New Design University St. Pölten

Otl Aicher un­der­stood “the world as draft”. For him the world was some­thing that has to be ac­tively and con­sciously fash­ioned by our­selves and only ac­tu­ally comes to be through active doing. It was for this reason that he sought to shift the pri­or­ity ac­corded ab­stract the­o­ret­i­cal think­ing back to the acts of doing and shaping. He pos­tu­lated de­riv­ing “think­ing from doing” and, indeed, per­ceived this as being the fun­da­men­tally correct ap­proach to design and design theory. Given a world beset by a whole raft of prob­lems re­quir­ing urgent action, his was thus a highly topical re­sponse and it is this that makes it worth­while con­tin­u­ing to apply our minds to Otl Aicher’s way of think­ing.

Master’s degree stu­dents in In­te­rior Design & Visual Com­mu­ni­ca­tion at the New Design Uni­ver­sity St. Pölten ac­cord­ingly set about or­gan­is­ing an ex­hi­bi­tion whose title trans­lates as “An O and an A. Otl Aicher – Deeds into Thoughts. Looking Both Back and Ahead.” under the stew­ard­ship of Prof. Chris­tine Schwaiger (ar­chi­tect) and Prof. Martin Düchs (ar­chi­tect & philoso­pher). Very much in the spirit of Otl Aicher, this was to be no mere act of ret­ro­spec­tion and, indeed, was to pri­mar­ily involve looking ahead. Stu­dents ad­dressed various aspects of the pi­o­neer­ing lu­mi­nary’s design phi­los­o­phy and took them crit­i­cally further forward in design pro­jects of their own.

The ex­hi­bi­tion ran in Vienna’s de­sign­fo­rum from 27 January – 9 March. The rel­e­vance of Otl Aicher and his the­o­ries to pre­sent-day de­sign­ers was ad­di­tion­ally in­ves­ti­gated, crit­i­cally re-ap­praised, refined, either af­firmed or refuted and, above all, dis­cussed by said de­sign­ers at a sym­po­sium held on 28 Feb­ru­ary.

The ex­hi­bi­tion and in­di­vid­ual pro­jects evolved on the basis of the con­vic­tion held by Otl Aicher that – other than would be in­tu­itively assumed – ar­chi­tec­ture and design not only have much in common with phi­los­o­phy, they ac­tu­ally pursue the same ob­jec­tive, that of shaping the world. It would be pos­si­ble to echo Otl Aicher (and Ludwig Wittgen­stein, too, in­ci­den­tally, a man whose work greatly in­flu­enced Otl Aicher) by posit­ing design as being phi­los­o­phy, though from the other side as it were – that of doing. If de­sign­ers wish to fashion people’s en­vi­ron­ments in a way that is both mean­ing­ful and sus­tain­able, then, like philoso­phers, they have also got to address them­selves to basic issues of being human. “Phi­los­o­phy and design con­verge on a common propo­si­tion. Phi­los­o­phy in thought, design in deed. It states that our world is what we have caused it to be. The blue­prints are ours, as is what has been made of them; it is the use that can be made of things that compels us to see how good or bad we are.” (Otl Aicher)

Otl Aicher’s “phi­los­o­phy of doing” departs from the premiss that, as well as being equal in status, the acts of think­ing and doing, theory and prac­tice, are ac­tu­ally in­ter­de­pen­dent. But he feels an im­bal­ance has come about between doing and think­ing in modern society. He argues that the prac­ti­cal di­men­sion has become ne­glected: pure thought devoid of a prac­ti­cal bearing will not be able to solve hu­man­ity’s prob­lems. This is an epis­te­mo­log­i­cal, but above all a moral dilemma for Aicher. He grasps “the world as draft”, i.e. as some­thing that re­quires shaping. Thus, the ques­tion “How must I act?” is of fun­da­men­tal im­por­tance not only to moral philoso­phers but also to de­sign­ers.

Design and phi­los­o­phy become di­rectly in­ter­meshed here. Aicher’s philo­soph­i­cal de­lib­er­a­tions also con­sti­tute an in­duc­tion into how to design, draft and develop in a morally correct manner. He aspires to this ap­ply­ing to one’s own life, to in­ter­ac­tions with others, as well as to Nature, to com­mon­place objects, to issues of ac­com­mo­da­tion and even to “correct think­ing”. Design is pri­mar­ily meant to be of service to the prac­ti­cal sphere and to the ways people live; aes­thet­ics as such are of no in­ter­est to him.

The ability to produce correct drafts and designs is pred­i­cated upon one taking action and making con­sci­en­tious judg­ments.

