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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...

Many Chinese cities have witnessed the introduction of Western town-planning ideas, modernity, and new townscapes. Dalian in Liaoning Province, North of China, is one of the earliest cases. International urban planning and design were transplanted and imposed by the Russians and the Japanese during the late 19th-century colonial period, which shaped Dalian’s unique urban forms and are still visible today. At the same time, Dalian was advertised as a tourist city because of its naturally endowed scenery and strategic position, while it took time before proper tourism planning was developed for the city. With the global trend of sustainable development and collaborative planning, various stakeholders including regulators, producers, and users of the urban space, are gaining increasing attention in urban planning and design. However, the conflict among stakeholders brings new challenges to the city. This paper reviews and reflects on the urban planning and design history of Dalian. Through the analysis of Dalian’s planning and design at different development stages, it reveals how the city’s distinctive urban features were shaped, evolved, and formed under the influence of national and international theories. 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...

What was more important to consumers in seventeenth-century Ireland: the fashion or the function of their silver? This article disentangles the multiple and complex motivations informing the robust acquisition and consumption by individuals and institutions of a wide-ranging assortment of silverwares. Using the body of extant plate and a large array of documentary sources, this article poses and addresses several questions that have hitherto received little or no attention in the literature: How was silver used in seventeenth-century Ireland? Can we dismiss or prioritise the use value of items ostensibly acquired for symbolic, ceremonial or commemorative purposes? Did design and decoration matter? And, if so, how did this impact on value and utility? By answering these questions, this article evaluates plate as a material simultaneously facilitating functional purposes and expressing taste. This article uses these conclusions to generate a greater understanding of early modern Irish consumer society and the role of silver within this society. more...

This introductory essay highlights the key themes that appear in the four essays that make up the special issue: ‘Complex Interior Spaces in London, 1850–1930’, which focuses on street markets, rai... more...

Bandung is the capital of west java province in Indonesia. It was referred to Paris van Java because of the beauty. Nowadays, since access to the city of Bandung is easier both domestically and international, Bandung become the travel destination. Like other travel destination in Indonesia, Bandung known as shopping and culinary tourism destination. To differentiate Bandung with other destination city in Indonesia, it need a differentiator that will help to characterize the city. A character design that used as a soft tourism campaign is needed. It will become the ambassador to persuade the target market to come and love Bandung as a city tourism destination. First of all, mascot will be a good way to represent and branding the city. The mascot should be developed to represent a culture and positive image of the city and become the pride for its citizens. Object of this study was Cepot from wayang golek Sunda. The Research covers visual aspects, philosophical and ideological. Every character designs are influenced by the culture. Each culture has different visual traditions with different ideological backgrounds. The best approach before make a character design, is to recognize the character design in every culture. How a culture affect the human figure and its visual style and the living creatures. The character culture can be found in its design history, anatomy and story. It become the basis of the new character creation. 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...

The international style of Bauhaus was intended as a promotion of a new lifestyle and way of thinking. This promotional character of modernism, however, was an issue of critique and debate among the Danish modernist designers and architects over decades. They tried to define Danish modern design as product of a national tradition of modest, user-centred objects. As the Bauhaus directors also fought against the reduction of their project to a ‘Bauhaus Style’ or a commercial fad, this was perhaps a fight on words. Beyond the ideal of modest, no nonsense object convincing users through their mute form only, promotion did, of course, had to be part of Danish modernism as well. The design had to be conspicuous in its simplicity through some kinds of presentation to sell to a broader public. Especially in the writings of the Danish architect and cultural criticist, Poul Henningsen, we find a constant negotiation of the two sides of this issue, as he made rather advanced explanations and advertisements for his famous lamp system, the PH-lamp. more...

In his most recent book, Ory Bartal, an associate professor of design history at the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem, builds upon and develops his ongoing exploration of postwar Japa... 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...

