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

One important way of thinking about design is to concentrate on the ordinary and the anonymous, as distinct from the artful and the self-conscious. It is to rebuke those who try to chart design through the biographies of celebrities, and a procession of attention-grabbing sculptural objects. It is an approach that has become the means to question one-dimensional readings of design that seek to present it as a form of self-expression, and instead to explore the reality of industrial production. Looking at anonymous design is a way to understand the contribution made by those who might not describe themselves as designers, but have nevertheless had a crucial impact on the world of things.

Anonymous design is a category that ranges from the mass-produced to the handcrafted. It is broad enough to have attracted the enthusiastic attention of both Victorian traditionalists and twentieth-century modernists. Japanese scissors, hand-stitched brogues from Jermyn Street, Georgian silver three-pronged forks, zip fasteners, aircraft propellers and paper clips are all objects that in their own ways can be considered as the product of anonymous design, even if they are actually the work of generations of individual craftsmen, or teams of engineers, all of whom have names, and many of whom feel a powerful personal connection with the objects for which they were responsible. These are objects unencumbered by obtrusive signatures, and by the arbitrary shape-making and the egotism that comes with them. When design is modest enough to allow itself to be anonymous, it is not being cynical or manipulative.

Yet the designer’s signature, or what might be called brand, has been an essential accompaniment to the development of design in its contemporary form. It is a phenomenon that has become more and more unappetizing just as it has become inescapable.

This is not a recent phenomenon. Josiah Wedge-wood played his part in shaping the contemporary practice of design when he created a market for ceramic products that carried his company’s brand. So did Christopher Dresser, one of the earliest designers to work as a consultant to multiple manufacturers, and to ask them for royalties for sales of his work.

Raymond Loewy, the first designer to appear on the cover of Time magazine, helped to turn design into a fairy-tale narrative free of complexities or subtleties. For the purposes of the fairy tale, the designer must become the all-encompassing genius, the heroic form-giver, ushering a new object into being through sheer force of personality. Loewy’s career as an industrial designer began with the Gestetner duplicator in the 1930s. But to suggest that he designed it is to skip over a few key questions. All the things about the machine that allow it to do its job had been worked out before Loewy got involved. His role was no more, and no less, than to give the Gestetner a new skin. Selling the machine with a sleek, streamlined look, and just Loewy’s name attached to it, rather than introducing the whole cast of contributors who made it possible, was a much simpler task than attempting to explain how the machine really came into existence.

Certainly there is no individual name linked to the paper clip. It is an object that belongs to the category of anonymous design. It is an ingenious and economical use of material to carry out a task. Such objects very often have complex histories. They are measured by multiple episodes of individual ingenuity rather than by single flashes of inspiration. A patent was issued in 1899 in the US to cover the copyright for a machine that could be used for making a paper clip. The clip itself, for which there is no patent, had existed long before the machine to make it.

The authorship of the zip has an equally complex story. Gideon Sundback, a Swedish-American inventor, filed a patent for the Hookless Fastener No. 2 with the US Patent Office in 1914. His work was a refinement of an idea for a fastener based on interlocking teeth that had been circulating among engineers for decades. Whitcomb Judson patented a design for a metal-clasp fastener in 1893, but it was difficult to make, and didn’t work very well. Before Sundback, no one had managed to get the zip quite right. The hooks were either too weak to hold two surfaces together, or they wore out too soon to be useful.

Sundback designed a needle-like projection on the top of each nib, and put a dent in the corresponding position on the underside of the tooth, which held them all firmly in place. Even if one of the row of teeth came apart, the rest were still locked in. It was different enough from Judson’s design for Sundback to get a patent.

The first customer for the new product, manufactured by the Hookless Fastener Company, was B. F. Goodrich, which started manufacturing rubber overshoes with a zip fastener in 1923. The zip turned putting the overshoes on and taking them off into a quick, single movement. Goodrich called it the Zip-er-Up, eventually contracting it to the Zipper, which in turn became the name of the fastener. And the Hookless Fastener Company renamed itself Talon at the same time.

In its first decade Hookless depended on Goodrich for most of its business. The zip was a relatively humble artefact, confined to footwear in its initial use. But by the 1930s, the zip had become an essential sign of modernity and it started to find customers everywhere. The zip was adopted by anyone in too much of a hurry to put up with the archaic customs of buttons. The distinctions of class and gender that buttons inevitably smuggle into almost any garment dependent on whether they are to the left or the right, precious metal, simple bone or cloth-covered, were made redundant by the zip. The workmanlike, no-nonsense, unfussy zip became the sign of the organized proletariat or those who wanted to be identified with it. Military uniforms started to adopt zips. The parka and the flying suit depended on them, as did the leather biker’s jacket. The zip could be positioned diagonally like a lightening flash across the chest, as it appeared on Dan Dare’s spacesuit, and added as a decorative flourish in entirely unnecessary places, such as the cuff in a belt-and-braces duplication.

