After the Second World War, institutions dedicated to applied art, artistic craft, and the improvement of consumer-goods production were established or reorganized across socialist Europe. Although they addressed similar problems – including the relationship between art, design, production, prototype development, and the aesthetic quality of everyday objects – their institutional trajectories, working methods, and priorities differed considerably.

In my talk, I explore these divergent institutional pathways by taking the Soviet system of institutions concerned with the supervision and development of applied art – from artistic crafts to the later growing concern with industrial design – as a point of departure and placing it within a broader comparative perspective. I briefly consider related institutions established in other socialist countries after 1945 before focusing on the Institut für industrielle Gestaltung/Institut für angewandte Kunst in the German Democratic Republic. Its history demonstrates, on the one hand, how such institutions had to respond to changing political priorities and official cultural doctrines and, on the other, how their actual functions were shaped by the practical conditions of production and industry.

The talk investigates how a comparative analysis of these institutions can help us better understand the different ways in which socialist states approached material culture and organized the fields of craft, applied art, and design. Rather than treating these as stable categories to which particular institutions were simply assigned, I ask how institutional structures contributed to defining, shifting, and separating these fields.