History of Design

A common ground is emerging for social and cultural studies of design. Design history is exploring the socially constructed and networked nature of our material surroundings; at the same time, STS is investigating design as the interface between humans and technology. This common ground is particularly interesting where it intersects with the rapidly growing fields of environmental history and environmental humanities. Today, environmental concerns, especially issues of sustainability, are essential parameters in all design practices. However, this ‘green revolution’ is a glaringly white spot on the design historical map, still awaiting its scholarly historicization. Historical understanding of, and critical reflection on, the rise of sustainability as the primordial trope in design discourse is essential to building a solid knowledge base and to underpin present and future decision-making. This article will argue for the urgency of charting this terrain, and call for design history, design studies, STS and environmental history to join forces in the pioneering efforts at studying histories of sustainable design.

L'histoire du design en France présente une grande richesse mais paradoxalement aucun état des lieux n'a jamais été effectué. Les inventions se sont multipliées durant la révolution industrielle et les premières tentatives d'industrialisation d'un objet esthétique, aux formes modernes, ont été entreprises au début du vingtième siècle. Si l'Art nouveau n'a fait qu'une proposition timide, son vocabulaire a motivé certains industriels, qui l'ont choisi afin de diversifier leurs gammes d'articles. L'Art Déco réussit davantage une popularisation de l'objet moderne dans le cadre d'une approche commerciale qui reste fondée sur l'artisanat. A la veille de la Seconde Guerre mondiale, un rapprochement est entrepris entre les ingénieurs, les industriels et les créateurs de modèles. Il est porté par l'Union des artistes modernes (UAM) et est mis en scène à l'Exposition des Arts et techniques de 1937. L'impulsion vient surtout après la Seconde Guerre mondiale avec l'influence du modèle américain de « design industriel », importé en France sous la traduction d' « esthétique industrielle » grâce à des figures comme Jacques Viénot et Raymond Loewy, qui fondent respectivement l'agence Technès et la Compagnie d'esthétique industrielle (CEI). Toutefois les tentatives antécédentes, nées du projet français d'un « art social » au travers de l'embellissement du cadre de vie, se maintiennent, grâce notamment au

More than 50 years have passed since the first international organisations of design were established to gather practitioners and professional associations worldwide. Among these, the International Council of Societies of Industrial Design (ICSID) and the International Council of Graphic Design Associations (Icograda) have played prominent roles in formulating international design standards and representing the design professions.

In this exhibition, documents from the ICSID Archive (1957-1989) and the Icograda Archive (1963-2003) – both held in the University of Brighton Design Archives –  have been selected to highlight how these networks moreover acted as key sites of encounter for practitioners and their professional associations through General Assemblies, international congresses, collaborations and publications, which favoured transnational exchanges and wide-ranging debates.

The world diagram on the wall – inspired by Peter Kneebone’s original design displayed in the glass cases, and altered to reflect the actual landmass of each continent– presents information about the members of both Councils between 1957 and 1989, emphasizing their global constituencies and reach.

Arts and Crafts of Dutch Design is a core course of the MA Design Cultures at the VU University Amsterdam, which challenges assumptions of what constitutes ‘Dutchness’ and ‘Design’. For seven weeks, students do ethno- graphic research into the every- day material culture of the Bijlmer (a multicultural neighbourhood in Amsterdam), virtually absent in mainstream enquiries into Dutch Design. Drawing on constructivist theories of national identity, geography, and material culture, students redefine well-known but ultimately restrictive notions of Dutch identity and of design. Consequently, they are able to offer alternative, more inclusive accounts of Dutch Design. Joana Ozorio de Almeida Meroz, currently writing a PhD disser- tation on The History of the Construction of the Idea of ‘Dutch Design’ (1970 – 2012), jointly teaches the course with design historian and programme coor- dinator of the MA Design Cultures Javier Gimeno Martínez. Here, she interviews two student groups about their projects.

