Hidden Design

The exhibition Hidden Design presents innovative solutions of the designer team of the company Rade Končar. With product assortment ranging from iron to locomotives and with megaprojects in hundreds of countries worldwide, Rade Končar was undeniably one of the industrial giants of socialist Yugoslavia, with over 25,000 employees in factories from Samobor to Skopje. Deliveries to a vast number of power plants from Iceland to India and to nuclear institutes in Switzerland and Great Britain demanded continuous investment in the development of Končar’s research resources.

In the ’70s and the ’80s when a majority of domestic companies produced licensed foreign products, Končar was projecting wide range of products – from household appliances to transformers and electric motors.  Creating within the restrictions of aging technology and without quality market research, designers in Končar persisted in the greatly reduced expression. The biggest part of the designers’ tasks was related to small household appliances – series of irons, heaters, ‘Miki’ coffee grinders… These products shaped the every-day lives of numerous generations in former Yugoslavia. It is almost unbelievable but forty or so years later some heaters, water heaters and ‘Miki’ coffee grinders are still in use today.

The Design Department was dissolved in 1990 as a consequence of the change of owners and the restructuring of Končar. Most of the products designed by the Design Department are not produced anymore and their designers remained unknown to the general public.

Author: Koraljka Vlajo

Visual identity: Luka Reicher

Production: Croatian Designers Society