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The role of British graphic designers and authors in spreading Swiss Style, “Swiss graphic design,” or “Swiss typography” internationally is evident, but less is known about the process and effects of transnational exchange in design. This article follows the trajectories of objects and texts, revealing how they have established and disseminated the labels in Britain and abroad, thus contributing to our current understanding of “Swiss graphic design.” It concludes with an example of alternative historiography of modern visual communication as a constant process of exchange that reveals the complex international interaction of design discourses.

Previous historiography of graphic design education in the mid-twentieth century is shaped by published theories and educational principles of a limited circle of design teachers. As a counterbalance, this article stresses the relevance of a marginalized source: design student magazines. It juxtaposes K and output, published in the early 1960s at the Basel School of Design and the Ulm School of Design. Both magazines intended to open critical debates at their schools, but took opposite paths regarding design, editorial concept, content of articles, and critical engagement with their respective schools' design philosophies. An analysis of their reception and context reveals the magazines' corrective potential for design education by raising crucial issues within the design discourse of the 1960s.

This 2000-word invited review discusses each chapter and the overall concept of Hendon and Massey's book, which brings out the use in many cases of a single object as a source of semiotic, social and political analysis. One of the things that emerges as most clearly “designed” in the volume under review is history itself. When Herbert Simon proposed in 1969 that “everyone designs who devises courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones,” he was thinking about designing the future. This volume emphasizes how we design certain pasts to suit and shape our chosen narratives. It is a truism of historiography that histories are selective and formative. What this fascinating collection adds is a perception that the design of history is as important as the history of design, and that it takes a multitude of forms both tangible and intangible. Those who succeed in designing the past may control the future.

Reflecting on arguments proposed in the article “Made in Patriarchy” ( Design Issues 1986), this article proposes that by re-viewing and re-searching design through the lens of women's experiences, we can think again about what design means and who does it to understand the potential of design as a vital component of heterogeneous everyday lives.

An edited presentation of an extended interview with the design historian John Heskett undertaken a few months after the publication of Heskett's Industrial Design (Thames and Hudson, 1980). Part One explores the genesis and structure of Industrial Design, as well as wider problems in the writing of histories of design. Part Two examines circumstances and tensions in regard to understanding the roles of design and the designer in the processes of industrialization especially with regard to emerging tensions between “production” and “consumption” and “industry” and “craft” in design historical understanding in the late 1970s/early 1980s.

An edited presentation of an extended interview with the design historian John Heskett undertaken a few months after the publication of Heskett's Industrial Design (Thames and Hudson, 1980). The first part explores the genesis and structure of Industrial Design, as well as wider problems in the writing of histories of design. Part Two examines circumstances and tensions in regard to understanding the roles of design and the designer in the processes of industrialization especially with regard to emerging tensions between “production” and “consumption”; “industry” and “craft” in design historical understanding in the late 1970s /early 1980s.

Design history tends to focus on designers and design outcomes, primarily objects. In contrast, historical accounts and analyses of designing are rare. This paper argues for the need of design histories that also address the origins of our design methods with respect to contexts, values and ideas in order to understand what these actually bring to the contemporary design situation. To illustrate what such a historical approach to design methods might bring, we present a study on the origins of Scandinavian user-centered design. In particular, we discuss the Home Research Institute's (HFI) development of methods for investigating and reforming everyday life and domestic work in mid-1940s Sweden.

Contemporary design is global. Along with international developments in higher education, the influence of post-colonial theory, and intellectual endeavours like ‘world history’, design historians are now writing Global Design History (to use the title of a 2011 edited collection). While the nation state is no longer the only socio-cultural or political-economic unit forming our identities and experiences—if it ever were—this article examines the value of national frameworks in writing design history and asks whether moves to discard them are premature. Are national histories of design dependent upon outmoded generalisations and stereotypes? Or do they demonstrate cogent frameworks for the discussion of common socio-economic and cultural conditions and shared identities? Globalizing design history involves writing new histories of neglected regions and nations and revisionist histories informed by the findings and methods of new comparative and global histories, of celebrated industrial nations.

Introduction As researchers and practitioners in the field of co-design, we are interested in design activism as a particular mode of engagement that denotes collaboration rather than persuasion. Co-design already has strong connotations to an activist ethos through its historical affinity with the more explicit emancipatory tradition of Scandinavian Participatory Design from the 1970s onward. In this paper we argue that some types of contemporary co-design practices embody a different form of activist agency—one that is experimentally and immanently generated only as the design project unfolds. First, the cases that we describe are delimited in a specific context—namely, the Danish public sector—and they use the co-design methods of the co-design research center at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, School of Design. Second, the type of political engagement that this paper examines is one that is intrinsic to the design process itself, rather than being directed by a priori political teloi. To begin a closer examination of such activist positions in co-design, we propose the notion of a minor design activism, inspired by the concept of minoritarian in the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari.1 We describe a minor design activism as a position in co-design engagements that strives to continuously maintain experimentation. Through this ongoing quest for displacement and change, a minor design activism challenges attempts to stabilize the initial design program around already unified agendas. A minor design activism is not restricted to certain marginal or non-commercial domains.2 In fact, both cases discussed in this paper are firmly situated within public policy-driven initiatives. As such, a minor design activism distinguishes itself from more general assertions of activism in contemporary design,3 insofar as this kind of activism works from within hegemonic public institutions and agendas. From this structurally embedded position and through open-ended experiments, minor design activism seeks to challenge prescriptive agendas and to reconfigure group relations. 1 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (London: Continuum, 2004); Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986). 2 Although providing an in-depth overview of activism in contemporary design is beyond the scope of this paper, the following definition of design activism proposed in the call for contributions to the 2011 Design History Society Annual Conference, titled “Design Activism and Social Change,” suggests that design activism should indeed “...distance itself from commercial or mainstream public policy-driven approaches. Instead, it embraces marginal, non-profit, or politically engaged ...articulations and actions.” “Design Activism and Social Change,” http://www.historiadeldisseny.org/congres/ (accessed November 21, 2013). 3 Alastair Fuad-Luke, Design Activism Beautiful Strangeness for a Sustainable World (London: Earthscan, 2009); Thomas Markussen, “The Disruptive Aesthetics of Design Activism: Enacting Design Between Art and Politics,” Design Issues 29, no.1 (Winter 2013): 38–50; Guy Julier, “From Design Culture to Design Activism,” Design and Culture 5, no.2 (2013): 215–36.

