Not only did the design influence where a shopper’s eyes would go, it also influenced the steps that shopper would take through the store. “In a department store, there’s a tile path or flooring that you feel compelled to walk on, because you’re not going to cut through the carpeted area that has all of the fixtures to get from one place to another,” Wood says. “So you follow that path, which leads you where the store wants you to go. It leads you away from the exits and toward the interior. When you want to go up, the elevators are always hidden so that you’re more likely to take the escalator. Once you get to the next level, you have to walk all the way around the other side to keep going up, so you see everything showcased on that floor.”

Raymond Loewy

Art Deco

But department stores didn’t really update their format to suit changing customer tastes until the 1930s. Bullock’s in Los Angeles pioneered this movement when it hired young New York interior designer Eleanor LeMaire to modernize its downtown flagship store in 1926. After that, she was charged with coordinating the decorating scheme for the store’s first luxury branch, Bullock’s Wilshire, which opened in 1929. She employed 13 interior designers to work on the breathtaking Art Deco masterpiece, most notably Jock Peters, who designed each department to reflect the emotional tone of the goods it offered. Because the experience of the design was such a priority, clothes and accessories were displayed in flat glass cases on rosewood stands or on live mannequins so that hanging racks wouldn’t interfere with the view.

Fixtures might seem like a small thing, but they were key to drawing in postwar shoppers, who were growing hooked on modern convenience and efficiency—at the time, cafeterias, drive-ins, and automats were way more exciting than sit-down restaurants. Of course, high-end department stores, like Ransohoff’s in San Francisco, continued to offer the full-service shopping experience. High-society ladies still enjoyed getting dressed from head-to-toe, the way you see Jimmy Stewart having saleswomen remake Kim Novak in 1958’s “Vertigo.” But by and large, the booming mid-century middle class wanted shopping autonomy. “In the mid-century, Americans were wanting and buying more,” Wood says. “In response, the department stores offered and displayed more, like the same purse in five colors. There was a new desire to let shoppers see and touch all the merchandise. Before this change, department stores would have everything behind the glass case, with just one sample out. You’d have to ask the salesgirl, ‘Hey, do you have any other colors?,’ and she would search the stockroom for you. The new stores would have had everything out so shoppers could walk around, see it all, and then choose something on their own and take it to the sales counter.”

“He really created a much brighter and lighter atmosphere,” Wood says. “Fixtures go from being very heavy pieces of furniture to being these ‘invisible’ pieces that really highlight the merchandise. Modular and movable, they could house stock within them and grow or shrink, depending on the merchandise that you wanted to display that season or that month.”

Victorian department stores were not only sectioned off into myriad departments, they were also dark, crowded places, with merchandise stuffed in imposing glass cases and dense wood furniture. That’s why when Loewy debuted his vision at the Gimbels in downtown New York with a pastel color scheme and “invisible” fixtures in 1948, it caused a stir.

“The stores were designed to create an expansive view so you could come off of the escalator, look around, and see all of the well-labeled departments, instead of having the departments walled off,” Wood says. “It was all about paring down the interior. The stores were beautiful spaces that looked and felt modern to people and were simple to walk around. And Loewy’s plan wasn’t just about how shoppers experienced the space, but how the stores could more efficiently sell their merchandise.”

“In the early 20th century, department stores, located downtown, were opulent and over the top, reflecting the Victorian and Edwardian obsession with excess and wealth,” Wood says. “To most people, they were aspirational spaces celebrating what you couldn’t have, unless you were extremely wealthy. In the mid-century, there’s still a bit of an aspirational ideal in department stores, but it’s much more toned down. With the booming middle class and the introduction of credit cards, the shopping experience is much more about what you can have.”

Of course, this surge of consumers needed somewhere to go, explains Alessandra Wood, a design historian who blogs at Huffington Post and is writing her Ph.D. dissertation on mid-century department stores for the University of Delaware. Into the void stepped forward-thinking designer Raymond Loewy, who took the fusty, old concept of the department store and reinvented it for these eager shoppers. As the young couples were drawn into these stores to start their new lives, Loewy and other designers were gently ushering them into the Modern Age of Design. Ultimately, Loewy didn’t just alter American style or tastes, he changed the way Americans consume.

But 60 years ago, these same department stores, particularly the new branches installed in fledging suburban shopping malls, were the way to the future. Post-World War II prosperity meant returning vets and their wives could ditch the turmoil of overcrowded cities, the frugal values of the Depression, and the frilly heirlooms of the Victorian Era. They would build their dream homes in the suburbs and fill them with shiny new appliances and furnishings made of cutting-edge materials, like acrylic and fiberglass, developed for the war. There, housewives would throw away their Rosie the Riveter coveralls and reclaim their “femininity” with new dresses, fashion accessories, and beauty products.

