Journal of Design History Vol. 22 No.

doi:10.1093/jdh/epp042

The Current State of Design History

Hazel Clark and David Brody

As a point of departure for this special issue of the journal, we turned to Clive Dilnots seminal two-part essay, The State of Design History, published in Design Issues. In these essays, Dilnot declares the imperative to place socio-historical understanding at the centre of our attempts to understand design activity. Twenty-ve years on the prescience of this call is underlined by the fact that scholarship has become more interdisciplinary, and the geographical foci of global discourses have been reassessed, certainly beyond Euro-American concerns. This development is evident in the themes and content of more recent Design History Society conferences, such as the 2009 conference on design writing. To bring the debate both closer to home for us and into another forum, we convened and co-chaired a panel entitled The Current State of Design History for the Design Studies Forum, held at the 2008 College Art Association (CAA) annual conference in Dallas, Texas. From the submissions, received from scholars working in the UK, Europe, Australia and the USA., we chose papers which together would present a diversity of perspectives and provide directions for the future. The essays contained in this issue are revised versions of some of the papers presented in that session. We also asked Clive Dilnot to reect on the essays and on what he saw as the potential futures for design history. This introduction serves to place these contributions within the larger context of design history. Keywords: comparative historydesign historyhistoricismhistoriographymethodology

We welcome the opportunity to edit this issue of the Journal of Design History as a way of considering how we practise design history today, in the relatively early years of the twenty-rst century. Our interest in investigating the current state of design history was stimulated by our positions as academics within a school of art and design history and theory in a large design school in a university in the USA. Over recent years we had worked together developing an introduction to design studies course and a supporting reader as a core requirement for undergraduate design majors.1 During this process, we had developed our own thinking and position on design studies, which we agreed could include the study of histories of design, while acknowledging the existence of design history as an independent eld.2 We also were aware that design history had changed since the 1980s when new courses and publications, not least this journal, were emerging in Britain in particular, but also in Europe and the USA.3 What had caused the change? Was this change a product of the academy itself, a result of broader educational politics and economies or other issues? The fact that many of the specialist undergraduate courses in Britain had closed, or had been merged into newer visual culture programmes, begged the question of whether the visual culture turn had served to relegate the study of design history. Where, today, does design history intersect with visual culture studies and, moreover, with art history, which has shown little interest in visual practices that intersect with design, or with what Johanna Drucker, in a 1999 article in Art Journal, called the forces that shape our current lives?4 Yet despite these concerns, further investigation showed that design history was still an active eld, the Design History Society having celebrated its thirtieth anniversary in 2007 and the Journal of Design History its twentieth year in 2008. The 2005 annual Design History Society Conference in London, for instance, witnessed an astounding range of papers. While several covered wellrehearsed territory, others ventured into more diverse areas, such as popular culture and how designers visualize their work, which demonstrated how design history had changed in character from its earlier days. The panoply of agendas that were expressed

The Author [2009]. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Design History Society. All rights reserved.

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served to raise and revisit important questions. Who today writes design history and why, how does it relate to changes in design practices, what methodologies are being used by scholars investigating design history, all of which add to the larger question of what is the current state of design history? To address this larger question, we felt it important to open a dialogue, while also acknowledging the currency of the discourse established over a quarter of a century ago. As a point of departure, we turned to Clive Dilnots seminal two-part essay, The State of Design History, published in Design Issues.5 In these essays, Dilnot declares the imperative of placing socio-historical understanding at the centre of our attempts to understand design activity. Twenty-ve years on, the prescience of this call is underlined by the fact that scholarship has become more interdisciplinary, and the geographical foci of global discourses have been reassessed, certainly beyond Euro-American concerns. This development is evident in the themes and content of more recent Design History Society conferences, such as the 2009 conference on design writing. To bring the debate both closer to home for us and into another forum, we convened and co-chaired a panel entitled The Current State of Design History for the Design Studies Forum, held at the 2008 College Art Association annual conference in Dallas, Texas. From the submissions, received from scholars working in the UK, Europe, Australia and the USA, we chose papers which together would present a diversity of perspectives and provide directions for the future. The essays contained in this issue are revised versions of some of the papers presented in that session. We also asked Clive Dilnot to reect on the essays and on what he saw as the potential futures for design history. In the process of working towards this journal issue, we became increasingly aware of how we were not in fact alone in our interest in the current state of design history; quite to the contrary. Design, History and Identity, the Second International Conference on Historical Studies in Design, organized by the IUAV University, was held in Venice, Italy, in September 2008. It was remarkable in part because the rst international conference in this series on historical studies in design entitled Design, History and Historiography had been held seventeen years before, in Milan in 1991. The 2008 conference acknowledged the similarities and the differences between the two periods in the social and economic contexts of Italy and the continuing need to focus on the changes that design has experienced in its theoretical paradigms and modes of operation, not least the increase in the number of countries where design is practised and taught. The conference acknowledged two contemporary problems for the discussion of history; one being whether history can help to clarify issues and debates that are present in the world of design, and the other, whether contemporary themes can offer new directions for the research and interpretation of the past. The conference was structured into three areas Design: History, Theory and Criticism; Design: General and Local Histories; and Design: The Edges, the Intersections, all of which were addressed by invited speakers, from Italy, Britain, Germany, the USA, Brazil, Argentina and India. One objective for the future was to establish a network of relationships between design historians in Italy and colleagues in the eld in other countries; some of these relationships exist while others are in the process of being formed. The potentiality offered to scholars by networking beyond national boundaries is, of course, one major shift that technology has facilitated in the last twenty years. Consideration is being given to both the denitions and the implications of world or global design histories. The former, a world history of design, has been used by Victor Margolin to describe the scope of and the approach to the book he has been researching now for several years. Global Design History references the discussions being hosted by Glenn Adamson, Sarah Teasley and colleagues on the Victoria and Albert Museum/Royal College of Art postgraduate course in the History of Design in London, which consider methodologies as well as content, and will