88 © 2015 Massachusetts Institute of Technology doi: 10.1162/DESI_a_00341 1 Under the title Design History Economics: A John Heskett Reader (Bloomsbury, London, 2015). 2 As Suzan Boztepe of the University of Copenhagen recently pointed out to me in an e-mail discussing Heskett’s work, the recent plethora of quasi-popular books on design success and the value of design in business beyond the product— books like Liedtka’s Solving Problems with Design Thinking: Ten Stories of What Works (New York: Columbia Business School Press, 2013); or Tim Brown’s Change by Design: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation (New York: Harper Collins, 2009) or Roger Martin’s book The Design of Business: Why Design Thinking is the Next Competitive Advantage (Boston, MA: Harvard Business Press, 2009) [and there are others like Vergant (2009); Zec (2011)]—focus much on stories and on the general case that ‘design driven innovation is a third alternative to market pull or technology push innovation, and has the potential of creating radically new products’ but do not confront design with economics per se. More surprisingly the issue is dodged, even in academic studies of design management: See for example, R. Cooper, S. Junginger, and T. Lokwood (eds.), The Handbook of Design Management (New York: Berg, 2011) where, as she puts it, ‘one would expect to see something on design + economics but doesn’t.’ Design from the Standpoint of Economics/Economics from the Standpoint of Design John Heskett Introduction by Clive Dilnot

Introduction In the past five years, in electrical engineering and design research, the electrical outlet seems to have developed advanced qualities, by reason of which it is now considered smart. Yet a closer look at its characteristics and history reveals that this little product has never actually been dumb; on the contrary, its affordances, form, and technology are the result of the efforts of many generations of inventors, engineers, and designers. It is therefore important to be clear about the type of intelligence implied by the term “smart.” The epithet “smart,” when applied to the electrical system and its components, refers to the concept of a new type of grid called the Smart Grid (i.e., the “Internet of Energy”).1 The term “smart” became more commonplace (in reference to the electrical system and its components) as the debate surrounding the theme of intelligent electricity management widened.2 This discourse about power borrowed the term “smart” from the field of computer science. The characteristics of an electrical outlet summarize not only the entire social and technical system of a nation’s electrical power grid, but also the political strategies and decisions contained in the energy agreements between different countries. The mere fact that the standards for electrical grids stop short of national borders speaks volumes about the trade relations and cooperation between foreign countries. These agreements have an effect on end users trying to connect a device to the power outlet, but only when that device is not compatible with the standards to which they are accustomed. The emerging Third Industrial Revolution will bring with it an intelligent power system,3 the main functions of which will be to promote a more flexible form of power distribution and to channel electricity from a multiplicity of producers into the market. In light of these coming changes, we can trace the salient phases of the development of the electrical system, as seen through the evolution of the power outlet. 1 A SmartGrid is an electricity network that can intelligently control the flow of power and data associated with it through the same power lines, using Information and Communication Technologies. For a detailed definition see Smart Grids European Technology Platform. SmartGrids: Strategic Deployment Document for Europe’s Electricity Networks of the Future; www.smartgrids.eu, 6 (accessed August 3, 2011). 2 In the United States, an intense debate about the need for a new, more efficient, and more intelligent management system of electricity began only after the August 2003 blackout in Ontario, Canada. A month later, in Italy, the largest blackout in the history of the country’s electrical system occurred. 3 For a definition of the Third Industrial Revolution, see Jeremy Rifkin, The Third Industrial Revolution: How Lateral Power is Transforming Energy, the Economy, and the World (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 1.

Introduction Advertising as a functional communication system, with a clear-cut goal of capturing the consumer’s attention and encouraging the purchase of the advertised product, typically consists of a visual image and a slogan. In analyzing the play of word and image in contemporary advertisements, this study looks to the conceptual changes that occurred in the relations between these two semiotic fields from the modern to the postmodern era, during which the mutuality and interaction between the two systems were modified completely. Within the realm of this extensive subject, this article attends to one particular element: the design of Japanese calligraphy and typography that, as argued by Gennifer Weisenfeld, is a visual mode of communication that functions on an aesthetic metalevel.1 Rather than presenting a survey of Japanese typographic design history, my intent instead is to show how the text itself becomes a visual image in contemporary Japanese advertising and how Japanese contemporary designers use calligraphy and fonts to create a meta-level visual communication mode.

The designer of the gun had clearly not been instructed to beat about the bush. "Make it evil," he'd been told. "Make it totally clear that this gun has a right end and a wrong end. Make it totally clear to anyone standing at the wrong end that things are going badly for them. If that means sticking all sorts of spikes and prongs and blackened bits all over it then so be it. This is not a gun for hanging over the fireplace or sticking in the umbrella stand, it is a gun for going out and making people miserable with. "1

Part 1: Concepts of Modern Design and Design Education in a Newborn Nation with an Ancient Culture. At the outset, let me say that what follows is based entirely on my personal teaching experience at the National Institute of Design (NID) in Ahmedabad since its founding in 1962. Its unusual but clear mandate was to equip young aspirants with design knowledge, skills, and attitudes to address design problems of a newly independent nation whose lifestyle still drew substantially from ancient cultural traditions. Besides responsibility for a faculty-training program in industrial design, I was entrusted with the task of formulating curriculum and course content for the proposed Professional Education Program at the undergraduate level. I became interested in design history, and discussions with my colleagues invariably centered on two obvious points. First, what the history of design meant in the Indian context in general and with respect to the NID education in particular. Second, if there was to be a course in design history, how should it be taught, since the new institute was dedicated to new forms of teaching and learning, where teachers created an ambience in which learning took place? Two developments: Chandigarh as the new capital of Punjab when international modern design arrived in 1952 in the form of Le Corbusier and associates; and the NID, where design education was established based on the proposal by Charles and Ray Eames,1 eventually helped define modern design in the Indian context. These are only two of many links in a long chain of transition that began with India’s independence in 1947, and her resolve to catch up with the rest of the world and to usher in modernity in the best sense of the word. There is an inescapable parallel between two kinds of superimpositions that took place at the same historical time: the imminent mechanization of carefully chosen craft production methods that must function smoothly along with their traditional counterparts, and the concept of modern design introduced with the clear objective of coexisting with traditional design ethos and idioms.2

