Rethinking the Environment. An Introduction to Matko Meštrović's 'Dizajn i okolina' ['Design and Environment'] from 1980

摘要

The article 'Dizajn i okolina' was first published in Croatian in 1980 as a chapter in the book Teorija dizajna i problemi okoline [Design Theory and Environmental Problems] by Matko Meštrović, a leader in the semantic and theoretical articulation of the concept of design in the local context of Croatia, which from the 1945 to the end of the 1980s was part of socialist Yugoslavia. Meštrović, still active in his eighties, is an art historian, and was an engaged member of the art group Gorgona and in 1961 was a founding member of the international art movement New Tendencies. The New Tendencies movement was the proper context for developing much deeper insights into design as a creative practice, because it paid significant attention to emerging areas of culture, such as television, computers, visual poetry, experimental art, and generative art and design.1