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In this history of the American open plan office, Jennifer Kaufmann-Buhler, an Assistant Professor in the Rueff School of Design, Art, and Performance at Purdue University, takes the reader on a jo... more...

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. more...

Modern version control strategies are highly capable at supporting the management of virtual artefacts. The process of developing a new product, however, is not limited to virtual artefacts. Today’s fast-paced industrial processes require a diverse range of both virtual and physical artefacts to explore, refine, and evaluate designs. These virtual and physical artefacts are interrelated, and the information they embody, the knowledge they generate, and the transfer of learning between are fundamental to the design history. Consequently, there is a requirement to capture and curate both virtual and physical artefacts, iterations thereof, and the interrelationships between. The Digital Twin paradigm couples physical and virtual artefacts throughout the product life-cycle, providing a means to capture an evolving design irrespective of the medium in which the designer is working. Recent literature has, however, raised questions about the concept of a Digital Twin early in the product life-cycle when the design in question is conceptual (a cognitive model) rather than physical or virtual. This paper reflects on the challenges of implementing Digital Twin-based version control in the early-stage of new product development, moving towards integrated version control of virtual, physical and cognitive models/artefacts. Firstly, by presenting an argument that current design practices capture cognitive models through stakeholder creation and evaluation of physical and virtual boundary objects, the ambiguity surrounding conceptual design and the Digital Twin is addressed. Secondly, the principles of the Digital Twin and current version control strategies are reviewed to determine how one can maintain digital/physical synchronicity as a design evolves. Finally, this paper reflects on the implementation of such an approach and the proposed future work. more...

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. more...

The rapid development over the past decades is the main difference between the history of design and the history of art and architecture. Due to the sensitive reaction to social changes, the history of design shows us evolutionary processes through the subject forms surrounding a person. The assumption that objects are a kind of cultural quintessence, demonstrating to us the level of technology development, consumer preferences, and methods of designing and shaping, reinforces the need for a comprehensive and multi-aspect consideration of evolutionary processes in the history of design. In this regard, the author refers to modern methods of considering historical and cultural processes and applies them to the history of design, taking into account the specifics of the object under consideration. As a result, the article discusses the transition from a monolinear approach to the consideration of historical processes to a multilinear one using the history of design as an example. It is proposed to study the history of design as a single multilinear process, consisting of relatively independent movements (lines) of design, linked into a single design and art system with common features (art-style, formal-compositional, etc.) and development trends. The conceptual historical and theoretical model of multilinear historical development of design reflects the specifics of design as a complex type of design and artistic activity and the features of its development at the modern post-industrial stage of society development. The article also formulates the basic principles of a multilinear representation of the history of design, such as "phenomenological principle", "historical-geographic principle", "phenomenal-geographic principle", "principle of interrelated design profiles", "principle of multilevel matrix", i.e. the principles forming the basis of the historical-theoretical model of design history. more...

Combination products (CPs), designated by the US Food and Drug Administration, continue to be on the rise, from the innovation of novel medicines and greater demand for injectable home and self-administration. CP qualification, its constituent parts or intended use, will depend upon the regulatory jurisdiction with reference to the product's primary mode of action. In the case of a drug product combined with a device, a consult or collaborative review process involving different Centers within the US Food and Drug Administration may be necessary. Policies and practices from different legislative branches of government will need to be merged for a single application. This presents a challenge for aligning information for the application dossier as it relates to a drug master file or drug-device CP design history file. A common objective for both pharmaceuticals and devices is to identify and evaluate patient risks to be mitigated, controlled, and managed across the drug product lifecycle. These concepts are reflected in the regulatory practices of pharmaceutical quality by design and device design controls. Early stakeholder engagement with this dynamic process between different regulatory paradigms becomes an advantage. This manuscript describes aspects for early planning for injectable drug-device development to facilitate time to market with patient centric solutions. more...

In this article, the history of visual communication design provides an area of thematic convergence. The research represented here engages typographic communication, an area of investigation familiar to the journal's readership. Yet its significance extends beyond illuminating the historical context of singular designs or designers. Collectively, the authors in this issue join a broader and sustained interdisciplinary conversation between design history and visual communication design practice. Situating their research relative to this shared context expands its relevance beyond their discrete areas of focus. At its inception, the history of visual communication design relied on the intuition of practitioners and the connoisseurship of collectors; its narrative prioritized aesthetic styles and eminent designers. The first sustained calls to move beyond such a conceptualization emerged in 1983 at Coming of Age: The First Symposium on the History of Graphic Design. more...