Introduction The volume in which this essay sits explores the long and social relationship between humans and alcohol, but, of course, no one really orders a pint of alcohol to drink. As Michael Dietler (this volume, Chapter 8), Lewis Daly (this volume, Chapter 9), and Asher Rosinger (this volume, Chapter 10) make clear, people have created a huge range of fermented beverages over time, with very different tastes, qualities, and uses. We also know that humans have not routinely drunk alcoholic beverages from their hands, nor (with the notable recent exception of the beer bottle and can) do they tend to drink from storage or serving vessels. Yet, by focusing on the manufacture of, trade in, and physical and psychological effects of alcoholic beverages, scholars can sometimes appear to imply that, in lived experience, alcohol drinking looked something like this: Moreover, intoxicating drinks are not, of themselves, inherently pleasurable. Learning to like wine, beer, tea and coffee, and how much and how best to drink them, has long been part of growing up, in Britain as elsewhere. The taste for, and effects of, alcoholic drinks is a continually evolving and contingent process-as much over the short lifespan of an individual life as it is for human societies over aeons of time. (Burnett, 1999; Courtwright, 2001; Herring et al., 2013; Withington & McShane, 2014) As we reach for a more nuanced and materialized social history of human drinking practices , physicist and gender theorist Karen Barad has usefully refocused our attention on the performativity of matter in social situations. She proposes a contestation of the excessive power granted to language to determine what is real [and of] the unexamined habits of mind that grant language and other forms of representation more power in determining our ontologies than they deserve. (Barad, 2003: 802)

This monograph reconstructs the history of Fuller's first three models for the Dymaxion Car through detailed plans and archival photographs, and relates the production process of Dymaxion #4, a new prototype produced by Norman Foster, which was launched on the street in 2010. (IvoryPress.com)

Challenging distinctions between fine and decorative art, this book begins with a critique of the Rodin scholarship, to establish how the selective study of his oeuvre has limited our understanding of French nineteenth-century sculpture.
    The book’s central argument is that we need to include the decorative in the study of sculpture, in order to present a more accurate and comprehensive account of the practice and profession of sculpture in this period. Drawing on new archival sources, sculptors and objects, this is the first sustained study of how and why French sculptors collaborated with state and private luxury goods manufacturers between 1848 and 1895.
    Organised chronologically, the book identifies three historically-situated frameworks, through which sculptors attempted to validate themselves and their work in relation to industry: industrial art, decorative art and objet d’art. Detailed readings are offered of sculptors who operated within and outside the Salon, including Sévin, Chéret, Carrier-Belleuse and Rodin; and of diverse objects and materials, from Sèvres vases, to pewter plates by Desbois, and furniture by Barbedienne and Carabin.
    By contesting the false separation of art from industry, Claire Jones’s study restores the importance of the sculptor-manufacturer relationship, and of the decorative, to the history of sculpture.
    Contents: Preface; Introduction: the false separation of fine and decorative sculpture: problems with the Rodin Scholarship for the Study of French Sculpture, 1848-1895; Sculptors and industrial art, 1848-1870; Decorative sculpture and the Third Republic, 1870-1889; Decorative sculpture and the fine arts, 1890-1895; Conclusion: the limits of decorative sculpture; Appendix; Bibliography; Index.
https://www.routledge.com/Sculptors-and-Design-Reform-in-France-1848-to-1895-Sculpture-and-the/Jones/p/book/9781472415233

For reviews, including in the Sculpture Journal, Design History Society, Decorative Arts Society journal, see https://www.routledge.com/Sculptors-and-Design-Reform-in-France-1848-to-1895-Sculpture-and-the/Jones/p/book/9781472415233

Review of three books:
Haunted Bauhaus: Occult Spirituality, Gender Fluidity, Queer Identities, and Radical Politics, by Elizabeth Otto
Bauhaus Women: A Global Perspective, by Elizabeth Otto and Patrick Rössler
Bauhaus Bodies: Gender, Sexuality, and Body Culture in Modernism's Legendary Art School, edited by Elizabeth Otto and Patrick Rössler

Grace Lees-Maffei, ‘Introduction: National Design Histories in an Age of Globalization’, in Kjetil Fallan, Grace Lees-Maffei, eds., Designing Worlds: National Design Histories in an Age of Globalization, (New York: Berghahn Books, 2016), ISBN 978-1-78533-155-8, eISBN 978-1-78533-156-5.