From Visual Culture to Design Culture The past ten years of academia have seen the establishment of Visual Culture, Material Culture and, most recently, Design Culture as scholarly disciplines. Visual Culture partly has emerged from art history through its incorporation of cultural studies. Material Culture’s provenance is in a mixture of anthropology, museum studies, and design history. The term “design culture” has been used more sporadically, and not just in academia. It also has been employed in journalism and the design industry itself. But if design culture is to be consolidated as an academic discipline, what relationship would it have to these other categories and, indeed, to design practice itself? Given the foci of Visual Culture in images, and that of Material Culture in things, they should, theoretically, provide a scholastic springboard for Design Culture. Visual Culture is now firmly established as an academic discipline in universities across Europe and the Americas. It sports two refereed journals,1 at least five student introductory texts,2 and three substantial readers.3 Undergraduate and postgraduate courses have been established. While differing in their approaches, Visual Culture authors generally include design alongside fine art, photography, film, TV, and advertising within their scope.4 Visual Culture, therefore, challenges and widens the field of investigation previously occupied by Art History. This project was instigated in the 1970s within the then-called “New Art History.” Proponents turned away from traditional interests in formal analysis, provenance, and patronage to embrace a more anthropological attitude to the visual in society. Henceforth, all visual forms are admissible into the academic canon—a notion spurred on by the rise of Cultural Studies, Popular Culture Studies, Media Studies and, indeed, Design History. As the academic discipline of Visual Culture emerged through the 1990s, its central concern was the investigation of the relationship between the viewer and the viewed. Nonetheless, despite this apparent openness, this article contends that the methods of Visual Culture have limited use for developing an understanding of the cultural role of contemporary design in society. Victor Margolin previously has suggested the need for doctoral-level studies of design and culture.5 In essence, 1 The Journal of Visual Culture (Sage, founded 2002) and Visual Culture in Britain (Ashgate, founded 2000). 2 For example, see Malcolm Barnard, Approaches to Understanding Visual Culture (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001); Richard Howells, Visual Culture: An Introduction (Cambridge: Polity, 2001); Nicholas Mirzoeff, An Introduction to Visual Culture (New York: Routledge, 1999): Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright, Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001); and Visual Culture: An Introduction, John Walker and Sarah Chaplin, eds. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1997). 3 For example, see Visual Culture: The Reader, Jessica Evans and Stuart Hall, eds. (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2001); Nicholas Mirzoeff, The Visual Culture Reader (New York: Routledge, 1998); and The Feminism and Visual Culture Reader, Amelia Jones, ed. (New York: Routledge, 2003). 4 Malcolm Barnard, Art, Design, and Visual Culture: An Introduction (London: Macmillan, 1998) includes some short references to design. 5 See Victor Margolin, “Design History and Design Studies” in The Politics of the Artificial: Essays on Design and Design Studies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002).

The young designers of developing nations are faced with conflicts of diverse kinds. Like many other young designers graduated in the recent past from the meager number of design schools in India, I belong to this community and have experienced the conflicts of opposing design ideals. Why is it that the informally trained design ers of today, the many street artists and local craftsmen, continue to produce culturally entrenched designs effortlessly, while the formally trained designers cannot produce culturally-rooted contemporary works? And yet they consider local crafts, traditions, and skills of visual depiction as "nondesign." A country with a glorious design history today is considered best only at craft products, many on the verge of extinction. Why do the formally trained designers consider the local designs and manifestations of vernacular culture as inferior and taboo? Why do all congregations of designers in the country vociferate about the lack of design appreciation and design illiteracy in the Indian population in spite of the existence and history of a diverse visual culture and languages?

© 2012 Massachusetts Institute of Technology DesignIssues: Volume 28, Number 2 Spring 2012 1 OED Online, s.v. “activism, n.” and “reform, n.2 and adj.,” http://www.oed. com (accessed November 8, 2011). 2 Alastair Fuad-Luke traces a history of design activism, but not a shift from “design reform” to “design activism,” in Design Activism: Beautiful Strangeness for a Sustainable World (London: Earthscan, 2009), 33-54. Reflections on Design Activism and Social Change Design History Society Annual Conference, September 7-10, 2011, Barcelona Grace Lees-Maffei

