“Do I want to be honest but broke, or do I want to prostitute myself and be loaded?” In 1961, Bernard Benson, a British aviation designer, articulated one of his generation’s core dilemmas: selling out.
Today, corporations and designers have a less fraught relationship. Making money off design isn’t viewed negatively, and using design to strengthen business is widely accepted. “Things have changed a lot,” Wim de Wit, adjunct curator of architecture and design at the Cantor Arts Center, tells Co.Design. “The fear of selling out to commerce is no longer the same.”
But it’s been a rocky road, as de Wit shows in a new exhibition from the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University, Design for the Corporate World: 1950-1975. The mainstreaming of design in business took decades and was hotly debated by designers and executives alike. And today, we’re seeing similar debates rekindled as designers question their relationship to corporations and the effectiveness of established ideas, like design thinking, in combating today’s problems.