In 1970, the socialist Salvador Allende became president of Chile. A broad alliance called Unidad Popular, composed of most of the Chilean left and center-left, backed his candidacy. Their plan was ambitious: to establish a truly democratic, socialist society in a country plagued with deep inequality of all kinds. The project relied in no small part on helping its participants, all Chilean citizens, to envision a different kind of life and country for themselves. In How to Design a Revolution: The Chilean Road to Design (Lars Müller Publishers, 2024), editors Hugo Palmarola, Eden Medina, and Pedro Ignacio Alonso analyze the everyday items designed and mass-produced in this new era that promised prosperity, as well as the iconography used by Unidad Popular to foment the idea of a modern, more egalitarian Chilean society. While such a society did not come to be—Allende was deposed by a US-backed military coup in 1973—the attempt at it yielded lasting insights, both about design and about government.
POLINA GODZ:
Let’s start with the book’s subtitle, a play on the Chilean road to socialism, which usually implies a high level of democracy within socialism. When you say “democratic design,” what do you mean?
EDEN MEDINA:
One of the things that Hugo, Pedro, and I have consistently said is that we are not using design as a way to illustrate the Unidad Popular period—we are looking to design because it shows what the period was. “How to design a revolution” is a provocative question that remains open and still has relevance today. We wanted to take a historical perspective to that question and use it as an opportunity to study what people did. How were small groups of Chileans working in government offices, in factories, in workshops, looking to design as a tool among many to try to bring about peaceful socialist change?
HUGO PALMAROLA:
The Chilean case is rather important because it’s a turning point in two ways. It’s the first time in the world that people tried to bring about a socialist and Marxist revolution through democracy. And then, with the coup, it’s the first time that such a project is destroyed and replaced by neoliberal policies. With Chile experiencing those two situations in a span of three years, it’s a rather fundamental case study to understand how these dynamics played out.
The subtitle of the book implies that we are discussing a specific road that is different from other roads; it’s a specifically Chilean road to socialism. Taking that sentence as a starting point, we end up with the Chilean road to design. The history of Chilean design in this period is one of the most significant cases of design in Latin America and the world, especially if we consider it within the context of the Cold War. It was a project that dared to challenge the poles of American capitalism and of Soviet socialism to create an unprecedented alternative.
PG: I wanted to go back to that framing of “how to,” which is a specific genre that implies instruction. To me, that seems like an optimistic framing, which seems important in light of the way right-wing media was portraying socialism in Chile during that time, promoting a climate of fear. This optimistic, future-facing framing sits in opposition to that and in contrast to how historical books are typically framed. Considering all of that, especially things like the programs on child development and things that have lasted even past the end of the Unidad Popular government, do you think that some of the goals materialized?
PEDRO ALONSO:
You’re right—the tone is optimistic. Our book is about an optimistic project about the future and the building of a new society for all Chileans. And so you have the music and the colorful posters [see centerfold] and the volunteer work. It was a moment where Chilean people were really dreaming about a future that would be different. At the same time, the questions are open-ended. The book is divided into twelve sections, and each asks one question. Our contention there is that the questions are not something of the past. All the questions are quite current. If you think about it, the questions of how we can manage the economy; how we can nurture childhood; how we can call for collective action; how we can reduce technological dependency; how we can get people to read, how we can encourage music—they are all very current concerns.
EM: The word how has been central, but we are not giving readers a manual of how to do something. We want to show readers how people at this particular point in time were grappling with what they perceived to be the most pressing challenges of their day and that they were trying to address these challenges from multiple directions. The book shows that people had an idea of what they wanted to achieve, but they didn’t necessarily know how to get there. That’s where design is useful: You see people drawing a sketch, and then they draw another and another in the process of trying to figure something out.
PG: The book opens up the definition of what it means to be a designer to include those on the shop floors, the engineers, and as you were saying, just regular people who were grappling with how to accomplish something, which almost makes them designers. The term design became widely used in the late sixties and seventies, and in Chile it took its own form. When people started to think of themselves as designers there, it was very political.