Forging strategies. Gold and silversmiths in eighteenth-century Ghent between guild and art academy

Faced by consumers’ new demand for fashionable, quality goods, design skills became increasingly important for manufacturers since the second half of the seventeenth century. Across Europe, art academies and drawing schools were established with the aim of countering a design deficit. This article examines the effect that academy attendance had on a typical, middling, urban group: the gold- and silversmiths of late eighteenth century Ghent. The analysis demonstrates that the legitimation of skills topped the curriculum alongside their production; and that as a result, the eldest sons of masters especially benefited from the academic training.

Colección 'Yo me quedo en casa'
https://libros.univalle.edu.co/index.php/programaeditorial/catalog/book/225

El inicio de la profesionalización académica del Diseño Industrial en Colombia se puede comprender como una cierta circularidad en la que se fusionan orgánicamente las ideas y los proyectos que un grupo de colombianos madura en el caldeado ambiente universitario entre 1954 y 1974, sensibilizados con la creatividad social en el marco de la estructura académica que le daba forma a sus filias y fobias como arquitectos y ciudadanos; algunas perspectivas de los gobiernos del Frente Nacional sobre el desarrollo social, que con la visita de misioneros internacionales promueven la creación de agencias gubernamentales y la seducción con una práctica disciplinar nueva en los años sesenta y la alineación de ciertas universidades que, con sus respectivos enfoques, son la base institucional de estas creaciones. Esta circularidad responde al dibujo de una nueva jurisdicción, y con ella, a la materialización de un campo que significaba para sus actores la conquista de la coherencia del proyecto de desarrollo social del país.

(From the cover) Se è vero che da puro nutrimento il cibo si è presto trasformato in complessa e raffinata operazione che convoca gusti e intelligenze per assurgere allo status d’imprescindibile «linguaggio», il luogo domestico a esso dedicato, in adesione al codice culturale percepito come egemone, viene a rivestire un ruolo di non comune interesse. Dalla scoperta del fuoco in epoca preistorica fino alle modernissime realizzazioni della tecnologia e della domotica, queste pagine ne seguono l’evoluzione privilegiando lo studio dell’architettura e del design su scala europea e nordamericana e verificandolo nella lunga durata, negli studi sociologici, antropologici e di genere, nei riflessi letterari e cinematografici, nello sviluppo sorprendente del gusto e dei suoi artefici attraverso i secoli. È un perfetto microcosmo, lo spazio che chiamiamo cucina, contesto sempre in bilico tra stabilità e cambiamenti la cui vicenda, qui raccontata con ricchezza di fonti e affabilità narrativa, si intreccia significativamente alla storia delle gerarchie sociali e familiari, ai ruoli definiti e alla loro eloquente messa in discussione.

** Index
Introduzione
Ringraziamenti

La cucina

I.  Ambienti tradizionali
1. La cottura primordiale
2. Tetto e focolare
3. L'oziosa culina
4. Diete conventuali
5. Coquina versus cellerarium
6. La cucina dei forti
7. Zuppa e panbagnato
8. Cortesie per gli ospiti
9. Femine amorevoli e operose
10. La comoda cucina
11. La cucina secreta
12. Il regno degli uomini
13. L'immaginario culinario
14. Richiami etici
15. Casseruole francesi
16. La cucina dei Lumi

II. Trasformazioni borghesi
1. La cuciniera
2. Utopie democratiche
3. Assaporare il gusto
4. La cucina moderna
5. La cuisine de famille
6. Ognuno ha il suo posto
7. Su e giù per le scale
8. Ordine e moralità
9. La cucina vittoriana
10. Il futuro è qui
11. L'Economia domestica
12. La cucina del cottage
13. La workroom
14. Senza cucina
15. Cucine italiane unite
16. La camera chiara

III. Trappole funzionali
1. Verso la cucina progressista
2. Dinamiche spaziali
3. Kitchen Management
4. Mangiare in cucina
5. Il pragmatismo gestionale
6. Razionalità europee
7. La cella operativa
8. Microcosmi standard
9. Armadi sovietici
10. La consumatrice
11. Time-Motion Kitchen
12. Composizioni modulari
13. La cucina del Ventennio
14. Gastronomie antipassatiste
15. Prototipi italiani
16. Cucinare nel pranzo