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also result in the publication Global Design History, edited by Glenn Adamson, Giorgio Riello and Sarah Teasley (Routledge, UK). The global is in fact one aspect of contemporary scholarship where design history reveals itself as being able to reect the scenarios that form our contemporary milieu. Networks of scholars working collaboratively, as well as independently as individuals, are drawing on diverse methodologies as design history engages with and builds upon the approaches of other scholarly elds. The four essays that follow, plus Clive Dilnots conclusion, facilitate an understanding of current practices in design history, through a variety of approaches that help to use the framework of history to explicate design; discuss methodologies; demonstrate interdisciplinary scholarship; consider the margins, without marginalization, and help us not only to address the current state of design history but also to move it forward. The rst paper, by Lisa Banu, moves us directly into the global context in assessing how the humanitarian organization Design Without Borders (DwB) denes a design decit in Bangladesh. According to the groups 2003 report, titled Design for Export-Oriented Production in Developing Countriescase Bangladesh, Bangladesh suffers from a lack of design because of a paucity of government interest, few trained designers, poor education and a limited sense of how radically transformative design thinking can be. Banu claims that the DwBs critique of Bangladesh uses denitions of design that are the product of the post-colonial context of that country. She notes how, The inability to realize a culture of design in Bangladesh can be understood by recognizing the historically situated colonial culture of production without identity. With its history of British rule and a complicated commercial past linked to the British East India Company, Bangladesh has long been part of what has been problematically conceptualized as the Third World, where local practices and processes have been deemed as inferior when compared with Western standards. Turning then to the work of Victor Papanek, Gui Bonsiepe and Victor Margolin, Banu investigates how design studies has explored the potential uses of design in the industrializing world. Each of these design thinkers raises concerns about the ethical implications of the way that design functions across borders and in relation to global disparities in economic capabilities. Margolin, in his essay Design for Development: Towards a History?, notes the incommensurability between an interest in sustainable design and the desire to develop those parts of the world labelled as undeveloped and thus as having a design decit.6 Like Papanek and Bonsiepe, Margolin points out the contradictions that arise when we try to posit conicting denitions of design in a global context. Thus, Banu looks to the philosophical work of Theodor Adorno and Hannah Arendt who helpfully suggest, through their analyses of how cultures use things, that design discourse becomes a proxy political discourse that parallels a normative denition and history of design with competing denitions and histories. In other words, the obsession with delimiting design through classication and practice produces a reductive logic in our shared human world. Using the example of current design practice in Bangladesh, Banu questions the DwBs claims. She considers Jute products, Nakshi Kantha and Jamdani sari as examples of local Bangladeshi design that can be further developed in a global context. In a provocative conclusion, she raises the possibility that current design praxis in Bangladesh can both challenge and extend the DwBs limited characterization. Banus essay is followed by that of Teal Triggs, who also wants to expand the scope of design history, but this time not by expanding geographical horizons, but by revisiting a professional eld, that of graphic design. Triggs claims that the history of graphics has not been central to the larger narrative of design history and graphics has, in short, been long understood as the design medium that deserves the least

