Gui Bonsiepe A Personal Retrospective of the Information Department

Portrait Bonsiepe
Gui Bonsiepe 2015. Photo: private.

The following key biographical data on the author (born in 1934) provide a frame of reference for placing the activities and projects mentioned in this retrospective in chronological order:

From 1955-1959 studied at the HfG Ulm, Department of Information. After graduating, he worked at the HfG in the fields of publication, development, teaching and research until 1968. Editorial work for the bilingual HfG magazine "ulm" (issues 6-21). From the end of 1968, worked as a consultant for design and industrialisation policy in Latin America (Chile, Argentina and Brazil) and as a freelance designer. From 1987 to 1989 interface designer at a software company in California. From 1993 to 2003 professor of interface design at the KISD (Köln International School of Design, Cologne, Germany). Author of several books on industrial design and interface design (published in Italy, Germany, Switzerland, Brazil, Spain, Mexico, Argentina, Holland, Korea). Main areas of interest include design discourse, design in peripheral countries, including design education, and the rhetoric of visual media. Lives in Brazil and Argentina.

My thanks to the HfG Archive of the city of Ulm for answering a number of enquiries, as I did not have the opportunity to do any research on site. The main part of the text was formulated in La Plata/Buenos Aires in January/February 2013 and finalised in January 2014 after adding a few notes.

 

Caution is advised when an active participant in an event ventures into the realm of historians as representatives of a research discipline responsible for documenting and interpreting the past. This retrospective thus claims to provide no more than a building block, based largely on memories, for a history of the Information Department of the HfG Ulm – and thus to complete the incomplete picture of this institution. As is well known, an experienced and lived history of the HfG differs fundamentally from historical research, which constructs a narrative based on documents within framed by a particular constellation of interests, which are primarily political in nature. The relevance of divergent forms of historiography and story writing in terms of approach and interests is measured by whether and to what extent they contribute to the understanding of a phenomenon. The relevance of all forms of historical writing and storytelling, diverging in their approaches and interests, lies in their contribution to understanding a phenomenon.

At the centre of the presented work is the time as a student from 1955 to 1959 – viewed through the prism of personal experience and supplemented by occasional digressions and reflections on the HfG Ulm including its political and cultural environment – up to the current situation of the design discourse and design education, including an Information Department adapted to the present day.

Among the text types available – academic article, interview, essay, first-person narrative, collage, collection of quotations with commentary, list of commonplaces, hypertext montage, chronological report supplemented by a timeline, etc. – it seemed appropriate to me to choose a hybrid text form for this retrospective: The neutral narrative form of the third person, which indicates a distancing between the subject and the author of the review (not to ensure supposed objectivity by avoiding the tabooed word "I"), supplemented by anecdotal inserts written in the first person. This results in breaks in the text structure – they are intentional. I have kept personal biographical data to a minimum. Biographical references proved to be unavoidable when it was necessary to show cross-connections between what was learnt in the Information department and some of the later work. The selection is limited to a few examples of an illustrative nature.

Just as I am not interested in weaving a myth, this review is also directed against a simplistic labelling and the caricature-like image of the grey, colourless "concrete monastery on the Kuhberg" plagued by internal conflicts. These labels avoid the necessary examination of the complexity of the HfG and they avoid to question the idea that the subject of the HfG Ulm can be closed by using terms like "functionalism", "rationalism" and "neo-positivism", which have currently become negative buzzwords.

As is well known, an adequate historical account of the HfG Ulm has yet to be written in Germany, which traces the ups and downs of its appreciation and investigates the reasons why this institution was held in such high esteem on the one hand and so bitterly attacked on the other. 1 A clear distinction should be made between the public image of the HfG during its existence and that which was spread after its closure. Of course, anyone who, for whatever reason – political, programmatic or design-related – finds this institution inconvenient or even "scary", as one press report put it,2 sees the HfG as nothing more than a production site for simple box shapes. An approach typical of a backward-looking understanding of culture that is based on superficial stylistic features, which are incorrect anyway. Once an institution has had the misfortune of being labelled a myth and a legend, the floodgates open for myth deconstruction, each with their own agenda and their own political, sometimes sybillinically coded intentions of wanting to clarify the myths – and at the same time hiding their own conservative interests.3 Thus, for instance the debate about the factual background to the internal disputes at the HfG will not move beyond personal opinion as long as documents in private archives are not accessible and analysed, making it possible to avoid the repetition of stereotypical attributions and to gain a differentiated picture of this institution and its protagonists.4

Unterricht
Lessons with Bernd Rübenach 1958/59. From left: Ilse Grubrich, Gui Bonsiepe, Elke Koch-Weser, Bernd Rübenach

This report does not intend to nostalgically glorify the supposedly "good old times" of studying around the mid-1950s. Rather, it is aimed at revealing the links between the education in the Information Department and the activities carried out after graduation, and implicitly expressing gratitude to the lecturers whose courses and seminars I had the opportunity to attend. There were fascinating and above all committed teachers at the HfG Ulm, with quite contrasting positions and the resulting conflicts – a phenomenon that runs counter to an authoritarian sense of order that sees the highest civic duty at universities in keeping calm.