Often, the mall’s anchors, the big chain department stores, are the first to go. It seems that the 2008 recession and dominance of the Internet—where you can buy anything and everything with a few clicks—have taken their toll on brick-and-mortar behemoths like JCPenney, Sears, and even Macy’s. As the Computer Age thrusts us into the future, would-be mall rats are spending all their time on Facebook, and the breath-taking range of products, once so meticulously displayed for our delight, is being crammed into our PCs, tablets, and smartphones.

“Today, we shop as if we know about everything that we’re shopping for, but in the mid-century, you trusted your department store.”

The once-vibrant shopping mall has one foot in the grave these days. About 20 percent of the 2,000 largest U.S. malls were failing in 2008, and by 2012, only 1,513 remained in operation. Current numbers predict more than 200 existing big malls will collapse in the next 10 years. Search the phrase, “dead malls,” and you’ll find photo after photo of tiled walkways littered with debris, untended planters near the darkened rest areas for bored dads, and empty indoor storefronts—the discolored shadows of their missing lighted signs lingering like ghosts.

From Retail Palace to Zombie Mall: How Efficiency Killed the Department Store

Great progress has been made for women in the workplace in the past 40 years. The Glass Ceiling, a term used to describe an invisible barrier that prevents someone (usually women and minorities) from achieving further success, seems to have almost no place in design, according to some in the field. To quote Sonya Dyakova in “Beyond the Glass Ceiling” by Astrid Stavro, “If there is [a glass ceiling], I’m not going to acknowledge it. The fear of such a ceiling is stifling. I think one must ignore all that nonsense.”

The repercussions of constant, even mild, discordance can cause female designers like Victoria Rushton, a type designer at Font Bureau in Boston, Massachusetts, to feel there is extra work that must be done in order to prove their ability and their value as a colleague. “It’s just this little extra hurdle, you know?” she explains. “I know I have to make good work for clients and myself, but on top of that I feel the stubborn need to prove that I belong in this industry at all.”

Despite notions that the issue of sex is obsolete in graphic design, only a small fraction of active female designers receive public acclamation. Margaret Calvert, a designer who defined the British network of roadways with her typeface design in the 1960s, never received wide recognition for this development. Presently, all road signs in Great Britain include her designs, an important contribution to the cultural landscape of England, but attempting to research this work and topic results in articles surrounding her partner, Jock Kinneir. Recently, after the passing of her studio partner, she has finally begun receiving more recognition for her work. Calvert’s experience is just an example of the oversight many designers encounter.

Denise Gonzales Crisp, Chair of Graphic Design at the College of Design, North Carolina State University, shared “[Look at] salary discrepancy between males and females in education. Almost every institution I’ve looked at, the women earned on average anywhere from $5,000 to $10,000 less in the same positions [held by men]. So that inequality we experience generally out in the world is also reflected in education.

Should it matter to the structure of design education if the majority of design students are female? Is it a matter of fairness that emerging designers require encouragement, and part of that is seeing their sex represented in the professional field and in the teaching of design? Brockett Horne, a designer and the Chair of Graphic Design at Maryland Institute College of Art, believes young female designers could greatly benefit from a change in the exposure and representation of women in graphic design. “I know from the classroom that student designers are thirsty for diverse insights on design methodologies, outcomes, and advice on how to create a strong life and work balance,” Horne explains. “I’d like to see females become more confident in publishing their process, ideas, and experiences. I see this as a continuity of tradition that we have inherited from the artists and designers who fought hard for us to sit at the table.

He believes that revealing only part of our history fails to fully inform our designers. “It’s important that these women get the recognition, because they were and are part of the history that’s shaping graphic design. Everyone needs to learn about them and their work, especially young designers. If not, then there’s just this big gap that doesn’t tell the entire story of graphic design.”

“Not enough women designers are given the recognition that they deserve,” says graphic designer Antonio Carusone. “Take for example Jacqueline S. Casey. She is primarily responsible for bringing the International Typographic Style to the US, and her work is just as brilliant as Muller-Brockmann’s, Crouwel’s, Ruder’s…. But for some reason, her name is left out most of the time.”

In the US, some 70% of design students are female, yet their education is scattered with gaps. Teal Triggs and Sian Cook, of the Women’s Design + Research Unit in the UK, explain, “For far too long, history has either marginalised or excluded many women from being entered into the design history books and as a result, the design canon. Whilst acknowledging that over the last decade such gender concerns have begun to be readdressed by historians, educators and the design profession at large, much more can still be done.”

