What do you mean by Pop?

The development of 'Pop' culture and 'Pop' design in the UK

If we were to use a term to describe the design style of the 1960s, the most appropriate would be 'Pop'. If we want to use a term to describe the design style of the 60's, the most appropriate one should be "Pop", which comes from the English word "popular", but when it is closely connected with the culture, art, thought and design of the 60's, it does not only refer to the culture enjoyed by the public, but also has the meaning of rebellion against the orthodoxy, which is the biggest characteristic of this era. However, when it became closely associated with the culture, art, thought and design of the 1960s, it became not only a culture for the masses, but also a rebellion against the orthodoxy, which was the most characteristic feature of this era. In the western countries, the most concentrated reflection of the "Pop" design style is the United Kingdom.

What must be clarified here is the difference between the meanings of the words "pop" and "popular". Many people think that "Pop" originated from mass, therefore, "Pop" culture and "Pop" art is mass culture and mass art. In fact, popular culture is the culture of the masses, and "Pop" culture is the culture of the intellectuals, but it has borrowed some forms of popular culture. The "Pop" movement is a typical intellectual movement, and some of its contents, such as art forms and design forms, are welcomed by young people, but this does not change its ideological basis and the elitist position of intellectuals' counter-culture. Richard Haoilton, one of the most important representatives of British "pop" art, repeatedly emphasized this distinction in a television interview with American critic Robert Hughes.

British "Pop" design has a very distinctive feature in this movement. Although Britain lags behind other developed countries in the modern design movement, the avant-garde features it displays in the "Pop" design movement have attracted the attention and attention of countries all over the world. Although Britain lagged behind other developed countries in the modern design movement, the avant-garde characteristics it displayed in the "Pop" design movement attracted the attention and attention of countries all over the world, and also influenced the design development of other countries.

While the British design lagged far behind the international advanced level due to the policy mistakes in the 50's, and almost completely lost the pioneer status and role in the mid-19th century when the "Arts and Crafts" movement was initiated, the British design in the "Pop" movement in the 60's, however, was not as good as the "Pop" movement. However, in the "Pop" movement of the 1960s, British design caught up and made great achievements. Especially in the design of consumer products for the domestic market, there was a very clear breakthrough, which attracted the attention of the world.

There was a time when Britain hoped to catch up with the modernist movement of the inter-war period through national efforts, because, while Germany, Holland, Russia and the United States were developing modernist design at a high rate, Britain basically stayed out of the way, and did not enter the real modern stage at all. Psychologically, it was only natural that Britain wanted to avoid lagging behind the advanced countries, and the way to do so was to go through the modernist design movement, which was 10 years behind others, but it seemed that there was still time to catch up. The British advocated "good design", a slogan put forward by the Germans as early as the beginning of the 20th century, but not by the British until after the end of the Second World War. Therefore, from the point of view of the design sector in Western countries, British design is indeed too outdated as it is a full 30 years late. It was also very difficult for the British to catch up with the modernist design standards of Germany, the United States, Italy, Holland and Scandinavia. The "Pop" movement, which was centered on anti-orthodox culture, gave British designers a shortcut to avoid the modernist stage.

One of the most significant shifts in British design in the 1960s was that the British no longer sought to restart the modernist design movement, but instead opened up a new design path through the special national and international circumstances of the time, according to market conditions and consumer demand, and according to the new atmosphere that emerged in the cultural world at the time. Although modernist design is characterized by good functionality, an emphasis on rationality and attention to the people it serves, the fact that the style is monotonous, cold and devoid of a human touch is there for all to see***, and for the younger generation born after the war, the style is already the embodiment of outdated and obsolete concepts. The new generation of consumers wants to have their own design style to represent a new consumer concept, a new position of cultural identity, and a new center of self-expression. The cold, depersonalized, highly rational character of modernist design is clearly contrary to their requirements. The simplicity of the design during the war was due to the lack of material plaques during the war, and the monotony of the colors was also due to the influence of the general atmosphere before and after the war. Now, the new consumers, especially teenagers, professional women and so on, they ask for is on behalf of their favorite, new, the style of the times, the color must be bold and strong, the design shape should break through the old modeling box, only in this way, the design can be for the new society, the new market services. Only in this way, the British, and even the European design, it is possible with the rampant United States of America to push the internationalist design style, self-supporting, the formation of their own national contemporary design style, rather than in the United States to push the internationalist design behind the same step, otherwise, the British design can not have their own real development of the future and the future. This realization was very common in the British design community at the time, especially among young designers. British design thus began a completely different phase, the "Pop" design phase.

