Krippendorff’s Cup

Abstract

The Hochschule für Gestaltung (School of Design) in Ulm/Germany (1955–1968) was a design lab which the design theorist Andrea Branzi once described very aptly as The Monks on the Hill.43 Following the years of the Nazi regime which had made excessive use of the power of images, there was the desire to exorcize them. The monks of Kuhberg did not just want to deal with the infernal taste-oriented goods of a reemerging consumer culture and renounced them. Semiotics — design as rational sign — was the new religion that rallied its followers for a struggle against irrationality and symbolism. In the twelve years the university was active there were 640 students, of which only 215 attained the high distinction of a diploma.44 Over the course of time — and this is something other religions have experienced — the successors reversed the original ideas; beliefs changed, while the name remained the same, the myth lived on. Once they sought to give industrial objects a new form based only on rational considerations. Today, by contrast, the symbolic, the irrational have reappeared thanks to the reality of consumer culture. There is one who has retained the monk status of the Ulm school — the design theorist Klaus Krippendorff. He is still committed to the old method, with today’s results encompassing an expanded view of rationality. All of a sudden metaphors are again able to give form to a phone booth. It certainly would have been sensational if, in those days on the Kuhberg mountain, a student has suggested designing a phone booth in the form of a three-dimensional phone receiver in which you pick up the receiver from the receiver.