The richness of what these teachers taught and the perspectives they opened up were only fully realised in retrospect. As exhausting as the internal and external disputes at the HfG Ulm may have been, combined with a permanent, unbearably growing stress of legitimisation to which the HfG was subjected as an outsider institution, they pale in comparison to the memory of an immensely stimulating course of study at an exemplary cosmopolitan institution, whose climate was decisively determined by the foreign lecturers, staff and students.5 It should be noted that in the early 1950s, the Federal Republic of Germany was by no means a particularly inviting environment. It can be assumed that foreigners came to Ulm at that time in spite of Germany and not because of Germany – a country burdened by the leaden weight of Auschwitz.6

Notably, compared to the other three departments – Product Design, Visual Communication, Industrialized Building – and the later-added Film Department, there is a gaping void in the public perception of the HfG Ulm regarding the Information Department. This may not only be due to the small number of students – estimated at around fifteen – and the invisibility and thus difficult communication of the results of this department, but also to the fact that it is not so easy to understand why an design education institution of all things considered the handling of language and texts to be so important that a department with its own study programme was created for this purpose. The unusual nature of this project is reflected in the fact that the information department was not included in the programmes of the various design schools in Germany and abroad that were influenced by the HfG Ulm – above all at the HfG Offenbach and the HfG Schwäbisch Gmünd, the ESDI (_Escola Superior de Desenho Industrial_) in Rio de Janeiro and at the NID (_National Institute of Design_) in Ahmedabad. Dealing with texts, dealing with language, apparently diverged too much from the understanding of what was considered a legitimate area of design. While the cultivation of visuality may have been considered natural at a design school, the cultivation of discursivity was not. It was precisely in the combination of the two that the HfG Ulm was unique.

During the conception phase of the later HfG Ulm at the end of the 1940s, the founders of the Geschwister Scholl Foundation, which was established in December 1950, initially imagined a political university that "considers politics, science, art and business in their integral relationship".7 Inge Scholl – the author of this project – envisaged the following seven main areas: Politics, Journalism, Broadcasting, Photography, Advertising, Industrial Design and Urban Planning. Four of the seven areas were thus clearly assigned to dealing with language. The later Department of Information can be seen as a remnant of this concept. Current design education programmes do not pay due attention to the formation of discursive competence, which can be explained by the predominantly non-discursive tradition of the design professions. This contributes to the fact that the necessity of a stringent design discourse can all too easily be undermined if it is misused as a playground for exuberant uplifting and speculations, which are far from project work and sprout especially from art and media theory.

Although the term "information design" has been used in English-speaking countries since the 1970s, it is primarily anchored in the visual domain and is occasionally equated with data visualisation (including data journalism) or information visualisation. However, this interpretation, which is tailored to the visual, differs considerably from what was understood at the HfG Ulm as design of information, which was explicitly linked to language, but – and this detail of the training concept seems decisive – closely linked to the Visual Communication department. In contrast to literary texts, the focus was on the formulation of utility texts, i.e. texts for everyday use in various forms (from the text of an user manual to a review of an exhibition in a daily newspaper or a political commentary), utilising the links to the Visual Communication department given by spatial and programmatic proximity. In the questionnaire for applicants, which comprised a total of nine questions, the questions tailored to the Information Department were: 
"8. name all the journalistic professions you know. which one would you like to take up? give reasons. 
9. name 3 examples of work from your chosen field of study and evaluate these examples."8

It is revealing that a document from the early phase of the HfG, estimated to have been written between 1953 and 1955, contains the phrase "an advertising department within the information department, which must also be closely linked to the visual communication department".9 This already makes clear the explicit difference between two types of communication: On the one hand, persuasive communication, which is concerned with shaping and influencing the preferential behaviour of consumers, and on the other hand, operative communication, which is aimed at effective action. This difference was later clarified in the context of the development of visual sign and guidance systems.10

We can only speculate about the motives for using the term "information" to describe the department as long as the available sources do not reveal who originally proposed this term.11 One could simply have spoken of publishing studies ["Publizistik", which in English may be translated to journalism, publishing, communication or media science, editor's note]; however, according to the understanding at the time – as well as today – publishing studies or journalism were exclusively oriented towards the formulation of texts. An analysis of the more than fifty years old curriculum and its descriptions reveals an astonishing topicality of the programme, in which sometimes only a few terms need to be replaced to adapt it to today's, especially technologically-induced radical changes (digitalization).12

It is likely that the majority of students entering the basic course in October 1955 did not initially intend to study in the Information department after completing the one-year basic course, which was compulsory for all students. Joining the Visual Communication department was the more obvious choice. It was Max Bense, the first head of the Information Department, who convinced some students to join this department in 1956 in order to learn, as it was called in prosaic terms, how to formulate, texts for everyday use. The fragile, peripheral character of the department is evident in the fact that it was later absorbed into the Film Department, as the course obviously did not have sufficient appeal to motivate a larger number of applicants to study in this department and in addition the position of the head of the department became vacant. The subsequent absorption was therefore more for pragmatic than for programmatic reasons. Both departments pursued their own educational goals and were therefore not dependent on each other.

