How 1960s TV thought the year 2000 would look, courtesy of The Jetsons
These videos from the 1939 World Fair are fantastic. When you think how long the model must have taken to make, it’s incredible they thought the real thing could be achieved in just 20 years…
I never did get my jet pack. Maybe it’s in the back of the hover car.
Part 1
Part 2
It’s worth bearing in mind what happened in September 1939 and how all that optimism got put off until the 1950s.
Lisa Jardine writes for the BBC about the history of the British concept of “home”:
‘An Englishman’s home is his castle’ was already a familiar platitude by 1700. To have a place of one’s own for shelter, where dependants are protected and their possessions are safe, feels like a fundamental social good. But have we gone too far in our quest for personal space and privacy?The family as a unit has varied considerably in the course of history, but the bond between those who live under one roof together has always been an important one. Today, a ‘family’ tends to mean the tiny cluster of individuals related by birth – typically, father and mother and one or two small children, but increasingly, one adult and a partner or dependant – who share a residential unit.
Until the 19th Century, however, the word ‘family’ was a synonym for an entire ‘household’, and was used to cover all those who lived together in a dwelling, whether related by birth to the householder, employed in their service, or simply lodged with them. ‘Home’ was the bricks and mortar in which half a dozen or more adults lived their lives, supporting one another by their labour.
When the renowned humanist scholar Erasmus of Rotterdam settled in Basle in the 1520s, for example, his familia or family included a collection of friends, admirers and disciples, all living together in one comfortable, spacious house.Household-families
Under the watchful eye of Erasmus’s formidable housekeeper Margaret, these young men and boys – pupils, lodgers and colleagues – performed all the household duties their distinguished Master required, preparing his meals, doing the housework, running errands and taking care of his horses.
Paintings of Erasmus like the one by Hans Holbein in the National Gallery in London show a solitary scholar in his study, surrounded by his books. But his was no isolated ivory tower. Even at work in his study on the Latin and Greek classics Erasmus had his famuli – his disciples, collaborators and factotums – around him.The same young men who staffed his kitchen and stable also worked as copyists transcribing from manuscripts, as scribes writing to his dictation, and as proof-readers and editors for his publications.
Throughout the 17th and 18th Centuries, household-families like these were the standard type of group sharing a single roof. The historian Naomi Tadmor has argued that the family portrayed in Samuel Richardson’s best-selling novel Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded (published in 1740) is typical of the times.
Mr B – the squire who over the course of the novel’s two volumes attempts unsuccessfully to seduce his household servant Pamela, eventually agreeing to marry her – is a bachelor, but nevertheless has a fully-fledged household supporting him and his lifestyle. These he refers to consistently as his family.City life
As a waiting-maid, Pamela belongs to this community of domestic servants, distant relatives, friends and companions, all living in a single dwelling. She never refers to her ‘poor but honest’ elderly parents, who lived elsewhere, as ‘family’. And the plot turns on the fact that she expects to be kept safe and protected within the household where she lives and works.
As family life moved increasing toward cities in the late-18th and 19th Centuries, houses of the type in which Mr B or Erasmus lived surrounded by dependants – big gabled mansions with plenty of nooks and crannies – continued to be built.But increasingly domestic structures centred on the housing needs of the growing middle classes. Scaled-down town-houses were put up, many of which still survive today, modified for modern use. These still provided lodgings for dependants and servants under a common roof, but centred on the family life of a group of blood-relations, in a way we can recognise.
Further down the social scale, accommodation was also always shared, but here it was fraught with difficulties. Just as happens today in rapidly urbanised economies, most of the working classes found themselves living in ad hoc ways, in overcrowded accommodation, which entirely lacked the privacy that we all now crave, and could hardly be said to offer the stable communal structures that Erasmus and Richardson wrote about.War years
Social historian Amanda Vickery has recently explored in detail the way in which, in multiple-occupancy working-class homes in the 18th Century, locked boxes, padlocks and keys to rooms and cupboards were talismans for hard-pressed lodgers, providing them with a remnant of private space and decency, away from the prying eyes of the landlady and their fellow-residents.
In our own times, the drive towards privacy has become paramount. We can see the modern ideal emerging in those wonderfully dated advertisements for domestic appliances from the 1950s and 60s, which show a smiling housewife, immaculately turned out in a many-petticoated dress with a cinched-in waist, pushing her vacuum-cleaner over expanses of carpet, or admiring her shiny new refrigerator.After the crowded, shared accommodation of the war years – shared washing and cooking facilities, wet laundry on the shared landing and a communal toilet – the domestic dream was resolutely a home with a front door of one’s own. The promise of government to the returning armed forces was that social housing would make that dream a reality – would provide ‘Homes Fit for Heroes’.
