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Design education in Australia is still largely dominated by Westphalian perspectives, values, histories and ways of learning. The focus on Euro‐western aesthetics, technologies, timelines and processes marginalises other identities, cultures and places. This signals to students that they should internalise, value and master dominant narratives, knowledges and ways of designing. Responding to this legacy, this article details the development of an intersectional and transformative framework to guide pedagogy for design education futures. Drawing from intersectional, student‐centred and transformative learning theories, we argue that students can develop self‐awareness and critical evaluation skills through understanding and designing within their own histories and cultures. In applying our framework, we reflect on how we developed a communication design history curriculum that centres on previously marginalised designers and prioritises pluralistic work that comes out of diverse cosmologies, perspectives and points of view. Early results demonstrate that offering spaces for students to connect design to their own intersectional identities increases self‐reflection and belonging, while engaging students to contribute new knowledges and perspectives to design history than we have had in the past. We hope this framework contributes to design education moving towards and respecting expanded ways of thinking, seeing and teaching design. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] more...

Writers often portray the relationship between graphic design and commercial art as an unproblematic progression, with the term 'commercial art' as the simple precursor of the term 'graphic design'. I argue that this is an over-simplification of an altogether more complex and involved process. Within an Australian context, and particularly within Victoria, this article explores the emergence of commercial art in its historical specificity. It suggests that commercial art was a collection of disparate practices, excluded from the developing discourse of fine art because of their industrial application. Since commercial art never constituted an actual discourse of its own, this allowed for, or necessitated, both a decline in the standing of commercial art, and concurrently that a number of these practices be subsumed within the emergence of graphic design as a component of design discourse in the twentieth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] more...

This article asks: what is the significance of design history within higher education? It reviews the practice and purpose of design history, in the education of historically aware and critically engaged designers, as an emerging independent discipline, and in terms of what the subject has to offer allied fields such as history, sociology, cultural studies, history of technology, area studies and anthropology. It considers the development and current state of design history as it is taught in the UK and non-Anglophone Europe (including France, Italy, Scandinavia, Spain, Turkey and Greece), in the US, Australia and East Asia. The argument that follows is grounded in recent design historical scholarship, combined with the views of design historians working in the abovementioned countries, in order to provide both a contemporary perspective on current practice and suggestions about possible futures. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER] more...

In the nineteenth century, tensions around the conditions of professionalization in architecture in Britain coincided with architects' renewed interest in the design of interiors. Furniture manufacturers also aimed to claim the attention of middle-class homemakers. These developments operated within a particular British social and economic hierarchy. Consequently, the relative position of an Australian example of a late nineteenth-century interior design collaboration within a broader narrative requires a move away from interpretations of marginality, innovation and imitation which have underscored Australian design histories. This article considers how a particular combination of artistic and commercial approaches to interior design in Australia resulted from the merging of British design ideas with Australian economic and cultural conditions. Such practices are, in this article, considered amongst the international foundations of the professionalization of interior design. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] more...