Im Schatten von Design

The complexity of the designed world demands a critical analysis of its social and economic contexts. A design criticism worthy of its name is urgently needed, because it scarcely exists.

The design theorist Michael Erlhoff is a radical critic who focuses on concealed banalities, hidden cruelties, obscured obviousness, disguised motives, and other repressed enmeshments of design. Specifically he examines the design of weapons, design under Nazism, the design of "electric chairs," the brutality of branding, the ambivalence of service design, the violence of signs, or the ornamentalization of people as masses. This book provides the kind of self-criticism that is needed if design is finally to become self-aware.