Principios de la Gestión de la Calidad

Aside from apprentices and journeymen who worked on the shop floor in factories doing the ‘making’ of products, and who attended art schools on a part time basis in the evenings, there were two other groups of students attending art schools, and it is these two groups which are the focus of Advanced Art Education in London (the Hambleden report) and D&DI reports; neither of these two reports deal with apprentices and

journeymen. First was the small number of full-time students training to be designers, a group anticipated to grow in number and which required a comprehensive training at art school, and referred to as ‘art students’ in the D&DI report. Second were those who were already working in a design-room in a factory in some capacity and who may have the ability to go on and become fully-fledged designers. These were students who tended to have been recruited from school at age 14 and trained ‘in house’, rather than

509Council for Art and Industry Design and the Designer in Industry (London, 1937) p. 21.

having completed a full-time design course at an art school and then entering the design-room fully qualified: they were referred to as ‘industrial students’ in the D&DI report. These students often attended art schools part-time in the evenings and were recognised by the Hambleden and D&DI reports as requiring a different sort of training to students attending art school full-time.⁵¹⁰

4.8.1 Industrial students

There were almost 20,000 industrial students attending part-time classes at art school during the 1930s, usually in the evenings, taking classes related to their daytime employment, and the D&DI report states that ‘Arrangements for the part-time training in the art schools of industrial employees are most important…’⁵¹¹ The report went on to comment that the system of training design room staff ‘in house’ could at best be described as ‘restricted in outlook and incomplete’, and could also be detrimental to the design of products, as the in-house training ‘represents a process of inbreeding…..the dangers involved are great’.⁵¹² The concern was that one designer would teach another and so ways of working and designing would be replicated, leading to rather stale and uninspired designs with no fresh input or ideas coming in.⁵¹³ There was also the concern that the separation of designing and manufacturing as brought about by the introduction of machinery could also be detrimental to design:

A further danger arises, at any rate in some cases, from the almost complete separation of the design room from the actual manufacturing process. We have received evidence that drawings are sometimes sent our from the design room which have been prepared without any regard to the methods of manufacture.

This is, for instance, sometimes the case with furniture design. From a paper sketch, which is an illustration rather than a design, the practical designing is done by the works foreman whose abilities for this purpose are possibly confined to manual skill and a sound knowledge of the forms of construction.

Cases were brought to our notice where the finished product is never seen by the design room staff, who, therefore, have no opportunity of supervising the

510Although the Hambleden report was concerned with art education in London, recommendations it made regarding the training of designers were also echoed in Design and the Designer in Industry, and are therefore pertinent to the thesis as a whole.

511Council for Art and Industry Design and the Designer in Industry (London, 1937) p 32.

512Ibid., pp. & 23.

513Ibid., p. 23.

execution of the design and do not even gain experience by learning how it had worked out in actual making.⁵¹⁴

The Design and the Designer in Industry report did note that there were some

companies that trained their staff well, but went on to state that ‘we are satisfied that, in modern conditions, a training and an experience which are limited to the design room and the factory will not by themselves prove sufficient to secure the fullest development of the capacities of the staff, or to keep alive such inventive abilities as they may

possess’.⁵¹⁵ In other words, additional training at an art school was required. In order to provide additional training to industrial students, part time attendance at art school was desirable to the authors of the D&DI report, but they did not think it was ‘wise or reasonable that industry should continue to rely on supplementary training for its employees which is dependent on their own spare-time efforts’.⁵¹⁶ It was noted that students who attended art school in the evenings were generally tired after a day at work and may not get the most out of the art school classes.⁵¹⁷ It was also observed that ‘in the industries of….cabinet making…there is a growing practice of releasing employees during working hours for courses of technical and other instruction relating to their occupations’.⁵¹⁸ The D&DI report thought this was a far better way of providing training to employees and went on to recommend that manufacturers should consider adopting the scheme of releasing their employees during the day to attend art school; as the report noted, ‘practically nothing comparable to this is to be found in the case of the design room staffs…’.⁵¹⁹ It was for the art schools to provide ‘appropriate courses which would be attended by member of the design room staffs…..and they must be based on a clear demarcation between the training required in the school or college and that given in the factory’.⁵²⁰

The D&DI report noted that it was the role of the art school to develop the artistic capacities of the industrial students, ‘to lead them to a wider appreciation of art in

514Ibid., p. 23.

515Ibid., p. 23.

516Ibid., p. 33.

517Ibid., p. 33.

518Ibid., p. 33.

519Ibid., p. 33.

