Book summary “Design as art”: summary

Introduction

You live in a world where art often remains locked away in ivory towers while mass production floods the market with ugly and inefficient goods. You struggle to bridge the gap between creative expression and the practical demands of modern living.

Bruno Munari argues that art must be brought down from the ivory tower and applied directly to the functional needs of everyday life through objective industrial and visual planning. You will discover that design is a rigorous process of problem-solving rather than mere superficial decoration.

The book guides you through distinct realms of visual culture. You will examine the differences between true designers and mere stylists, explore the foundations of visual communication, and analyze the principles of graphic and industrial design. Finally, you will investigate research design and kinetic art to understand how modern objects function.

• How do you separate objective design from temporary styling?
• What makes visual communication instantly legible to the public?
• How can you apply artistic creativity to everyday industrial objects?

1. Designers and Stylists

Traditional art remains locked in ivory towers while culture becomes a mass phenomenon. You can bridge this gap by bringing creativity directly into everyday life. Ancient Etruscan vases serve as proof that items used for cooking-oil eventually become precious works of art.

A designer is an objective planner with an aesthetic sense who develops the logical form of an object based on its function, materials, and production techniques.

The designer gives equal weight to all project parts. You avoid abstract beauty, styling preconceptions, and personal taste to help the object make itself naturally. A leaf takes its form entirely from its function, and you should follow that same structural logic.

An engineer designing a motor-scooter chose its colour simply because it was the cheapest option. An industrial designer or design engineer often treats aesthetics as a mere finish or makes choices based solely on cheapness. You must avoid such shortcuts to achieve formal coherence.

The Role of the Designer

Artists must abandon romantic isolation to engage directly with everyday life. You should respond with competence to the demands of society instead of producing rare masterpieces for an elite.

The Fallacy of Styling

Styling operates on an entirely different set of principles focused on quick commercial turnover.

• Stylists rely on fads and theatrical sketches with dramatic highlights.
• They apply sculptural curves or square corners depending on current trends.
• Their goal is deliberate obsolescence based on the idea that an old style is out as soon as a new one is created.

Bernard Tettamanzi created a famous car for Peter Zunzer, while stylists once designed an aerodynamic hearse. You can recognize this aerodynamic style by its purely decorative veneer, which bears no relation to actual functional efficiency.

2. Visual Design and Communication

Visual communication must evolve alongside society, using contemporary signs, symbols, and conditioned reflexes for instant legibility.

Just as dead languages fade, historical symbols lose their meaning over time. A blacksmith sign that once excited children in 1900 now merely functions as a lucky charm because children no longer associate it with an active forge. Modern visual design incorporates contemporary discoveries to communicate effectively with today's public.

• X-rays;
• microscopic imagery;
• neon lights;
• aerodynamic forms.

A Living Language

People process countless surrounding visual stimuli through established mental categories. Viewers automatically categorize shapes, heights, and colours while filtering out uninteresting stimuli.

Drivers instantly step on the brake pedal when they see a red light without having to consciously analyze the signal. Global roadsigns and trademarks require absolute clarity and speed because viewers read them without thinking through conditioned reflexes.

Signs and Symbols

Standardized signs and symbols can be combined like ideographic scripts to construct complex visual narratives. When combined according to logical rules, these symbols can function like words in a poem to express complex conditions.

• A meteorological asterisk means snow.
• A downward triangle means a stormy sky.
• The two combined indicate a blizzard.

Combining multiple images into a single cohesive visual creates concentrated communication that operates on the subconscious. An advertisement for motor vehicle rubber spare parts arranged the detailed outlines of individual parts to form a picture of a car. Such double images can be obvious or subtly hinted at to leave a lasting impression as a personal discovery.

The Shape of Words

Printed words possess a distinct overall visual shape defined by their letters, spacing, and lines. Familiar words are seized at a glance through their overall contour. Modifying this shape changes legibility and reading speed, which is crucial for warning signs on motorways.

Cutting out newspaper letters and pushing them together until one upright stroke serves for two reveals the true shape of the word, as seen in the trademark DAMO.

Colour is a physiological sensation dependent on nervous systems, existing in thousands of subtle variations dictated by materials and surface textures.

Industrial and artistic catalogues demonstrate that thousands of distinct colours exist, created by systematically adding black or white to pure hues. Furthermore, the perceived colour changes entirely depending on whether the supporting material is smooth or rough, matte or reflective. A plastic manufacturing company in America maintains a catalogue containing 12,000 different colours to guarantee constant production standards.

3. Graphic Design

Effective graphic design relies on clear structural geometries, endless poster patterns, and simple concepts tailored for children.

Poster without End

The Japanese flag pattern serves as a highly effective basic poster structure because its central circular form traps the eye and its white background isolates the message. Unlike partitioned posters where sections bleed into neighbouring displays, a central disc with surrounding negative space prevents the eye from easily escaping along corners. This geometric arrangement forces viewer engagement and provides exact, immediate information without visual assault.