Whatever the documentary evidence of the reasons for the creation of this department and its naming with the word "Information" – the fact that Hans Werner Richter, as the initiator of Gruppe 47 ["group 47", an association of German writing avant-garde authors, editor's note], took part in discussions during the conception phase of the HfG programme and played an important role – makes it very plausible to assume that the historical context also exerted a considerable influence on the name of the department. Fascism and its consequences were by no means overcome at the end of the Second World War in the Federal Republic of Germany. In a country that had been destroyed materially, morally and culturally, the language had also suffered under fascism. It may be indicative of the consistently conservative atmosphere that the term "reconstruction" rather than "new construction" was used. One of the aims of the re-education programme devised by the Allies – it was also an instrument of the Cold War against communism – was to immunise the population against a repetition of fascism and to promote an understanding of democracy – in the Western, by no means in a socialist sense.

The alleged or actual ignorance of the majority of the German population about the crimes committed during fascism was blamed, among other things, on a lack of information. Appropriate information would therefore be an instrument to prevent a relapse into fascism. As is well known, the explicitly anti-fascist concept of the HfG Ulm turned out not to be favourable for the HfG in the course of history. Bringing together politics and design in a programmatic context was not only incomprehensible for an affirmative cultural understanding but outright sacrilegious. The debate about the relationship between design (including architecture and urban planning) on the one hand and politics on the other, which had been largely buried since the 1980s, continues to smoulder underground because the antinomies between what is technically possible, economically feasible, politically prescribed and desirable for society as a whole continue to resurface. The program of the HfG Ulm had one of its roots in the project of modernity – understood as an attitude that does not only consider the changeability of existing power relations as possible but as desirable, if not necessary, and not excluding design from this political dimension.13

As is well known, this distinguishes the programme of the HfG Ulm from postmodern positions, which found their first resonant expression in the field of architecture in Robert Venturi's and Scott Brown's book Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (1966) and culminated in Charles Jencks, who claimed to be able to pinpoint the end of modern architecture to the minute on 16 March 1972, 3:00 p.m., when the first of the 33 apartment blocks of the social housing project in St. Louis, Missouri, completed in 1955, was blown up. The demolition of the Pruitt-Igoe housing complex was instrumentalised to discredit social housing in general (primarily in the USA). Talking about utopia and the modernist project today and even harbouring the thought of possible change, after its supposed end has been declared with triumphant gestures for decades, may be met with incomprehension – not necessarily an indication of progress.14

In the reception history of the HfG in the Federal Republic of Germany, the innovative character of the radical cultural-political experiment has so far gone unnoticed and has been overshadowed by recurring internal conflicts that were exploited in the media, accusing the aloof institution of having a deficient public relations policy. According to a schematic reading of the end of the HfG Ulm, the reason for its closure was primarily, if not exclusively, to be blamed on the stubbornness of its members, especially the lecturers. Which is – intentionally or unintentionally – political whitewashing. After all, a former naval judge with an at least peculiar understanding of law managed to make it to the post of Prime Minister [Former Nazi judge Hans Filbinger, editor's note] and to justify the withdrawal of the financial support on which the HfG relied for its continued existence in 1968 with the key sentence: "We want to do something new, and that requires the liquidation of the old!" The language alone is telling: "liquidation" suggests the worst. In view of this, to believe that better public relations could have prevented the closure betrays a considerable amount of political naivety. The flame of the politicians' suddenly awakened passion for "the new" died out after just four years, so that the continuation of the HfG in the form of the "Institut für Umweltplanung" [Institute for Environmental Planning, IUP] at the Technical University of Stuttgart probably served primarily to forestall a class action lawsuit by the remaining students, as they could insist on completing their studies properly, i.e. being able to obtain the diploma of the former HfG Ulm.

For the ministerial bureaucracy, the HfG must have appeared to be a rebellious, insubordinate institution and a permanent source of unrest. A letter from the Ministry of Culture from 1974 shows how difficult it was for the bureaucracy to understand this deviant institution. In certifying that the diploma certificate was an official document, the letter from the Baden-Württemberg Ministry of Culture dated 5 August 1974 states that the HfG was a private institution sui generis – which is undoubtedly true – whose studies were most comparable to an academy of fine arts 15 – which is undoubtedly completely wrong. Neither in its curriculum nor in its orientation did the HfG Ulm resemble an academy. None of the traditional educational institutions – neither university, nor technical college, nor art academy – had ever given design the place it deserved. Design did not fit structurally into any of these institutions. For the understanding of culture that prevailed at academies, design, especially industrial design, was commercially infected and therefore taboo. For the sometimes narrow-minded understanding of technology that prevailed at technical colleges, everything outside of the purely technical was relegated to the realm of supposedly irrational aesthetics. And at the universities an epistemological interest prevailed which was indifferent to the design dimension. Max Bense, who tirelessly advocated the acceptance of technical civilisation as one of the central themes of modernity, aptly described the situation: "One can say that we do not enjoy the education that is necessary for our existence in this world. We lack the technical concept of education that translates technical training into an ethically meaningful character of this technical world." 16 Contemporary design can find a place in this concept of technology, which was formulated even before the HfG was founded at the end of the 1940s.

