In maker laboratories and science centres as well as art and design schools, the work with electronic components plays a decisive role in unpacking the knowledge of technologies using participatory, hands-on methodologies for the making of little machines, experimenting with sensors, and playing with digital fabrication. However, these methods also conceal the paradox that has accompanied a Western understanding of the democratisation of industrial design since its beginnings in early 20th century modernism: while design knowledge is opening up itself, an immense industry of consumer goods has emerged in parallel. In this case, it is a consumer industry of electronic components specifically for educational purposes. In what is known as the maker culture,¹ which also operates at the interfaces of textile, interaction and product design, as well as engineering and artistic practices, the term ‘industrial design’ is not so much associated with the outcome of the design process. Yet it is an industrial design from a wider perspective. If the design process is not only thought in a future-oriented manner but also including the industrial processes of the materials and tools purchased on Amazon or Alibaba for a couple of cents a piece, we face a more complex understanding of democratising design and connected socio-ecological demands.

On the one hand, it is an industrial design associated with education in art and design schools, and on the other, it is a design that comes from the materials sciences. Both are connected in the design process. However, in the dominant narratives, this very connection runs in a linear logic of an assembly-line-like industry of knowledge production from mountain, to laboratory, to manufacturer, to online store, to maker space, to landfill – disconnecting histories, places, bodies and materials. This assembly line is also closely related to a history of (neo-)colonial extraction, toxic substances and military research, while those relations were for a long time rarely addressed in the maker spaces themselves. However, this separation of the linear readings of design and history has changed in recent years and more and more positions can be seen that include material politics into the making.² To make those design processes otherwise, history has to be thought beyond this linear understanding of knowledge production. Unmaking this assembly-line cannot only happen on a hyper-local material level that makes technologies better but in connection with its critical relationships.

To develop critical industrial design historiographies in those fields, I am looking into one specific case, which is addressed in the following text. In it, archival material that traverses around and through one very specific electronic component – “piezoelectric material” – is read through the lens of touch. While touch is a recurring topic in the history of material based design practices, I go beyond reading and writing a design history that explores what the hands do but expand it through questions of being in and out of touch with material politics. How can we be in touch with material not only through being physically close to the stuff but also being close to its histories simultaneously?

Based on the feminist performativity of Donna Haraway and Karen Barad, in which “vision” for the former³ and “being in touch” for the latter⁴ are also thoughts beyond, yet, in the context of, material-reality, I will ask what piezoelectric materials in current maker contexts are in connection with their critical industrial design histories of a crystalline modernity. In this crystalline modernity different knowledge contexts between the science behind crystals and material histories of design meet. In relation to the perspective on touch from the notion of body politics, I am looking into a new materialist understanding, which means, “a theoretical turn away from the persistent dualisms in modern and humanist traditions”⁵ and opening up perspectives that look into human and more-than-human relationships. This means connecting different understandings of design beyond its modernist view of separating objects from nature but looking into material/body relations.

In a new materialist reading, Karen Barad, for example, explores touch through the lens of quantum theory, in which they develop a relational, yet ahistorical account of how everyone is being in touch with everyone due to the countless possibilities of the electron moving.⁶ While from a core thought of analyzing ‘touch’ through the lens of electron behavior (quantum theory), the idea of an equal connection between everyone is relatable, it leans towards a vision from everywhere, a universalist lens. Therefore, I would like to extend Barad’s thoughts with Haraway’s perspective on “vision” – a view from somewhere.⁷ By this, I am trying to avoid falling into the trap of a universalist thinking of equality when it comes to lived realities of technologies that are connected on more levels than the eternal connection of time and space. Even though the quantum appears as a kind of poetry of touch, a hopeful thought of resistance against disconnection, connecting touch back to the limitation of human experiences might help us think about a material politics for a critical history of industrial design.

While the piezoelectric effect was already in 1880 discovered by the Curie brothers in tourmaline crystals and the scientists were touched by this wonder of nature,¹⁰ science was yet about 130 years away from relating the effect to human bodies or touch. Shortly after a period of theorisation of the piezoelectric effect, a scientific design process of utilising piezoelectric materials for technologies began in 1915 that led to an ongoing process of a crystalline modernity of techno-materialised devices – sonar, radio, clocks, ultrasound, sonic censors, measurement technologies. From 1915 onwards, the majority of scientific research on piezoelectric crystals has been related to their application, which means, to their design. However, this design is also entangled with its violent pasts, of the birth of piezoelectric mass-production in WWII as well as continuing in the present, entangled with extraction, toxicity and military research. While in terms of environmental impact, there are currently attempts to improve the design of piezoelectric materials,¹¹ the current dominant knowledge production in the context of science, as well as their dominant historiography, perpetuates a form of techno-materialisation in a linear form of crystalline modernity. The focus of the exponential increase in piezoelectric research for consumer technologies and markets since 1990 was mainly focused on the efficiency of technological function and material use in disregard to extraction, inclusion of toxic materials like lead or recycling processes. However, the tendency of being out of touch with environmental responsibilities seems to be connected to a dominant history of being out of touch with human and more-than-human bodies in general.