There is little doubt that, in the last twenty years' discussion, the historical culture of industrial design has made a significant contribution to put important theoretical issues into focus; first of all, that of the definition of the discipline and its field of action. I am thinking of, for example, the debate conducted in publications and periodicals,2 the birth of associations, the multiplication of opportunities for international encounters,3 exhibitions, and events in museums. These phenomena are familiar to all, so there is no reason to discuss them at length here. As often has been the case for other areas of study, historical research has turned out to be a preliminary, basic condition for the very nature of industrial design as a culture, a context, and a discipline. Without attempting to retrace the fertile discussion that has taken place on an international level, we should at least mention that the results achieved have been very useful in a wide range of directions, especially for the identification of prevailing historiographic models, the identification of new ones, the expansion of the area of investigation,4 and the refinement of research methods. And while many, perhaps a great many, fields have yet to be explored or have been overlooked, many new perspectives have appeared. I would like to briefly indicate at least three points I feel emerge more than others, and that, in my opinion, are crucial: the relationship between historical research and design research; innovation as a key of interpretation both for history and for design activity; and the role of historical research for design. As we can see, these are wide-ranging arguments. What prompts me to discuss such themes is not the pretense of providing in-depth insight each of them. The fact of the matter is that they are closely interconnected; only their mutual interrelations can give a complete sense to my line of reasoning. Therefore, all I can do is to develop, for each of them, a few lines of working investigation (which have emerged in my work first in the doctoral program, then in teaching and research activities in the Industrial Design course of the Politecnico of Milan), illustrating their points of contact and cross-fertilization. 1 Raymond Queneau, Una storia modello (1966) (Torino: Einaudi, 1988), 6-7. 2 Although it is familiar ground, I would like to recall the important role in the design history debate played, in the past and present, by magazines such as Industrial Design, Stile Industria, Design Issues, Design Studies, Joumal of Design History, and Culture Technique. (some of which still exist, fortunately). Here, I would like to call the reader's attention above all to Design Issues of Spring 1995, entirely devoted to the question of the history of industrial design. In my opinion, it represents an indispensable turning point for the theme discussed here. 3 After the first Convegno internazionale di studi storici sul design held at the Politecnico of Milan, 1991, we can mention the first International Conference on Design History and Design Studies, "Design History Seen From Abroad: History and Histories of Design," Barcelona, 5th Spring of Design, 1999 April 26-28. and the Second Scientific Meeting of Design Historians and Scholars, Havana, June 2000. 4 1 am thinking of the fundamental area of the history of visual design, connected in an increasingly aware manner to the history of products, companies, and institutions; autonomous co-protagonist of a design situation in which certain sectors are encountering a blurring of the boundaries between product design and graphic design. But I am also thinking about the emergence of the historiography of "peripheral countries" and the questions it raises concerning the dominant, AngloSaxon approach to historiography. ? Copyright 2001 Massachusetts Institute of Technology 24 Design Issues: Volume 17, Number 4 Autumn 2001

of Art and Design, Helsinki, Finland, in September 1996. Introduction: Is Design Research of Second or Third Order Quality? Should researchers in art and design adopt and adapt methodologies developed in other academic disciplines, or should they concentrate on developing original methodologies which recognize the distinctive quality of discovery in art and design? Although the answer to this question is complicated by the broad spectrum of subjects currently being pursued under the aegis of art and design research (a Ph.D. by thesis' in, say, design history on an aspect of costume obviously will employ very different methodologies than a Ph.D. by project 2 in ceramics which explores the development of new glazes in the key area of action research by project3 and, in particular, in those projects in which the end product is an artifact which, in effect, embodies the essential research, the need to develop and to legitimize original research methodologies seem essential. While it is well documented that much original research in the various spectrum of disciplines follows a similar path, a variety of factors seem to be threatening the self-confidence of some students pursuing action research by project. The most important of these obstacles seems to be the academic blueprint inherent in the Ph.D. qualification, its demand for originality, for methodological rigor in the production of explicit data, for a defense of the reliability and validity of the research methodologies employed, for "transparency" of method, "replicability" of results, and the transmissibility of the final outcome of the research project. These requirements, of supreme importance to the legitimacy of the Ph.D. qualification in academia, can clash with artists', craftspersons', or designers' suspicions about what might be termed the "demystification of process" in creative work. In addition to this ideological conflict, action researchers by project in art and design face the familiar problems of finding suitably qualified and sympathetic research supervisors, and of negotiating the economic and political discrepancies between the entrenched research cultures of universities and those of colleges of art and design in which the idea of research continues to remain vague and contentious. The danger in all of this is that perplexed researchers in art and design will opt to "play it safe" and, rather than risking the 1 The research degree "Ph.D. by thesis" is a conventional written Ph.D. of 80,000 words. 2 The research degree "Ph.D. by project" consists of a major element of practical research supported by a minor element of related text of between 25,000 and 40,000 words. 3 Action research is research in which the process of making or designing an artifact constitutes the methodology.

Introduction-Formulating the 'Problem" The Art and Design Academic Registry (ADAR) figures for students in design courses in England and Wales show a consistent pattern of gendered choices. Women are under-represented in product and furniture design, and over-represented in fashion and jewelry.' This discrepancy reproduces the stereotypical dualism whereby women are associated with the body and the decorative, and men with technology and the shaping of nature.2 The dichotomy of "hard" and "soft" is not unique to design, and there is a complex relationship between disciplinary cultures and gender.3 The unbalanced recruitment across design courses has sustained itself over time despite more than two decades of feminist deconstruction of the categories, and concerted equal opportunities policies in schools. Moreover, the overall profile of women in the profession is poor. Designer Liz Farrelly4 reports on a mysterious absence at the cutting edge and a reluctance of young women in design to identify themselves with issues of women's under-achievement and stereotyping, or to be associated with feminism. The pages of the major trade journals reveal a picture of a profession which, despite the success of some women, portrays itself as highly individualistic and overwhelmingly male. We are interested in the ways women, and men, are attracted into different areas in design education and, in particular, the pattern of women's under-representation at the industrial and product end of the spectrum. However, it would be a mistake to try to conceptualize the "problem" of women in design as one of women's failure. In schools, girls have begun to outperform boys in many areas.5 Well qualified young women, it appears, are in a position to exercise positive choices, but are not attracted to the "hard" end of the design spectrum. Our approach is influenced by a substantial body of work from other discipline areas.6 Gerda Siann,7 investigating patterns of gendered choices in computing education, has identified an "I can, but I don't want to" attitude in women towards information technology courses. She suggests that it is not that young women cannot do science and technology, but that they find what is offered unattractive. The drift away from computing is an international trend.8 There is also evidence in the literature that equal opportunities 1 W. Mayfield, "Women's Participation in Product Design Education," The Journal of Design and Technology Education 2:2 (1997): 128-133. 2 J. Attfield, "FORM/female FOLLOWS FUNCTION/ male: Feminist Critiques of Design" in J. A. Walker, ed., Design History and the History of Design (London: Pluto, 1989), 199225. 3 K. Thomas, Gender and Subject in Higher Education (Buckingham: SRHE, 1990). 4 L. Farrelly, "Mysterious Absence at the Cutting Edge," Eye 5:9 (1995): 6-7. 5 C. Gipps and P. Murphy, A Fair Test? Assessment, Achievement, and Equality (Buckingham: Open University Press, 1994). 6 See, for example, A. Durndell, "The Persistence of the Gender Gap" in Computing, Computers, and Education 16:4 (1991): 283-287; A. Durndell and P. Lightbody, "Gender and Computing: Change Over Time?" in Computers and Education 21:4 (1993): 331-6; C. Greed, Surveying Sisters Women in a Traditional Male Profession (London: Routledge, 1991); A. F. Grundy, Women and Computers (Exeter: Intellect Books, 1996); and R. Lander, and A. Adam, eds., Women in Computing(Exeter: Intellect Books, 1997). 7 G. Siann, "We Can, We Don't Want To: Factors Influencing Women's Participation in Computing" In R. Lander and A. Adam, eds., Women in Computing. 8 R. Wright, "Women in Computing: A Cross-National Analysis," in R. Lander and A. Adam, eds., Women in Computing.

