Unlike today, ‘design’ was yet to become a buzzword in postwar Scandinavia. Still, a new discourse centred on industrial design was emerging, fuelled by the establishment of professional organisations for industrial designers, like the Norwegian ID Group for Industrial Design in 1957. Six years later, the ID Group co-organised the first exhibition of Norwegian industrial design at the Oslo Museum of Applied Art.
The doctoral thesis So Different, So Appealing considers the mediation of modern design culture through the 1963 Norwegian Industrial Design exhibition. Jointly organised by the National Association of Applied Art, the Export Council of Norway and the Federation of Norwegian Industries – besides the Oslo Museum of Applied Art and the aforementioned ID Group – the exhibition was the first major attempt to stage industrial design proper to a Norwegian audience. The ambitions behind the project were complex and manifold: To the ID Group, it manifested their commitment to promoting industrial design as a discipline distinct from that of decorative or applied arts; to the Export Council and the Federation of Norwegian Industries, the exhibition demonstrated the potential of the Norwegian manufacturing industry and its value for export; to the museum’s ambitious curator Alf Bøe, the project trumpeted industrial design’s relevance to the museum, advocating a return to the engagement with industry that had once conditioned the establishment of Europe’s applied art museums in the nineteenth century.
Considering the project’s background, display, and reception history, I argue that the exhibition and the illustrated 300-page catalogue accompanying it mediated new ideas – visual, textual and conceptual – about industrial design, at a time when the word ‘design’ itself was still a neologism in Norwegian.
Peder Valle succesfully defended his thesis on 24 January 2025.
Trial lecture
Designated topic: "The 1963 Norwegian Industrial Design exhibition at the Oslo Museum of Applied Art: national, regional and international perspectives on the legacies of a single case study"
Evaluation committee
- Senior lecturer Harriet Atkinson, University of Brighton (first opponent)
- Professor Anders V. Munch, Syddansk universitet (second opponent)
- Senior lecturer Christina Pech, University of Oslo (committee administrator)
Chair of the defence
- Professor Christine Amadou
Supervisors
- Professor Kjetil Fallan, University of Oslo
- Professor Christine Myrvang, BI