Graphic designers adapt the red disc and white background pattern to represent tomatoes, clocks, steering wheels, globes, and targets.

Posters can be designed without fixed limits by making the left and right sides correspond, allowing them to be pasted side by side infinitely. If a figurative element is cut by an edge, the opposite edge must feature a corresponding form so they link seamlessly, functioning like wallpaper or clothing patterns.

An Italian Campari advertisement in underground stations uses a red background and cut letters to form an endless visual game.

Children's Books

Good children's books should feature simple stories and clear whole figures, appealing to children's keen observation rather than adult vanity. Publishers often produce expensive, elaborate, or ugly books to impress other adults, whereas children prefer modest books with clear illustrations and simple concepts like animals or time.

Munari included a cat going off the right edge of a black page and looking around the corner into the next page in one of his books.

• Your heart goes tick tock. Listen to it.
• Put your hand on it and feel it.
• Count the beats: one, two, three, four….
• When you have counted sixty beats a minute will have passed.
• After sixty minutes an hour will have passed.
• In one hour a plant grows a hundredth of an inch.
• In twelve hours the sun rises and sets.
• Twenty-four hours make one whole day and one whole night.
• Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday make one week.
• Four weeks make one month: January.
• After January come February, March, April, May, June, July, August, September, October, November, December.

4. Industrial Design

Industrial objects achieve excellence through natural materials, ergonomic wear patterns, and functional necessity rather than excess luxury.

Industrial objects are tending to become smaller and more functional through new technologies without losing effectiveness.

Advances like transistors and printed circuits reduce the size of devices, while microfilms drastically cut down archive space requirements. A German computer cell measuring two millimetres square contains 15 silicon transistors and 13 resistors. It stores complex information in a thousandth of a second. Automatic microfilm can be made at a speed of a thousand frames a minute. This system saves ninety per cent of space in archives.

Constant use alters the shape of objects, revealing the ideal ergonomic form dictated by function rather than aesthetic preconceptions. Observing how friction wears down objects like wooden spoons or stairs helps designers understand the correct shape an object should have. A wooden spoon used over time in a kitchen loses an oblique piece from its end due to constant rubbing against the saucepan.

Natural objects demonstrate absolute coherence between form, function, packaging, and consumption, offering lessons for industrial design. Fruits and plants use specialized packaging layers derived from the same source material, contrasting with human production of useless decorative objects like roses. Munari analyzes the orange as a modular container system and the pea as a bivalve case, while criticizing the rose as a useless decorative object with thorns. A pea-green color heavily influenced fashion and furnishing in the 1920–30 decade.

Cars function as pieces of travelling sculpture fulfilling social prestige needs, often neglecting functional ergonomics for stylistic fashion. Styling experts focus on aesthetics, interior luxury, and subjective criteria rather than statistics, lab tests, and standardized functional parts. Car designs swing between classic V.I.P. cars and aggressive red sports cars, while functional features like standard bumper heights are ignored.

Uncultured consumers often confuse value with price, prioritizing superficial luxury like marble and gold over comfort, acoustic insulation, and true culture. Builders cater to a mania for luxury by installing impractical marble and large panoramic windows that cause glare, neglecting basic habitability. A golden telephone adorned with papal arms and symbols was given to the Pope as an ultimate display of luxurious excess.

Commercial fancy goods often disguise utilitarian objects into whimsical shapes, divorcing form from real function. Gift shops are filled with objects disguised as unrelated items, such as brass boots meant to hold umbrellas, frying-pan clocks, or refrigerators disguised as suits of armor. A lady friend asks for an unusual Christmas present, leading the author on a bewildering tour of gift shops selling items like a pig-shaped salami-cutting board. A brass boot seen in a gift shop has an approximate size of 25.

Traditional Japanese Houses and Bamboo

Traditional Japanese houses use natural materials, modular construction, and flexible spaces that adapt to different needs without fixed furniture. Japanese homes use tatami mats as a modular grid, sliding paper walls, and natural wood or straw, achieving high functionality and simplicity. Munari stayed in a traditional house in Tokyo and Kyoto, noting the discrete entrance, tatami dimensions, and sliding paper doors.

• A tatami mat measures three foot by six.
• A two-tatami room measures six foot by six.
• An eight-tatami room measures twelve by twelve.
• The rooms have an approximate height of eight feet.

Bamboo is a natural, fast-growing tubular material whose inherent structure and straight fibers guide craftsmen in creating logical tools and objects. Craftsmen use bamboo's natural knots, hollow interiors, and easy splitting qualities to make vases, brushes, and architectural elements without complex tooling. Sen-no-Rikyu created an ancient vase for Ikebana out of bamboo in the mid-sixteenth century. Under the right conditions, bamboo can grow at a rate of eight inches a day. An ancient Ikebana vase made by Sen-no-Rikyu stands at just over thirteen inches in height.

