The Industrial Design Reader by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Allworth
Published: 2001-09-30T16:00:00+00:00

1932

Earnest Elmo Calkins, “What Consumer

Engineering Really Is”

Earnest Elmo Calkins (1868–1964), head of the New York advertising firm Calkins and Holden, was probably the single most prominent American advertiser of the 1920s and 1930s. He and his partner Ralph Holden billed their firm as a “modern” ad agency, emphasizing the importance of good design in print advertisements, packaging, and promotional materials. Calkins wrote extensively about advertising and product design, and promoted “artificial obsolescence” as an answer both to the economic woes of the Great Depression and to the question of how to increase Americans’ standard of living (artificial obsolescence, of course, was a strategy that came under fire in subsequent years for being wasteful and environmentally irresponsible). In these excerpts from the introduction to Consumer Engineering , a book written by industrial designers Roy Sheldon and Egmont Arens, Calkins argues in favor of this “new business science,” whose task was to ensure that Americans consumed as many products as the factories could make.

Excerpted from Earnest Elmo Calkins, “What Consumer Engineering Really Is,” the introduction to Consumer Engineering, by Roy Sheldon and Egmont Arens (Copyright ©1932 by Harper and Brothers; copyright © renewed 1952 by Roy Sheldon and Egmont Arens): 1, 4–8, 13–14. Reprinted by permission of Harper-Collins Publishers, Inc.

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