I too am a layman in this area, but from what I've gathered is that the designers of Bauhaus and similar European design movements of the 1900s is they took design and all of its elements very seriously. "Good design" was an expression of a well thought out approach to the message at hand and was a reflection of a society that ought to be well-groomed themselves (i.e. intellectually, morally, all those sort of qualities).

Intense stuff, mate.