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Design as Semiotic Construction

The Bauhaus Heritage During a sinister era of German history, something akin to “German” physics was postulated and juxtaposed with an allegedly “Jewish” physics, where Jewish physics—especially Albert Einstein’s paradigm-changing achievements—was denounced as being part of the “Jewish World Conspiracy.” And now we are talking about “German designwissenschaft”? Science is international; there is no “German designwissenschaft.” There are efforts by German researchers to contribute to the international discourse. Doubtless, each country’s contribution is colored by its respective stylistic traditions. The German tradition is rooted in the Bauhaus philosophy—a philosophy that was seen as being labeled “un-German” during the era of “German” physics; and German design is still proud today of this fact. After WWII, the Bauhaus tradition, which had by then achieved international significance, was continued at the Ulm School of Design (HfG), although under different auspices. One of the co-founders of the Ulm School was the graphic designer and philosopher Otl Aicher, who was married to Inge Scholl. She was a sister of Hans and Sophie Scholl who paid with their lives for their courageous stand against Hitler. These developments lead us to an issue that has been shaping the more recent German tradition of thinking about design: the question of whether the “morality of objects” (the title of a Berlin exhibition on the subject) is able to promote the morality of society. German design did not emerge unscathed from the Nazi era, and hence the Bauhaus and the Ulm School shared the same belief that design embodies morality. But the hope that the morality of design would affect the morality of society might have been a bit too optimistic and naïve. As would later become obvious, the moral ethos had been too bold a claim. By no means too bold, however, is the view that design today does, indeed, affect the whole society. The lessons we can learn from the Bauhaus/HfG Ulm have not yet been exhausted. On the contrary, they still point toward the future.