This paper reconstructs the design history of the Ayalon Crosstown Expressway in Tel Aviv, a project that initiated the technology transfer of American and European transport planning methods to Israel. It examines the unstable, evolving dynamics between agents pushing the technology such as the World Bank and international traffic planning firms, and local institutions pulling or opposing it such as the city, the highway company, and various competing governmental departments. The five successive plans developed for that highway by Canadian, American, French, and British planners offer themselves to comparative analysis of national design philosophies of urban highway systems. Through a close reading of the different geometric plans of one bifurcating interchange, the paper analyses how the technology was adapted to fit the Israeli political, administrative, and economic environment, and identifies a shift in highway planning rationality and techniques for governing mobility at the American source of innovation. more...

With products reaching the whole world and being sold by thousands or millions the responsibility of designers has never been higher. A design mistake can cause - among others - physical damages, high costs or pollution of diverse types. Each mistake has consequences, whether before or after sale to various actors (manufacturing company, users, recycling company, etc.) and has to be avoided. Research is starting to integrate environmental impacts within the Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) approach and particularly within System Modeling Language (SysML) as a tool to foresee design decisions according to previous gained knowledge. Following this, the research holds on existing foundations and proposes to extend current research efforts into a new SysML Assistant to capture the essence of product design and thereby support product development decisions. This paper focuses on the first part of the research, proposing design principles and warnings from requirements via the SysML Assistant. When facing a decision, designers can question the Assistant about examples of what had been designed before in similar or different domains. Depending on the request, designers receive, a formatted object containing several solutions or design principles (requirements, specification, use cases, test cases, warnings) for possible implementation. Various benefits are foreseen with the proposed research. First, a reduced design development time with an increased quality of products in the long term. Second, a reduction of product environmental impacts as well as repeated design mistakes. Third, an incentive to designers competitivity to achieve better design. more...

This study explores freeway interchange design as an example of traffic architecture. It reconstructs the design history of one bifurcating interchange along the Ayalon Crosstown Expressway in Tel Aviv, a project that initiated the transfer of American and European freeway technology to Israel. The different geometric configurations developed for the interchange were generated by the unstable, evolving relation among the expressway, city, and national economy and by a fundamental ambiguity within traffic engineering rationality. The realized interchange reveals the disparity among the semiotic, hierarchical concept of route continuity, the optimizing process of cost–benefit analysis, and memory-based spatial orientation. This interchange advances the interpretation of highway technology as a cultural technique that organizes driving activity into a series of switching operations within an informational grid, one that is at odds with the humanist construction of concentric, directional spatiality. Keywords: Interchange design, Traffic architecture, Urban planning, Technological transfer, Space and mobility, The Ayalon crosstown expressway more...

The purpose of this article is to gather and analyse the visual appearance and interface of “comprehensive design” within different historic, social and cultural contexts. As elaborated by R. B. Fuller in 1949, the “comprehensive designer” is "an emerging synthesis of artist, inventor, mechanic, objective economist and evolutionary strategist", who is to synthesize the knowledge produced by various fields of science and tries to bring balance to the world. The notion of comprehensive design can be seen as a way of designing in regards to and across both small and large scale design activities that perceive the world as an interconnected system. As to answer how this notion was visualized, the article will analyse the interfaces of “comprehensive design” including May’s New Frankfurt, Fuller’s “World Game”, Bonsiepe’s Cybersyn project and Archigram’s projects which seem to have high relevance in the contemporary efforts in designing a new type of sustainable city. more...