I find that today there’s a tendency to narrow the definition of design to create isolated professions, whether it’s “industrial designer” or “graphic designer” or “interface designer.” So I found it really interesting that you present design almost as an antidote to technocratic politics, where design serves to present complex information really simply, and that helps the general public as well as elected officials to understand the complex factors that form their opinions and that could guide their decisions. Could we talk about the definition of designer—what that meant for you while doing this research and what it meant in Chile specifically?
HP: At the time, the designers at the state technological institute, called INTEC, were talking explicitly about a multidisciplinary approach to policy. That was integral to the project, and they were working toward that both theoretically and in practical terms. They knew that design should be integral to thoughts on engineering or architecture or economy, and to the building blocks of running the Chilean state. That doesn’t happen out of the blue. Most designers were motivated and encouraged by public policies. They were responding to something that was wider than themselves in very interesting and creative ways, and that’s something that’s only possible within democracy. Without the democratic context, you wouldn’t have that freedom to design in such an avant-garde way.
EM: Design was emerging in a political context that viewed technology, production, and consumption in ways that were different than one might think. For example, INTEC published a series of journals on the different projects that they were developing that described technology as political, in the sense that it stems from certain relationships, whether geopolitical or on the factory floor, and can help make certain national goals possible. Today we think about technology being political as a revelation, but this was a central part of how people in Chile in the early 1970s were thinking about technology and design.
During the Unidad Popular period, one of the major goals was to increase the participation of workers in factory management. This question of how to involve workers in factory management also arose in the design of projects like Cybersyn, the large cybernetic project the government created to manage the national economy. Members of the Cybersyn project team also thought about worker participation and theorized that they could involve workers in modeling factory production processes. The workers would thus help design the models that would regulate their factory. The workers involved in building the operations room also collaborated with INTEC designers to figure out how to make the room’s chairs swivel properly, which was hard since they couldn’t access the right component parts. In both cases we see workers contributing to design processes.
We also see an independent trajectory of participatory design emerging in Chile that grows out of this very specific political context of democratic socialism. The commitment to democracy and to socialist change affected what designers could do, what they actually did, what they could produce, and the relationships that were involved in creating new objects and images. It’s hard to overstate the importance of the political context in making this possible.
PG: It sounds like the broadening of the term designer is made possible by democracy and by the very existence of the govern- ment policies and projects that called on designers and regular people to participate, to design, and to voice their opinions.
PA: It is a coming together of two things that do not necessarily come together: the democracy that allows people to be free to create and the creation of a set of collective goals. Within many other structures you might be or feel free to create, but you don’t have collective goals; you’re not working toward an overall project for the nation. Or you might have a collective goal, like in the Soviet Union, but not democracy. That’s why the Chilean way is so particular.
PG: Mass production sometimes gets a bad reputation, but it was very important in Chile because the scale of the project was the scale of the nation. It was really important to create products that were designed with the idea of mass consumption in mind. How does the Chilean example help us think about ideas of consumption and mass production, which are typically associated with capitalism?
EM: There’s a chapter in the book that looks at consumption. The author, Francisca Espinosa, makes the point that typically we think of consumption and mass production as associated with capitalism, but here we see it playing out in a socialist context. That might seem contradictory at first, but there were very clear reasons for why that was taking place. In the context of Unidad Popular, the Allende government wanted to raise the standard of living for members of the poor and working classes. As part of that strategy, they sought to increase access to consumer goods: things like bed linens, record players, televisions, and automobiles. It implemented programs that gave members of poor and working classes more money to spend while also creating new low-cost models that were designed for popular consumption.
But what happens when you have greater employment, people are making more money, and goods are becoming more accessible to more people? You could be in a situation where demand outstrips supply, causing inflation. The government therefore decided that raising production was essential, as it would allow supply to keep up with demand. They called it the “battle of production,” and Chile wanted to win. Unfortunately, shortages of spare parts and components, brought about in part by US intervention in Chile, made it hard for the government to maintain production levels. But the point is that consumption was central to the government’s economic plan for socialist change.
PA: We are concerned with designs made for a lot of people and designed by collectives. That is quite different from the conventional canon of design history, which is typically concerned with the heroes of design who made unique objects. We’re talking about supplying people with a large number of goods for their well-being. Within the Chilean context, the plan was to make only a few models that would last longer. That is totally the opposite of what is going on today, especially within capitalist models, where the plan is always to make a lot of several different models that are short-lived and frequently replaced.