That dream is summed up in the so-called Parker Morris Standards, adopted for social housing in the 1960s. They became mandatory for council housing in 1969, and remained in force until 1980.
The Parker Morris Standards laid down the dimensions for typical items of household furniture for which the dwelling designer should allow space, and provided anthropometric data needed to calculate the living space required to use and move around that furniture.High-rise blocks
Its rules specified that a four person terrace house should have 74.5 square metres of space; kitchens for one or two people should contain 1.7 cubic metres of enclosed storage space; in one, two and three-bedroom dwellings the WC could be in the bathroom, but in four person houses it should have a separate compartment. The Parker Morris Standards for space, privacy and convenience continue to provide the familiar features of what we feel to be a modestly comfortable and convenient family home today.
But since the scramble for home ownership in the 1980s, our demands for personal space and privacy have come to dominate the planning and construction of domestic dwellings, and residential units have got ever smaller.Now is perhaps the time when we have to begin to ask ourselves whether the units of accommodation which have been constructed – often in glamorous high-rise blocks, with built-in appliances and fabulous views – are really, in the long run, fit for ‘family’ living, however we define that family.
In June of this year, at the launch of the London Festival of Architecture, the Mayor, Boris Johnson deplored the fact that ‘new buildings in London have some of the smallest rooms in Europe’. For new social housing to be provided in London, Johnson announced, ‘we will be re-establishing the space standards first promoted by the visionary planner Sir Parker Morris’.
The chair of the London Assembly’s planning committee Nicky Gavron welcomed Mr Johnson’s pledge, saying: ‘The mayor has been very clear that he thinks our space standards are shameful; that we are building rabbit hutches.’ Others poured scorn on his promise, as an impossible dream – property values, they insisted, made reinstating the old housing standards out of the question.
We may have to wait until house prices have fallen dramatically before we know whether the homes designed for exaggeratedly ‘nuclear’ forms of living, offered by politicians and property speculators in an over-heated property market, were part of an impossible dream of home-ownership for every individual.
Perhaps the drive in Britain towards compact, separate ‘homes’, with ever-tinier floor-plans, crammed together by developers on restricted urban sites, is our housing equivalent of the Dutch tulip craze of the 1630s – our housing South Sea Bubble.
If that bubble bursts, it is intriguing to imagine how these undersized dwellings might be combined and converted into homes for other types of ‘familia’ to suit the changing times, just as has happened so often in the past before.
I have to admit I’m a bit of a sucker for Star Wars video games, though very poor at finishing them. Dark Forces (Mac/PC) is still one of my favourites but I never got past one of the middle levels… Never mind, Dark Forces 2 soon followed! (I got stuck on that, too).
I’ve been disappointed with some of the console-based games (Knights of the Old Republic just doesn’t do it for me) but am intrigued by the upcoming Force Unleashed.
I just found a series of videos over at Gametrailer that give a great rundown of every single Star Wars video game (starting with The Empire Strikes Back – I remember seeing an ad for this when ITV first showed Star Wars and my memory of the game seems to have made it out to be far better than it actually was).
One of the earliest and best games is Death Star Attack, a vector-based game that allowed you to battle Tie Fighters and then recreate the trench run from the first movie. My schoolfriends and I were addicted to this game and every Sunday one summer we’d cycle to York University’s student union and take over the console there. I was actually very good at this game and even though you just repeated the same routines over and over again, it never got dull…
You can see high quality versions of the videos here. Even if you’re not a Star Wars or gaming fan, it’s an intriguing look at the development of video game technology.
A stunning collection of posters by Tom Eckersley has been digitized and is now available online at vads.ac.uk [NB you need to use the search box to access the images - search for 'eckersley']
Eckersley is one of the foremost poster designers and graphic communicators of the last century. He used bold simple designs, often resembling collage, and the collection reflects the range of his work from propaganda posters to his post-war posters. The collection was formed by Eckersley and is held at the University of the Arts London Archives and Special Collections Centre.
Eckersley’s bold, graphic statements coupled with memorable slogans and unique use of colour, were seen promoting some of the most iconic of British institutions such as London Transport, General Post Office, The Ministry of Information and the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents (RoSPA). Eckersley was also a teacher of poster arts and established the first graphic design course in Britain at the London School/College of Printing (now College of Communication, part of University of the Arts London).