IV. Stili di vita
1. Ricostruzioni
2. Nazionalismi
3. L'Easier Living
4. Cucine del domani
5. Trasparenti intimità
6. Cucine scandinave
7. Verso la modernizzazione
8. Cucine arredate
9. Cucine componibili
10. Utopie plastiche
11. Cocktail party e cuisine française
12. Guerra fredda in cucina
13. Casalinghe demistificate
14. Il campo di battaglia
15. Rosso in cucina
16. Environments trasgressivi

V. Indizi contemporanei
1. Il grande freddo
2. Loft kitchen
3. Essenzialità tedesca
4. Fra citazione e superdesign
5. La cucina intelligente
6. «Superwoman»
7. Caleidoscopi familiari
8. Fra High-tech, minimalismo e surplus
9. «Kitchen-plaza»
10. Tendenze variabili
11. Uomini in cucina
12. Genitori e figli
13. Cokitchen
14. Cucinare in ufficio

Un mondo che governiamo?

Riferimenti bibliografici
Indice dei nomi

Fuller's work has often suffered from lopsided treatment. Some laud him as a planetary prophet whose design science work foretold sustainable architecture and nanotechnology; others dismiss him as a "delirious technician" with a talent for linguistic obfuscation. Between adulation and disdain must lie a balanced picture of Fuller's life and his work.

This volume paints that picture by taking a broader historical view, discussing Fuller and his work in the context of larger social and cultural patterns. Fuller is a common thread in a critical cultural history that will show him to be both a participant in and a product of his times. By placing Fuller and his work in a historical framework, we will arrive at a much richer understanding of both this self-made polymath and his times. This fresh, contextual look at Fuller's work from leading scholars in different fields is an important step toward filling the void of serious scholarship on Fuller. (Hsiao-Yun Chu, on sup.org)

Este artigo objetiva fazer um breve resumo da vida de John Chris Jones, apresentando e contextualizando suas contribuições para o campo dos métodos em Design. Jones foi responsável por introduzir nos requisitos projetuais pela primeira vez a Ergonomia e a figura do usuário. Em seu livro, Design Methods (1970), ele cataloga 35 métodos que são didaticamente apresentados, e é tido até hoje como uma referência em métodos para o design. O autor tem como objetivo mostrar os caminhos para que os designers evoluíssem suas próprias técnicas em projetar.

Could an ‘iconic’ dress as worn by Marilyn Monroe, a taxidermy dwarf crocodile, and the nose cone of the Concorde be seen as an updated version of the Cabinet of curiosities, an taxonomy that combines cognitive dissonance with recognition value in a way that is peculiarly adapted to the age of the meme and the sound bite?

And how might this new kind of interaction relate to older forms of connoisseurship and the ‘convulsive beauty’ of the Surrealists?

In the context of the documentation and reflection on the history of the Kunstgewerbeschule Zürich (School of Arts and Crafts, Zurich), the field of graphic design assumes an important role. Within the history of the graphic design education, it assumed a fundamental role in the curriculum since 1906, when Julius de Praetere reorganized the disciplines, and defined a course of applied graphics (von Moos 1992). Since 1918, and until 1956, Ernst Keller developed his own didactic methods, and influenced in a sustainable way the origin of the so-called Swiss Style.

The research project is structured in distinctive sub-projects:
1. Design Zurich: Design and Innovation since 1878;
2. Ernst Keller, graphic designer (1891-1968), biography, didactics, students, and the contribution to the foundation of the so-called Swiss Style;
3. History of the graphic design education at the Kunstgewerbeschule, Zürich, since 1906.

אמת החומר הוא רעיון מנחה בעיצוב, באדריכלות ובאמנות הקובע שלכל חומר אופי מהותי וטבעי שצריך להיות גלוי ונוכח ביצירה. המאמר מתחקה אחר היווצרות הרעיון ותמורותיו בהיסטוריה של העיצוב מהמהפכה התעשייתית ועד ימינו. הטענה המרכזית במאמר היא שישנם הבדלים מהותיים בין אמת החומר של הייצור הידני לאמת החומר של הייצור התעשייתי, הבדלים החורגים מהאסתטיקה של התוצר אל האתיקה של פעולת העיצוב.