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amount of attention. As the 1980s witnessed a number of books on other elds of design, such as industrial design, graphic design in general was not attracting the same attention for historians. Yet, recently there has been a growing interest in graphic design and the publication of several texts, including Johanna Drucker and Emily McVarishs Graphic Design History: A Critical Guide, which reveals an increasing concern with the historical milieu and social context that shape the eld.7 Triggs, however, wants graphic design history to go further and she suggests that design historians should assess the spate of independently published graphic design magazines. Indeed, Triggs embraces Dilnots charge about the imperative for historical contextualization and remarks that by examining these smaller magazines we can gain a better understanding of graphic designs current and past interests. Because these self-published periodicals offer a glimpse into the conversation that takes place between those working as graphic designers, they are a valuable archive. Through the use of popular culture theory that focuses on the importance of fan culture, Triggs unpacks a New Zealand-based graphics magazine called The National Grid. This periodical, which she includes as an example within a growing body of self-published journals, has a low press run and its independence from the mainstream allows its editors to focus on design issues not linked to the marketplace. The awards for serving vast corporate entities, whose coverage is so prevalent in most design magazines, are not the focus of The National Grid. Many of the writers who contribute to the magazine are professional designers whose writing tackles topics ranging from the banality of signage on university campuses to concerns about counterfeiting as understood through the writing of Michel de Certeau. These discussions, according to Triggs, provide a window of understanding into the discourse amongst designers that denes the design process from both a local and global perspective. In the context of these papers, which consider the changing scope of the eld, it is critical to question how the shifting nature of the discipline has affected its presentation to students who take design history survey courses. Sarah A. Lichtman claims that a tension exists in survey courses between the desire to include those works considered canonical (think, for instance, of the Wassily Chair) and larger thematic concepts that have also, of course, played an integral role in the production of design (think, for instance, of discussions about the history of gender disparity in relation to design education). There is, as Lichtman observes, no easy answer to this conundrum and different universities handle this issue in a variety of ways. Furthermore, with a growing acknowledgement of design histories that lie outside the purview of scholarship with a Western biasas Lisa Banu references in her enquiry into the idea of design in Bangladeshthere is an increased recognition of the imperative of teaching a survey that is more inclusive. Using the example of the course she teaches in her home institution, Parsons The New School for Design, Lichtman grapples with the complexities of constructing a history of design survey, recognizing the need for design to be taught not as a series of illustrated historical events to be memorized, but rather as a network of cultural systems integral to the histories of other disciplines, and relevant to practice. Creating a venue where art and design students can further their knowledge of their own practices, in the context of a class that offers a chance to engage with history, and theory is a complicated dance carefully choreographed at art and design schools all over the world. As we move well into the twenty-rst century, this nuanced conversation about what to survey and how to survey it will continue, and, as Lichtman rightfully claims, it is the teachers responsibility to help students understand more fully the deeper connection between thinking and making to make the enterprise viable.

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The teaching of design history to design practitioners in British art and design schools, by scholars such as Gillian Naylor at what was then Kingston Polytechnic, was instrumental in the origins of the eld. Grace Lees-Maffei traces this trajectory in the last of the four essays. Lees-Maffei identies the emergence, over the past three decades, of the productionconsumptionmediation paradigm, or what she refers to in short as the PCM. Beginning with a discussion of John A. Walkers emphasis on production and consumption, which he posited in his 1989 book Design History and the History of Design, Lees-Maffei notes that over the past two decades this model of enquiry has evolved into embracing other models of scholarship that changed the nature of the way in which design historians research and write. She traces the beginnings of design history, and its emphasis on production, to Nikolaus Pevsners 1936 book Pioneers of Modern Design.8 This classic text lauded exceptional designers and its celebration of those male designers deemed great led to a form of design history that dominated the twentieth century, namely a type of scholarship that could dene the work of designers and delineate design history as parallel to art history. Scholars who emphasize production, such as Penny Sparke, who wrote books that celebrated individual makers and also anonymous producers, helped to develop a canon of design history.9 As the eld progressed, critiques emerged that took design historians to task for not placing enough emphasis on historical context.10 Lees-Maffei points to Clive Dilnots 1984 articles as an early warning that helped the discipline formulate the imperative for a socio-historical understanding, as we have already mentioned. Indeed, Dilnots early critique of design history led to other debates, proffered by individuals such as Victor Margolin and Adrian Forty, about how best to dene the eld.11 Thus, the second tendency identied by Lees-Maffei, consumption, seems to answer this criticism by assessing the importance of context, focussing less on designers and more on how products and ideas were part of a larger market milieu. Through an engagement with different theoretical paradigms, gleaned from authors such as Roland Barthes, Dick Hebdige and Mary Douglas, those analysing consumption posited design as part of a system of meanings that gained symbolic import through the machinations of consumer activities. The nal piece of the puzzle is, according to Lees-Maffei, delineating the idea of mediation. She claims that to study mediation is to study the phenomena which exist between production and consumption. This third stream of enquiry in design history brings together issues of production and consumption, illuminating not only the importance of mediating channels...but also illuminating the role of designed goods as mediating devices: mediating identity, mediating between individuals; the world is mediated through objects which are designed. Thus, mediation allows for the inclusion of multiple discourses about makers, labourers and consumers relationships to design processes and products. Projects such as Regina Lee Blaszczyks important scholarship on Imagining Consumers: Design and Innovation from Wedgwood to Corning reveal that design is a multifaceted act where designers and consumers work together to mediate the production of material objects.12 And it is objects with which Lees-Maffei ends her essay, as she concludes by noting, The future of design history may depend on the successful alignment of object-based understandingthe hallmark of design historywith analysis of social-historical contexts. She comments that Dilnots plea from 1984 has been answered, yet the movement towards looking at the history of design through the lens of mediation has yet to be fully exploited. In his conclusion, Dilnot addresses three propositions from the essays as indicators of future possibility for the history of design. He begins with the idea of the Other, a word which is not found in Sarah Lichtmans essay yet, he argues, pervades it. The survey offers the potentiality for the unknown as much as for the