Although some historians say that design history is neither linear nor easy to grasp, it definitely has its own autonomy and phases of emancipation. Design has always been in line with its mission: to improve or at least maintain the “habitability” of the world in all its dimensions: physical/material, psychological/cognitive/emotional, spiritual/cultural/symbolic, etc. In order to understand the impact of design in the last two centuries and its influence on the development and evolution of homes, this chapter is organised into three sections. The first one presents at a large scale the history of design as a humanistic approach to technologies and emphasises the political role of design in different societies. Once the general context of this discipline is explained, we show in the second section an evolution of homes as symbolic elements of different ways of living and future projections. The third section shows methodological approaches from design to explore the future of emerging technologies such as robotics and artificial intelligence (AI) in the global ecosystem of the home. 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). 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. 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...

Design Beyond the Canon is an exciting anthology of fourteen scholarly essays covering a wide range of mostly European and US topics. The book is a product of a 2015 summer institute sponsored by t... 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...

It seems remiss that while New Zealand’s design prowess continues to impress globally, the indigenous and cultural knowledge that has for centuries inspired and informed aesthetic languages worldwide has not been recognised for its contribution. Forgotten, or perhaps conveniently ignored, is the praise of both the New Zealand Māori and Pacific people’s use of nature’s harmonies to achieve beauty in aesthetics made in 1852 by education and aesthetic reformist, Owen Jones (1809 -1874) in his seminal and determinative work, The Grammar of Ornament. In order to reinstate Jones’ claim, this paper asserts it is critical that we revisit design’s history from a less Eurocentric perspective. This offers an opportunity to debunk the counter-claim that indigeneity was counter-productive to the development of modernity. By recalibrating design’s history with a more accurate and culturally orientated compass, the contributions made by indigenous knowledge to the endeavours of some of design history’s most iconic contributors becomes tangible. Having made these connections, this study will introduce Māori and Pasifika ideologies of time, space and connectivity to demonstrate a pathway forward in which this knowledge can be understood, acknowledged, respected and most importantly appropriately included within design’s histories, current practices and future endeavours. 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...

This article explores the advent of the China Design Museum (CDM) in Hangzhou, placing the architectural design of its physical museum space, its collections, and exhibitions in dialog with Chinese governmental policy. Drawing on oral histories conducted with CDM staff and supported by exhibition observation and analyses, this study demonstrates how the CDM concentrates much of its activities on the Bauhaus, following the acquisition of some 356 Bauhaus-related objects purchased in 2011. The article exemplifies that while the institution’s curatorial approach may appear transnational at first, its methodology is in fact imbued with contemporary national concerns, which have significantly informed the museum’s strategy towards design history. 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...

Conceptions of cultural diplomacy and the increasing profile of ambassadors of design have featured in the design media of the last two decades. Two principal lines of enquiry underpin this article: one that emerges from the direct experience of influencing design policies and formally becoming a design ambassador; the other from a design historical perspective that suggests that links between design policy, practice, and diplomacy have been in place for many years. The roles of design, cultural diplomacy, and soft power are considered in the light of national presence and profiles in world’s fairs and expos. Also discussed is the shift in outlook of international design associations away from their original campaigning concerns about recognition of the professional status of industrial and graphic designers towards their desire to play a “global” ambassadorial role in promoting the power of design as a major instrument of change across industrialized and emerging world powers. 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...

This chapter shifts the focus to the broader post-war design culture. It considers the way in which urban design and planning met challenges similar to those encountered by administrative justice and human rights during the same period and explains how alternatives to the priorities of individual user, system and closure were expressed in the values of community, network and openness. The post-war vogue for Scandi-design, the celebrations of the Festival of Britain and the contested territory between the ‘new humanists’ and the ‘new brutalists’ emerge as directly relevant to contemporary options for administrative justice in an age characterised by a ‘digital by default’ mentality. more...

Le design s’etend aujourd’hui a tous les champs de la vie, professionnelle et personnelle. Le terme « design » ne concerne plus seulement la realisation de meubles ou de vetements mais recouvre egalement la sphere de la communication et de la vie de tous les jours. Le sac en bandouliere des freres zurichois Freitag, realise a partir de bâches usagees de camion, est plus qu’un simple sac, c’est un mode de vie au message clair : j’achete des produits a la ligne simple, gage d’individualite. Pra... more...