Why did the foundation of the HfG Ulm take place in the Federal Republic, which was not particularly innovative in terms of socio-politics? One plausible answer to this question could be that for a moment "the ever-watchful eye of the status quo" was preoccupied with other, probably more important issues.17 From today's perspective, the soon emerging structural internal contradiction of the HfG seems to lie in the fact that, on the one hand, it needed the freedom for pedagogical experiments that could not be found in established, innovation-resistant – and bureaucratized – institutions, and on the other hand, it was dependent on the sciences, risking to degrade design practice to the subject of the ambitions of old-world science teachers. In view of the potential for tension and conflict inherent in this constellation, it is astonishing that the HfG managed to survive at all for fifteen years from 1953 to 1968, or 1972 respectively. This internal structural contradiction was compounded by the regressive attitude of the Baden-Württemberg state government in the form of unacceptable conditions for the continued financing of the HfG Ulm. Explanatory attempts that psychologize and attribute the end of the HfG Ulm to personal ambitions and differences between members of the institution, which undoubtedly existed but were not decisive, therefore fall far short of the mark.

Portrait Gui Bonsiepe
Gui Bonsiepe at the HfG in the 1960ies. Archive Bonsiepe, Photo: unknown.

Anecdotal Insert Local Climate

In the winter of 1967, a small group of HfG members set off on a march to the city centre in the evening to protest against the Vietnam War. The protest was organised by Claude Schnaidt, a lecturer in the Industrialised Building department and – horribile dictu – a professed communist, which may have fuelled fears in the local context that the HfG was a hotbed of subversive activities. The manifestation obviously was a provocation for some citizens of the city – the group was intimidated by encircling motorcyclists, whose aggressive behaviour left no doubt about their desire to simply crash into the group.

While a graduate of the Product Design Department could rightfully call themselves a product designer, none of the few graduates of the Information Department probably presented themselves as information designers; at best, as journalists or, as is common in the advertising industry, as copywriters. However, as a graduate would hardly have recommended himself as an all-round copywriter who could write a commentary on a football match today and conduct an interview with a cyberneticist tomorrow, it made sense to move the degree programme closer to specialist journalism, i.e. to see the aim of the information department as training experts who could report competently on the wide-ranging field of design, be it in the press, on radio or television, or even in film. At that time, the topic of design was primarily located in the field of cultural editing and interior design magazines, and was covered by journalists who may have studied art history or architectural history. After all, the universities did not offer any courses on design history and even fewer courses on the history of technical civilisation, in which a history of design would find its appropriate place – something that has not happened to this day and constitutes an obstacle to an autonomous history of design.

The equivalent to the design exercises given in other departments were text exercises in the Information department, occasionally combined with photographs. Two writing tasks set by Hans Magnus Enzensberger, who taught at the HfG as a guest lecturer during a quarter from October 1956 to December, were on the subject of "fire" and "fog". During the academic year from October 1957 to June 1958, a radio play was written under the writer Gert Kalow, a literary text that stepped out of the class of utility texts.18 Max Bense's interest in concrete poetry, as well as in information-theoretical discussions about – as he wrote – the aesthetics of provocation instead of aesthetics of pleasure or saturation 19, carried over to the information department. The new topics of cybernetics, automation and later also programmed learning exerted a fascination – a fascination that is difficult to comprehend today. Already at that time, the fundamental text on a philosophy of technical objects by Gilbert Simondon 20 was received, which was only translated into German with considerable delay four decades later. If you ask me today what I consider to be the defining characteristic of the Ulm experience, the answer is: the lively and open intellectual climate, not a single course to be emphasised, but the unique constellation of courses – the counterpart to a curriculum consisting of bureaucratically regimented modules.

   

Unterricht
Lessons with Tomás Maldonado in semiotics, around 1958 Photo: Claus Wille

Anecdotal Insert A Misunderstanding

While browsing through the magazine display in the library of the university in Munich in the summer semester of 1955, I came across a German literary magazine – it was probably the magazine Akzente -, founded in 1954, in which examples of concrete poetry by Eugen Gomringer were published. The explanatory footnote mentioned that the author was the private secretary of Max Bill, the rector of the newly founded HfG Ulm as a successor institution to the legendary Bauhaus, which was to open in new buildings in Ulm in October 1955. Having studied for a semester in Hamburg with one of the last students of the Bauhaus, Kurt Kranz, and having learned about the Bauhaus, which fascinated me, I had the false assumption that I would find a new edition of a Bauhaus coined by artists. Therefore, I applied to study at this institution hoping to receive an artistic education there. I had deliberately overlooked the well-known fact that there were no official fine art classes at the Bauhaus. In my ignorance, I therefore took the liberty of submitting artistic graphics as application documents, including etchings strongly influenced by Paul Klee with motifs from winter-rainy Venice. At the end of the first quarter in December 1955, the head of basic teaching, Tomás Maldonado, summoned me to a meeting in one of the sparse conference rooms, as he had noticed that I was not at all happy with the basic teaching programme. I explained to him that I had come to Ulm to study painting. His terse reply was: "If you want to study painting, go to Paris. We do THIS HERE!" With these words, he lifted the only movable object in the room (apart from two Knoll armchairs) from the flat conference table – a black Bakelite telephone – banged it back on the table and left. I repeated all the exercises during the Christmas holidays and stayed at the HfG. This short conversation was a turning point in my education.