Most highly charged in its symbolism is the use of the zip in place of fly buttons for trousers. Introduced after centuries of buttons, despite the risk of serious damage if incautiously raised, the zip came to be seen as a signal of shifting messages of sexual availability. The zip was celebrated by Erica Jong and deployed on Sticky Fingers, the Andy Warhol-designed Rolling Stones album cover.

Even if buttons are more demanding to deal with, they have survived. And with time, the zip has lost its functional associations with rational modernity. Paper clips, Japanese scissors, silver forks and zips are all objects that have supposedly eliminated superfluous excess. They are the products of a process of continuous refinement that have succeeded in achieving maximum economy of means by Darwinian evolution. The results of this process reflect the aesthetic preferences of modernism. It’s a movement which always claimed to be allergic to style, but which paradoxically had the potential to become highly self-conscious about it. Marcel Breuer, for example, described his tubular steel furniture as ‘styleless’ and suggested that what motivated him was designing tools to equip people for daily life. But tubular steel for a while became a highly self-conscious sign of the aspirations of architects and designers, and in many cases of their clients’ intentions to be taken as ‘modern’.

Understanding the nature of an anonymous industrially made object has become a recurring preoccupation of design curators around the world. They bring together collections of paper clips and ballpoint pens, Post-it notes, clothes pegs and rubber gloves, and all the other humble masterpieces, as they are often called, chosen for their simplicity and fitness for purpose. Or, as in the case of the glove developed especially for shucking oysters, or the towel reduced to the size of a bar of soap by shrink-wrapping, for the ingenuity that goes into problem-solving for very specific tasks.

Putting such objects in museums can be traced to Bernard Rudofsky, an acerbic Austro-Hungarian-born critic and curator who moved to America. Rudofsky’s best-known project was Architecture without Architects, an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in 1964. He brought together a wealth of material on what at the time was called vernacular building: waterwheels from Syria, mud fortresses from Libya, cave-dwellings and treehouses, which managed to address the demands of climate and function with a grace and a level of efficiency that eclipsed much of what conventional architectural practice is capable of. Rudofsky was fascinated by designs which, though conceived without the involvement of a professional architect, had aesthetic qualities that they could not match. He went further than looking at vernacular buildings and the nonchalant way that they dealt with such issues as climate control, which cause our energy-greedy era so much grief. With a gently mocking eye Rudofsky started questioning contemporary conventions about every aspect of daily life; he explored the underlying assumptions of how we eat, how we bathe and how we sit.

Anonymous design, or design without designers, might be understood in much the same way. We may not know who is responsible for the zip, in fact it may be impossible to be precise about assigning to it the name of any one designer. But there can be no doubt that the zip is one of many design innovations that defined the twentieth century. Some objects in this category are the product of the work of better-known individuals - the Tetra Pak, for example, developed by Ruben Rausing and Erik Wallenberg. Tetra Pak played a significant part in changing the way that a generation of Japanese growing up in the 1970s looked by making milk a part of the country’s staple diet.

It was another piece of low-tech innovation, the sea container, that transformed not just the shipping industry but the docks that accommodated it, and the port cities that depended on them, and so the world. Shipping containers demanded bigger ships, and big open-air docks. As a result London’s upstream docks closed, and within two decades were cleared to create the new financial district of Canary Wharf.

The ballpoint pen, or Biro, named for its inventor, is of course anything but anonymous, but it was the result of a simple but powerful insight into how to deliver an even line of ink in the most economical and efficient way.

By inviting us to examine objects that have become so familiar that they have disappeared from our conscious attention, we are being presented with a way to find what really drives design. It is an effective way to address the tension between the myth-making version of design and the reality of step-by-step refinements, between the cult of the individual genius and the way in which enterprises are driven by teams and groups.

There is no styling or egotism to a safety pin, or a paper clip; they are as simple and as universal as a reef knot. The comparison between the modesty of anonymous production and the brittle egotism of signature design is apparently about reclaiming design from superficial styling and celebrity. But for all the aura of sanctity that comes with the authenticity of the unselfconscious and the anonymous, the closer you look at the anonymous the more complex the question of what it actually represents becomes. Anonymity can be presented as a kind of automatic writing, the inevitable outcome of a practical approach to problem-solving; a kind of functionalism. But anonymous design is still the product of individuals, and individual decisions. And the zip retains its sense of design outside time. Velcro might be taking its place for some uses, but the zip, after more than a century, is still a small marvel.