This chapter reconsiders the adoption and adaptation of the style in the UK, combining approaches taken from design history and recent work in the study of the contemporary interior with reference to Hollywood Beyond the Screen: Design and Material Culture (Massey 2000). The adoption of Art Deco in the UK in the 1930s is complex and came at a moment when the global presence of Britain and its Empire was coming increasingly under threat. The contemporary, British perception of Art Deco was that it represented a heady combination of superior French haute couture styling and American commercial success. Although it was seen as a threat by cultural commentators, who instead promoted its antithesis, modernism, there is no doubting its popularity amongst the lower middle and working classes. The chapter then conducts a detailed analysis of rooms in the Regent Palace Hotel. more...

Testing the Roles of Design History and Affordances in the HIPE Theory of Function Sergio E. Chaigneau (schaigne@uta.cl) Departamento de Psicologia, Universidad de Tarapaca Av. General Velasquez 1775, Arica, CHILE Lawrence W. Barsalou (barsalou@emory.edu) Department of Psychology Emory University, Atlanta, GA 30329 Two views currently dominate theories of object function. According to the affordances view, function arises from an object’s structure and use the object’s design history is relatively unimportant. According to the historical view, function reflects the intention of an object’s creator structure and use are relatively unimportant. A new view, the HIPE theory, integrates the affordance and historical views, proposing that function cumulatively requires history, goals, structure, and use to be complete (Barsalou, Sloman, & Chaigneau, in press; also see Chaigneau & Barsalou, in press; Chaigneau, Barsalou, & Zamani, 2002). Three experiments in Chaigneau (2002) tested the HIPE theory. In each, participants read scenarios that described an artifact’s design history and physical structure, along with an agent’s goal and actual use. After reading a scenario, participants either rated how appropriate a name was for the object ( mop ), how well the scenario illustrated a category’s function (mop), or how likely the scenario was to cause the functional outcome (sopping up spilled liquid). In the baseline scenarios, all four components were intact. In the critical scenarios, one or more components were compromised. Design history could be accidental instead of intentional; the goal to use the object for its function could be absent; the physical structure could be insufficient; the action could be insufficient. As predicted, Experiment 1 found that compromising each component reduced an object’s functionality relative to baseline, consistent with HIPE’s prediction that all four components are cumulatively necessary for a complete function. However, compromising structure and use generally produced the largest decrements, consistent with the affordances view. Furthermore, design history was more important for naming than for function and causality judgments, consistent with the causal link between history and naming in historical theories. Experiment 2 tested the historical view’s assumption that design history is causally sufficient for function. If so, then compromising any other component after compromising history should have no effect. Compromising goals, however, produced an additional decrement, consistent with HIPE’s cumulative view. Experiment 3 explored the finding in recent experiments that history is more important than structure and use in naming (e.g., Gelman & Bloom, 2000; Matan & Carey, 2001). In these studies, however, the scenarios lacked sufficient detail about structure and use to derive affordances, thereby leaving history as the most informative factor. When sufficient information was provided so that participants could derive affordances, history became much less important for naming than structure and use. Overall, these three experiments support three conclusions. First, function is a cumulative construct. Second, affordances are more central to this construct than history, although both are cumulatively important. Third, history is particularly important for naming, and less so for understanding function conceptually and reasoning about it causally. Acknowledgement This work was supported by National Science Foundation Grant SBR-9905024 to Lawrence W. Barsalou References Barsalou, L.W., Sloman, S.A, & Chaigneau, S.E. (in press). The HIPE theory of function. In L. Carlson & E. van der Zee (Eds.), Representing functional features for language and space: Insights from perception, categorization and development. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Chaigneau, S.E. (2002) Studies in the conceptual structure of object function. Doctoral dissertation, Department of Psychology, Emory University, Atlanta, GA. Chaigneau, S.E., Barsalou, L.W. (in press). The role of function in categorization. Theoria et Historia Scientiarum. Chaigneau, S.E., Barsalou, L.W., & Zamani, M. (2002) Function as a multimodal relational construct. Manuscript in preparation. Gelman, S. A., & Bloom, P. (2000). Young children are sensitive to how an object was created when deciding what to name it. Cognition, 76, 91-103. Matan, A., & Carey, S. (2001). Developmental changes within the core of artifact concepts. Cognition, 78, 1-26. more...