Although no course on rhetoric was offered, the practical text exercises helped to develop linguistic differentiation skills.21 Copywriting for advertising was also not specifically practised in a course, although the labour market in this sector would probably have offered graduates of the department professional opportunities.22

Max Bense also addressed the stylistic exercises of Raymond Queneau and the poetry of Francis Ponge, as well as the texts of Arno Schmidt, whose appointment as a lecturer in the department was proposed twice. Max Bense's aesthetics, which were based on information theory, were directed against the aesthetics of interpretation or the aesthetics of pleasure, which were cloaked in spirituality. His dictum that one must speak about art as precisely as about the weather, namely in observational sentences, was clearly formulated with polemical intent. It is reasonable to assume that it was also Max Bense who recommended the purchase of the first two-volume edition of Walter Benjamin's writings, published by Suhrkamp press, for the HfG's small library. An analysis of this small library could reveal the diverse influences of intellectual history on the HfG Ulm and the cultural climate that prevailed there. Research into the development of the HfG's history of ideas has yet to be conducted.

The many-faceted aspects of the term "information" are documented in Max Bense's work. He characterises the everyday meaning of the term "information" as follows: "Information is knowledge whose meaning is to be transmitted, to be communicated. [...] Information here therefore means a supply of knowledge. Information eliminates a certain lack of knowledge." 23 In contrast, "the scientific concept of information denotes as information only that which can be measured or counted in the message." 24 The works created under the influence of Max Bense find themselves in a field of tension between these two interpretations, which on the one hand are bound to meaning and significance, but on the other hand also exclude meaning. As is well known, the diversity of the concept of information has expanded since the 1950s to an almost unmanageable extent – a development that would probably have to be taken into account in the case of a reappraisal of such an study programme in design education.25

In a practical work based on a detailed analysis of the distribution and frequency of point elements of an image, the aesthetic information content and redundancy were calculated using Shannon's formula (see illustration). This exercise had nothing to do with conventional image interpretation, and it did not say anything about the aesthetic quality. At the end of the exercise you had a numerical value, but nothing more. If we apply the taxonomy of illocutionary acts from John Searle's theory of language, quality is discussed with assessments (judgments), for which different conditions of fulfilment apply than for assertions. For assessments, the standards must be specified on the basis of which the assessment is made; whereas for an assertion, the fulfilment condition is that it is true. It is verifiable.

The literary scholar Käte Hamburger used the sentence "Tomorrow was Christmas" to explain the difference between a fictional text and a non-literary text. The quoted sentence can only occur in a fictional context. It can be found in her dissertation Die Logik der Dichtung [The Logic of Poetry], which she used as the basis for her lectures at the HfG Ulm.

In the student handbook (see illustration) there is an entry about a lecture on Friedrich Engels' book "The Condition of the Working Class in England". At the time, such a topic was hardly covered at design schools. Over the past 50 years, the thematic areas of interest have probably shifted and interest in engaging with the writings of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels has likely waned.

In another course on industrial sociology, Hanno Kesting explained his criticism of Marx's concept of alienation, which was based on an empirical study of the labour relations of team-like cooperation between workers in a steel rolling mill. In social science lessons, he dealt with his main work Geschichtsphilosophie und Weltbürgerkrieg [Historical Philosophy and War of the World Citizens], among other things. I remember two definitions by Carl Schmitt with the approximate wording: "The sovereign is the one who decides on the state of emergency." In other words: Power belongs to whoever decides on the state of emergency. And "No pardon is granted to a partisan." (in contrast to a captured soldier). The concrete meaning of these formulations I comprehended later in Latin America in the context of military coups and guerrilla movements.

In addition to the strong influence of Max Bense, who left the teaching staff of the HfG in 1958, Tomás Maldonado had the strongest impact on the author of this retrospective. It may seem unbalanced to highlight one person. If it is nevertheless done, it is in a constellation of teachers, all of whom, in their diversity and with their various, sometimes contrary approaches, shaped the teachings at the HfG. Each student, following their affinities and experiences, will favour one teacher or another, which does not imply a lack of gratitude or recognition for the other lecturers. For many students, Max Bill may have been an outstanding reference person, for others Horst Rittel, or Otl Aicher, Hans Gugelot, Josef Albers, Konrad Wachsmann, Abraham Moles and others.

Zeichensystem für ELEA
Selection from the character system for the control panel of the Olivetti ELEA computer (1960). The characters are inscribed in a slight ellipse so that the plastic discs do not rotate in the key holders.
1 Writing, 2 Reading, 3 Telex, 4 Read head, 5 Error, 6 Not, 7 Symmetrical, 8 End, 9 Absolute , 10 Switch on, 11 Switch off, 12 Verify, 13 Compare, 14 Occupy, 15 Character, 16 Set character, 17 Maximum character, 18 Last character.