Design history has long overlooked women in our narrative, despite continuously having a large group of women active in the field of graphic design over the past century. Lucinda Hitchcock is a professor in Graphic Design at the Rhode Island School of Design, as well as a member of the Design Office in Providence, Rhode Island. “For me, it has to do with the imbalance of genders in the educational environment and in the framework of the design history that is being taught,” Hitchcock explains. Careful to point out it may not be the same situation in all design schools, Hitchcock adds, “Why does design history still teach about male designers 80% more than women designers? Why do we have 80 % women in the student body (in our [RISD] department) and 80% men in the faculty?”

There is a line of forgotten women in our history. I argue that sexism is somewhat less obvious in our workplace today, far subtler than it might have been in the 1950s and 60s, but perhaps we still accept some mores of old, underlying currents that flow through our design culture, much like that lecture in 2011.

Forty or fifty years ago, the workforce was overwhelmingly a man’s world. In the design field, many women may have been assistants or “office girls” and so few held the top titles, such as art director or creative director. In a basic sense, women’s careers have rarely followed the same path of men’s, since there has historically been immense pressure placed on women to be solely homemakers and nurture families (see: Beyond The Glass Ceiling: an open discussion, Astrid Stavro, Elephant #6) with more sinister pressures of socially-accepted sexism and segregation discouraging, or even disqualifying, the career ambitions of capable women.

The National Education Association reports of 2011 estimated that 54% of all US designers in the profession are women. In the UK it is lower, although the Design Council research found that 70% of design students in the UK are women, but 60% of the industry is male. I was curious to explore the reductive process by which these female majorities dwindle.

It’s the spring of 2011 and I am sitting in History of Graphic Design, a lecture course at my design school. We are learning about the many designers and movements essential to the narrative of graphic design. Designer’s names are listed on a page, hundreds of them. It’s so subtle; I almost miss it. Later on, I would count the names — three hundred and twenty-three independent designers listed — twenty-two women. In the history of graphic design, my classmates and I were learning about just twenty-two women. That was only 6% of the overall canon. Surely this was a mistake.

It is often discussed, academically and informally, that the presence of female designers missing from the history of graphic design is a sore oversight of the profession. And while we can claim more progressive (and equal) laws and beliefs in present day society, the disparity between male and female representation in design lingers on. But why is retrospective accreditation important? And if it is getting better, do we need to keep talking about it? Tori Hinn, of Women of Graphic Design, talks through some of the issues facing women in the past, and regrettably, in our industry today.

Women in Graphic Design (and why we need to talk about them)

Although originally conceived for Manchester, I believe that Park+Jog may be adapted to any city worldwide and serve as an example for how Cycle Space could lay the ideological foundation to change our cities for the better. Combining new transportation methods that encourage the principles of a healthy life style with traditional roads can raise land values, attract investment and activate the urban environment. The social revolution that Bazalgette offered London in the 19th Century, Cycle Space might just bring to London and our world’s cities in the 21st.

Active transportation routes and linear parks, on the other hand, regenerate their surroundings, bringing activity and value to blighted sections of the city. They also radically alter the political situation for the suburb and its inevitable commute. Of course, the creation of these green networks need not be at the expense of the motorist. On the 10th July London’s Transport Commissioner Peter Hendy launched a study for London that envisaged burying sections of the North and South Circular ring roads, and stretches of road close to the Thames. The initiative would create linear parks overhead, much as the Big Dig did for Boston.

What is striking about these parks is the positive impact they can have on their surrounding neighbourhoods, particularly when one considers the alternative. With roads, be it a dual carriageway or a street, comes heavy traffic, noise and pollution, at the expense of those who live and work around it. In the case of a High Street we forego certain types of shops, cafés and restaurants that engender a street life. At the scale of the dual-carriageway the A40 that tears through west London illustrates beautifully how dramatic the blight on homes can be, as this Mid-20th Century residential avenue has been transformed into a slum wrapped around a congested commuter road. These zones lack the 'density' of the city centre and the space of the suburb. And, each successive wave of Greenfield development adds to the expanse of this grey space.

And imagine if – instead of London’s Cycle Superhighways, currently only blue-painted tracks on the side of the road – London’s cities and villages were linked by a series of segregated active transportation routes?What might these be like? A scheme our firm designed in response to a competition in 1998 could serve as a good model. At the time, “Park + Jog” was treated as a curiosity; we still describe it as a “ utopian scheme.” But nowadays, it seems less and less fanciful.