This chapter posits that design history, as a set of approaches, perspectives, and techniques, offers a powerful mode for undertaking histories of the contemporary. It suggests that the approaches and perspectives possible in the history of design – attention to lived experience, materiality, and the everyday; an understanding of experience as interface with artifactual environment; and a concern with the making and experience of the artifacts, environments, and experiences that shape our physical and emotional interaction in the world – might provide an effective net for catching and seeing that history. Combined with methods for communicating histories that activate such an understanding of affect as a designer would – or in collaboration with artist and designers – the chapter proposes that design history offers a powerful script for compiling and communicating histories of the recent past, and for relating those histories to decision‐making now. The intention is to invite historians working with contemporary questions and material to engage with design historical approaches, and to articulate avenues, tools, and challenges for researchers and students in design history, research and practice. To this end, the chapter draws primarily on evidence and literature in design history, with reference to methodological reflections on contemporary history. The chapter builds also on findings from British Academy-funded research (Design History of Now, 2013-14) that sought to identify, test, and develop tools and perspectives for contemporary design through scoping studies, literature review, workshops and structured discussions with design historians, curators and researchers. The chapter is organized in three sections. The first explores the temporality, scope, and subjects of contemporary design history. The second discusses methods, perspectives, and challenges for undertaking contemporary design history effectively. The third argues for the potential of contemporary design history, as an aggregation of approaches and perspectives, to contribute to history practice and public knowledge alike. more...

The professionalization of interior design has operated through several trajectories, including the recognition of professional status, the development of charters and codes, and the consolidation of technical and theoretical disciplinary bodies of knowledge. Much of this has resulted from a desire to differentiate and evolve beyond nineteenth century decorative design advice, and its associations with amateur practice. In this chapter we examine this relationship through disciplinary developments in interior theory and the corresponding shifts in professionalization. This is not to suggest the two are closely aligned, but to examine how their respective conditions have evolved relative to the theoreticization and positioning of interior design as a discipline in its own right. To assist this discussion we draw on three periods from the mid‐twentieth century to the present in order to explore how various developments have affected historical and theoretical formulations, and in particular the influence of women, gender, and identity on a discourse that is different than that in architecture. The chapter concludes with a tilt at future development in the digital age, and how new technologies, the Internet of Things, sensory data, digital fabrication, and design complexity will affect traditional understandings of the interior, when experienced from these new perspectives. more...

International audience; Shaping both the environment and the embodiment of the users in that virtual world, VR offers designers and cognitive scientists the unprecedented potential to virtually explore a vast set of interactions between persons, and persons and their environment. By design, VR tools offer a formidable opportunity to revisit the links between body movement and lived experiences, and to experiment with them in a controlled, yet engaging and ecologically valid manner. In our multidisciplinary research-creation project we ask, how can we design (virtual) environments that specifically encourage interactions between multiple persons and that allow designers, scientists, and participants (users or "immersants") to explore the very process of interaction itself? Building on our combined experience with dance improvisation research and interactive virtual spatial design, we document a multiuser VR experience design approach we name Shared Diminished Reality (SDR), where immersants are co-present and able to move together while their bodies and the environment are represented in a minimalist way. Our working hypothesis is that non-anthropomorphic embodiment of oneself and one's partner(s), combined with open-ended exploration, focuses the user's attention on the quality of the interaction and encourages playfulness and creativity. We present the articulations VR platform and its design history, as well as design evaluations of SDR in a laboratory setting and through a mixed reality performance, interrogating the impact of our minimalist approach on user experience and on the quality of the interaction. Our results suggest that minimizing (self and other) representation in Shared Diminished Reality positively impacts relational dynamics, induces playful creativity, and fosters the will to move and improvise together. more...

This case study looks at augmented reality (AR) flashcards used in a university-level classroom. The collaborative design effort used RtD and pulled from the outcomes of three prior case studies using AR in the classroom. This poster focuses on the latest case study. Using research through design (RtD) to develop various AR user interface (UI) for educators to use as a framework to augment classroom content aiming to improve learning outcomes for all students. The case study shows that more research is warranted, and there is a viable need for using AR in higher education humanities courses. more...

Inspired by a progressive vision of a working environment without walls or hierarchies, the open plan office has come to be associated with some of the most dehumanizing and alienating aspects of the modern office. Jennifer Kaufman-Buhler’s fascinating new book examines the history of the open plan office concept from its early development in the late 1960s and 1970s through its present-day dominance in working spaces throughout the world, examining the design, meaning, and use of the open plan from the perspective of architects and designers, organizations, and workers. Using the progressive vision of the early promoters of the open plan as a framework for analysis, and drawing on original archival research and contemporary discussions of the open plan, this book explores the various goals embedded in the open plan and examines how the design of the open plan evolved through the late 20th century in response to various social, cultural, organizational, technological, and economic changes. more...

