Otl Aicher’s Designs for Development

As a founder of the Hochschule für Gestaltung Ulm and creator of graphic identities for Lufthansa and the Munich Olympics, Otl Aicher has been celebrated for his role in establishing modern design as a pillar of post-Nazi West German culture. This talk examines a different and little-known facet of Aicher’s career, his contribution to the globally emergent field of design for development. Traveling to India in 1960, Aicher made design proposals to support economic and social programs in the newly independent nation. Examining Aicher’s unpublished travel reports, held today in the HfG Archives, the talk considers the designer’s work in India in relation to the Ulm School’s influential systems-design method, Third World politics, and postcolonial debates on development.

Eric Anderson is Professor and Chair of the Theory and History of Art and Design department at Rhode Island School of Design. 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.