institutions

In the phase of reconstruction and modernization that followed the disasters of the Second World War, the countries of what would become the Eastern bloc and Yugoslavia or the ‘Second World’ devoted significant attention to the industrial production of consumer goods. This was accompanied by the establishment of various institutions—mostly public, rarely private, but always the result of the enthusiasm of committed individuals—to deal with the problems of industrial design, from professionalizing the field to introducing new design developments to manufacturers and consumers. To this end, they organized exhibitions and seminars, published magazines and specialist literature, and awarded prizes for outstanding designs. Design was often seen as encompassing everything from consumer goods to the shaping of buildings and the surrounding environment.
The 1960s saw the entry of professional organizations from Eastern Europe into ICSID (the International Council of Societies of Design), which was created in 1957 as a professional organization dedicated to the global networking of the new industrial design field. Over the next decade, a number of representatives from Eastern Europe took up important positions at ICSID.
The institutionalization of design was driven by the economic reforms brought on by the renewal of socialism that swept across the Eastern bloc during the early 1960s, including in Yugoslavia, which had broken with the Soviet Union in 1948 and had already begun introducing ‘self-managed socialism’ in the early 1950s. In the course of this economic restructuring, state enterprises became the new basic economic units within a more decentralized planning system.