Between January 1971 and September 1973, the Design Group of the Technological Research Committee of Chile (INTEC), within CORFO, developed different projects for consumer goods, capital goods and goods for public use. These goods would be produced by the nationalized industrial platform, and distributed by different State programs, and by the market, thus implementing a specific experience
... [Show full abstract] regarding the role of design in defining the material culture of socialism. An experience that involved the design of around 90 objects, most of which were never produced, given the interruption of the project by the military civic coup.
This brief encounter between cultural transformation, design and public policy was carried out by a group of professionals whose joint work, in turn, proposed the encounter between various modern trajectories. On the one hand, the group was made up of former members of the Hfg Ulm, a German design school founded in 1950, which was an international benchmark in integrating design into industrial development processes. On the other hand, the Group also included young students and graduates of the first generations of industrial and graphic designers in Chile, who had been agents and witnesses to the process of curricular adjustment of the discipline in the context of university reform. Adjustments ranging from a training based on Fine Arts, to the late implementation of various models à la Bauhaus.
Faced with this, the motivation of this research has been the restitution of the set of ideas, trajectories and displacements, which were tried in Chile, an original reflection on the relationship between industrialization, daily life, technology, design and public policies. Essay in which conceptual approaches typical of European modernity are interwoven with the political projects of the revolutionary governments of Latin America in the context of the Cold War.
With this objective, the research methodology has consisted of material reconstitution of goods designed and not produced, in order to be able to deliver a body to this story. This reconstitution has involved, when possible, following the instructions provided after the discovery of its original documentation, developing a series of objects, furniture and functional electronic prototypes, with the aim of bringing them to the present and projecting them into the future.
