Taking his approach from a range of related fields, he discusses the problems of defining design and writing history. He considers the different methods that leading scholars have used in the absence of a theoretical framework, and looks critically at a number of histories of design and architecture.
Taking his approach from a range of related fields, he discusses the problems of defining design and writing history. He considers the different methods that leading scholars have used in the absence of a theoretical framework, and looks critically at a number of histories of design and architecture.
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Overview
Taking his approach from a range of related fields, he discusses the problems of defining design and writing history. He considers the different methods that leading scholars have used in the absence of a theoretical framework, and looks critically at a number of histories of design and architecture.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781783718306 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Pluto Press |
| Publication date: | 10/20/1990 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 264 |
| File size: | 873 KB |
About the Author
John A. Walker (1937-2014) was Reader in Art and Design History at Middlesex University. He is the author of Art and Celebrity (Pluto, 2002), Art in the Age of Mass Media (Pluto, 2001), and Cultural Offensive: America's Impact on British Art Since 1945 (Pluto, 1998).
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Design History and the History of Design
It is vital at the outset to distinguish between design history and the history of design. It is unfortunate that the same words 'design' and 'history' have to be employed, albeit in a different order, to refer to different things. In other fields the problem does not arise: the science of astronomy is clearly distinct from what it studies: the universe. Design history, it is proposed, shall be the name of a comparatively new intellectual discipline, the purpose of which is to explain design as a social and historical phenomenon. It follows that the expression 'the history of design' refers to the object of study of the discipline design history. Like art history, its immediate forbear, design history is a branch of the more general academic discipline, history. And like history itself, design history has close links with other disciplines such as anthropology, archaeology (especially industrial archaeology) and sociology.
What constitutes a discipline may be hard to grasp. It can be described briefly as the ensemble of assumptions, concepts, theories, methods and tools employed by a particular group of scientists or scholars. During the early stages of a discipline, most of these assumptions, etc., will be implicit and unconscious. When they become explicit the discipline attains self-awareness. Also, of course, disciplines are defined by the particular body of material or field of research they claim for themselves. Problems relating to the character and limits of the subject matter of design history will be discussed shortly.
The awareness that a distinct discipline exists occurs when a sufficient number of practitioners become self-conscious about their activities and begin to join together to discuss common problems and interests. It is usually at this critical conjuncture that a professional organization is formed. In Britain the Design History Society was established in 1977 even though, of course, histories of design were being written long before that date. Once an organization exists, the trappings of an academic discipline soon follow: elected officers, a newsletter, a scholarly journal, an annual conference.
Although the phrase 'the history of design' implies that there is a single, homogeneous object of study, in practice design history never supplies us with a single, complete, homogeneous account upon which we can all agree. There are always multiple histories, various histories of design. These histories are the output, the product of the discipline design history. They are physically embodied in various languages, media and forms of presentation, for example, lectures with slides, diagrams, articles, books, radio and television programmes, exhibitions.
Although various histories exist, this does not mean that there is more than one material reality – as many worlds as there are individuals. One difficulty all historians experience is that the past can never be reconstructed in its totality and completeness; every history is, therefore, a partial or simplified representation of a past situation. Selection is inevitable in history-writing. Histories differ not only because scholars tackle different facets of design but also because one historian will select and emphasize certain facts and events while another will select and emphasize different facts and events.
Two historians approaching the same subject will therefore in all likelihood produce two different accounts. For example, a survey of design since 1900 written by an Italian would, in all probability, feature Italian design more prominently than a comparable study written by an American. Similarly, a history of Soviet design is likely to vary according to whether it is written by a Marxist or an anti-Marxist. (One of the aims of design historiography is to make such differences visible and explicit by analysing texts using techniques like content analysis.) An analogy with map-making may be helpful: several maps can be drawn of the same country each of which focuses upon different features of the terrain. The various maps do not contradict one another, instead they complement one another. Taken together they provide a more complete account of the terrain than taken singly. However, if two maps by different map-makers are produced to show transportation routes, they can be compared to the terrain in order to judge their accuracy and one map could be found more true to reality than the other. Histories can be similarly compared and evaluated, though in their case the task of estimating their truthfulness is more difficult because the terrain – the past reality they represent – no longer exists as a totality.
Design History's Problematic
'Problematic' (problématique) is a term employed by several French philosophers, most notably Louis Althusser, to describe the theoretical or ideological framework within which a concept or a discipline gains its specific meaning and value. Besides referring to the consciously recognized theoretical problems and themes of a discipline, the term also encompasses its 'unconscious' – the problems, absences, silences which it does not acknowledge. The 'unconscious' of a discipline or a text is revealed by what is called 'a symptomatic reading', that is, attention is paid to what is not said rather than to what is said. For example, if a symptomatic reading of an encyclopedia of world architecture showed that African and Chinese buildings were not mentioned, then the Euro-American bias of the compilers would be revealed.
The Work of Design Historians
Rather than attempting to define design history further at this stage, it may be more useful to itemize what design historians do, the kind of work they perform:
Empirical study: design historians study and photograph designed artefacts and any drawings, models, plans or prototypes associated with them. Wealthy individuals and public museums form collections of such artefacts; however, most of the items which interest design historians exist outside museums.
Research and information gathering: design historians study documents and images preserved in archives, libraries, museums and private collections in order to accumulate information about all aspects of the production, distribution, marketing and consumption of designed goods. Some scholars establish data banks and libraries; some interview living designers, manufacturers and consumers. All read articles and books in order to increase their knowledge of design and of its socioeconomic context.
Theoretical work: design historians categorize, classify, compare, interpret and evaluate designed artefacts. They develop concepts, theories and methods specific to design history and they also borrow ideas from other academic disciplines. They reflect upon the limits and aims of design history.