Over 100 posters are now available online from this unique archive and further images will be launched on VADS in the coming months.
The collection complements other resources on vads.ac.uk such as the Imperial War Museum’s poster collection which includes works by Eckersley and his contemporaries such as F H K Henrion and Abram Games.
For more information about the Eckersley Archive, see vads.ac.uk/collections/TEC
The Guardian reports on the end of the black cab (full article by clicking the link)):
They are as much a part of the national landscape as the London Routemaster bus or Gilbert Scott’s red telephone box, but this year the last of the classic black FX4 ‘Fairway’ taxi cabs could be erased from our streets. Mann & Overton, the main dealership for the modern replacement, the TX4, is offering FX4 operators up to £3,000 – 10 times the market value of their old cab – if they trade it in for a new TX4.
Sadly, for those of us who would like to emulate Kate Moss – she has been spotted behind the wheel of her own Fairway – this generous offer does not mean there will be a healthy supply of cheap classic cabs to snaffle up: M&O say, with chilling finality, that they will ‘scrap … all the old Fairways we take in under this amazing deal’.
The classic cab was launched under the Austin badge exactly 50 years ago and 42,000 units were produced over a 39-year period. It survived the ructions of the British Leyland years to become the Carbodies FX4 when the firm that had made the bodywork took over responsibility for the entire design.Famed for its unmistakable engine rattle and nifty 25ft turning circle, the FX4s were designed specifically to comply with transport regulations in London but ended up being driven in cities throughout Britain. They have gradually been made safer, comfier and faster (the first ones would only do 60mph; not much good for the M4 Heathrow run) and, compared with the Noddy-car looks of the new TX series, there is a undeniable nobility about the FX4.
It seems the manufacturer is using the environment as part of the excuse for this, but the cynic in me says there might be a bit of money to be made here as well.
You can see the new models here, but there’s a really obvious question here: why don’t they just make them in black? Seems a bit silly not to…
BBC News reports on a new study being undertaken at Dundee University:
The long decline of Dundee’s jute industry and the reasons for it will be examined in a new research project at the University of Dundee.
Academics have been awarded £128,000 to study why production fell and the impact it has had on the city.The research team will interview those involved in the industry and study archive material.
The jute sector was a major part of Dundee’s economy through the Victorian age and into the 20th Century.
However, the industry then went into a long decline through the rest of the 1900s, with the last jute mill closing in 1998.
‘Global cities’
Professor Jim Tomlinson said: ‘Jute is a pioneer of the decline of old local industry – others like shipbuilding and coal in other parts of Britain came later.
‘Dundee was one of the most globalised cities in the world in the early 1900s, certainly more so than it is now.
‘The city was at the hub of global trading in jute, importing from India and exporting around the world.
‘That faded with the decline of the local jute industry as it faced a number of pressures.’
Dr Carlo Morelli, from the department of economic studies, added: ‘Another focus of our study will be the impact on women’s lives.
‘It is a highly unusual feature of the industry that the jute workforce was largely made up of women.’
The money has been awarded by the Leverhulme Trust, which provides funding for research and education projects.
More Saul Bass:
A rather nice-looking site, here’s The History of Visual Communicationy.
Some beautiful images on the site, and a selection below…
A fascinating opinion piece from John Naughton in The Observer that should be of particular interest to graphics, interactive media and product design students, and more generally too:
The First Law of Technology says we invariably overestimate the short-term impact of new technologies while underestimating their longer-term effects. The invention of printing in the 15th century had an extraordinary short-term impact: though scholars argue about the precise number, within 40 years of the first Gutenberg bible between eight and 24 million books, representing 30,000 titles, had been printed and published. To those around at the time, it seemed like a pretty big deal.‘In our time’, wrote German humanist Sebastian Brandt in 1500, ‘…books have emerged in lavish numbers. A book that once would’ve belonged only to the rich – nay, to a king – can now be seen under a modest roof… There is nothing nowadays that our children… fail to know.’ They didn’t know the half of it.
They didn’t know, for example, that Gutenberg’s technology, which enabled lay people to read and interpret the bible for themselves, would undermine the authority of the Catholic church and fuel the Reformation. Or that it would enable the rise of modern science by facilitating the rapid and accurate dissemination of ideas. Or create new social classes of clerks, teachers and intellectuals. Or alter our conception of ‘childhood’ as a protected early stage in the lives of young people. In an oral culture, childhood effectively ended at the age when an individual could be regarded as a competent communicator, ie, about seven – which is why the Vatican defined that as ‘the age of reason’ after which individuals could be held accountable for their sins.