This becomes particularly apparent in the prevalent representation of, for example, scientific accounts in academic research papers, patents, and educational and military propaganda videos, as well as in the few academic accounts of the history of science. To give a few examples, while the aforementioned easily accessible data of a traditional epistemology of science history focuses predominantly on the different forms of collaboration between scientists for technological innovation, retained material can be found on marginalised voices that appear only in-between the lines, in subordinate clauses, in side notes, if not only in one little word here or – many times – nowhere. Countless narratives are hidden behind the vast amount of meticulously unfolded step-by-step descriptions of how to build and calculate things, how to grind, cut and grow quartz crystals, how to build up a field oscillator production, how to theorise a crystal for a mechanised nature.¹²

While the historical research at hand is impressive in terms of accumulated accessible data from archives – for example, narratives about the women workers in WWII USA oscillator production¹³ or the indigenous mine workers of Minas Gerais in Brazil during the same period¹⁴ – narratives about those who touched the piezoelectric materials with their hands for military mass-production, although they are mentioned in texts or shown in audio-visual sources, do not acknowledge their agency. In one dissertation on the history of piezoelectric materials between 1880–1959, the author writes in the introduction: “Engineering knowledge must also be distinguished from another type of nonscientific useful knowledge – artisanal, craft-based knowledge. The latter is a form of so-called ‘tacit’ knowledge in that it is not easily codified and communicated to others without personal, face-to-face contact.”¹⁵ Even though the author continues by acknowledging the significance of artisanal knowledge in general, the narrative carries on by pointing out that “(…) the study of engineering knowledge is more conducive to historical inquiry given the rich array of written documents available.” In this example, the scientific design history of crystals runs the risk of being out of touch if only written from perspectives of already codified data (technological language and mathematical formulas) written by those who were also not touching the crystals at the time.

Moreover, in the propaganda films of the US Army corps mentioned above, the notion of being out of touch is taken to a perfidious extreme. The viewer is looking at people touching the crystals – the factory workers grinding millions of quartz plates by hand and the mine workers standing barefoot in mud with scant equipment preparing the Quartz for shipment – yet, Disney-like music and an uplifting voiceover tells the tale of seemingly joint forces. This military propaganda with its gaze-like view of a design process that is not only out of touch but even treacherous, through its depiction of a disconnection between vision (what we see) and bodies (what we are supposed to feel), gaslights the viewer into a distrust of their own perception.

At the other end of the relation of crystals and touch in the beginnings of European modernist industrial design in the artistic context, we can see a rather awkward relationship that is in touch with the crystals, yet touches only glass in the end. Awkward it is in the sense that there are numerous prominent accounts of design being touched by scientific vision onto crystals of that time in a sense of inspiration,¹⁶ and touch was partly connected to the socio-biological understanding of design;¹⁷ however, the science of the crystal (material-reality) and the symbol of the crystal (imagination) ran in parallel. This caused a certain disconnect between vision and touch in regard to human perception and material use for products and architecture. For example, the so-called “first industrial designer” Peter Behrens revealed a crystal at the opening of Mathildenhöhe Darmstadt in 1901, which was – presented as material metabolism from coal to diamond – a symbol and a utopian fantasy of autonomous art as a life expression for social liberation.¹⁸ While a diamond is not piezoelectric, the crystal vision was created by materialised touch in this case.

In another example, at the opening of the Bauhaus building in 1926, a series of short scientific documentaries were shown in Dessau, including the film “Das Wachstum der Kristalle” [“The Growth of Crystals”].¹⁹ This video was shot with a camera mounted to a microscope and showed crystal formation in a time lapse by the Emelka Kulturfilm company. In a review of the screening, however, László Moholy-Nagy, who was responsible for putting together the film programme, was criticised for the connection between “Bauhaus culture” and crystal growth being “too vague.”²⁰ While the critique at the time might not have been able to draw the connection between the meaning of scientific innovation for Moholy-Nagy’s work on sensory perception, there is some truth in the correlation between touch and vision. Even though, Moholy-Nagy did not envision a crystalline architecture for his own work like other modernist artists at the time, but the vision of science was at the core here instead, there is a gap between being inspired by the image of the crystal connected to science and developing the design process with the material itself.

