Ikigai Daily
Menu
DriveDesign education fact

The Ulm School of Design in West Germany, open from 1953 to 1968, taught design alongside science, sociology and industrial production rather than as decoration. Its teachers and students helped shape Braun's clean-lined products and Lufthansa's visual identity.

Ulm School of Design

DesignTechnologyCultureHistory

The story behind the card

The school was founded by Inge Scholl, the designer Otl Aicher and the Swiss artist and architect Max Bill. Scholl's brother and sister, Hans and Sophie Scholl, had been executed in 1943 for resisting the Nazis, and the school was set up partly in their memory, to educate responsible citizens after the war. Bill designed its building and was its first head. Teaching became increasingly methodical, drawing on mathematics, psychology and the study of how signs communicate. The teacher Hans Gugelot worked with Braun on its 1950s radios and record players, and Aicher's team designed Lufthansa's complete corporate identity in the early 1960s; Aicher later created the pictograms for the 1972 Munich Olympics. The school closed in 1968 after losing its public funding.

Türkçe oku
Batı Almanya'daki Ulm Tasarım Yüksekokulu 1953'ten 1968'e kadar açık kaldı ve tasarımı bir süsleme işi olarak değil; bilimle, sosyolojiyle ve sanayi üretimiyle birlikte öğretti. Braun'un sade ürünlerinde ve Lufthansa'nın görsel kimliğinde okulun hocalarının ve öğrencilerinin imzası vardır.

Okulu Inge Scholl, tasarımcı Otl Aicher ve İsviçreli sanatçı ve mimar Max Bill kurdu. Inge Scholl'un kardeşleri Hans ve Sophie Scholl, Nazilere direndikleri için 1943'te idam edilmişti; okul kısmen onların anısına, savaş sonrasında sorumluluk sahibi yurttaşlar yetiştirmek amacıyla açıldı. Binasını Max Bill tasarladı, ilk yöneticisi de o oldu. Eğitim giderek daha yöntemli bir hâl aldı; matematikten, psikolojiden ve işaretlerin nasıl anlam taşıdığını inceleyen bilimden yararlandı. Okulun hocası Hans Gugelot, Braun'un 1950'lerdeki radyo ve pikaplarında firmayla birlikte çalıştı. Aicher'in ekibi 1960'ların başında Lufthansa'nın bütün kurumsal kimliğini tasarladı; Aicher daha sonra 1972 Münih Olimpiyatları'nın piktogramlarını da çizdi. Okul, kamu desteği kesilince 1968'de kapandı.

Sources and further reading

Background reading: Ulm School of Design
Get the mobile appAbout our cards

Related cards

These cards share a subject or reading mode with the card above.

WonderMigration

Polynesian navigators crossed thousands of kilometres of open Pacific without compass, charts or instruments. They steered by rising and setting stars, the sun, ocean swells and seabirds, and kept track of speed and direction in their heads.

By the 1970s the old skills had almost disappeared, and some scholars argued that the Pacific islands had been settled by canoes drifting there by chance. The Polynesian Voyaging Society set out to test this with the help of Mau Piailug, a master navigator from the small island of Satawal in Micronesia, where a closely related tradition survived. In 1976 he guided the double-hulled canoe Hōkūleʻa about 4,000 kilometres from Hawaii to Tahiti without any instruments. The voyage showed that deliberate long-distance navigation was possible. Piailug went on to teach Hawaiian navigators, among them Nainoa Thompson, and traditional wayfinding has since been revived across the Pacific.

Polynesian wayfindingRead card
WonderMigration

Over several thousand years, Bantu-speaking farming peoples spread from the highlands between today's Cameroon and Nigeria across most of central, eastern and southern Africa. Hundreds of related Bantu languages, including Swahili, Zulu, Shona and Kikuyu, are spoken there today.

Historians once pictured a single great 'Bantu migration'. Linguistic, archaeological and genetic evidence now points to a slower spread along many routes, roughly between 4000 BC and AD 500, with Bantu speakers reaching what is now South Africa by about AD 300. The German linguist Wilhelm Bleek coined the name Bantu in 1862 from the word for 'people' shared by many of these languages. Farming, herding and iron-working spread in different mixes from region to region, and everywhere the newcomers mixed with the people already living there. The click sounds of Zulu and Xhosa, for example, were borrowed from the Khoisan languages spoken earlier in southern Africa.

Bantu migrationsRead card
WonderArchitecture

Angkor, capital of the Khmer Empire in today's Cambodia from the ninth to the fifteenth century, was ringed by giant reservoirs, moats and canals that stored monsoon rain and moved water across an urban area of about 1,000 square kilometres.

The largest reservoirs, called barays, are vast rectangles banked with earth: the West Baray, built in the eleventh century, measures about eight kilometres by two and still holds water. Moats such as the one around Angkor Wat framed temples modelled on the sacred mountain and surrounding oceans of Hindu and Buddhist cosmology. Radar and aerial surveys published in 2007, and airborne laser scanning (lidar) that saw through the forest in 2012, revealed roads, canals and house mounds across at least 1,000 square kilometres, the largest known pre-industrial settlement. Researchers still debate how much the barays watered rice fields. Tree rings show long droughts broken by intense monsoons in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, which damaged the network and probably contributed to Angkor's decline.

Angkor hydraulic systemRead card
DriveDesign

Isotype is a way of showing social and economic data with rows of small repeated pictures, so that people can understand it across languages and levels of schooling. It was developed in 1920s Vienna by Otto Neurath, Marie Reidemeister (later Marie Neurath) and the graphic artist Gerd Arntz.

Isotype stands for International System of Typographic Picture Education. Otto Neurath developed it in 1920s Vienna at the Social and Economic Museum, aiming to let ordinary readers, including people with little schooling, compare social and economic data at a glance. Its central rule was to never resize a single icon to show a bigger quantity; instead, a larger number was shown by repeating the same small icon more times, so a reader could count as well as compare. After Austria's political turmoil forced Neurath to flee in 1934, he continued the project first in the Netherlands and later in England. The approach's descendants are visible today in transport maps, road signs and the small repeated icons used in modern infographics.

Isotype picture languageRead card
WonderTechnology

Bakelite, invented by the chemist Leo Baekeland in 1907, was the first fully synthetic plastic. Heated in a mould, it set hard for good, and because it resisted heat and did not conduct electricity it was ideal for plugs, switches, radios and telephones.

Leo Baekeland, a Belgian-born chemist living near New York, was looking for a synthetic replacement for shellac, a natural resin made by lac insects and used to coat and insulate electrical wiring. He found a way to control the reaction between two chemicals, phenol and formaldehyde, using heat and pressure. Earlier plastics such as celluloid were made from plant cellulose; Bakelite was built entirely from laboratory chemicals. It is also a thermoset: once cured, its molecules lock into a rigid network, so it cannot be melted and reshaped. On its own the resin was brittle, so makers mixed in fillers such as wood flour. By the 1920s and 1930s it was everywhere, from telephones and radio cases to jewellery and pan handles.

BakeliteRead card
Next card in the archiveA plug that fits only one way cannot be put in wrongly. Designing products and processes so that mistakes are impossible, or noticed at once, is called poka-yoke, Japanese for “mistake-proofing”.Read next →