This study analyses the professional life and work of Jose Brandao, the first educator in a BA in Design in Portugal, with a first degree in the field. Brandao graduated in Communication Design from the Ravensbourne College of Art and Design, London, and distinguished himself in the field of communication design, not only for the vast legacy of graphic works carried over 50 years, but also for his academic contribution to the creation of BA, Master and PhD courses in Design in the country. This study is focused on Brandao’s pedagogical experiences in Design, as a student and as an educator, as well as his contribution to the establishment of the first Communication Design course in public higher education at the Lisbon School of Fine Arts. The study also addresses Brandao’s pedagogical methodologies, in a context and at a time when this area was underdeveloped: Design courses in Higher Education were in their infancy, and the resources available for learning were scarce. The research methodology includes document analysis and ethnography, namely interviews conducted with Jose and Salette Brandao at their studio in Lisbon. This study was carried out within the framework of Wisdom Transfer: towards the scientific inscription of individual legacies in contexts of retirement from art and design higher education and research (POCI-01–0145-FEDER-029038); the research stems from the evidence that there is insufficient inscription of individual knowledge and experience of retired academics and researchers in art and design. more...

This paper joins an already vibrant discussion about the challenging nature of Participatory Design (PD) in British housing design. Through an analysis of a case study - Walter Segal's self-build method - it investigates how architects and residents fostered participation to engage communities in the decision-making process. The study suggests that participatory methods applied by practitioners let communities play an increasing role as driving forces for participation. In particular, it explores the relationship between the architect Walter Segal and Lewisham residents and simultaneously illuminates the structural and fundamental levels of PD through which housing design inevitably shapes the lives of its users. It demonstrates that PD processes in architecture require a design historical revaluation because they are significantly linked to material culture. In doing so, this paper highlights the correlation between design history and architectural practice as a possible platform for a reflection on the built environment and PD. more...

This chapter presents and discusses the historical development of PV-powered products, such as pocket calculators, lamps, and charging devices. The timeline goes from the 50s until 2015 and includes a comparison with product designs of “normal things,” such as televisions, lamps, and furniture. By zooming in to the historical development of solar-powered wristwatches, it is shown that a correlation exists between the appearance of a new technology, such as photovoltaics (PV), and the aesthetics of the dominant design movements. During the diffusion period of a new technology, such as PV, in society, the conformity of this technology to the looks of the prevailing design movements of these diffusion periods increases. At the same time that PV technologies became successful, PV-powered products’ features became less technical and started to looked more and more like “normal things.” This chapter is supported by multiple illustrations and photos of PV-powered products in the course of time, among which are wristwatches. more...

Modern manufacturing firms are more inclining to promote the product quality, save costs and reduce times of product design by both collaborative designing and model reuse. If CAD components constructed collaboratively have information representing their developers’ design intents embedded in the model, people’s understanding over the product should be improved and the product model should be best reused. Until now, capturing, recording and presenting design intents still remains a challenge. It has been shown by empirical studies that textual summarisations can lead to improved decision making. In this paper, we propose an approach to generation the natural language description about design intents of collaboratively developed product. The approach brings together techniques from different areas of collaborative designing, ontology and semantic network, and natural language generation. The language generation process is guided by an information model we established to give a structured description about design intents of collaboratively products. In order to record information related to the design intents, we build a common CAD model ontology and then generate a semantic network to describe dependencies, component structures and design history which are components of the design intent information model. The techniques of natural language generation, namely discourse planning and sentence planning, are adopted for the eventual linguistic generation of design intents. Finally, we use several case studies to prove the advantages of natural language in helping people better understanding the design intents. more...

The article identifies the graphic design periodization criteria and its development stages in the Arab countries. It is noted that the initial development stage of graphic design aligns with design history in general. The allocation of graphic art as an independent professional domain can be considered to be a specific characteristic of the protodesign period (8th–19th centuries). Certain specific elements of the Islamic decorative canon developed, particularly calligraphy, geometric patterns, and vegetal arabesques, and professional artists and calligraphers appeared during this stage. The second stage of graphic design development in the Arab countries is characterized by the period of colonial dependence and priority of the European cultural tradition (19th — first half of 20th century). This was connected with the establishment of applied graphic arts as an independent art form — book and advertisement design (pictorial signboards, political advertisements, posters, and event posters), bank note design, typographic letterheads, postal graphics, etc. This form of graphic design is connected with cultural borrowing and the lack of national traditions and professionals in the sphere of graphic design. The third stage goes back to the visual language of geometric patterns, arabesques and Arabic calligraphy as an all-Arab visual heritage. It marked the establishment of printing offices and printing schools, changes in aesthetics of the printing industry due to production computerization, the introduction of a graphic designer occupation, and similar major programs in Arabic universities. more...