Tableware and Travelling Sculpture

Modern tableware exhibits excessive specialization, creating a distinct tool for every minor culinary task, which contrasts with the radical simplicity of Japanese chopsticks. The cutlery industry produces countless specialized knives and tools for specific foods, prompting the question of whether such complexity is necessary. Japanese wooden chopsticks measure ten inches long. Market research reveals specialized knives for steak, fondue, lobster, oranges, cheese, lemon rinds, and even making slits in chestnuts.

Chairs designed for everyday use must satisfy an immense and contradictory variety of functional, social, and material demands. Market research shows that a chair must be simultaneously comfortable, luxurious, rustic, functional, narrow, broad, hard, soft, cheap, or impressively expensive, and built from single or diverse materials ranging from rare woods to metals. Architects and designers across the world continue designing thousands of different chairs as if all previous attempts were wrong.

5. Research Design and Kinetic Art

Research design explores the internal structures of nature and utilizes modern technology to create dynamic, open, and participatory works of art.

Studying the internal structures and developmental evolution of natural forms helps you understand the world better than merely copying their external appearance. You can take a spring iris flower and cut it clean across the middle with a razor-blade to observe how its parts are arranged before opening. A bush caught at maximum expansion resembles a hand-grenade explosion. The visual progression of organic growth mirrors the mechanics of an explosion or a nuclear chain reaction when viewed across time scales.

You can create concave-convex forms using simple materials:

• Cut a square of metal netting with a 4-5 mm mesh and turn cut-side wires back on themselves using pincers to prevent shredding.
• Mark points on the surface either by measurement or freely by trial and error.
• Bend corners of the net smoothly towards the marked points and tie them securely with fine wire.

The author began making these forms in 1948. Continuous structures use identical basic elements based on squares and right angles that can be linked in infinite variations. These structures were exhibited in 1961 at Galleria Danese in Milan, where different assemblers like Shuzo Takigouchi and Michel Seuphor created completely dissimilar objects from identical elements.

Exploring Natural Forms

Programmed art utilizes industrial materials and motors to introduce an effective dimension of time, depicting nature's dynamic mutability rather than static forms. The tetracone object features cones rotating at programmed speeds so that color combinations repeat every 1,080 seconds. You can explore optical effects by superimposing patterns:

• Take two screens with square dots printed on transparent paper.
• Place one sheet on top of the other so patterns superimpose.
• Shift the top sheet very slightly round to produce new symmetrical patterns.

The author and Marcello Piccardo made a 3-minute short film titled Moiré using this technique with music by Pietro Grossi. You can experiment with direct projections by following a simple setup:

• Take two sheets of polaroid and sandwich a piece of Cellophane folded over two or three times between them.
• Revolve one of the polaroids to observe the color spectrum.

These experiments began in 1954, and ninety compositions are now housed in the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Topology treats geometrical forms as flexible and material, studying how shapes transform when stretched, cut, or subjected to physical forces. You can explore this by making a Möbius strip:

• Take a paper strip 2 inches wide and 8-10 inches long and place ends together to form a ring.
• Open the ring, twist one end round 180 degrees, and place the ends together to form a Möbius strip.

Moiré, Light, and Topology

Useless machines were created to free geometric abstract painting from the static canvas and let it interact dynamically with real-life air currents. In 1933, the author designed and made his first useless machines. Friends kept these early objects in children's rooms because they were made of cheap cardboard and thread, while placing serious sculptures by Marino Marini in sitting-rooms.

Unlike Alexander Calder's plant-inspired mobiles, useless machines are strictly geometric and based on interlocking rotating elements. A useless machine was mass-produced in aluminium in 1952. These kinetic objects provide kinetic information and cultivate taste rather than producing material goods.

10 Key Ideas

1. A designer is an objective planner who develops the logical form of an object based on function, materials, and production techniques without relying on personal taste.
2. Styling operates on fads and theatrical sketches to create deliberate obsolescence based on the idea that an old style is out as soon as a new one is created.
3. Visual communication must evolve alongside society by using contemporary signs, symbols, and conditioned reflexes for instant legibility.
4. The Japanese flag pattern serves as an effective poster structure because its central circular form traps the eye and its white background isolates the message.
5. Good children's books should feature simple stories and clear whole figures that appeal to children's keen observation rather than adult vanity.
6. Traditional Japanese houses use natural materials, modular construction, and flexible spaces that adapt to different needs without fixed furniture.
7. Constant use alters the shape of objects, revealing the ideal ergonomic form dictated by function rather than aesthetic preconceptions.
8. Studying the internal structures and developmental evolution of natural forms helps you understand the world better than merely copying their external appearance.
9. Continuous structures use identical basic elements based on squares and right angles that can be linked in infinite variations.
10. Useless machines were created to free geometric abstract painting from the static canvas and let it interact dynamically with real-life air currents.