ABSTRACT
This chapter describes how photography could offer insights for design, in keeping with Moholy-Nagy's conceptual and perceptual analysis of photography, while also reframing design to strengthen its visual accessibility and embodied operation. In particular, one of the photographs of Breuer's interior design and furniture for the woman's bedroom forms a connection with Moholy-Nagy's work and hints at the perceptual and photographic focus of the design process. The photographs of the woman's room nevertheless possess a complicating twist, because the duplications and reflected resemblances suggest an engagement with the New Woman and her self-formation. The furniture's geometric shapes also take on symbolic meanings that imply cross-gendering. Breuer's geometrical "mimicry" and modulation of furniture parts and public bodily communication give a phenomenological indication of intersecting aspects of the more comprehensive normalizing economies of perception and conduct in technological society.