As the HfG saw itself as an avant-garde institution, it should come as no surprise that contacts were cultivated with representatives of various artistic movements, primarily concrete painting and sculpture, op art and pop art and composers in the field of electronic music (Mauricio Kagel). At the beginning of the 1960s, a Fluxus event was organised in Ulm in which Wolf Vostell participated. As part of this artistic event, which was spread across various locations in and around Ulm, participants listened to the noise of a jet plane's jet engine on a tarmac in grey, cold, rainy weather. Surrealism, Dadaism and event art stood at the opposite pole to the rational design concept of the HfG, which was tailored to industry. But there was a point of contact between the critical component of these artistic directions and the HfG's attitude towards the artificial obsolescence of products. The students at the School of Design in Rio de Janeiro (ESDI, Escola Superior de Desenho Industrial), which was strongly influenced by the HfG programme, did not stop at verbally expressing their critical attitude towards society in general and consumer society in particular. They went further by translating their criticism into concrete design at the first Brazilian Design Biennial in 1968: "On a large dining table surrounded by ten Arne Jacobsen Series 7 chairs [from 1952, UK], packaging of industrial products were displayed [...] In the same exhibition, a vacuum cleaner was shown with a broom handle connected to the hose." 26

   

Anecdotal Insert Visual Worlds

Italy was an important point of reference for a number of friends from other departments. Magazines such as Civiltà delle macchine 27 – "the indispensable instrument of modern culture", as the subtitle of this publication read – and Superfici were role models for this group. Likewise the magazine Stile Industria. Occasionally we took one-day trips to Zurich to look at Swiss graphic design and Italian products in the Globus department stores. The visual world, especially the adverts in the American magazines Look and Life, was carefully studied, as was the twen magazine [from Germany, editor's note] in the 1960s. The collection of adverts from these magazines provided the basis for the visual/verbal rhetoric developed towards the mid-1960s – probably one of the first attempts to uncover and conceptualise specific figures linking image and language – or, as the more appropriate term is, patterns.28 Among the jazz bands favoured by the group were the Dave Brubeck Quartet (Take Five) and the Modern Jazz Quartet, whose records were played in the curvy canteen bar, which was opened especially for these weekly meetings.

Zeitschriften-Cover
Covers of Italian magazines for architecture and design from 1959 and 1961.

Max Bense, Käthe Hamburger and Erich Franzen were able to encourage an interest in literature and cultural criticism – without them, the access to the writings of Walter Benjamin, the Frankfurt School and Marcel Proust would hardly have been possible. Writing, as is well known, also involves reading texts and thus engaging with literature. This also explains the interest in theoretical questions and the theoretical prerequisites of design work. It is true that at that time design theory was not a subject, neither at design schools nor at universities. But – and this is a personal extrapolation – a department for design theory could well have emerged from the Information Department. From today's perspective, it appears to be a theory laboratory in nuce. To substantiate this assumption, it suffices to go through the tables of contents of the journal ulm, which can be regarded as one of the visible "products" of the Information department. They clearly show how far the HfG reached out without neglecting the materiality of the design work, but rather bringing reflection and design practice into a balanced relationship. The editorial work was like walking a tightrope between theory and practice.29 The difficulties of editorial revision of texts by colleagues with sometimes strongly divergent writing styles and varying opinions, as well as the time-consuming manual work of laying out the printing proofs – cutting and pasting onto A4 paper as a template for photomechanical printing – is hard to imagine today in the face of the digitization of editorial practices, especially considering that the texts were also translated into English. The theoretical interest in the relationship between sciences and design could be misunderstood, and due to this misunderstanding, the accusation could be made that the HfG Ulm had attempted to turn design into a science. Today it has become clear that science and design are characterised by a different approach to the world: Science is primarily concerned with gaining knowledge, with cognitive innovation, whereas design is concerned with structuring behaviour between users and material artefacts (products) and semiotic artefacts (information) in the living environment. It is concerned with the assimilation of technology into everyday culture.

Since the dichotomy between theory and practice is misleading, I chose the title Theory and Practice of Industrial Design for the Handbook of Industrial Design, which was written in German but published not in Germany but in Italy in 1975. At the time, this critical handbook represented the sum of what could be considered the essence of the rational "Ulm" design approach. This handbook also incorporated the experience gained in Chile between 1971 and 1973.

Umschlag Teoria
Cover of a book published in Italy in 1975.

Some previously published project reports dated back to 1959 – before graduation – such as the development of a writing instrument by Nick Roericht (published in Stile Industria), and the press release from 1961 about the compact tableware TC 100, developed as part of his diploma thesis, which elicited an ironic comment from an architectural critic.30

Report on a writing tool designed by Nick Roericht. Stile Industria 24, 1959.

In a meeting with the owner of form magazine at the time, Dr Friedrich Middelhauve, setting up a section for design analyses was discussed – a completely new topic at the time. Over the course of several years from 1961 onwards, design analyses of the IBM ball-head typewriter, tape recorders, car dashboards, refrigerators, alarm clocks and cutlery were published. Informal contacts with colleagues from the product design department and collaboration in Entwicklungsgruppe 6 [development group 6], which was headed by Tomás Maldonado, were influential in shaping the perspective on products from a design standpoint.

