
Associate professor of history and theory of art and design.
Margareta Tillberg
Associate professor of history and theory of art and design at the Linnaeus University, writes about design, art, and technology in 20th century Russia.
Currently working on a monograph about design and art, ergonomics, observation and cybernetics, collaboration and innovation within the planning system in the Soviet Union from 1945 until today.
Her PhD thesis, Coloured Universe and the Russian Avant-Garde, was translated into Russian. It is the first close study on practices of a so-called laboratory in an art- and science institute in the Soviet Union in the 1920s.
In 2010, visiting scholar at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin.
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Articles by Margareta Tillberg
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VNIITE, once the world’s largest institute of design research, ceased to exist on June 14, 2013. It was once conceived as a marriage of engineering and aesthetics. Intellectual abilities and sensitivity were to be respected rather than viewed as problems.
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Soviet Design 1950–1980 was shown for two busy winter months and enjoyed great public success. Even if Soviet design was often — but far from always — based on originals borrowed from the West, the individual objects exude a personal charm, variation, and quirkiness that makes them well worth preserving, exhibiting, and discussing.
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The questions posed by this year’s Berlin Biennale are an expression of anger; over the lack of attention to issues that concern ownership of access to the public space, control of money, and frustration about how the art world is being controlled by increasingly few hands, even as events are increasing in number and being spread all over the world.
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In the 1960s, the Soviets took up a rivalry with the US in a hitherto new field, industrial design. ElektroMera was a grandiose effort to produce utilities for everyday use: an effort that nonetheless was never realized in the form of finished products.
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