Five lessons the Bauhaus School can offer today’s designers

1. Go back to basics

Marianne Brandt’s teapot from ca. 1924. Bauhaus redesigns of everyday objects went on to influence user-centred product design in the later twentieth century.

One of the great insights of the Bauhaus movement is to recognise that creative education is about more than passing on and refining technical knowledge or skills.

Google is full of brilliant answers to every “how to” query. Watching fantastic online content like Aaron Draplin’s logo design challenge gives us great insight into the design process, and inspires us to try for ourselves. But when it comes to solving our own design problems, we need more than a how-to guide.

By going back to the fundamentals of colour, form, and meaning in design, we connect with the basic elements of our craft, and free ourselves to be more inventive and to respond authentically to the design problem that we are called to solve.

2. Form follows function

“Form follows function” is now an article of faith for designers, but that wasn’t always the case. The Bauhaus School rejected the purely “ornamental” role that they felt the visual arts had acquired.

This feeling only became more widespread during the Bauhaus period: notably, in 1936, the early critical theorist Walter Benjamin wrote about how mechanical reproduction could rob art of its critical power.

Breaking with the widespread ornamentation and ornateness that characterised art, design, and architecture in the early 1900s, the Bauhaus strove for rational solutions to design problems.

This meant stripping away the intricate and floral decorations of the late nineteenth century. In their place, the Bauhaus School required students to reflect and enhance an object’s function, without adding decorative elements for their own sake. We can see this simplicity and rationalism in Josef Albers’ geometrical nesting tables:

Left: Josef Albers’ nesting tables (ca 1927). Right: “Kilo” nesting tables, available through UK retailer Habitat (2016)

3. Break the rules

The Bauhaus-Archiv explains that “one of the decisive qualities that the Bauhaus possessed was an ability to see diversions or even unsuccessful experiments as potentially necessary lessons and to derive corrections in its course from them.”

1920s Bauhaus costumes

The Bauhaus School’s learning culture encouraged experimentation at a fundamental level. They stand to remind us that rules and conventions are there to be learned, but not always to be observed. Some design problems call for radical solutions that nobody but you believes in. (Remember air travel?)

4. Think big even when your work is “small”

Left: Marcel Breuer’s “Bauhaus Telephone”, ca 1928.

Right: Dietrich Lubs’ ET 66 Calculator for Braun, 1987.

The Bauhaus movement set out to change society, and it succeeded — by designing teapots, table lamps, and telephones. The Bauhaus-Archiv explains that, “starting in 1928, the college’s social aims intensified under Hannes Meyer; the solution was now summarized as ‘people’s necessities, not luxuries’”.

The Bauhaus anticipated a major theme of twentieth-century design — that the most serious site of design and transformation is not in grand projects (like designing an opera house), but in the stuff of everyday life. We see this in the domestic items designed by Dieter Rams and Dietrich Lubs for Braun from the 1950s onwards.

So even when our work as designers is “small”, we should still think big, even if we’re just doing a logo design for a friend’s hot dog stand.

5. Get your hands dirty

The Bauhaus School wanted to reunite the artist with their craft, and encouraged students to immerse themselves in the full range of materials and techniques available.

So, next time you need to print some business cards, before heading to an online print service, why not buy yourself a home screenprinting kit and do the job yourself? (Here’s a photo of some of mine, which I did with a Riso Gocco PG-11.)The quickest and most effective way to learn about the constraints and potential of materials like paper and ink is to get our hands dirty and work with them ourselves.