In this article I interrogate the complex relationship between nature and culture by examining how tropical nature and raw materials were conceptualized and displayed in the nineteenth century. I do so by discussing a display of tropical wood mounted by the Empire of Brazil for the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1867. The reception of this display in Europe is analysed through Karl Max’s ideas on the gendering of nature and commodity exchange, through the concept of tropicality, and through Claude Levi-Strauss’s binaries of the raw and the cooked, which help reveal how natural materials were commodified into things themselves. Broadly, I am interested in putting ‘nature in our official past’ and bringing key concerns from environmental history studies to the fore, to bear on studies in design history. 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...

Este artigo propõe um conjunto metodológico para pesquisas em história do design a partir da análise de materiais impressos. Durante anos de trabalho, os pesquisadores do Laboratório de Design: História e Tipografia, da Universidade Federal do Espírito Santo, revisitaram, aprimoraram e desenvolveram diferentes estratégias metodológicas no intuito de investigar a história do design local. O objetivo deste artigo é apresentar a metodologia do Laboratório, comentar algumas experiências aplicadas do método e discutir a contribuição do design da informação para a pesquisa em história do design.This paper proposes a set of methodological procedures for design history research from the analysis of printed materials. During years of work, the research team of the Laboratory of Design: History and Typography (LadHT), from the Universidade Federal do Espírito Santo, located in the Southeast of Brazil, reviewed, refined and developed different methodological strategies in order to investigate the local design history. This paper aims to presents the lab methodology, comment some applied experiences of the method and also discusses the contribution of information design to the design history research. more...

This article interprets the work of cultural theorists Steven Connor and Sianne Ngai in terms of their efforts to reevaluate certain key presumptions of aesthetic theory that inherits the surprisingly resilient biases of the 18th century, in particular the work of Immanuel Kant and Edmund Burke. Focusing on the work of Ngai and Connor, I think through the implications this recent theory has for the previously peripheral position occupied by gustatory taste and the cultural objects and experiences it implicates. I discuss the possibility that ideas and examples drawn from the work of Connor and Ngai might form the basis for an alternative area of analysis that is better adapted to the peculiarities of gustatory taste and the culinary. In particular, I argue that the visceral element, which tends to accompany gustatory taste, ought to be interpreted in terms of its generative contribution to the creation of concepts through metaphor, rather than as a muddying influence that prevents clarity of discrimination. Similarly, the close relationship between the edible and the domestic is deserving of a more generous reading than is commonly found in aesthetic theory underwritten by the categories of the sublime and the beautiful. Tom Lee is a lecturer in design history in the Faculty of Design, Architecture and Building at the University of Technology Sydney. He has a PhD in comparative literature, focusing on the innovative syntax of WG Sebald and has published on topics including cemetery design, environmental aesthetics, literary lists, Peter Sloterdijk and the prose of Cormac McCarthy. Tom was the 2014 recipient of the Marten Bequest Travelling Scholarship for the category of prose. Keywords: aesthetic theory; proximal senses; minor aesthetic categories; Sianne Ngai; Steven Connor; mass culture; gustatory taste; thing theory (Published: 19 July 2016) Citation: Journal of Aesthetics & Culture, Vol. 8, 2016 http://dx.doi.org/10.3402/jac.v8.32022 more...

The article examines one of the unique aspects of design – the national component. The history of design demonstrates to us the importance of the national component in the formation of object-based shaping, its development in the industrial and post-industrial eras. In the conditions of post-industrial design, the role of the national component is growing and is increasingly revealed in its various directions, from object design to design of the urban environment. Through the prism of the interaction between national and international components in design, we can scrutinise design’s entire history. Using specific examples, applying phenomenal-geographical and synergetic approaches, the authors formulate the main models of the evolution of the national component in the design of different countries. As a result, 6 models of interaction of the national and international components in the subject design of the twentieth century were identified. They are «the constant of the national component», «transformation (expansion) of the national component into the international», «synchronization of the national and international components», «replacement of the national component with the international», «conglomeration of international and national components», «autonomy of national and international components». Graphic visualizations of models of countries – design nations are presented on the example of Japan, USA, Germany, Italy and Scandinavia. more...