Over the years, writing about design continued in the form of book publications and was primarily aimed at preparing teaching material for the classroom and contributing to the conceptual clarification of design and the professional profile of the designer. This also included a number of translations, such as Josef Albers' Interaction of Colors [Wechselwirkung der Farbe] (1970) from English, La speranza progettuale [Umwelt und Revolte] (1972) by Tomás Maldonado from Italian, and a selection of writings also by Tomás Maldonado entitled Digitale Welt und Gestaltung [Digital World and Design] (2007) from Spanish and Italian. The Ulm approach filled a gap, among others in peripheral countries, where design education programs had existed since the 1950s, but largely from an artistic perspective, contrasting with the systematic, technical, and industrially oriented approach of the HfG.

The interest in emancipation and the dismantling of power and domination, i.e. the political interest, awakened during the studies, had remained largely abstract until 1971, despite the student rebellion, which also affected the HfG in 1968 and escalated at times to the extent that picking up a pencil to sketch a design was almost frowned upon – according to radical positions, the goal was to revolutionize society as a whole first. The concrete political dimension of design only became apparent through the work in Chile, which was abruptly ended by the bourgeois-military coup with a clerical-fascist touch, including the intensive assistance of President Nixon and his Secretary of State Kissinger on 11 September 1973. The work of the Product Development Group at the Technological Research Institute in Santiago de Chile was thoroughly influenced by the HfG's design approach. It was one of the rare moments in the history of design practice when the socio-political programme and the design programme coincided seamlessly.

Umschlag Teoria
Cover of the German translation of Tomás Maldonado's book (La speranza progettuale, 1970) published by Rowohlt Verlag in 1972. It bore the motto Le coté blanc de notre espoir by Pierre Reverdy – an indication that the situation offered little cause for hope.

Anecdotal Insert A Book and its Consequences

In 1970, a technical cooperation project supervised by the then International Labour Organisation (ILO) was implemented in Chile. One day, at the suggestion of a friend, a young Chilean engineer came to visit. He was not particularly talkative and it was not clear to me what would come of this visit. A few months later – he had become an important member of Salvador Allende's government – he confessed the following to me: He didn't have a particularly high regard for designers; like architects, he thought they were all scatterbrains ("confusionistas" in Spanish). But when he discovered Stafford Beer's book Decision and Control in my library, he quietly corrected his prejudice. Without this coincidence, the product development group working at the INTEC Technological Research Institute would hardly have come across the strategic and emblematic project Cybersyn. From the seminars with Max Bense and Horst Rittel, a direct link led over fifteen years to the professional present in a different cultural, social, political and technological context.

Unterricht
General view of the Opsroom for Economic Planning, 1972/73. Design of the room and the information design for economic data: Product Development/Industrial Design Group at INTEC (Technological Research Institute, Santiago de Chile).
Häckselmaschine
Agricultural machine. Design: Group for Product Development/Industrial Design at INTEC (Technological Research Institute, Santiago de Chile).

The practice of systematically documenting the development of projects, inherited from the HfG tradition, was reflected in the publication (four issues in total) of a small INTEC magazine at the institute. Among other things, it served to make the development process of a design comprehensible and to eliminate widespread misunderstandings about the role of the industrial designer and, above all, to work out the constitutive difference between design in the centre and design in the periphery. In the context of an institution dominated by engineers and researchers, it was quite common in the early 1970s to equate design with aesthetic finery – an experience that was repeated fifteen years later in a completely different context. Working at a software company in Emeryville (California), it took months to dispel the simple prejudice that design work involves more than just correcting an unsuccessful icon or a garish colour combination on a computer screen. Design work was only accepted when I casually threw the term "visual algorithm" into the discussion while developing an interface for a groupware application. The term "algorithm" sounded familiar. This immediately dispelled any reservations.

Unterricht
Unterricht
Design of the graphical interface for a mail programme, adapted to the monochrome 9" screen (512 x 342 pixels) of the Apple computer. (Action Technologies, Emeryville, 1987).

Tomás Maldonado fostered a constant intellectual curiosity, an unwavering commitment to the project of modernism, including its political component and utopia as an expression of dissatisfaction with reality as it is – so aptly put by Adorno – and opened access to the culture of the Romance language sphere, from the then oppressive atmosphere of narrowness in Germany: access to the cultures of Italy and Latin America.31 He also awakened and supported interest in publishing and teaching. This constant participation in the design discourse and the activities in the field of design education are a direct result of studying in the Information Department.

Buchcover
Cover of a book published in Spain in 1975.
Buchcover
Cover of a book published in Brazil in 1983.