Today’s success of industrial companies is largely determined by engineering competence and the digitization of all corporate processes. The design process and know-how of engineers is strongly individual and a rule-based description of their approach can often not be done at all or only with high effort. Existing knowledge can therefore only be passed on to other engineers with difficulty, which in particular increases the effort required for familiarisation. A further problem is the lack of an overview of existing components within a company, which very often leads to multiple designs and unnecessary waste of time for the engineer. The aim of this approach is to extract the implicit knowledge from existing CAD models with the aid of machine learning methods and thus to make it formalizable. In addition, a suitable classification and similarity analysis should quickly point out existing components. For this purpose, an AI-based assistance system is to be created. Based on the existing database, the assistant first points out to the engineer already existing, but very similar components. For that, the component type currently in construction firstly is identified and then very similar components are searched within the detected scale that are finally suggested to the engineer. The engineer now only has to parameterize the proposed components according to his application. In a further step, the assistant should also be able to suggest useful next design steps, which it has learned on the basis of the CAD data already available and their design history. The implicit experience knowledge that is contained in the existing CAD models thus ensures a design suitable for production and the avoidance of errors in the design. more...

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. more...

The authors recently executed a project in which we twice exercised the full product lifecycle of conceiving, designing, building, and testing a UAS. The process was fully instrumented, with a captured history of all key process metrics to include a full design history, software tools used, prototypes created, and person-hours performed per person and per task; all synchronized to key design reviews and events. The UAS were primarily constructed from additively manufactured polymer components, a technology that directly affected the product development lifecycle. All of the design/build raw product and metrics collected are being made available digitally to the design research community for analysis. This paper introduces the design process products to the community, presents a retrospective examination of the data collected during the design process, and provides summary results along with anecdotal lessons learned during the course of the project. more...

Guns are usually designed with great attention to their aesthetic, ergonomic, and functional component parts. Yet, their contemporary manifestations are considered so culturally and symbolically fraught – especially in the United States – that guns produced in the last century have rarely been presented as industrial objects worthy of sustained and close reflection within the context of a major design exhibition or art museum collection. This article considers the few recent exceptions, the legacy that curators and design historians have inherited and recently mobilized around guns in the design canon, and the future of public conversations in the art museum around contemporary intersections of design and violence. more...

Design historians generally avoid extended self-reflection or discussion of how they conduct research. Typically, they use historical research methods, yet design historians have also used methods borrowed from art history, cultural and literary studies, anthropology, sociology or other social sciences. This Virtual Special Issue, comprising articles drawn from past issues of the Journal of Design History, addresses the state of design history’s methodology. While few authors in the Journal have focused specifically on the topic of methodology, their implicit adoption of an eclectic variety of research methods over the past thirty years is revealing. This Introduction seeks to contextualize a collection of twelve articles within a brief overview of methodologies in history, art history and design history. The articles are then linked to scholarship beyond the Journal of Design History, and the final section presents additional methodological possibilities for design historians. more...

The legacy of colonialism in Australia has resulted in the devaluing and exploitation of Indigenous visual culture, design and representation. Through reinterrogating, revealing and documenting previously unacknowledged or omitted Indigenous contributions to communication design history in Australia, this article seeks to reposition examples of Indigenous visual culture as powerful sites of iconographic symbols, graphic forms and political posters. In this article, communication design as 'visual communication' is utilized as a framework to re-evaluate Indigenous contributions to Australian design history. This article presents a number of case studies of Indigenous contributions to communication design within a historical timeline, from prehistoric visual communication to twentieth-century examples-mirroring the development of the communication design industry. Parallel to the historical timeline, I note the emergence of recurring themes that are critical to the incorporation of Indigenous contributions into design history more broadly; notably effects of national politics, conflicted ideas around national identity, cultural ownership of work and the inclusiveness of the design industry. Through an applied retelling using a decolonizing historical paradigm, key Indigenous contributions are recognized and misappropriated work is repositioned, to acknowledge and give voice to Indigenous communication designs and their undeniable role in creating a national design style. more...