In essence, the 'Pop' design movement was an anti-modernist design movement, opposed to the tradition of modernist design that had developed since 1920, centered on the German Bauhaus. The roots of the movement's ideas came from American popular culture. The British teenage generation at the time was inspired by American popular culture, including Hollywood movies, rock and roll, and consumer culture. They believed that American consumer culture and American popular culture were to their liking, and that popular culture was the best way to counter the internationalist style promoted by the American mainstream design community. Therefore, the British design industry responded to this psychological need of British youth and launched this movement. The American popular culture's worship of dry matter and the constant emergence of various new products were very tempting to the British people who were in a post-war period of material shortage. British young people are more fond of American pop music, they call themselves eggshell head (egg-heads), British designers noticed this demand, and to adapt to their needs and design and the then mainstream internationalist style, rationalism, reductionist design features contrary to the new products, new graphic design, which gave rise to the "pop" design movement.

The British "Pop" movement was influenced by the "Pop" movement in art creation and development. The "Pop" art movement first appeared in a number of independent organizations that included artists, critics, architects and designers. The earliest British organizations with a "Pop" flavor were formed around the mid-1950s, and included Richard Hamilton, Eduardo Barroz, Reyner Ranham (1917-), John McCall, and Lawrence Alloway, Alison Smithson and Peter Smithson, among others. They met at the Institute of Modern Art in London to study the phenomenon of American popular culture, focusing on the crucial role of American advertising, American cinema, and American automobile styles in shaping the face of popular culture. Banham raised the issue of the monetary connotations behind American popular culture, suggesting that the American automobile style contained symbols of sex and power. Hamilton, on the other hand, used some special contents of American popular culture, such as portraits of American movie star Marilyn Monroe, television sets, tape recorders, popular posters, American furniture, living rooms, Mr. Bodybuilder, tennis rackets and so on, to make a collage work in 1956, which was called What Makes Today's Homes So Different, So Attractive?

When the "Pop" movement began, the work of this "Pop" art organization in the UK was basically focused on artistic creation, and after the 1960s, "Pop" art in the UK took off. "By the 1960s, Pop art had become popular in the UK, and a new group of Pop artists emerged, including David Hockney, Alan Jones, Derek Poscher and Ron KitaJ. They formed a second, independent organization that also focused on "Pop" art, but was motivated by a different source, primarily by other aspects of American popular culture, such as comic strips, science fiction, advertising, and other more visually influential content, which was combined to reflect the face of The face of popular culture, the "pop" face.

British "pop" art was soon to be reflected in design. The UK can be considered the birthplace of Pop design, which began to develop in the UK and then influenced other countries. A group of young designers were very dissatisfied with the monopoly of modernist and internationalist design styles, and started the design movement by borrowing the "Pop" style as an active rebellion. Their target market was the affluent teenage market, the post-war baby-boomer generation. The British business community recognized the potential of this market and embraced their designs, promoting the new design style through production and sales, and achieving excellent market results.

