ABSTRACT
This chapter examines how industrial designers in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) understood a product's aesthetic function and its communicative function and what implications these positions had for socialist design practice. Despite the advancement within GDR design discourse of a product's practical utilitarian and operational qualities as important facets of its aesthetic quality, its visual appearance continued to be recognized as a central determinant too. A product's aesthetic quality was therefore closely connected to its practical functionality and usability. Decorative patterns applied by GDR industrial designers tended to consist of simple abstract geometric patterns. These were deemed to have a more timeless and versatile appeal and were more economical to produce than elaborate naturalistic motifs. Industrial designers were to harness the semiotic potential of products primarily to make them more intelligible to their users. GDR functionalism could therefore be argued to constitute an 'expansion' of classical functionalism that retained its original social intentions.
