Anna G), both designed for Alessi by the Italian designer Alessandro Mendini.

Venue: Shanghai Auto Museum

Dates: January 2017, possibly extended

Cover image and in-text images (unless otherwise noted) courtesy of the Shanghai Auto Museum