Imagine "design criticism" as the space for developing an unrestricted and sometimes playful form of writing on design, a writing which could be quite distinct from the more obviously practical or serious-minded concerns of most design history and design theory, and which would certainly throw into question the privilege traditionally given to the claims of both history and meaning: this will be the direction of my initial remarks. In their introduction to the "Design History or Design Studies" debate of 1995, the editors of Design Issues began by seeking reasonably safe ground on which to discuss a historical writing on design. To this end they offered the following "minimal definition of history: to provide an account of the facts about a subject," which they imagined that "most historians and readers are likely to accept as a beginning." 2 Minimal as it may be, it will, nevertheless, strike those of us who are sympathetic to poststructuralism's critique of history and of "facts" as a contentious definition. One reader who might well refuse it outright is Eugenio Donato, and it is his words which will begin to lead us away from the familiar territories of history and meaning. Donato's 1979 essay "The Museum's Furnace" focused on Gustave Flaubert's hapless characters Bouvard and Pecuchet, and on their frantic succession of failed attempts to collect knowledge and expertise from the texts, objects, and institutions around them. Drawing on certain correspondences between what is known of "the objects that caught Flaubert's fancy" on his own visit to the Great Exhibition of 1851, and the willfulness of his characters' interpretation of museum displays (what impressed them most about the cedar in the Natural History Museum in Paris, writes Flaubert, "was that it had been brought over in a hat"), Donato expresses his conclusion without compromise: "As for the past of our globe or of human societies, it is given to us only in the form of senseless fragments without a memory, and any attempt of ours to reconstruct a history is nothing but vain fabulation."3 It is perhaps apt that it is a fictional text, and a subversively ironic one at that, which provokes this statement. If history, with its positivist claims to objectivity, can even be imagined to collapse 1 Adam Phil lips, Terrors and Experts (London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1995), xiv. 2 Richard Buchanan, Dennis Doordan, and Victor Margolin, "Introduction: Telling the History of Design," Design Issues, 11, no. 1 (1995):1. 3 Eugenio Donato, "The Museum's Furnace: Notes Toward a Contextual Reading of Bouvard and Pecuche(' in Josue V. Harari, ed., Textual Strategies: Perspectives in Post-Structuralist Criticism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1979), 225, 220, 231. See also Derek Attridge, Geoff Bennington, and Robert Young, eds. Post-Structuralism and the Question of History(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). ( Copyright 1997 Massachusetts Institute of Technology Design Issues: Volume 13, Number 2 Summer 1997 65

Footnotes begin on page 80. Air transportation is one of the distinctive and most influential developments in our century. Civil aviation transformed the experience of travel for millions of people, and profoundly altered our sense of time and distance as obstacles to be overcome in getting from one place to another. Aerospace museums celebrate aircraft as designed objects as well as engineering accomplishments, and they are included in important museum collections of design (figure 1). Yet, the work of industrial designers for the aviation industry is among the least known, and least researched of topics related to transportation in our era. For whatever reason, there is no real chronicle of industrial design for aviation, and what we know of the subject is filled with inaccuracies. While preparing an exhibition and catalog on architecture and design for commercial aviation, I encountered numerous difficulties in even finding basic documentation on designers and what they did. Even the careers of famous practitioners such as Raymond Loewy and Henry Dreyfuss, despite the existence of archival materials on their lives, proved difficult to accurately trace when it came to their work for airlines and aircraft manufacturers.' Inadequate documentation is a nagging problem throughout the wider, somewhat young field of design history, which seems to place great emphasis on discussions of theory and method in an

Design History and Design Studies Since its emergence as a distinct field of academic study in the 1970s, design history has been subject to considerable criticism from many quarters; whether at the hands of scholars working within the general framework of the discipline but seeking to redefine radically its goals and broaden its ambit1 or academics concerned with different academic fields, such as anthropology, who criticized trenchantly the limitations of the design historical work which they had encountered;2 as well as others who should have been well-placed to review the position of design history as a legitimate area of pedagogy, research and publication.3 Victor Margolin4 falls into this latter category, particularly with regard to his 1992 article "Design Hstory or Design Studies: Subject Matter and Methods."5 The reason why I wish to draw particular attention to this text is that it misrepresents the academic health and identity of design history (at least in Britain), understates the increasing opportunities for specialist design historical study at undergraduate and postgraduate levels and largely overlooks the growing body of valuable research, exhibition and publication work in the field.6 Secondly, since it seeks to colonize design history under the imperial umbrella of design stud

Indeed, I will take as a reference starting point some customary given units (like psychopathology, or medicine, or political economy); but I will not locate myself inside these doubtful units so as to investigate their internal configuration or their secret contradictions. I will rely on them only the time needed to ask myself what kind of units they are; what right they have to claim a domain that specifies them in space and a continuity that isolates them in time; according to what laws they shape themselves; on the background of which discursive events they stand out; and if, finally, they are not, in their taken-for-granted and almost institutionalized individuality, a surface phenomenon of some more substantial units. I will only accept those units presented by history to immediately put them under close scrutiny and in doubt; to untie them in order to possibly recompose them more legitimately; to know if one should not reconstruct new ones; to replace them in a more general space and, by erasing their apparent familiarity, to include them within a theory. Once these types of immediate continuity are suspended, a whole domain is indeed liberated. Michel Foucault1

