Professional Graphic Design and Cold War Politics: National and Transnational Design Organizations

The entwined histories of modernism, modernization, industrialization and the professional practice of design, offer a significant challenge for the study of design history. Historically, the role of the designer as a full-time professional occupation has appeared in societies where increasingly complex production systems have resulted in the fragmentation of work, further emphasized by the introduction of mechanical devices into production systems. For instance, the development of paper and printing systems enabled the development of new ways of reproducing and distributing texts and images, from manuscripts produced one by one, to the mass printing of texts and books by a number of skilled workers dedicated to specialized tasks in graphic reproduction. Similarly specialization occurred in the pottery and textiles industries in Europe during the nineteenth century, where a division of labour was established to increase production, differentiating the act of designing from that of making