HfG Ulm notably emphasized strengthening the relationship between design and the sciences, thereby contributing to the development of design theory. But just as Christopher Alexander turned away from design methodology soon after publishing his standard work Notes on the Synthesis of Form (1964) when he realised its academic excesses, today, as an "Ulmer", one wonders whether design theory has succeeded in providing a space for reflection on critical questions of design and in maintaining a connection to concrete design practice, however this connection is mediated. The permeability and softening of the term "design" have allowed, in the context of the intensified academisation of educational paths (master's and doctoral programs for design) and the associated academically certified qualifications in the form of titles, for design theory to become somewhat autonomous – with counterproductive consequences for design education and design theory itself. The required research activity favoured the creation of new academically approved teaching positions, allowing design-distant scientific disciplines in the field of design studies to gain a foothold. However, this increased (and continues to increase) the risk of thinning out the design component. Among other things, highly popular terms such as "emotional design", "experience design" and "design thinking" were launched. In order to raise its academic profile and, thanks to this increase, to create the formal requirements for the approval of research funding, efforts are being made to define design as a discipline. In attempts in the reverse direction, especially in media studies and cultural studies, the word "design" is combined with prepositions "trans-", "inter-", "meta-", "post-" and "multi-", as if the not even yet solidified discipline were too narrow and needed to be transcended. Sometimes it seems that the authors are less interested in delving into the topic of design than in using design merely as a pretext to speculate about art, especially media art enterprises. Obviously, design research is still in its infancy, although there is certainly no shortage of papers being produced, as is common in other academic areas. Design research can be distinguished from other research by three characteristics: by the research content, by the research method, and by the research approach shaped by the perspective of designing, i.e. the point of view. The latter seems to me to be the decisive characteristic.

By the end of the 1960s, the HfG Ulm had become dysfunctional, which does not mean that the educational concept of critical rationalism is out-dated. On the contrary, it has retained an astonishing degree of relevance, especially in view of the alarming symptoms of the erosion of society's biotic substrate and increasing social fragmentation. It experienced its heyday in the period of Fordism, with its interest in the rationalisation of production, modular systems, interchangeability and combinability. With the emergence of post-Fordism and increasingly dominant marketing, this concept was no longer unchallenged. However, the topic of contemporary, critical design education has lost none of its validity. In order to create the appropriate framework conditions for this today, a new type of teaching facility would have to be invented, in which science and design not only nominally share a campus or belong to an overarching institution, but are thematically, problem- and project-related intertwined.

As already mentioned, the Department of Information was an exception in the design education programmes – and has remained so to this day, a strand of development that has not been pursued further. The fact that the current age is labelled as the "age of information" and contemporary society as a "knowledge society", may serve as sufficient evidence for the necessity and justification of a new concept for an Information Department in order to fill a gap in design programmes. This would encourage design students to engage intensively with content and to acquire discursive skills as well as visual competence. A contemporary Information Department would find its place in a dialectical, digital mediation of the world of images and the world of language, of visuality and discursivity.

Unterricht
Topological exercise "Non-orientable surfaces", third year of study 1964/65. Students smoked during class at the time. No problem.

The cornerstone of the programme was project-orientated teaching, which differs fundamentally from the discipline-based teaching that is commonplace in university education. It is hard to deny that tertiary education is not in a good state at the moment. The crisis became apparent already decades ago. It is the merit of the medical faculty at McMaster University in Canada that in the 1970s, a radical cut was made in the traditional education of doctors by replacing the discipline-oriented training program with problem-oriented teaching. Because this new approach was developed within a university, it enjoyed academic credentials and thus legitimacy from the outset. I cite this case because the HfG had taken this important step for tertiary didactics already in the 1950s in the field of design education. These two examples can serve as an indication of a revision of university programmes that are considered necessary. The reorganisation of the university canon in this direction is so promising that it is reasonable to predict that in future all university education will be problem-oriented, and that means project-oriented. This applies to all areas of knowledge and thus goes far beyond the field of planning and design professions such as architecture, product design and visual communication. The thematically specialised teaching concept of the HfG, which began as an outsider, might be well placed as a universally valid concept of university education in the not-so-distant future – a certainly pleasing prospect.

Anecdotal Insert Disillusionment and End

To illustrate the mood that prevailed at the HfG in the final phase, I quote from a letter to my fellow student Ilse Grubrich dated 8 March 1968:
"Yes, things are bad for the HfG, although now, after the unexpected support of the West German press, the future no longer seems quite so dark. However, I believe that for us here in Swabia there is no longer a suitable place to stay, even if the University of Stuttgart takes us over. […] In the latest issue of "Die Zeit", the underlying causes were brought to the surface very clearly […] It's a very short report – I now have to travel (already a bit tired and groggy) to Stuttgart for a meeting to clarify how the HfG can be "saved". As if it were about that and not about fundamentally changing the HfG."

Unterricht
A double page from the author's handwritten, cloth-bound study book.

First year in the Information Department 1956-1957



- - - - - -
Citation
Gui Bonsiepe "A Personal Retrospective of the Information Department", translated by Silvia Fernandez and Gui Bonsiepe (2024), available online at http://www.hfg-ulm.info/en/retrospective_gui-bonsiepe.html
Original work published as Gui Bonsiepe "Ein persönlicher Rückblick auf die Abteilung Information" in: David Oswald, Christiane Wachsmann, Petra Kellner (eds) Rückblicke. Die Abteilung Information an der hfg ulm. Ulm, 2015, pp. 44-65.

- - - - - -