DESIGN EVERYWH Ebook EN.Pdf

DESIGN EVERYWHERE 40th Anniversary of the Faculty of Design of the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw Warsaw 2018 3 4 Introduction 8 Ksawery Piwocki From the Curators 10 Czesława Frejlich, Magda Kochanowska From Prehistory to History, or: 01 Educating Designers in a Non-consumer Society 14 Józef A. Mrozek New Challenges: 02 The Faculty of Design after 1989 40 Magda Kochanowska 03 Beyond Aesthetics: Graphic Design in the Faculty of Design 56 Agata Szydłowska Designs by Educators and Graduates 04 from 1954–2018 70 Bios 249 Index 280 5 6 7 Introduction Design Everywhere is an overview of the most interesting and memorable designs by employees and graduates of the Faculty of Design of the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. This choice was driven by two aims. The first was tying the interwar achievements of the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw into the program. We presented this legacy at the Art Everywhere exhibition in 2012 at Zachęta – National Gallery of Art. The school’s program attempted to create a new national art after 123 years of Poland being partitioned – to evoke traditional formal elements and ideas characteristic of interwar Polish artists. The program and its execution were an international success. Polish decorative and fine arts reappeared, and stood out from was being produced in the other countries of Europe. Those who survived the hardships of war continued their mission. The publication and exhibition note this legacy. The other aim is to show how, in recent years, the number of implemented designs is on the rise, how designers are making headway into unexplored fields, how the scope of design is increasing, and how designers are using digital tools as they emerge. They are using design to make real visions of the future, though not always based on advanced technologies. This is a chronological display of eighty-nine designs created over the sev- eral decades of the faculty’s existence, by designers who, in our view, are vital to its history and to the development of Polish design. We want our viewers to see the growing creative abilities of our community, and its increasing effectiveness. The shift from a centrally planned to a market economy has been instrumental here, the opening of our doors to Europe and the world, the global network of thought, inven- tion, and knowledge exchange, but we hope that methods of educating designers developed for decades in Polish academies have made their mark as well. We bor- rowed from the experiences of other schools, but we also created our own methods. Our graduates and teachers are active designers – they work in industry, designing 8 trains, cars, yachts, military gear, rehabilitation and medical equipment, furniture, household appliances, toys, clothing, porcelain, glass, and packaging. They also develop visual identity systems, small architectural forms for the city space, and public interior arrangements. They win competitions and launch products in Poland and abroad, and their art-design objects are exhibited in museums and important culture centers in other countries as well. We have become an equal and serious player on the international design market. As such, we think it is worth displaying the work of this group, which is small, yet important for the Polish economy and culture. Although we have yet to become innovation and technology leaders on the world market, we know how to produce modern products with ideas behind them, which are attractive, and environmentally and socially responsible. We should promote this legacy and its creators, as well as the partners who released these designs – the producers, in industry and crafts. Professor Ksawery Piwocki Dean of the Faculty of Design of the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw 9 From the Curators An anniversary provides an opportunity to stop and look back. The forty-year anniversary of the Faculty of Design of the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw is a fine moment to appreciate the important events of the past decades, it is a time for summation and reflection. This could be done in a variety of ways. We have not only taken an interesting journey into the past, we have also tried to glimpse how the concept of the designer’s role has taken shape in our country in the wake of historical events. Exploring the faculty archives let us see this in terms of the path the school took; we could see how, in the 1950s, design was born in our country as an autonomous creative field tied to industry, though education was still based on programs with a fine arts slant. The faculty was created in 1977, but its preparation can be seen as far back as 1954, when the Artistic and Research Workshops were created at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, making designs for companies. This unit was the brainchild of Jerzy Sołtan, who began running the Industrial Forms Studio at the Faculty of Interior Design in 1950. After over two decades, a team composed of Rafał Kwinto, Cezary Nawrot, Jacek Sempoliński, Lech Tomaszewski, Andrzej Jan Wróblewski, and Wo- jciech Wybieralski developed the program of the Faculty of Industrial Design, whose first dean was named Andrzej Jan Wróblewski. From that point on, the teaching program was modified many times, when new generations of teachers appeared on the scene. The external conditions of designers’ jobs also changed drastically, shaped by Poland’s overall politico-economic situation and the global digital revolution. In the 1980s the designer profession did not in fact exist in our country, and it was left to the next decade to rebuild the occupation’s prestige; in recent times the young generation has been entering the job market with neither disadvantages nor com- plexes, and has been taking their achievements abroad. These transformations are the history of the faculty, but also an important chapter in the Polish history of design. 10 We decided that the school’s strength was proven by the accomplishments of its graduates and instructors. This is why our exhibition does not feature educa- tional programs, or student or diploma projects, but work created after graduation. Since 1977, around 1,000 students have graduated from the school. Some of them have passed away. In the 1980s, those who finished their studies here often went abroad. Some who were educated as designers changed professions, many became successful advertisers in the 1990s. Those whom we managed to reach, we asked to submit what they judged to be a few of their finest released works, ones that had a solid market or social impact. Of these we chose eighty-nine designs. Design is most often the result of teamwork. We tried to choose pieces which, on the one hand, say something about the times in which they were created, and on the other, endured in our memories, such as the visual identity for LOT airlines by Roman Duszek and Andrzej Zbrożek (1978), the Warsaw city information system by Grzegorz Niwiński, Jerzy Porębski, and Michał Stefanowski (1996), or the Gamma locomotive by Bar- tosz Piotrowski (2012). While there are fewer older works – understandably, as many have not stood the test of time, some could not be accessed, and of others we only have drawings for documentation – in the younger generation the number of designs is growing from year to year. Producers are increasingly interested in working with designers, as they see success in manufacturing quality products that can be sold both domestically and abroad. Today, design is one of the most important factors in improving competitiveness. Companies, but also social and cultural organizations, want to be perceived through a modern and well-designed visual identity, such as the one presented for the Warsaw Theater Encounters by Anna Goszczyńska (2010). Designers are also getting involved in cultural activities, creating looks for social campaigns, as in Love Makes No Exceptions (2013) by Marianna Wybieralska, and running workshops of various kinds. Some open their own companies, in which they invent and sell their own products with their own labels, most often through the Internet, such as Agata Matlak-Lutyk and Hanna Ferenc Hilsden’s Balagan. Industry commissions and the activities of small companies mainly show that Polish manufacture and its designers are in excellent shape, but they also demonstrate that the field of design’s concerns is growing. They also show that the graduates of Warsaw’s Design Faculty have a great deal to say in the development of this field, and can meet the challenges of the present. Czesława Frejlich and Magda Kochanowska 11 12 01 13 PAGES 14—36 From Prehistory to History, or: Educating Designers in a Non-consumer Society Józef A. Mrozek 14 The creation of the Faculty of Industrial Design at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw in 1977 came as the result of a thirty-year process which – as often was the case in communist Poland – was full of attempts to establish something normal in times that did not favor normalcy. Introducing an important tool to generate consumption into the structure of a non-consumer society make seem paradoxical at first glance. And yet the efforts of the many people who undertook this task brought major results, and the creation of design departments in Poland, including the Faculty of Industrial Design. This could be because, unlike in the West, design in Poland was shaped through its institutions, such as the Production Aesthetics Supervision Bureau, The Institute of Industrial Design, The Production Aesthetics and Design Council, and, last but not least, the design departments in art academies. In such a thoroughly bureaucratized state as socialist Poland, things could hardly be any different.

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