This paper considers some examples of creative glass practice and research at the &lsquo, overlap&rsquo, of two distinct sectors of art and design&mdash, &lsquo, glassmaking&rsquo, and &lsquo, printmaking&rsquo, The unique properties of glass mean that printed imagery can be applied on the glass surface, encapsulated within the glass form and can even be made of glass. Case studies are given relating to each of these areas. In particular, the article offers some reflections on the development of glass and print over the last twenty or so years. These reflections are based on the author&rsquo, s perspectives as an artist, teacher, and researcher. Following a historical overview, case studies are given on the work of Kevin Petrie, Rachel Welford, Miyoung Jung, Jeffrey Sarmiento, and Kathryn Wightman. All of these makers are associated with the Glass and Ceramics Department of the University of Sunderland, UK, based in National Glass Centre, but all have made wider impacts beyond the UK. more...

This chapter provides a re-assessment of still relatively unexplored aspects of design history –ceramics- and examines the ‘contingency’ of modernism in Britain in the 1930s with both regional (Stoke-on-Trent) and metropolitan (London) perspectives. The chapter highlights the intricacies of debates about decoration and modernism and elucidates the ‘gendered’ responses to design of key critics such as Pevsner and Forsyth. It contributes to the rethinking that has taken place regarding the nature of modernism in Britain. A thread running through Buckley’s four RAE outputs is the relationships between centre/periphery; regional/metropolitan; and north/south. This adds depth to understandings of modernism and modernity; and gender and class identities. This essay appears in a well reviewed subject-defining anthology that brought together key figures working in the area. The author has made a significant contribution to these debates over time –both nationally and internationally. The history of ceramics remains an important area of Buckley’s on-going research activity, and new papers are planned, for example on inter-war ceramic ‘fancies’, taste and class (part of a new edited collection Best Things. Taste, Class and Design ), plus publication of existing conference papers (e.g. ‘The Point of the Pot: Early Studio Ceramics and the ‘taste’ for early Chinese and early English ceramics in The Burlington Magazine , 1900-1920’, ‘Visual Culture and Taste in late Victorian and Edwardian Britain conference’, Northumbria University, July 15-16, 2004). PGR students working on related subjects - David Campbell’s PhD ‘Place, Image Space and Pleasure: the seaside resort in the North East 1919-1939’ (Sept 2002) -Michael Johnson ‘Architectural Taste and Patronage in the NE of Eng 1870-1914’ (full-time AHRC studentship Sept 2005). more...

Este ensayo explora cómo la dimensión de género contribuyó al trabajo de los medios de comunicación impresos que transmitían información sobre el diseño y los diseñadores estadounidenses en diálogo con la artesanía vietnamita, y los artesanos refugiados durante la Guerra Fría estadounidense en Vietnam. En gran medida, los estadounidenses que participaron en el programa de ayuda a la artesanía del Departamento de Estado en Vietnam del Sur promovieron los beneficios de la ayuda a la artesanía, y su apoyo se basó en la política. Sin embargo, la política de la diplomacia estadounidense en relación con Vietnam del Sur se basó en el poder de Estados Unidos. Las fotografías publicadas en revistas de diseño de interiores y artesanía estadounidenses ayudaron a convertir a los refugiados en un tema de interés para los lectores estadounidenses. Asimismo, asentaron el estatuto del diseñador diplomático, al que los artesanos refugiados estaban subordinados. Su autoridad en Estados Unidos definida a través del género sustentó en parte el poder y la agencia que ejercía en Vietnam del Sur y en relación con este., This essay explores how gender contributed to the work of mass print media relaying information about American design and designers in dialogue with Vietnamese craft and its refugee artisans during the American Cold War in Vietnam. In large measure, Americans participating in State Department’s craft aid program in South Vietnam promoted the benefits of craft assistance, and their support was predicated on politics. However, the politics of American diplomacy concerning South Vietnam meted craft through American power. Photographs published in American magazines for interior design and craft helped shape refugees into subjects of interest for American media readers. Equally, they constituted the status of the designer diplomat to whom refugee artisans were subject. In part, his gendered authority at home in the United States underwrote the power and agency he wielded in and in relation to South Vietnam. more...