This is a book review of Plywood: A Material Story Christopher Wilk. London: Victoria and Albert Museum / Thames & Hudson, 2017. 256 pp.; 282 color and b/w ills. Cloth $ 30.00 ISBN 9780500519400. This paper was published in West 86th: A Journal of Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture, the definitive published version can be found via: https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/699505 more...

El rigor de la investigación sobre el diseño y en su misma actividad proyectual no conlleva necesariamente el requerimiento para la obtención de un 'empowerment' de las teorías de diseño. También los titubeos, los debates indefinidos, la inconsistencia de las reflexiones en las propuestas proyectuales, lo otro que no acaba de definirse, poseen su dignidad intelectual y cultural; quizás representan mejor tanto eso que llamamos' diseño' como eso que llamamos 'investigación en el diseño'. El presente trabajo expone parte de una investigación sobre la teoría del diseño, especialmente en referencia a la participación privada de dos mujeres de la historia del diseño clásico; Friedl Dicker-Brandeis; Marianne Liebe Brandt. Su finalidad es la de establecer el escenario básico en el que reconstruir posteriormente el aprendizaje que el diseño podría obtener de la filosofía feminista. more...

Since Postmodernism, presenting universal guidelines for aesthetics is highly suspect. However, aesthetics can play a significant role in the acceptance of technology and its success in society, so this paper argues for the generating of specific aesthetic guidelines, based on a general perspective. The goal of the research was to find a method of generating guidelines for the design of a technology to improve the diffusion of that technology in society. Aesthetic theories were generated by comparison of factors with historic precedents (the automobile, the television and the personal computer) The theories were then tested for the design of a social companion robot and a vacuum cleaner robot. From these two design cases it became apparent that the acceptance of both devices can be improved by, respectively, improving their conformity to contemporary design (the social companion robot), or improving their conformity to contemporary philosophy of technology (the vacuum robot). more...

Over the past decade, anthologies – also called ‘readers’ – of design history and theory have proliferated across publishers’ catalogues. These books perform important pedagogical functions: they define fields and establish canons of authoritative texts, authors and concepts. While detractors argue that the easy availability of textual sources online means that we no longer need anthologies, the opposite argument can be made: the overwhelming volume of electronic information sharpens the need for concise, edited selections. This paper examines the practices of selecting, editing and publishing anthologies and the reasons for their increasing popularity, particularly in design education, at the present time. more...

Industrial Design History is a basic course in industrial design college. It allows design students to develop products with greater insight as it relates to the historical perspective of the users. In Industrial Design History courses, teachers’ research methods in combination with new-generation designers and designers throughout history will achieve this goal. Despite the prevalence of industrial design history knowledge, there is still a lack of studies which address industrial design history education, which needs to be reflected upon. In this way, industrial design history teaching methods can be integrated into design education and practice. The purpose of this study is to show a case study in industrial design history teaching method “from styling perception to styling creation”. In the past 15 years, there has been considerable development of critical literature about design. Journals such as Design Issues, The Journal of Design History, etc., have demonstrated that design is a subject that can sustain critical discourse just as well as art, architecture, or literature. The conclusion includes a summary of key findings on the teaching of industrial design history. The significance of this case study is to further research into teaching methods of Industrial Design History as well as providing a common frame for the course. more...

Shortlisted for the Design History Society Scholarship Prize 2001-2002 What do things mean? What does the life of everyday objects after the check-out reveal about people and their material worlds? Has the quest for the real thing become so important because the high tech world of total virtuality threatens to engulf us? This pioneering book bridges design theory and anthropology to offer a new and challenging way of understanding the changing meanings of contemporary human-object relations. The act of consumption is only the starting point in objects lives. Thereafter they are transformed and invested with new meanings that reflect and assert who we are. Defining design as things with attitude differentiates the highly visible fashionable object from ordinary artefacts that are taken for granted. Through case studies ranging from reproduction furniture to fashion and textiles to clutter, the author traces the connection between objects and authenticity, ephemerality and self-identity. But beyond this, she shows the materiality of the everyday in terms of space, time and the body and suggests a transition with the passing of time from embodiment to disembodiment. more...

