Design at its simplest is not usually associated with philosophical movements like Dada, but rather with craft movements, such as the Deutscher Werkbund, the Bauhaus, or with the Constructivist (Constructivism) art movements of Russia, the Netherlands and other countries.
It is as if design is, inescapably, part of a mode of production that is both craft-related and direct, quite removed from all ambiguous or chaotic artistic and creative activity. Dada began in Zurich in 1916 during the First World War and involved literature, fine arts, theater and music, and was influenced by antiwar and anarchist philosophies an aspect that was particularly important to Hugo Ball, the Club Voltaire’s protagonist from Munich.
Dada never propagated arbitrary disorder but questioned the existing concepts and dominant systems of order and government in a profound and radical manner. Having experienced the social and cultural poverty and the violent chaos of the First World War that resulted from the existing social and cultural bourgeois good order, Dada confronted it with new, radical forms of organization and logic.
The ideas, concept, and practice behind Dada had major effects on poetry, fine arts, and music, but also on architecture and, above all, on design.
The latter particularly applies to Dada’s development after 1918 in Berlin (George Grosz), Hannover (Kurt Schwitters), and Cologne (Max Ernst and Johannes Bargeld), and was assisted by the fact that postwar Germany, with its chaotic economy and the resumption and redefinition of politics, open debates, advertising, and propaganda greatly influenced day-to-day life. Moreover, the ordinary and the “everyday,” as opposed to highculture, itself gained major relevance in theory and art. Flyers and pamphlets also popped up everywhere, touting or criticizing political programs and parties; at the same time, trade and industry were exploiting advertising in order to rekindle consumerism. There was also a need, typical after the breakdown of any regime, to reorganize and redesign the forms of mass communication such as ordinances and bulletins.
This is where Dada came in and Raoul Hausmann, one of the most important protagonists and theoretical founders of the Berlin Dada movement and publisher of the magazine Der Dada, was able to pinpoint profound and thoughtful ways to communicate and deal with the public.
As a consequence, Hannah Hçch and Raoul Hausmann, and later John Heartfield among others, designed photomontages and collages as a contemporary medium to understand, visualize, and communicate the nature of a fragmented existence. Collage and other media were also developed by Dada to address the enormous escalation in speed and noise, the jumbled worlds of experience, and to design forms of work and publications appropriate to this incoherent and confusing world.
Dada published flyers and magazines with totally new layouts and typographical formations including overprinting; they experimented with phonetic writing, like graphically screaming characters and simultaneous writing (text that can be started or ended at any point) or simultaneous poems (collaborative performance poems in which two or more voices speak or sing simultaneously). They also organized actions not only to confuse people, but as a way to publicize and to digest all these new impressions, experiences, and philosophies. Dada regarded experience as the essential starting point of design, and the social dimension of experience was a fundamental aspect of this; hence the design practice was always directed at the general public and sought popular acceptance.
As one expression of a radical new order, Dada publications chose collage and photomontage as media and played with typographical symbols and scale.
Question and exclamation marks, slashes, dashes, and periods were systematically scaled up and pushed to the fore giving individual letters, as the smallest components of texts, a completely different presence. This set up some revolutionary principles for a new approach to graphic images that no longer followed traditional rules or conformed to a simple sequential compendium of design and thought (as frequently found in Constructivism). Dada (quasi-romantically) implemented these principles to make a radical attack on a linear sense of logic, and, in the process, exploded the encoded grammar of the relationship between subject and object.
Kurt Schwitters was particularly influential in this progressive prehistory of design. He lived mainly in the northern German city of Hannover, once worked as a technical draftsman, and called his form of Dada “Merz.” He painted, created collages, assemblages, and sculptures, wrote poetry, polemic, and critical and theoretical texts. He also suggested a way of entering a movie cinema for free (that is, backward through the exit, in other words, with negative energy), opened the Werbezentrale Merz (an advertising agency), and later founded the Ring Neue Werbegestalter (the Circle of New Advertising Designers) with members such as Vordemberge-Gildewart and Max Burchartz. Schwitters drew a strong line between his artistic (even poetic) work and his other design activities; however, his visual and action-based experiences (he gave action readings and wrote theater plays) were equally important in developing his general design practice.
He designed a new font (and gave detailed and precise explanations for this), as well as an ad for the ink and fountain pen company Pelikan, advertising slogans for the Hannover streetcar company, and from 1927 onward, he even designed stationery (including the logo) for the City of Hannover and its public authorities, such as the school system.
In addition, Schwitters worked with architect Otto Haesler on the Celler Volks-Mçbel (Celle is a small town near Hannover), creating affordable tables and chairs and a very concise and attractive advertising brochure. Kurt Schwitters also cooperated with Walter Gropius (the founder of the Bauhaus) and designed the plans and publications for the Dammerstock-Siedlung, an architectural project designed by Gropius that was built near the city of Karlsruhe. Moreover, Schwitters conceived new design forms for the theater stage and for spatial arrangements that adapted to human beings by continually changing in response to human movement and behavior.
The obvious basis for all of his design work was a constant questioning of the concept of order, which he would not accept as an abstract mechanism, but always viewed as use-oriented, even empirical, always fluctuating and concrete. Schwitter’s radical critique of the Bauhaus and the formulations from similar institutions or movements is symptomatic of his evercritical view of order (and is thus symptomatic of Dada’s reflection on and practice of design in general).
Since these architects and institutions, he once wrote, aspired to design harmonious spaces and objects, and that this, by definition, is inhumane, as then any person entering such a space or using one of these objects fundamentally and empirically destroys this harmony.