B is for Bauhaus, Y is for YouTube: Designing the Modern World from A to Z (2015)

The Design Museum acquired an AK-47, the notorious assault rifle developed in 1947 in the Soviet Union, for its permanent collection in 2012. It was a decision that attracted some hostile questions. Weapons do not form part of most museum design collections; a reflection perhaps of the continuing persistence of the concept of good and bad design. An assault rifle - that is, one designed to be used in combat at close quarters, with people trying to kill each other a maximum of 400 metres apart - may be robust, reliable, easy and economical to mass-produce. It may, by those definitions, represent functionalism of a high order. It is an object that has shaped history, which has appeared on the national flag of Mozambique, and represented considerable technical innovation. And there are not so many other industrially made objects that have been in continuous production since 1947. Evil or not, it’s hard to deny that the AK-47 is a piece of successful design.

But if collections of design are intended to show examples of good design - as indeed most of them, at least originally, were - weapons of any description are excluded. Because of its lethal purpose, a brilliantly designed weapon cannot be described as ‘good’. So there are no assault rifles in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, in the Museum für Angewandte Kunst in Vienna, or in the Neue Sammlung in Munich. Exceptions are made for other objects that have military purposes: the Jeep, for example, and the helicopter. But guns are taboo, despite the early part that they played in the development of standardization, mass production and modular construction.

Weapons are not to be glorified, or made a fetish of, but they can offer important insights into other objects. That is why the Design Museum acquired its AK-47. The weapon represents an argument about the nature of objects. To be significant, design does not have to be ‘good’ design in either of its two most commonly understood meanings: neither morally virtuous, nor fit for purpose.

The Spitfire is a rather less contentious piece of design, most likely because of its decisive role in the defence of democratic Britain against totalitarian aggression. It combined multiple technical innovations with a refined beauty in the way its wings were integrated with the body of the aircraft, making it immediately recognizable.

The paradox that any analysis of design has to deal with is that so many key developments in technology and design have depended on the accelerated investment that war brings with it. The development of the jet engine was brought forward by the Second World War. The fact that there is any kind of prophylactic against malaria is an outcome of the wars that Britain and America fought in the mosquito-infested jungles of South East Asia.

The internet is now a civilian system based on the planning for distributed military communications systems that could survive atomic warfare. Three-dimensional printing, or additive manufacturing, had some of its earliest deployment in the US navy, to provide emergency spare parts at sea for aircraft carriers.

At the end of his long life, Mikhail Kalashnikov himself began to feel a sense of guilt and doubt about the malign impact of his design. His priest suggested to him that there was no shame in creating a weapon to defend the motherland. What he did not say was that there is no clear division between military and non-military development. That is why the AK-47 can be read as a highly significant piece of industrial design, with multiple meanings.