Imagine that the Boris Bike docking stations outside railway stations and in key public spaces might incorporate general cycle parking. Thus the Cycle City would bring with it a new building type – the multistory cycle park. Fietsenstalling, a multistorey cycle park outside Amsterdam’s Centraal rail station, with its Escher-like pattern of steel decks that suspend over the canal, is a dramatic model. Its very presence is didactic. It is persuasive.

The day of Margaret Thatcher’s funeral at St.Paul’s Cathedral gave me an indication. For security reasons, much of the Square Mile was closed to vehicular traffic; the streets were preserved for the pedestrian and the cyclist. What I remember about that day was the sense of calm, how quiet it was, and how generous the streets actually felt. For a brief moment the public realm was uniquely different. Imagine: whilst it may not be possible to ban the car outright, it ought to be possible to keep HGVs and delivery vans out during the day, when their impact on the physical environment and the safety of pedestrians and cyclists is most evident.

This monumental feat of engineering offers us the best precedent for the impact the bicycle might have on London or any city for that matter. Cycling offers us, for the first time in more than a century and a half, the chance to build an infrastructure that will bring with it significant public health improvements. In our auto-centric world, we have unprecedented levels of health problems - obesity, diabetes, etc - all associated with our sedentary lifestyles. Cycling should mean a fitter population and a longer life expectancy, which would take pressure off the National Health Service and bring huge economic benefits. It would of course also reduce energy consumption.

But it’s the work of Joseph Bazalgette, the chief engineer of the Metropolitan Board of Works, that stands out to me - not just for its contribution to public health but also for its potential parallels to Cycle Space. For much of its history London had been associated with poor living conditions and disease. By the late 1850s the scale of the city was making things worse: London’s sewage was deposited into the River Thames, out of which the city’s drinking water was being collected. Bazalgette’s solution was to construct a series of sewers that would run parallel to the Thames, both north and south of the river, collecting the sewage and ensuring the drinking water that was drawn from the river was clean.

Of course, the tabula rasa model wasn’t necessary. It was ideological. But it brought with it flats with fitted kitchens, bathrooms and toilets. This prompted the gradual gentrification of the remaining streets. Indoor toilets were fitted, and bedrooms and sculleries were converted into bathrooms and kitchens in the surviving 19th century housing stock.

In the Twentieth Century, Corbusian Modernism eventually had a monumental impact on London’s streets and skyline. Again the catalyst was in part a disaster - the havoc wreaked by the Luftwaffe and the need for rapid reconstruction - and the solution was political. The dilapidated terraced houses with their back yards and privies were associated with poverty and poor living conditions. Modernity, and the mass production of homes demonstrated optimism, and a commitment to those who had survived the war. It was a tangible dimension of the newly established Welfare State.

Take London in 1667, a year after the Great Fire of 1666. An Act of Parliament was passed that introduced building inspectors to ensure that buildings be built from brick and not timber (a law which predated the fire, but that hadn’t been enforced). Of course, the fire and resulting devastation meant that much of London had to be rebuilt, and that these buildings would be brick.

Towards the end of my trip, it occurred to me that this explosion in cycling, ought to be put into an historic context, in order to enable the politicians and the public to recognize the scale of the opportunity, the change it might bring to our cities and our lives.

What impressed us was the speed of progress. When we were in Chicago at the end of June, the city launched its own bike share scheme. New York already has one. The docking stations bring tangible cycle infrastructure to the city streets. In-carriage and separated cycle routes have begun to proliferate. Disused railway lines are being harnessed as leisure trails, and in some cases these were working well for commuters too. Indianapolis had recently completed their “Cultural Trail,” an active transportation loop linking the five central city districts.

Recently I took four weeks out of the office to cycle from Chicago to New York and to visit cities along the way. My 1,300 mile trip was part of a group expedition called P2P that went from Portland, Oregon to Portland Place in London (read more about it on portlandtoportland.org). The objective was to report back to the UK and London in particular on American city-cycling culture and the political initiatives that are emerging in the US.

The 2010 launch of the “Boris Bike” - London’s cycle hire scheme, named after mayor Boris Johnson – was the clearest indication to date that cycling was no longer just for a minority of fanatics but a healthy, efficient and sustainable mode of transport that city planners wanted in their armoury. There are now more than 8,000 Boris Bikes and 550+ docking stations in Central London. And the trend’s not anomalous to London: Wikipedia reports that there are 535 cycle-share schemes in 49 countries, employing more than half a million bikes worldwide.