Ultimately-to use an intellectually compromised and politically discredited word-we are all probably investigating what (in Adrian Forty's words) "we are able to say about the actions of individuals as social beings." Design doesn't exist for its own sakemuch to the disappointment of unreformed Modernists and some curators of white cubic museum. It exists, instead, in real lives, real situations, real places, and real time. Modernist designers, of course, believed that they were treating design as a means to an end of a social project. The most committed of Modernists, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, declared: "Not the product, but man, is the end in view." But the Modernist conception of "man" (let alone woman) left much to be desired because men and women inevitably failed to live up to the Platonic perfection of phileban solids and beautiful forms. It was Reyner Banham who pointed out that the proof of the pudding is in the eating, not in the design of the dish. Banham's Confucian-like wisdom was uttered in the 1960s; and his influence was felt profoundly, if sometimes grudgingly, by the first generation of design historians in the 1970s. Victor Margolin is right in his dating of the shift from a Pevsnerian, Modernist approach to design history, to a Banhamesque one around this time. The design criticism that Banham was publishing in New Statesman and New Society, beginning in the 1950s, opened up the study of design history to include almost anything from the design and graphics of cigarette packaging, through television puppet series, to Argentinean decorated buses. This shift was not the result of Banham's writing; rather, the writing was, itself, a symptom of a paradigm shift resulting from the explosion of an urban, sophisticated popular culture. Design objects (and graphics, too) were no longer seen as derivations (whether stylistically or intellectually) of architecture, but of fashion. Fashion initially provided the new model because it was constantly in a state of change, and thus it was essentially ephemeral. What mattered was not its intellectual content, integrity and zeitgeist credentials; but its visual impact and appropriateness to particular-and temporary-circumstances. Banham (and others of the Independent Group generation) taught us that design history was not concerned with a particular class of architecture-related objects deemed by high-minded writers as worthy of serious consideration. Instead, design history could concern itself with what previously had been dismissed as trivial

As an academic subject, design history received a strong impetus in the early 1970s, and yet there is still little that can gain recognition for the subject as a solid field of study. Firstly, the subject matter has been fluid. Beginning with strong influences from the decorative arts, scholars expanded the subject matter to include popular culture, military technology, and womens' work in the home. There are problems with attempting to establish a fixed subject matter for design history and its fluidity therefore prompts its to include it within a larger field of design studies that can posit design as a powerful theme around which diverse inquiries related to history as well as the contemporary situation can be organized.

As so often happens in intellectual debates, Victor Margolin and Adrian Forty seem to be working at cross purposes in their exchange of views on design history. The issue of defining the discipline, which both of them address, affords a good example of this apparent absence of common discourse. Over the years Margolin has been an active promoter of design history as an academic field-and more recently of design studies. While he views definition as a liberating process that would enable scholars and critics to work within expanded horizons encompassing all of the artificial structures of human contrivance, Forty considers the very project of definition as a narrow-minded exercise in compartmentalization, creating limiting borders "thrown up and policed by academic separatists." Taking advantage of the last word in the debate, Margolin responds that he would rather "clear a new site for research" than "mov[e] fences around in fields that are already tilled." Here are two scholars with differences of opinion so extreme that they embellish their comments with politely sarcastic barbs. Even more indicative of their apparent lack of common ground is an exchange of views focusing on the use of "good design" as an organizing concept for design studies. Sketching out a brief historiography, Margolin points out that Nikolaus Pevsner's emphasis on aesthetic evolution arbitrarily excluded a good part of the designed world as beyond the pale of a whiggish or progressive historical narrative. Choosing to interpret Margolin's unremarkable statement of a commonly accepted point as a symptom of amoral, relativistic, post-structuralism, Forty maintains that design history must indeed discriminate between good and bad, because its practitioners must assist designers and consumers alike in the making and selecting of quality in the things of everyday life. It is here, on the issue of design history's relevance to the present practice of design, that Forty and Margolin actually occupy common ground. From the perspective of a historian, this is such a crucial and controversial point that it is hard to imagine how they can think of themselves as being in fundamental disagreement. To introduce a discussion of this central issue of their exchange, I would like to refer to a collection of essays published in 1939 by sociologist Robert S. Lynd, best known for the study Middletown, which portrayed ordinary Americans as no longer making a living but instead "buying a living" (and thereby assem

In The Journal of Design History (also appeared Arttu 6/1992) Adrian Forty took considerable issue with my article "Design History or Design Studies: Subject Matter and Methods" which appeared in Design Studies (also appeared Arttu 5/1992). Forty wants to defend design history as it is currently practiced and suggests that I have not recognized the field's accomplishments. He states that a concern with design quality is a central topic for design historians and he defends the historian's concern with quality as a contribution to the consumer's understanding of how to discriminate between good and bad design. In doing so, he presumes a common understanding of what is intended by the word "design." I disagree with Forty and this is precisely the point of my critique. I noted in my article that from the beginning the boundaries of subject matter in design history were slippery. There is a huge gap, for example, between Pevsner's celebration of the Dessau Bauhaus building and Reyner Banham's promotion of Archigram's "Instant City" in the 1960s. And much that we can call design has not even been considered by design historians. I claim that design history has not addressed the issue of subject matter boundaries and by neglecting this topic have thus heavily relied on traditional categories of objects established by art history and decorative arts as powerful determinants of historical narrative. I certainly don't mean that design historians have not embraced products of the contemporary world such as electric appliances and automobiles, nor that they have accepted traditional methods of interpretation, but I do believe that these early categories, have had a strong influence on the field. My concern is that design history has not developed a selfconscious process of questioning its subject matter and asking why the particular objects that constitute the bulk of historical research should be the primary one studied by the field. I have also argued in the past that design history has not been able to lay exclusive claim to the things it does study because it has no distinctive methodology or methodologies that have grown from the unique experience of research in the field. Forty says that "some of the most interesting work in design history recently owes its interest to the influence it has received from other disciplines." He mentions anthropology and cultural studies as two examples. But what then makes the work produced under these influences design history rather than cultural studies or anthropology? This is

