ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that German Democratic Republic (GDR) designers thought about and experimented with system design extensively over the years, which gave rise to the ideas and developments. It discusses theoretical ideas and the associated designed product systems to demonstrate a profound and sustained engagement by GDR designers in system design. Unistar also demonstrates, even more so than Heliradio, that modular product systems can demand a considerable degree of active participation from their end users, who may be required to store, prepare, disassemble, rearrange or modify the modules of such systems. The person who engaged perhaps most persistently and influentially with this idea of consumption as a creative process was the furniture designer Rudolf Horn. A further notable idea to emerge in this context was a more holistic approach to design on the basis of the unique opportunities presented by the supposedly cooperative nature of relationships between manufacturers in socialist economies.