This awkward relation also becomes apparent from the other angle of touch in relation to material in general. Early European modernist design was touched by the crystalline on a metaphysical level, yet, in the end only touched glass, concrete and steel. Cross-read with Beatrice Colomina’s “X-Ray Architecture”²¹ in which she builds up an architectural theory of the body politics of early European modernity (the house becomes a body of healing, envisioned from the perspective of illness) and drawing connections to what Christian Hiller calls “Therapy for Democracy”²² in Moholy-Nagy’s work on the senses, the relation of early European modernist design and crystals can be perceived as the dream of being in touch to heal the body in relation to the mental state in shock due to war and industrialisation. However, in those cases, the body and material are connected from a human-centred perspective only. The inside and outside of the crystal do not touch physically, yet.

In Moholy-Nagy’s book “von material to architektur” (1929) there is a kind of jump cut between the extensive exercises in touch – “tastübungen” – and the development of form and structure for the architectural model later in the process.²³ While, like the Curie brothers, Moholy-Nagy couldn’t know about the scientific relation of human bodies, crystal and piezoelectricity back then, there is an awkward relationship between the inside (body) and outside (material) crystal vision of nature and design. Beyond an elevation of the crystal to a higher being, he brings the inner and outer crystal in his thoughts on socio-biological entanglements indirectly together. In Moholy-Nagy’s so-called “biocentrism” the social liberation of the individual and society through experiencing and being with nature come together beyond dualist paradigms.²⁴ Being touched by crystals from a scientific perspective helped also to gain a new social vision.

Today, piezoelectric materials make an immense field of applied scientific study.²⁵ One commonly used component in those contexts are piezoelectric materials of PZT (lead-zirconium-titanate). Here, the crystals come in the form of little round components of sintered industrial ceramics, which are used for audio and sonic experimentation, as well as frequency measurement. As mentioned at the beginning of this article, those components exemplify industrial design’s core ambivalence of learning and unlearning technologies simultaneously. In 2011, a policy by the European Commission was legislated to substitute lead in electrical and electronic equipment.²⁶ This would also apply to piezoelectric components made of lead-zirconate-titanate. Nevertheless, they are still available in abundance for a cheap price. In only a few cases, like, for example, in the work of Miranda Moss and Urs Gaudenz for the “Energy Giveaway at the Humuspunk Library” at AIA gallery in Zurich 2023, PZTs are used in their recycled form.²⁷

In an experiment in 2019, I tried to cut through this linear assembly-line of crystalline modernist knowledge production by cutting one PZT piece open. Like a messy version of experimental archaeology, I wanted to find out whether I can go back in time with a simple paper scissors cut. However, this form of touching histories revealed itself to be limited: Not only didn’t I see more – meaning being able to understand the material by my vision – I also later found that the worst thing I could have done to a lead based material is cutting, grinding or opening its outer structure. While the toxicity of lead is limited in its manufactured form, the lead dust created by my cut was what makes the material so toxic to humans and biodiversity. Touching it to reveal its design history revealed rather its limitations for investigating histories.

From a performative reading perspective – with which I mean, feeling not only material but also words – the effort it takes to literally struggle to read through several hundreds of pages of techno-materialisation and codified data of a technological design history, the exhaustion this kind of reading brings with it, perpetuates the effects on human and more-than-human bodies of the technologies their histories are about. Writing an industrial design history that is in touch with others, means writing a design history of different and ambivalent connections to art and design educational contexts. In it, not only is the codified data of already well documented and archived material re-read, but in correlation with its impact on body politics,  the previously untold history that does not exist in archives must also be told.

With this, I also connect to voices that call for a design and design history beyond a Western modernist canon of technological progress but highlight the ambiguities, frictions, and struggles instead.²⁸ Seeing industrial design histories from the critical perspectives of, as in this case, calcium ion channels, quartz production, scientific crystal vision or toxic ceramics, connects us to the partial perspective of a very situated material instead of separating us from its histories. This challenges not only our perspective on history, but also how and with whom we write and design it together. Furthermore, it helps us to also write a design history beyond a binary understanding of either perpetuating positivist knowledge production or a design critique that ends up in the void of doom. A design history that includes material politics resists unwanted touch where it is necessary but also opens up being in touch with narratives outside of itself.