In this lecture, design historian Eric Anderson presents new research based on unpublished archival documents from the Hochschule für Gestaltung Ulm, dating to the 1960s and concerned with design for development in the Third World. The materials include diploma projects on development themes by Ulm students from India, Chile, Egypt, and Liberia, as well as reports of faculty consulting projects for the government of post-independence India. This little-studied body of work illustrates an approach to design for development that the West German school taught to its international student body. Ulm’s development pedagogy emphasized systems-based design methods applied to economic and social programs for poverty alleviation and nation-building. Existing scholarship on the short-lived but enduringly influential school has focused on Ulm’s role in remaking postwar German culture in the political context of Western alliances, but Anderson will draw attention to Ulm’s status as a global center for development education attuned to the politics of the Third World.

A Modern Design History Lecture.

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Eric Anderson is professor and chair of the theory and history of art and design department at Rhode Island School of Design. As a historian of modern design his research interests include interiors and domesticity, exhibitions and media, the cultural history of Vienna and psychoanalysis, and the global history of modernism. He recently completed a manuscript titled The Chromatic Unconscious, on Sigmund Freud and Viennese design before 1900, and is currently beginning a new project, Ulm in the World, on the West German school’s transnational networks, development pedagogy, and geopolitical engagements in the 1960s.

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Object Labs
At BGC, we use an object-centered approach to advance the study of the decorative arts, design history, and material culture. Join our student educators before select public events to learn about some of the objects in BGC’s Study Collection. Each week we will showcase three objects carefully selected from the collection, which includes over 4,000 objects in a variety of media.

October 22 and 29; November 5, 12, and 19; December 3
38 West 86th Street, 5–6 pm

Founded in 2011, the BGC Study Collection supports student research by providing opportunities for hands-on close examination of objects. Learn more about the BGC Study Collection here.