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Kelly, Jessica (2025) The industrialized designer: gender, identity and professionalisation in Britain and the United States, 1930-80. Journal of Design History (epaf02): epaf020. ISSN 1741-7279
This is a book review of: The industrialized designer: gender, identity and professionalisation in Britain and the United States, 1930-80 / by Leah Armstrong, (Manchester University Press, 2024).
In his talk at the 1971 Design Research Society Conference on the topic of design participation, Reyner Banham declared that "a professional is a problem-oriented man".
He went on to explain that the expertise through which professions were defined relied on the definitions of problems, meaning that professionals had a vested interest in maintaining those problems. Banham cast designers as problem makers rather than problem solvers. Leah Armstrong’s book opens with a related quote from Ivan Illich, who in 1977 declared that the age when people had problems and experts had solutions was over and the "illusion of professional omniscience and omnipotence" (page 1) was being called into question. The 1970s was the decade of the 'crisis of professionalism', captured in Banham and Illich’s polemics. Armstrong’s insightful book, structured over six thematic and broadly chronological chapters, traces how the design profession arrived at this moment of crisis. It asks how the ideas and practices of professionalisation in design were defined and disseminated in Britain and the United States throughout the middle decades of the twentieth century and why, ultimately, they were doomed to failure. This critical history, unpicks - through detailed archival research in professional organisations and private collections and oral histories - how the profession of designer came to be characterised and, crucially, gendered. There are also important reflections on how the legacy of this twentieth-century professionalisation continues to shape discourses in design and the role of the designer today.
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