520Ibid., p. 33.

relation to design, and to afford them the outlets for self expression which may be unobtainable during their daily work’.⁵²¹ A note of caution was sounded though, that this art school education should be directly related to a student’s work in the factory, and the authors of the D&DI report thought that ‘close and continuous liaison should be maintained between the factory and the school and that both sides should realise that they are engaged in a joint enterprise with a common aim’.⁵²² During the 1849 Select Committee one witness, Charles Richardson, RIBA member and master of architecture and perspective at the School of Design, had been aware of this, noting that if the work of art schools was more practical and masters were allowed to instruct their pupils in design, ‘artisans would come to the school in shoals…’.⁵²³ It seems that if students could see that the education they were receiving in art school was relevant to their occupation they would be more likely to attend art school. There may well have been a motivation in terms of increased pay or status: if a student attended art school and subsequently produced better work he or she might well gain a pay rise or promotion.

4.8.2 Art students

Art students were defined as those who would enter industry as in the ‘higher ranges’

and were talked about in terms of ‘qualified staff designers’, ‘artist-craftsmen’ or ‘free-lance designers’, and the D&DI report recognised that these full-time students required different training from that of their part-time counterparts.⁵²⁴ Regarding full-time students, the issue ‘therefore, that has to be solved is how best to provide for the training of a limited number of selected students, so that they may become a body of creative designers for industry…’.⁵²⁵ D&DI felt that in the case of full-time students, it was for the art school ‘to produce a designer who, before long, will be able to take his place in industry and to grasp the problems presented by design under the conditions of

521Ibid., p. 34.

522Ibid., p. 34.

523Report from the Select Committee on the School of Design: together with the Proceedings of the Committee, Minutes of Evidence, Appendix and Index (1849) HC 576, 1491.

524Council for Art and Industry Design and the Designer in Industry (London, 1937) p. 35.

525Ibid., p. 36.

production’.⁵²⁶ The intention was, then, that art schools should provide as complete a training as possible for full time students, in contrast to the supplementary training given to apprentices and those already in employment. The Council for Art and Industry felt that art schools should give students some understanding of technical knowledge and the technical requirements of industry, but, at the same time ‘the art school cannot and must not be expected to turn out finished designers who are capable immediately of taking their full place in industry’.⁵²⁷ It was though, for the ‘employer, not the art school to ensure they have all the experience of methods or processes desirable to

manufacturing’.⁵²⁸ This comment seems to be reasonable, given that each firm would have its own unique way of working and may employ slightly different processes from another firm producing the same product.

As Cyril Kisby commented, the present system of education for full-time students was that they attended art college for four or five years after going to secondary school, and sat the Board of Education examinations.⁵²⁹ On the results of these, students could either then enter industry, or a scholarship could be awarded which allowed the student to then attend the RCA for an additional three or four years.⁵³⁰ Kisby stated that ‘During all these years of study, they have had little or no contact with industry, although some form of craftwork will have been studied in order to satisfy the requirements of the examiners’.⁵³¹ Design and the Designer in Industry also recognised that however good the art school training was, and whatever the extent to which it related to industry, actual industrial experience was still necessary and it was felt that once art school students were employed in industry they would need up to a year to find their feet and get to know the processes of their particular firm.⁵³² Some industrialists saw this year of

‘settling in’ in rather a different light, complaining that they had to spend time ‘re-training’ the art school student, but as Design and the Designer in Industry suggested,

526Ibid., p. 35.

527Ibid., p. 35.

528Ibid., p. 34.

529C. Kisby ‘The Future Designer – from Elementary School to College’ Royal Society of Arts Journal 86:4457 (1938: April 22) pp. 552-566.

530Ibid., pp. 552-566.

531Ibid., pp. 552-566.

532Council for Art and Industry Design and the Designer in Industry (London, 1937) p. 35.

what this actually meant was that students had to become accustomed to factory conditions before what they had learnt at art school could be applied in the factory setting.⁵³³

Walter Gropius, one of the contributors to the Hambleden report, and the founder of the Bauhaus, had confirmed that attempting to replicate factory conditions within the art school was not practical but that some ‘basic multi-purpose machines’ would be useful.⁵³⁴ Gropius considered that the best place to study large-scale processes and machinery was the factory itself, which led to the Hambleden committee’s

recommendation that students should ‘if possible, spend some time in a factory studying actual conditions and processes of large scale production’ during their courses, as well as having the opportunity to ‘bed down’ in industry once they had graduated.⁵³⁵ Harold Sanderson, more than likely the Harold Sanderson from the wallpaper company

Sanderson and Co, echoed the view of Gropius, and commented to the Royal Society of Arts in 1937 that allowing students into the factory to see what was being done and how processes worked;

is what can and should be done for a student in any up-to-date manufacturing concern’. There is no way to-day you can so well educate your students for entry into industry as by bringing them into the very centre of the factory and letting them work with artists and craftsmen, and absorb the processes for

themselves.⁵³⁶