During Fall 2016 we had the unique opportunity to participate in the regular internship program of the Museum of Modern Art in New York and assist with ongoing exhibition projects in the Architecture and Design Department (A&D). This Department was established in 1932 as the first curatorial department dedicated to architecture and design and built on an ambitious collection covering major figures and movement of architectural culture from mid-19th century to the present. With looking back on a rich history of influential exhibitions such as Modern Architecture: International Exhibition (1932), Architecture Without Architects (1964/65) or Deconstructivist Architecture (1988) it has been one of the key institutions to push the format of the architecture exhibition and which it keeps doing up to today. Having this in mind we both came to New York with great respect and honored to gain insights in this institution for a period of three months. The department currently employs around 15 people which made it a really pleasant, intimate place to work with highly passionate and professional individuals full of remarkable expertise and respect for each other. This said and with the department going through some recent (at that moment) personnel changes, most notably the new directorship of Martino Stierli since 2015, as well MoMA reconfiguring and adding gallery spaces set to be open in 2019, we felt it was a very interesting moment for us to talk to our curator colleagues about their personal history and professional ambitions as curators at MoMA as well specific challenges of exhibiting architecture and design. Being both educated in architecture in different countries (Brazil and Germany) we could gain not only a lot of professional insights but also talk about personal aspects of the curators´ – not always linear – careers. In total we conducted six interviews with all (senior) curators and one curatorial assistant of the Architecture and Design Department, all of whom we asked the same, around ten questions in order to produce a complete “panorama” of the departments staff at that very moment. In the following we would like to share with you the second half with Juliet Kinchin, Martino Stierli and Sean Anderson. The first three interviews with Paola Antonelli, Barry Bergdoll and Michelle Millar Fisher, were published on RISCO v.16 n.1 2018. From the interviews, Juliet Kinchin had an approach since a student into intellectual debates and design history rather than architectural history, while Martino as a professor, was also engaged doing exhibitions. Sean Anderson struggled being a professor and practicing architect, and curation for him “means also being able to condense ideas and questions”. Since they had different backgrounds before arrive at MoMA, the teaching position and a special love for research is a shared common background for them. Juliet Kinchin argues that the curator’s activity apart from the responsabilities also means communicate and creating view points and arguments in a spatial and material form, while Martino talk about the work of curating a show as very much about a teamwork. For Sean Anderson also the very strong critical sensibility, is a must have skill for a curator. Sean Anderson’s advice to young curators is to ask questions and to have as many experiences in the world as possible. Juliet Kinchin talks about integrity, that makes the difference in your work, Martino in the same way, reinforce the ideia to love what you do and so you will be successful. Luis Michal, Amanda Saba Ruggiero more...

The scholars enrolling in design schools today are a whole new ‘breed’ of student fixated with a desire for achievement. Yet, success is not so easily attainable without great effort, application and exploiting all of the resources available to us. The current students’ eagerness to reach victorious targets can cause them to pack their design toolboxes with kindred instruments – namely visual tools. While these types of tools are highly valuable to the student, verbal tools remain imperative to design thinking, communication, professionalism and industry. Consequently, an inadequate perception of the value of verbal tools and this thirst for expeditious success can be somewhat detrimental to the development of a callow designer’s skillset. Students must be encouraged to talk the talk, write the words, and keep talking while they walk the walk. Therefore, in order to fully nourish and catalyse a design student’s capability, designers-in-training must be equitably exposed to – and make full use of – all of the tools available to them. yes more...

This article probes the design history of Stanley Milgram’s simulated shock generator by comparing drawings and notes from Milgram’s archive in the Sterling Memorial Library at Yale with laboratory equipment and apparatus catalogues from the Archives of the History of American Psychology, University of Akron. By applying contemporaneous human factors engineering principles to the generator’s control panel layout, sequencing, and display optimisation, an argument emerges that suggests the tailor-made device had an influential role in facilitating the behaviour witnessed in the laboratory and generalised as obedience. Such an approach puts forward a new reading of Milgram’s experiment design, his penchant for dramaturgy, and reconsiders his generalisation of obedience to social authority. more...

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. more...

A commentary on an unpublished memoir by the calligrapher Margaret Alexander (1902-1997) drawn from the papers of Heather Child at Ditchling Museum of Art+Craft. The text was written following Johnston’s death in 1944. The commentary sets the memoir in context and discusses the additional light it throws on Johnston’s vellum bound notebook and the personal philosophy that guided him and the research that formed his posthumously published book Formal Penmanship (1971). more...