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known, for the use of pasts, not the past, to challenge the limitations of the present. If surveys are insufciently theorized, they provide an experience that is akin to attening the artefact, a proposition which can be drawn from Teal Triggs essay. Her subject, the little magazine as a text and also an artefact, offers the potential for a twofold commentary on history and design. Such conguration leads to mediation, Grace Lees-Maffeis interest, as a resonant internal relation both to design and to the history of design, lies in its value as a conceptual and methodological necessity and, for Dilnot, as economically directed. Dilnots third proposition is absence, drawn from Lisa Banus essay, which demonstrates how history may now require the ability to draw on a considerably more complex range of theoretical and methodological sources than has previously been thought necessary. In the case of Bangladesh, the issues opened cry out also for anthropology, cultural sociology and above all, development economics. Banu has shown how it might be possible to write the history of the absence of design as other than merely absenceand to write back into history that crucial mediation that Arendt amongst others has proposed. Dilnot asks provocatively if history has a future, is this relation its key? As Dilnot also points out, the post-Second World War years have witnessed both the golden age, or perhaps ages, of design, as well as a long goodbye to history. In this context, we can do no other but continue to re-evaluate the very nature of design and its history as a complex and multivalent task. Indeed, the articles in this issue raise conundrums that have dened and will continue to delimit the future possibilities of design history.
Hazel Clark and David Brody Parsons the New School for Design, New York E-mail: clarkh@newschool.edu; brodyd@newschool.edu

Notes
1 H. Clark & D. Brody (eds.), Design Studies: A Reader, Berg Publishers, Oxford, 2009. 2 See, for example, J. Walker & J. Atteld, Design History and the History of Design, Pluto Press, London, 1990. 3 Here, for instance, we are thinking of the journal Design Issues, as well. 4 J. Drucker, Whos Afraid of Visual Culture?, Art Journal, vol. 58, no. 4, 1999, pp. 3747. 5 C. Dilnot, The State of Design History, Part 1: Mapping the Field, Design Issues, vol. 1, no. 1, 1984, pp. 423 and C. Dilnot, The State of Design History, Part II: Problems and Possibilities, Design Issues, vol. 1, no 2, 1984, pp. 320. 6 V. Margolin, Design for Development: Towards a History, Design Issues, vol. 28, no. 2, 2007, pp. 1115. 7 J. Drucker & E. McVarish, Graphic Design History: A Critical Guide, Prentice-Hall, New York, 2008. 8 N. Pevsner, Pioneers of Modern Design: From William Morris to Walter Gropius, Pelican Books, London, 1960; 1936. 9 See P. Sparke, Elsie de Wolfe: The Birth of Modern Interior Decoration, Acanthus Press, New York, 2005. 10 Again, see, for instance, both Dilnot essays. 11 A. Forty, A Reply to Victor Margolin, Journal of Design History, vol. 6, no. 2, 1993, pp. 1312 and V. Margolin, A Reply to Adrian Forty, Design Issues, vol. 11, no. 1, 1995, p. 19. 12 Regina L. Blaszczyk, Imagining Consumers: Design and Innovation from Wedgwood to Corning, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 2000.

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