Translated by John Cullars. Design is a discipline related to both economics and the environment. This makes it possible to explain the birth, development and eventual decline of certain episodes in design history, such as the Werkbund and the Bauhaus in Germany, the Triennale in Milan, l'Ecole Boulle in France, the Arts and Crafts Movement in England, and l'Ecole du Meuble [School of Furniture Design] in Montreal. In recent years, the Ecole du Meuble has become one of the most widely discussed of these cases, even after more than thirty years of oblivion following its closing in 1958.1 This movement, more than any other, shows how economic and cultural considerations-in this case those in Quebec-determine the development of schools of design. The Montreal Ecole du Meuble originated in 1930 as a section of the cabinetmaking workshop of the Ecole Technique [Technical School]. It became autonomous in 1935. These were crucial years, especially for the Bauhaus and the dissemination of its ideas in the West. The Canadian school wanted to propose an ideology that was distinct from the German. In the Ecole, the rejection of industrialization became programmatic. It decided that craftsmanship was a cultural patrimony to be reclaimed. In fact, this goal, opportunely brought up to date technically, and formally, would become a profitable productive activity for the whole Province of Quebec. The polemic for craftsmanship as opposed to industrialization was articulated in the 1930s, in contrast to the German experience of the Werkbund and the Bauhaus. This proved to be the winning ideology, not just from a formal point of view, but also economically and structurally. Craftsmanship was assumed to encompass manual ability and executive skill, the propaedeutic quality necessary for the industrial realization of the object. Considering the changing needs of the market, large-scale production appeared to be the best way to meet the demand. These two episodes, however, though apparently antithetical, reflected a common will aimed at a single objective-a formal revision of the object as an embodiment of the spirit of the times. In 1989 in Montreal, the first exhibition

Aluminum is one of the ubiquitous metals of the late twentieth century. Designers have used aluminum for everything from aircraft design to cookware; objects as diverse as skyscrapers and lunch sandwiches have been wrapped in aluminum. This pervasive presence of aluminum in the designed environment is not, of course, the result of chance or coincidence. Starting in the late 1940s, the American aluminum industry embarked on a remarkably successful campaign to promote the use of aluminum. Even a brief review of this campaign, such as this essay offers, can be rewarding for design historians and practitioners. A case study of the design activity sponsored by the American aluminum industry affords historians the opportunity to explicate the complex relationship between design and industry in the modern era. A review of the place and role of design in the American aluminum industry also challenges historians to distinguish between the emerging field of design history and other scholarly disciplines such as the history of technology or business studies. In order to understand the dynamic role played by industrial designers within the American aluminum industry after World War II, several questions need to be answered

Parts of the present paper were delivered at the 1985 College Art Association meeting, Design History Forum. The material is drawn from the author's M.A. thesis: Beate Ziegert, "The Debschitz School, Munich: 1902-1914," Syracuse University, May 1985. The bibliography, No. A1492, The Debschitz School, is available from Vance Bibliographies, P.O. Box 229, Monticello, IL 61856. The information contained in this study includes some privileged material obtained through family archives; Wilhelm von Debschitz was the maternal

1) Barbaralee Diamondstein, in "Pushing Future Directions in Modern Design," Art News 76 (September, 1977): 44, quotes department chairman Arthur Drexler's characterization of automobiles as "floating, hollow sculpture." What Is Modem Design? Edgar Kaufmann, Jr.'s, 1950 statement of the museum's design philosophy (Introductory Series to the Modern Arts, no. 3 [New York: The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1950, 1978]), actually compares, using photographs, Brancusi's "Bird in Flight" with a vertical propeller blade and stainless steel knife (enlarged to scale). The helicopter, highly publicized, became the collection's virtual signature piece at the time of the opening. 2) Arthur Drexler, in "Architecture and Design," The Museum of Modern Art, New York: The History and the Collection (New York: Abrams, 1984), p. 387, writes that the collection is organized to "emphasize the continuity and transformation of ideas, rather than the disruption of tradition.... Now that modernism itself has assumed the status of an historical event, the greater depth and variety of the present collection accord well with a growing interest in the origin of ideas, and in the design alternatives that have begun to seem attractive When the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in New York City reopened in newly expanded quarters last year, much of the press commentary centered around and rejoiced in the fact that the museum's basic character had not significantly changed. True, the physical plant was larger, allowing for the display of far more material, but the intimate scale of the galleries and their visibly clean, squared-off spaces (once one left the somewhat grand, glassed-in Garden Hall) seemed very much the same. This was still the optimum viewing environment for the museum's checklist of modernist masterpieces (Van Gogh's "Starry Night," Picasso's "Desmoiselles d'Avignon," Matisse's "Red Studio," and others) to be closely, judiciously inspected in more or less chronological sequence with full comprehension of their formal and stylistic values, said even the most apprehensive MOMA watchers. The Architecture and Design galleries, relocated to the fourth floor of the new west wing and infinitely more spacious, also emerged basically unscathed in the expansion. Although the press concentrated mostly on counterpart galleries in painting, on close inspection, the architecture and design section's physical ambience, generic object type, and didactic intent, like those of the painting section, have remained virtually intact. MOMA's traditional lionization of industrial design as art in a Brancusismooth propeller blade, bright red Cisitalia automobile, and deliciously compact orange-and-green helicopter suspended above the up escalator at the gallery entrance are immediately recognizable. l Inside the galleries, MOMA's particular view of design history again unfolds along a discrete exhibition platform and in well-spotlighted display cases. Here, as if lifted from the pages of Nikolaus Pevsner's Pioneers of Modern Design, are forerunners, exemplars, and first cousins of classic modernism: gracefully curvilinear bentwood furniture by the Thonet Brothers; planar constructions by Charles Rennie Mackintosh, Gerrit Rietveld, and Frank Lloyd Wright; machine-age chrome classics by Miis van der Rohe, Marcel Breuer, and Le Corbusier; trendsetting stackables, molded designs, and unit furniture by Alvar Aalto, Harry Bertoia, Eero Saarinen, and Charles Eames; and a myriad of later variants of taut, functional furniture, such as Mario Bellini's Cab armchair of 1977. 2 Shining home appliances and commercial products appear in display cases opposite, exhibiting an almost breathtaking sheen and confidence of good workmanship. A partial list includes such "stars" as Peter Schlumbohn's Chemex coffeemaker (1941), Achille and Pier Giacomo Castiglioni's red-encased vacuum cleaner (1956), Marco Zanuso and Richard Sapper's minimalist black-cube television set (1969), and Jakob Jensen's steely, authoritative Beogram 6000 turntable (1974). Design in these galleries is presented as a kind of post-Victorian triumph of logic over excess, technology over handicraft

