Eva Kasser

This dissertation compares design theory for the field of product design taught in the former Federal Republic of Germany to that taught in the German Democratic Republic, with a special focus on the period before Germany’s reunification. Despite the differences between the ideological, political economic, and social conditions of West Germany and socialist East Germany, they share some common ground. Similar approaches to design theory were pursued at the West German University of Art and Design Offenbach, on the one hand, and the School of Industrial Design Burg Giebichenstein Halle, on the other. This concordance in theoretical approaches can be seen as a result of the debate on functionalism, which was conducted in the West German magazine form in the late 1960s. Since it related to both industrial mass-production and the development of an affluent society, the debate had a great impact on design practitioners and theorists in both Republics. Jochen Gros’ Product Semantics can be seen as an extended functionalism in which the object is no longer isolated but viewed in an object-user relationship, based on the objects’ semiotic and semantic meaning functions. Horst Oehlke's approach, on the other hand, places this object-user relationship in a strong connection to its social-systemic context according to socialist ideologies.