This chapter looks at the evolving Gothic of the Vampire role-playing games. It offers a brief explanation of role-playing games, defining their textuality in Bakhtinian terms—as ‘chronotopes’. It lays out the particular relationship that role-playing enjoys with the Gothic, drawing on Spooner’s postmodern “ludogothic”, and Kryzwynska’s sense of genre as defined by coordinates. But mostly, it summarises the Vampire game line’s complex design history, and offers a swift tour through Vampire’s various editions, charting how the game’s Gothic has evolved and, eventually, come to transcend itself over nearly thirty years. more...

Last year we initiated the use of Instagram into our design history course at an introductory level. This year we explored further integration of Instagram as an academic tool. This study included twenty-two undergraduate participants who prototyped five new classroom uses of Instagram: posting full student presentations, utilizing Instagram desktop view as the primary in-class presentation tool, employing templates enabling a cohesive visual identity and a simple search process, and methods to enhance student comments. We surveyed course participants mid-semester asking students about their personal Instagram use, the value and purpose they felt Instagram had in the course, and on the usefulness of the presentation templates. We learned that while the majority of students use Instagram in their daily life, few of them make comments on personal or course posts and will only do so for credit. We also learned that while students might not enjoy using Instagram in the course, they find it of value and highly meaningful. Finally, the students prefer using formatted templates over an open style like PowerPoint to build their presentations in. These templates enabled the students to post their full presentations and created a visual cohesiveness for the account while providing a rudimentary search process for individual posts. We will continue using Instagram in future courses with the exception of requiring comments. We believe that students will reference their class posts in years to come, and as they do, it will re-enforce their design knowledge and provide evidence of their personal growth. more...

In the first of a series of invited papers to mark the 20th volume of the Design Journal, founding editor Rachel Cooper reflects on the changing landscape of design research activity since the journal’s launch. more...

As part of a roundtable response to Peter Andersson's article 'How Civilized Were the Victorians', this paper argues that material culture studies can help us to articulate new historical narratives about the Victorian period. Post-structuralism helped to privilege linguistic representation to the detriment of direct analysis of material culture while approaches aligned to archaeology and anthropology enable us to rediscover the significance of physical matter and those who shaped it. The opportunities for learning how to study material culture are limited but could be enhanced through the heritage sector. As a case study, the paper examines the first selected edition of Tennyson's verse. The covers, layout and design of the book clashed with the poet's ambition of publishing a cheap edition for the working classes. The book generated a lot of profit and the selection provides evidence of Tennyson's attempts to be populist and patriotic. The posthumous description of this book, written by the poet's son, misrepresents the book as a philanthropic gesture to poor readers while it was in fact a moderately expensive book pitched at middle class readers. This interpretation of the book is only available though study of the artifact. more...

Due to the multiplicity of computer-aided engineering applications used in industry, interoperability between programs has become increasingly important. A 1999 study by the National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST) estimated that inadequate interoperability between the original engineering manufacturers (OEM) and their suppliers cost the US automotive industry over $1 billion per year, with the majority spent fixing data after translations. The Neutral Parametric Canonical Form (NPCF) prototype standard developed by the BYU Site of the NSF Center for e-Design offers a solution to this problem by enabling real-time collaboration between heterogeneous systems while preserving design intent. The NPCF is implemented within a SQL database and defines the schema both for neutral features and for the parameters defining the inter-feature relationships and associations. more...

Consumer understanding of the goods they consumed is something that is usually either taken for granted or overlooked in design history, which has tended to focus on production, distribution, consu... more...

In this paper we explore how the collaboration between Design Research and Philosophy of technology can be profitable for both disciplines. From three case studies where Philosophy of Technology theories and methods were applied in a design context we show how these projects profited from a more reflexive perspective. Then we analyse the three cases again to show how these design projects also lead to a better understanding from a Philosophy of Technology perspective. In putting the in principle rather abstract theories in design practice, the consequences become clearer and designing actual things thus provides a laboratory to test philosophical frameworks in real life. One can say that the Philosophy of Technology, besides thinking and talking, proceeds to action. Not only Philosophy of Technology with the head, but also Philosophy of Technology with the hands. Therefore, in analogy with the empirical turn in Philosophy of Technology before, we present this collaboration with design as the ‘Practical Turn in Philosophy of Technology’. In:Proceedings of DRS 2018: Design as a catalyst for change (Vol. I, pp. 190-200) more...

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. more...