Between Chairs: Design Pedagogies in Transcultural Dialogue

by Regina Bittner (Contributor), Marleen Grasse (Contributor), Gwendolyn Kulick (Contributor)

In 1965, Hans Gugelot (1920–65), professor of design at the Ulm School of Design, and the students at the National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad collaboratively designed a group of chairs and a table―the India Lounge. The postgraduate research program the Bauhaus Lab has taken up the India Lounge (also known as the 24/42 Chairs) as the starting point for a study of transcultural design in the 1960s. As the researchers discovered, the original chair itself (now lost) was the product of several complex design issues. As they worked on their designs, the students and faculty negotiated questions of the relationship between craft and design, local and universal, traditional methods and modern needs, and international debates about what constitutes a socially responsible designer.

135 pages, Paperback

Published November 27, 2018