Most of the main designers of the British "Pop" design are students who have just graduated from art colleges. They have little reliance on and affection for tradition, including the tradition of modernism, and attach more importance to the habits and favorites of their own generation. Therefore, they have the most motivation to break the boundaries of tradition. They started to make breakthroughs in the three main areas of product design, clothing design and graphic design, thus creating the "Pop" design styles in these three basic areas, the British "Pop" product design, "Pop" clothing design and "Pop" design. British "Pop" product design, "Pop" clothing design and "Pop" graphic design are all very distinctive. The direction of these designers' efforts is to find their own visual symbols and characteristics, their own styles, and to represent their own generation, while making it clear that what they stand for is the position of their non-parents' generation. As a result, all kinds of strange product shapes, all kinds of special surface decorations, very special pattern designs, and unconventional design concepts emerged, and for a while there was indeed a lively and clear-cut flag. However, since it was mainly a kind of youthful catharsis, it was lively but soon disappeared without a trace. It was as Banham tells it: coming on strong, but with very little staying power.

British "Pop" design mainly emphasizes pattern decoration. Many patterns were borrowed directly from some of the "Pop" art of the time, such as from Jasper Johns ( Jasper Johns ), Victor vasarely ( Victor vasarely ), Bridget Riley ( Bridget Riley ) paintings to distill the pattern, to make the design surface decoration. to make the surface decoration of the design. The main sources of motivation for the design of the products were the technology of astronautics and the innocence of children, such as the design of the kitchen as an interior space of a spacecraft, the design of women's fashion imitating astronauts' clothes (Andre courreges's silver Foi1Suits), or women's fashion as the clothes of little girls (Marie Marie Courreges's silver Foi1Suits). or design women's fashion into little girl's clothing style (Mary Quant's little girl's clothing). In fact, these British "Pop" designers, themselves are the positive, optimistic spokesman for the era of abundance, through their design works, to reflect the excitement of this new era of material abundance, this young era.

British "Pop" design is more concentrated in fashion design, furniture design, interior design, graphic design several aspects. Among them, fashion design appears to be the most prominent. Fashion design is also the first British "Pop" design movement. Its biggest feature was that it concentrated on fashion for the teenage generation, and no longer for the middle-aged generation, and the target market was not only the high-level part of a few powerful people, but also the wider mass market. Some of the more important designers included Mary Quant, Marion Foale, Sally Turrin and Ossie Clack.

Fashion design is the most concentrated expression of "Pop" culture. These designers gave a new meaning to clothing through their designs, which strongly expressed the characteristics they wished to emphasize in terms of materials and patterns, and their clothing was a new statement of the teenagers of this era, which was very contemporary. This book is not primarily an introduction to fashion design, so no detailed discussion thereof will be made.

British "pop" design furniture is also very distinctive. Furniture design, compared with fashion design, it is more difficult to completely get rid of the influence of the traditional furniture style or constraints, because the furniture has a combination of more durable characteristics and more associated with the traditional style, therefore, the complete reform seems to be more difficult. For a long time, in addition to modernism, internationalism furniture design is a complete revolution, a complete breakthrough of tradition, other furniture design are still very heavy traditional influence, the furniture of the 50's, or modernism, or traditional eclectic, there seems to be no other way to develop.

But by the mid-1960s, the British furniture design finally appeared in the "Pop" style, a complete break with tradition, but also broke the boundaries of modernism, internationalism style. British "Pop" furniture was mainly popularized through Terence Conran's furniture retail store "Habitat". His furniture store was originally opened in 1964, but due to the success of the business, it gradually developed into a professional center specializing in the sale of inexpensive, brightly colored and specially designed furniture and home furnishings, targeting the youth market. The colors of the furniture and supplies are very simple, but colorful and simple. It also sells cheap ceramics and jewelry, many of which are imported from Scandinavian countries, and is very popular with teenagers because of its distinctive "pop" style, which is booming.