In a print-based culture, communicative competence took longer to achieve and required schooling, so ‘childhood’ was extended to 12 or 14. All these long-term impacts were not – indeed, could not have been – foreseen. Yet they represent the profound ways in which Gutenberg’s technology transformed society.
Today’s Gutenberg is Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the web. In the 17 years since he launched his technology on an unsuspecting world, he has transformed it. Nobody knows how big the web is now, but estimates of the indexed part hover at around 40 billion pages, and the ‘deep web’ hidden from search engines is between 400 and 750 times bigger than that. These numbers seem as remarkable to us as the avalanche of printed books seemed to Brandt. But the First Law holds we don’t know the half of it, and it will be decades before we have any real understanding of what Berners-Lee hath wrought.
Occasionally, we get a fleeting glimpse of what’s happening. One was provided last week by the report of a study by the British Library and researchers at University College London. The study (available from tinyurl.com/2eslnr) combined a review of published literature on the information-seeking behaviour of young people more than 30 years with a five-year analysis of the logs of a British Library website and another popular research site that documents people’s behaviour in finding and reading information online.
The findings describe ‘a new form of information-seeking behaviour’ characterised as being ‘horizontal, bouncing, checking and viewing in nature. Users are promiscuous, diverse and volatile.’ ‘Horizontal’ information-seeking means ‘a form of skimming activity, where people view just one or two pages from an academic site then ‘bounce’ out, perhaps never to return.’ The average times users spend on e-book and e-journal sites are very short: typically four and eight minutes respectively.
‘It is clear’, says the study, ‘that users are not reading online in the traditional sense, indeed there are signs that new forms of ‘reading’ are emerging as users ‘power browse’ horizontally through titles, contents pages and abstracts, going for quick wins. It almost seems that they go online to avoid reading in the traditional sense.’ These findings apply to online information seekers of all ages.
The study confirms what many are beginning to suspect: that the web is having a profound impact on how we conceptualise, seek, evaluate and use information. What Marshall McLuhan called ‘the Gutenberg galaxy’ – that universe of linear exposition, quiet contemplation, disciplined reading and study – is imploding, and we don’t know if what will replace it will be better or worse. But at least you can find the Wikipedia entry for ‘Gutenberg galaxy’ in 0.34 seconds.
You learn something every day.
From BBC News:
Scottish banknotes have an unusual status.
In 1826, the British parliament passed legislation preventing banks from issuing their own pound notes, a practice which was threatening to get out of hand.
But a vigorous campaign in Scotland, which enlisted figures such as the writer Sir Walter Scott, ensured that it was exempted from the new law.
In Scotland, three banks retain the right to print their own money: the Royal Bank of Scotland, the Bank of Scotland and the Clydesdale Bank.
Interestingly, if the UK were to join the Euro, the three Scottish commercial banks would lose the right to print their own notes, something they oppose on grounds of ‘heritage’.
The story quoted above cites a Scottish politician who claims some English shops’ refusal to accept Scottish notes is embarrassing to Scots. Well it also happened to me, and I’m not Scottish, although in this instance the London shopkeeper just stared at it for a while, looked at me, and accepted my apologetic shrug. The following week I paid my gas bill in Scotland with the then new English £20 notes and got a similar reaction, so it works both ways. No insult, just uncertainty.
It appears though that Scottish bank notes are not ‘legal tender’ in the UK and it is a matter of discretion as to whether a shop will accept them or not – much the same as they can (if they want) accept Euros, US Dollars, Yen or any other currency. Unlike those currencies, however, there is no fluctuation in the exchange rate between Scotland and the rest of the UK, so no real reason not to accept them.
Personally I don’t see this as a case of English shopkeepers ‘insulting’ Scots – more a case of a politician trying to stir it for local support.
It’s quite rare to see a Scottish bank note in England and to be given one can be a bit surprising. If you’ve never seen one before, I suppose the first reaction would be to reject it.
But why is money so emotive a subject? Is it a problem looking for a design solution? Back in 1998 when the new designs for the Euro were revealed I wondered why money couldn’t be like stamps – every country has its own design and name, but it all has the same value. 50 francs = 50 pounds = 50 lira and so on. Monetary Union doesn’t have to mean visual homogeneity, does it?
