The Good Form. Digitization and indexing of outstanding photographs on product design 1950-1990

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The project is designed to index the historical archive of the German Design Council, which is highly relevant for design history, and to publish it online. These are significant photographs of German and international product design in the second half of the 20th century. The collection of photographs, which is characterized by a high degree of content, comprehensively shows the consumer and life-world of the 1950s to 1980s, focusing on post-war modernity, as a unique and uniquely preserved design archive for publication and teaching purposes. Photographs of exemplary industrial products were systematically collected, focusing on Germany but also considering international manufacturers. The archive was enriched with contextual information about the picture content as well as the utilization history of the photoprints. The spectrum of objects ranges from everyday items in the consumer goods sector, such as cutlery and crockery, to products from the working world, e.g. office machines, motorcars and products from the capital goods sector. Almost all important designs of authoritative designers and companies are documented in this collection, which influenced the product design in West Germany in the second half of the 20th century. A total of approx. 20,000 picture motifs from approx. 15,000 register folders of the historical photo archives are to be processed within the scope of the project. The publication of these recordings and their contextualization will improve the relevant information infrastructures in a sustainable way, giving new impulses to ongoing or planned design and art history research projects from a technical and scientific perspective. Making these image sources available online will in particular present extensive systematic analyzes on questions of the interaction between design and subject photography for the first time, such as the interactions between product design, aesthetics and the media staging of contemporary product design.