Besides "Habitat", there are also some individual designers in the United Kingdom engaged in "Pop" style furniture design exploration. One of them was Peter Mudosh, who designed paper chairs (actually made of fiberboard, but made using a paper-layering technique that made them look very much like paper products) decorated with the alphabet as a surface motif, with the dual "Pop" characteristics of cheapness and expressive intensity. Other such designers include Max Clendenning (Max Clendenning) and his design of jig-saw furniture (jig-saw furniture), Roger Dean (Roger Dean) and his design of blow-up chairs (blow-up), these designs have a playful character, bright colors, special shapes, and often have a kind of cynical adolescent psychological characteristics. of the teenage psyche. The message is clear: in mass culture and the new materialistic civilization of use-it-or-lose-it, functionalism is no longer the first thing to be considered in design. Designers should think more about market segmentation and try to satisfy the psychological needs of consumers, rather than just creating durable, well-functioning classic functionalist furniture. This phenomenon of "Pop" culture in the 1960s was not only widely loved by young people in Britain and European countries, but even formal British design institutions, such as the British Design Council, also had to face it squarely, because it was no longer just a few young intellectuals exploring their own personal expression, but also a cultural, cultural and social phenomenon. "has become a cultural, commercial and economic phenomenon.

But the "Pop" movement's pursuit of novelty, eccentricity, and novelty lacked a solid socio-cultural basis, so it disappeared very quickly despite its strong presence.

Since the mid-1960s, "Pop" design has moved away from Since the mid-1960s, the efforts to find design motives from novelty in "Pop" design have become insufficient, and it is difficult to find more eccentric styles to sustain the development of the movement by simply chasing novelty. As a result, a search for references from historical styles has emerged. In terms of design references in the British design world, there are two main periods of style that are used as references: the Victorian style, which has long been criticized by the design world as vulgar and pretentious, and the style of the British Arts and Crafts movement that emerged in the middle of the 19th century. This is a very strange transformation, because "Pop" began with the basic position of denying tradition, but in the end, it is a bit ironic that it actually went back to history to find a style to draw on. It also illustrates how thin and unreliable it is to explore development purely in terms of form.

The earliest example of this kind of retrospection was in clothing design, especially clothing patterns, which began to be used in many "Pop" garments in the late 1960s, and then appeared as decorative motifs on furniture surfaces, curtains, tablecloths, and so on, and over time, the UK's "Pop" style came to be seen as a way to create a new style of clothing. "Pop" design was not only Victorian and Arts and Crafts styles, but also Edwardian, Art Nouveau, Art Deco, and so on. Edwardian style (Edwardiana), "Art Nouveau" movement style, "Art Deco" movement style and so on also appeared together. A movement centered on opposition to tradition, a movement that boasted a youthful style, and finally a hodgepodge of historical styles, it can be said that this movement has come to an end.

This retro phenomenon in the British "Pop" design movement was concentrated in poster design, record cover design, store design, window design and other more graphic design categories. Among them, the more important designers include Martin Sharp, who simply adopted the Art Nouveau decorative style, especially the two main painters of the Art Nouveau movement, Alphonse Mucha and Alphonse Mucha. They simply adopted the decorative style of Art Nouveau, especially the illustration style of the two main painters of Art Nouveau, Alphonse Mucha and Aubrey Beardsiey, as reference for their own designs. In addition, they also borrowed a number of decorative motifs from the East, particularly from Eastern religions such as Buddhism. Their graphic designs of this period have a very strange character, a kind of retro characteristic in the immediate post-war period and for the young generation. This tendency toward retro design soon spread to the United States and France. In France, when this "Pop" plus retro style from England emerged, the French immediately gave it a new name "retro style". This vintage style lasted in Britain until the 1970s, longer than the early authentic "Pop".

In addition to the style of retro, the British "Pop" design, and later influenced by it in the United States, France and other countries, "Pop" design also appeared to revitalize the traditional craftsmanship. For example, the love of Scandinavian furniture, whether it was furniture, jewelry, textile design, clothing design, metalwork design, etc., were all designed and produced as much as possible using handmade or imitation craftsmanship, in order to achieve the purpose of the characteristics of craftsmanship. This was basically a repetition of the work done by the "Arts and Crafts" movement in Britain and the "Art Nouveau" movement in Europe and the United States since the middle of the 19th century. This was very special in an era of highly developed aerospace technology and rapidly changing electronic technology. It was also a reaction to the early "Pop" of the 1950s.

