Design history

Design history is the study of objects of design in their historical and stylistic contexts.

With a broad definition, the contexts of design history include the social, the cultural, the economic, the political, the technical and the aesthetic. Design history has as its objects of study all designed objects including those of architecture, fashion, crafts, interiors, textiles, graphic design, industrial design and product design.

Design history has had to incorporate criticism of the 'heroic' structure of its discipline, in response to the establishment of material culture, much as art history has had to respond to visual culture, (although visual culture has been able to broaden the subject area of art history through the incorporation of the televisual, film and new media). Design history has done this by shifting its focus towards the acts of production and consumption.

Design history also exists as a component of many practice-based courses.

The teaching and study of design history within art and design programmes in Britain is one of the results of the National Advisory Council on Art Education in the 1960s. Among its aims was making art and design education a legitimate academic activity, to which ends a historical perspective was introduced. This necessitated the employment or ‘buying in’ of specialists from art history disciplines, leading to a particular style of delivery: “Art historians taught in the only way that art historians knew how to teach; they switched off the lights, turned on the slide projector, showed slides of art and design objects, discussed and evaluated them and asked (art and design) students to write essays – according to the scholarly conventions of academia”.

The most obvious effect of the traditional approach design history as sequential, in which X begat Y and Y begat Z. This has pedagogical implications in that the realisation that assessment requires a fact-based regurgitation of received knowledge leads students to ignore discussions of the situations surrounding a design’s creation and reception and to focus instead on simple facts such as who designed what and when.

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