From Savage Minds to Savage Machines: Racial Science and Twentieth-Century Design by Ginger Nolan (review)

In this book, Ginger Nolan endeavors to trace the influence of primitivism on design, from nineteenth-century education in industrial arts to the design of technologies for children in the Global South. She argues that understanding primitivism's influence is central (1) to reflect critically on design's goal to support or drive social integration at the expense of political dissensus and organized social movements; and (2) to reconsider the assumptions behind "good" design—that is, design that can be used intuitively due to matching innate human sensory and cognitive proclivities.

Her book responds to the architecture and fine arts scholarship on primitivism (Nolan points to Jo Odgers et al., Primitive, 2006, and Jack Flam and Miriam Deutch (eds.), Primitivism and Twentieth-Century Art, 2003). Nolan argues it tends to overlook primitivism's enduring impact in the second half of the twentieth century as well as how it shaped other design disciplines. She demonstrates how designers, building on structuralist social sciences, set up some groups as examples of an unreflective and intuitive relationship to the environment in order to derive design principles matching innate human characteristics. Although designers framed their work as a way to smooth the impact of modernization on such "savage" minds, they never fundamentally questioned economic inequalities and in fact benefited economically from the hierarchy between them and the design recipients. Nolan argues that designers therefore impaired the recipients' ability to articulate a different vision for the world, rooted in verbal rather than visual language. Each chapter weaves together evidence of the influence of anthropology on design, artifacts produced by the designers, and documents outlining their vision and discusses the benefits designers derived from primitivism.

The first part of the book focuses on industrial design. It opens with Charles Leland's vision of industrial crafts education for the underprivileged. He saw traditional patterns as nature mirrored in human cognition, with two implications: crafts teaching would reconcile body and mind in manual work, and, if core natural patterns were identified, designs could be automatically produced. Turning to the Bauhaus, Nolan articulates how modernist designers legitimated their work as an evolution from traditional guildsmen by identifying natural aesthetic laws. This also enabled them to claim copyright: whereas natural phenomena could not be patented, their translation into designs could.

The next two parts focus on architecture and urban design after World War II, when designers aimed to integrate marginalized groups. For architecture, Nolan builds on two cases, the Team Ten collective and Yona Friedman. She argues that they represent two influential understandings of vernacular architecture in the Global South and their integration into mass housing: one seeking to identify and translate core principles, the other envisioning structures for inhabitants to build on. Here again, designers perceived the recipients of their work as distinctively spontaneous and at the same time as an inspiration for systematic design principles.

For urban design, Nolan turns to the Aspen Institute in Washington, D.C. She shows the reception among designers of ethnographic scholarship on how the environment shapes thought prior to language. Environmental design can be framed as a means to induce large-scale changes in behavior, especially in the context of audiovisual immersive environments, but simultaneously led designers to speculate on how human subjects might transcend their environment. Nolan concludes with designers' views on the necessary changes to education that would leverage technologies to allow children to design environments.

Education is the focus of the fourth part, looking at the Architecture Machine Group at MIT and the Centre mondial informatique et ressource humaine, which supported the development of visual interaction to bypass written literacy. Technologists further argued that computers' flexibility enabled tailoring learning to children and using gamified environments to capture these new savage minds. Nolan comments that this restricts participation to preset design parameters, which are less flexible than writing, while making education a prime market for Global North computer designers.

Nolan concludes with a call for...