The ques­tion “What is beauty?” is central to aes­thet­ics. Otl Aicher nev­er­the­less dis­missed it as being ir­rel­e­vant. Beauty is not a cri­te­rion for suc­cess­ful design in his view. He was loath to “win anyone over” with what was vi­su­ally pleas­ing, pre­fer­ring to per­suade them with ref­er­ence to use, func­tion and ma­te­r­ial. Only in this way can items drafted and de­signed gain their in­de­pen­dence as opposed to being ex­ploited for po­lit­i­cal or eco­nom­i­cal pur­poses.

Aicher’s reser­va­tions about beauty and visual allure are un­der­stand­able given his ex­pe­ri­ence of the sledge­ham­mer aes­thet­ics favoured by Nazi pro­pa­ganda.

And yet a brief perusal of his own work suf­fices to arraign him on a charge of self-de­cep­tion.

His cre­ative out­pour­ings, from his posters for the Ulm adult ed­u­ca­tion centre and his design work for the Munich Games through to later con­tri­bu­tions for the likes of FSB are, amongst many other things, also good-look­ing.

The ques­tion “What can I hope for?” is what un­der­pins the philo­soph­i­cal field of meta­physics. In­volved here are issues that go beyond (meta) that which can be ex­plained by natural means (physis). This in­cludes ques­tions of re­li­gion and whether there is a God and/or a world here­after. Meta­phys­i­cal issues were of great im­por­tance to Otl Aicher through­out his life. In this respect, too, he was always probing; though he did embrace a re­li­gious her­itage, he re­mained as much a free thinker on issues of faith as he did in so many other spheres.

He was raised a Catholic and es­sen­tially re­mained one all his life. But he ques­tioned re­li­gious tenets even as an ado­les­cent and arrived at an in­de­pen­dent set of con­vic­tions by study­ing the­ol­ogy in­ten­sively off his own back. He sub­se­quently con­tin­ued to mull over ques­tions of faith in dis­cus­sions with other thinkers. It can be elicited from the little he uttered on meta­phys­i­cal topics that he evolved a kind of Catholic in­di­vid­u­al­ism with the passing of time and here, as in so many re­spects, managed to rec­on­cile the seem­ingly con­tra­dic­tory.

Still today there is a readi­ness to address issues of faith – one’s own and those of others. Otl Aicher’s at­ti­tude, thoughts and deeds can serve as a role model here.

The ques­tion “What can I know?” targets hu­man­ity’s ca­pac­ity for cog­ni­tion. Epis­te­mol­ogy seeks to clarify how we per­ceive and grasp factual sit­u­a­tions. This is closely bound up with in­ves­ti­ga­tions into one’s own ex­is­tence that call models of reality and being itself into ques­tion. Looking into such issues does not, at first glance, appear to be a par­tic­u­larly press­ing concern in the context of design. But they do impinge on how de­sign­ers should ba­si­cally pitch their work. Should they adapt their designs to the be­holder’s reason or appeal to his or her emo­tions?

Is design meant to reveal the essence of a thing or is it assumed that this is non-ex­is­tent anyway and that the con­crete in­di­vid­ual object and the use to which it is put are all there is to go on? Here, too, Otl Aicher adopts po­si­tions that are oc­ca­sion­ally con­tra­dic­tory. On the one hand he is intent on iden­ti­fy­ing the essence of things and make it the object of his design. He does, there­fore, seem to believe in there being a core to things that de­sign­ers need to pin­point. On the other hand, though, he refutes the ex­is­tence of ab­stract uni­ver­sal con­cepts or of an “essence to things” in his texts.

The point of de­par­ture for any act of cog­ni­tion, he argues, is that which is con­crete and non-ab­stract, and most notably that which people do. Cog­ni­tion, Aicher feels, is en­gen­dered by the act of doing, a process in which ab­stract thought and sen­su­ous ex­pe­ri­ence are in­ter­twined.

The In­te­rior Design & Visual Com­mu­ni­ca­tion course ex­am­ines means of com­mu­ni­ca­tion in ar­chi­tec­ture to­gether with the spatial po­ten­tial in­her­ent in visual com­mu­ni­ca­tion and the as­so­ci­ated scope for de­sign­ing in a so­cially minded manner. The New Design Uni­ver­sity St. Pölten (NDU) was set up by the Lower Aus­trian Chamber of Com­merce in 2004 as a venue for in­ter­na­tional en­coun­ters and life-based train­ing in the field of design.

The NDU is a uni­ver­sity spe­cial­is­ing in the fields of Design, Tech­nol­ogy and Com­merce that trains cre­ative de­sign­ers devoted to driving change in various areas of society who are already grap­pling with future de­vel­op­ments today.