Since the late 1960s, the British "Pop" design movement has been characterized by a number of phenomena that have made its stylistic features so variable that it is very difficult to define a unified style. It can be said that the British "Pop" design has a variety of forms, a variety of eclectic characteristics, but it also has a unified base: that is, the reaction to the dry orthodox modernism, internationalism design, in this point of view and standpoint, all the designers belonging to this movement is basically the same.

"Pop" design movement is a formalist design trend, its background and the post-war increasingly formed western "society of abundance", the youth consumer market, the rebellious position, especially for modernist design and internationalist design. The background of its emergence was closely related to the growing post-war Western "affluent society", the youth consumer market, the rebellious stance, and especially the aversion to modernist and internationalist design. It is also because this movement was basically explored in the circle of formalism, and there is no deeper ideological basis, so the form itself is constantly changing, but has never been able to become a unified design movement.

Proposal of the concept of design ethics

During this period, in the midst of the clamor of the "Pop" design movement, some people began to seriously raise the issue of "design purpose" from the point of view of design theory. This is a very important starting point for the ethics of modern design and the purposeful theory of modern design. It is precisely because of this starting point that later design theory has seen more in-depth development.

The person who put forward this topic is the American design theorist Victor Papanek. He published his most famous book, Design for the Real world, at the end of the 1960s, through which he presented his new vision of the purposefulness of design. In this then controversial book, the theorist made three main points clear:

l) Design should be for the masses, not for the wealthy few. Here he particularly emphasized that design should serve the people of the Third World;

2 ) design should serve not only the healthy, but must also be considered for the handicapped;

3 ) design should give serious consideration to the use of the earth's finite resources, and that design should serve to preserve the finite resources of the planet we inhabit.

These few theoretical ideas of his protect important factors that have been neglected since the emergence of modern design. For the first time, he proposed that design must be considered from the standpoint of internationalism and serve the people of the Third World; it was also the first time that the issue of design for the disabled was explicitly mentioned; more importantly, he proposed the point of designing for the limited resources of the earth, which was not well understood at that time, but since the world energy crisis broke out at the beginning of the 70's, Babanak's view of limited resources has been universally recognized. But since the world energy crisis of the early 1970s, Babanak's finite-resource perspective has become universally recognized.

After the publication of this book, it was immediately translated into more than ten foreign languages, and became the reading material for designers and design students in various countries. In the consumer society, the society of abundance, and the climax of the "Pop" design, this book very calmly sounded an alarm for people: the purpose of the design must be clear, and the design must be for the society as a whole. The purpose of design must be clear, and design must serve the society as a whole. Babanak's theory was regarded as a heresy by the American design world, and he himself mentioned to the author of this book in Los Angeles in 1991 that he was expelled from the Industrial Designers Society of America (IDSA) at the end of the 60s because of this book, and the reason was that he was an alarmist in his design theories. The degree of nativism and conservatism in the American design community at that time was unimaginable. But there is no way to undo the book's significant impact.

After Babanak, more and more designers and design theorists began to reconsider design itself from these serious perspectives, with many very productive results. People began to look at Scandinavian design from a different perspective, and realized that the design system contained a number of rational elements that had previously gone unnoticed. Scandinavian designers had long considered the preservation of natural resources, and their designs were for society as a whole, not just for the powerful few. A Swedish design group, Ergonolu itoam (Ergonomic Design Office), had already been designing cutlery and knives and forks for the disabled as early as the 1960s. The results, which were widely studied and learned from after Babanak's ideas, raised the standard of design in general, and made it more than just a formalist movement.

The most important contribution of Babanak is that he put forward the concept of design ethics, the purpose of design is not only to serve the immediate functional and formal purposes, but also the main significance of design is that the design itself has the factor of forming the social system, therefore, the consideration of the design must also include the content of the short-term and long-term factors for the society. While modernism proposed design for the masses, from the point of view of contemporary design ethics, design must also be considered for the people of the Third World and developing countries, as well as for the purpose of ecological balance and the inclusion of natural resources. Such considerations have greatly deepened the dimension of design thinking and driven the development of design concepts.

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