Pauline Saliga, Editor On June 10, 1987 Corry Hiebert, the contract furniture manufacturer based in Irving, Texas, sponsored a design symposium at the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts in Chicago. The symposium, which was a benefit for the Department of Architecture at The Art Institute of Chicago, took place during NEOCON, the vast contract furnishings exhibition held annually at the Merchandise Mart in Chicago. The focus of the symposium was on museums and how they might best collect, exhibit, and educate the public about design. The intent was for the panelists to discuss the standard problems with collecting and exhibiting design that museums have traditionally faced and to pose innovative ideas and solutions to those problems. Dr. Victor Margolin, Assistant Professor of Design History at The University of Illinois at Chicago and co-founder and editor of Design Issues, chaired the panel. The distinguished panelists were Robert Cadwallader, President of Cadsana, a firm in Greenwich, Connecticut, that markets high-quality furniture and design products; Beverly Russell, Editor-in-Chief of Interiors magazine; Michael Vanderbyl, Dean of the School of Design at the California College of Arts and Crafts and head of Vanderbyl Design, a graphic design firm in San Francisco; Massimo Vignelli, President of the New York design firm, Vignelli Associates and President of Alliance Graphique Internationale; and Pilar Viladas, Senior Editor of Progressive Architecture. In his introduction to the panel discussion, Dr. Margolin read a short introduction to set the stage for the discussion to follow. Excerpts from his introduction follow: As interest in architecture and design continues to grow in the United States and abroad, there is clearly a role for the museum to play in providing a forum for the presentation and discussion of these subjects. This challenge is being taken up, not only by art museums, but also by museums and exhibition centers especially dedicated to architecture and design. These include, for example, the National Building Museum and the Renwick Gallery in Washington, D.C., the Cooper-Hewitt Museum in New York, the Centre de Creation Industrielle at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the International Design Center in Berlin, and the new Museums of Architecture and Decorative Arts in Frankfurt. In addition, quality design is to be seen increasingly in the growing numbers of [design-oriented] stores such as City here in Chicago, and numerous other places including showrooms of various companies. The Art Institute of Chicago is now exploring ways of expanding its concern with architecture to include design as well. It is our hope that the panel discussion this evening will clarify issues and provide some ideas that will be helpful in this process. In considering the role of the art museum in presenting design exhibitions, there are at least two large questions that should be

Design history is understood here as various and competing explanatory models of design. As with other emergent and established forms of institutionalized knowledge and practice, it exists in and produces conditions of marginality. The aim of this paper is to explore such conditions in the context of the rise of design history in Australia. To engage in such an exploration productively, a complex geography must be put in place and traversed. There are two elements of this exercise: one is an exposition, in general terms, of what is meant by marginality; the other, an acknowledgment of how the notion of geography being put into play is marked by the spatial, the social, the historical, and the economic, as expressed in and by relations of exchange. Marginality has most commonly been configured in a binary model in which it is the "other" of centrality. Two ways of viewing this configuration dominate. One poses marginality on the geographic edge of a metropolitan center, in either national or international terms. The second view has, as its basis, power, rather than location. Being on the edge of centers of political or economic power thus becomes defined as powerlessness, irrespective of physical distance from any center of power. In many ways, Australia has had a history of marginality to the dominant forces that have shaped the world economic and cultural order, both in political and economic terms. Another way of thinking about marginality must also be acknowledged here. In this additional formulation, marginality is a condition of isolation, inbetweenness, and ineffectuality. This model depends upon a unified center, thus no simple binary

Nonetheless, the book provides a record of some of the most invigorating contributions that British designers have made to graphics, fashion, interior, and product design over the past 10 years or so and is lavishly illustrated throughout. There is a useful section on Designer Biographies, complete with references, and a bibliography which provides further relevant material. As a piece of historical insight the book clearly has flaws, but as a document which may provide future historians of British design with some interesting and exciting material it will certainly validate its place on library shelves. Design history as a subject area of academic integrity has developed in many interesting ways in the curricula of the specialist undergraduate and post-graduate programs in the few British higher education institutions in which it is practiced. Students approach the subject from a variety of angles, are often at home with primary sources of some complexity, and would recognize many of the historical and methodological shortcomings in the plethora of "design history" books that are flooding the bookshops. It is to be hoped that their understanding of design in terms of meaning, production, retailing, consumption (and history) will eventually provide some corrective to the continuing deluge of books on individual stars, organizations, and styles. The problem is perhaps that the commissioning and publishing of "design history" is too often allied to the expectations of the design profession, itself much concerned with success, media profile, and profitability. Presentation rather than content appears to be the dominant factor in design historical publication, and so the future health of the subject, concerned as it is with many wider and more significant issues, may well lie in the forging of closer links with other more appropriate fields of expertise and rigorous inquiry.

1) Clive Dilnot, "The State of Design History, part I: Mapping the Field," Design Issues I (Spring, 1984): 4-23. 2) According to Stephen Bayley (In Good Shape [London: Design Council, 1979]), it is the art form of the twentieth century. For Victor Papanek, it is the "conscious effort to impose meaningful order." (Design for the Real World [London: Paladin, 1974], 17.) For Terrence Conran, the founder of the Habitat range of stores in Britain and now chairman of the Habitat-Mothercare group, design has proved to be the key to an immensely profitable business. What bedevils design discussion is that we pretend that the differences do not exist. The fact that