PG: I think it’s important to assess the goals of a design, instead of just its formal qualities. I think about “naked products,” the idea that we should step away from formalism and view the function of the objects as the primary consideration. There are examples of that in the book: milk spoons, for one, designed as part of childhood development programs. On the other hand, there are certain projects that did create a certain formal visual language. Cybersyn comes to mind. I also noticed that quite a few designs reinforced Chilean national identity graphically by using the colors of the Chilean flag; even the TV sets had a little Chilean seal on them. Could you talk about the dichotomy of naked products versus more designed products that had a certain look or aesthetic?
HP: With the idea of “naked objects,” the designer Tomás Maldonado was not just criticizing form but trying to achieve an equilibrium between the political forces and the technological capabilities that were working to make a product. What happened in Chile is that, perhaps for the first time, the political aims matched the technological capabilities that made it possible to realize the ideals coming from Maldonado during his tenure at the Ulm School of Design.
PG: It sounds like the Chilean context made it possible for designs to exist beyond mere theory. There was ability to make things possible. It seems that one of the reasons that some of the Ulm School designers were drawn to Chile was that, while they could have stayed in Germany and continued to create these theoretical projects, in Chile there was a way for them to make them reality. Often in left politics, we talk about art and design as ways to imagine the futures that might be possible. But in Chile, art and design were made tangible.
PA: There’s this idea that, for example, Cybersyn was utopian or technoutopian. But the thing is that it was built, it existed, and it was about to be implemented. It was even used prior to the 1973 coup. What would’ve happened with it? Of course, it’s a matter of speculation, but the certain thing is that we don’t know, because it was destroyed by the coup. It didn’t fail on its own. It was not a utopia; it was a topos, meaning it actually existed. The objects in the book don’t merely represent the period; they present it. They’re not things that could have happened; they did happen.
PG: I noticed that the photography throughout the book usually shows workers and their creative ways of fighting right-wing opposition to the government programs. Even in the sections that show right-wing backlash, you demonstrate how working people were coming up with visual manifestations that resisted it. Do you think creativity is tied to those ideas of democracy and socialism? Creativity implies creation as opposed to appropriation and destruction, which are a function of reactionary politics. How do you view creativity and revolutionary creativity within the Chilean context, and what can that period tell us about the idea of creativity?
EM: The book communicates the richness of the creativity that defined the period and flourished in so many different places across Chile. Not only artistic creativity, or creativity in the service of social mobilization, but also creativity in problem solving. For example, How do I keep my factory running when I don’t have enough spare parts to fix the machinery in the way I typically would? Or, I need to figure out a way for the government to communicate with the factory floor; how can I build a new communications channel?
This creativity was not unique to the design community. It could also be found in the protest signs made by shantytown women. It includes the graphic art created by the State Technical University that pushed back against the growing influence of fascism. There are just some examples of the kinds of creativity that we see during this period.
None of these objects or images existed in isolation. They all existed in a context and in conversation with one another. Seeing that context and conversation in a concentrated way is powerful, perhaps even moving. Because we know that most of this creativity was cut short by the dictatorship that followed.
PA: We might also suggest that within the democratic context, there was an open call for everyone to participate. It really was about calling the whole of the country to participate in these transformations. Because it was in this context of democracy, we might think that it was a process of acceleration or an increase in the possibility for imagining futures. That’s why creativity and innovation came forward, I think, in such a fantastic way.
EM: Having seen how people react to the history of Project Cybersyn, especially among tech communities, I think that it also shows people how tech or design could be otherwise. What would happen if we foregrounded human values in the creation of our systems? What would happen if we put a social aim first and then designed a system to help us reach that goal, instead of thinking about what will sell? What would happen if we took this other kind of stance?
PG: It seems like it was important that under Allende, there was this call for participation, but there were also means for that participation, whether through education programs or even increasing quality of life, which gave people more time to participate. That seems to be kind of an important dynamic, too, which led to this sort of popular creativity at the time.
HP: Yes. The cover synthesizes this idea of a revolution conveyed through design. It’s not a revolution being led by some strong man—it’s led by the collective.