global drift

I feel pretty sure that Bert Lance did not invent the phrase, "If it ain't broke don't fix it." I think it is much older than that.

One naturally thinks of a saying in the same "family" of phrases:
"Let well enough alone." Researched (well -- clicked) and discovered that this phrase apparently dates back to the ancient Greeks.

While seeking that info -- branched off to a book called
Never Leave Well Enough Alone,
(The Johns Hopkins Press)
autobiography of an industrial designer named Raymond Loewy, who moved to America from France.

[excerpts from the autobiography's Introduction, written by Glenn Porter]-------------
Industrial design extended well beyond merchandising, providing a unique link between marketing and production. It took into account not only appearance but also efficiency of manufacturing, quality and durability, new materials, ease and safety of use, and other factors. Later its concerns extended to the environmental impact of designs and how to make products usable by the disabled. When practiced well, industrial design made genuine contributions to a better life for consumers.

Loewy’s own designs sought those broader goals, and they combined engineering and artistic sensibilities. All his life he advocated simplicity of design, which he defined as reduction to essentials, the engineer’s commitment to minimizing the use of materials and combining parts.

A good designer, in Loewy’s view, should also smooth surfaces by removing or concealing protuberances, hinges, and other unsightly mechanical items such as motors, rods, wires, and the like. This would normally result in a simple, functional, modern solution that was beautiful as well as practical, and often less expensive to manufacture.

Although he was always identified with streamlining (the use of smoothed shapes that reduced air or water resistance), Loewy was never enthusiastic about that term, preferring instead to speak of simplicity. He praised light, airy, elegant, “thoroughbred” creations such as the bridges of Swiss engineer Robert Maillart. The worst design sin as he saw it was fussy, busy surface decorations, the principal shortcoming in the creations of the premodern era. If a form still looked disorganized or unfinished after simplification, he advocated encasing it in a shell for an appealing appearance.

...Loewy was well aware of the political punch in the American Dream. Speaking at the Harvard Business School in 1950, he noted that “The whole world admires and envies American products, American appearance, American quality.” The nation “should, and I believe will, take advantage of this receptive attitude,” he forecast. He lamented the fact that “no one has yet been able to make [democracy’s] high spiritual values of freedom, liberty and self-respect a ‘packaged’ item to be sold to the rest of the world.”

But consumer capitalism and American products offered “substitute solutions.” “The citizens of Lower Slobovia may not give a hoot for freedom of speech,” he asserted, “but how they fall for a gleaming Frigidaire, a streamlined bus or a coffee percolator.” Here was the key to victory in the Cold War, and to the extension of a democracy of consumption at home.

Never Leave Well Enough Alone concludes by placing industrial design in this broad economic and political context….
Loewy portrays their profession’s role in the nation’s consumer economy. Industrial design had the “social responsibility” of contributing to the “lowering of the cost of manufactured goods” and to economic growth. This would both “speed up employment and bring more essential products to the underprivileged classes.” “This,” Loewy concludes, “is democracy in action.”

Although it is difficult to gauge the true economic contribution of industrial design, there is no doubt that Raymond Loewy and his profession played a significant role in furthering the consumer culture of the twentieth century. First Americans and then many of the world’s peoples embraced the goals of endless growth and constant novelty in the material civilization of the modern era.

As much as anyone, Raymond Loewy symbolized the vast social changes implicit in the triumph of consumer capitalism. This autobiography gives a rare, fascinating, inside look at one of the major sources of the cultural transformation that produced the global drift toward the American Dream.

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