Writing and communication: design historians compile inventories, catalogues and indexes. They write scholarly treatises and more popular articles and books. They also organize exhibitions and write catalogue introductions. They give lectures and assist in the making of radio and television programmes and films about design. Their aim is to make their findings available to other researchers and to the general public. Professional activities: design historians form organizations and hold conferences to further their discipline. They establish journals and serve on the editorial boards of scholarly periodicals and on the committees of various public bodies and educational institutions.
Employment: a few design historians are private scholars or self-employed, freelance writers or journalists. Some work as curators in museums or large firms with archives. The majority, however, teach the history of design in polytechnics, art and design colleges and universities.
The advantage of such a listing is that it suggests design history is not a unitary and homogeneous 'thing' whose being or essence can be defined once and for all, but a set of cultural practices engaged in by a specific group of intellectuals. Let us now consider some of the above topics in more detail.
Empirical Research
Empirical research involves direct experience and observation, the first-hand study by sight and touch of concrete examples. It is essential for design historians to examine designed goods and buildings 'in the flesh' whenever possible because this almost always reveals information secondary sources such as photographs fail to communicate. Furthermore, since function is a key aspect of design, ideally goods should be used as well as scrutinized. Later on, however, we shall question the conventional wisdom that the designed object is the main focus of design history.
Normally, empirical research is undertaken in respect of a predefined body or corpus of material, usually artefacts of some kind. Once such a corpus has been assembled, examined, described, categorized, classified and compared, the historian may feel confident about making some generalizations derived from the material, that is, induction rather than deduction.
Perhaps the most famous empirical enterprise in twentieth-century architectural history was Nikolaus Pevsner's systematic survey of the notable buildings of England. (Theoretical issues clearly arise in the criteria for distinguishing 'notable' buildings from the mass of unremarkable ones.) Some preliminary work was done in libraries by assistants, then Pevsner and his wife set out by car to survey selected buildings shire by shire, doing two shires per year. To complete the project took a quarter of a century (1949-74)! Findings were published in Penguin Books' Buildings of England series, a total of 46 volumes.
Clearly, the chief value of Pevsner's books is the detailed recording and characterization of individual buildings. This celebration of particular, unique examples is often considered to be the distinguishing feature of the discipline of history as against the physical sciences. The latter, it is argued, are only interested in concrete examples in so far as they exemplify general laws.
In the case of the Buildings of England series, its nature and limits were decided by Pevsner and his assistants. Museums, it could be argued, supply historians with 'readymade' bodies of material because they usually contain several collections of artefacts. Assuming that access can be gained to them, private collections too – whether of pre-1939 wireless cabinets, scooters, 1950s' furniture, plastic products of Beatles' memorabilia – can make the historian's task much simpler.
Yet another 'readymade' source is the archives of large companies and design studios. Besides documents, such archives can include samples or prototypes of whatever the company or studio produced. Middlesex Polytechnic is fortunate to possess the contents of a designer's studio – the 'Silver Studio Collection' – which includes samples of wallpapers and textiles designed by the Silver family who practised from the late nineteenth century to 1963. The London firm of Sanderson, a furnishing fabrics, bedding and wall coverings manufacturer founded in 1860, also maintains an archive which serves as an inspiration for its designers. Nearly 100 collections of material constitute the Archive of Art and Design, part of the National Art Library, at the Victoria and Albert Museum. Included are the papers of individual designers and craft persons, plus the archives of relevant societies and businesses.
Exceptionally conscientious scholars include in their histories descriptions of the archive material they have used in the course of writing them. Professor Michael B. Miller, for instance, in his thorough study The Bon Marché: Bourgeois Culture and the Department Store 1869-1920 (1981) devotes several pages to the private archives of the famous Parisian grand magasin. He notes the gaps in the store's records and he also lists other archives in Paris which he consulted.
Besides studying artefacts and documents, historians can gather additional information by means of oral history – at least in respect of the design of the present and recent past – by interviewing designers, clients and consumers. A major twentieth-century source of observations and comments by members of the public about everyday life – the Mass Observation archive stored at the University of Sussex – is a useful resource in this respect.
Empirical research is crucial to design history but it is dependent upon a pre-existing conceptual framework of some kind. The information it yields also gives rise to a host of questions which can only be answered by investigations conducted in other fields, for example economic history, and by theoretical work.
Classification
Categorizing and classifying are the intellectual operations by which natural scientists seek to reduce the sheer quantity of natural phenomena to manageable proportions and to impose order on infinite variety. Such operations are equally essential in regard to human material culture. To see the advantages of classification, one has only to imagine how impossible it would be to find anything in a department store if goods, rather than being organized in departments, were randomly distributed, if design historians and museum curators had to see every designed product as a unique item, they would be overwhelmed by the vast numbers and diversity of things modern industry generates.
Any complex artefact possesses a number of attributes (shape, colour, size, purpose, etc.) which means that it can be placed in several categories according to the attribute or set of attributes singled out by the scholar. Clearly, the choice of category depends upon the objectives of the historian. Often the aim is to establish a group of similar items so that comparisons can be made. Three categories have been particularly favoured by design historians: material, type and style (to be discussed individually later).
As an example let us consider the organization of artefacts in the Pitt-Rivers Museum, Oxford. This museum houses a substantial collection of ethnographic and archaeological artefacts – tools, weapons, clothing, ornaments, ritual objects, and so on – collected by General Pitt-Rivers (1827–1900). The General's interest in this material was aroused as a consequence of a study of firearms which made him curious about cultural evolution. The collection was intended to illustrate how artefacts develop over time, hence items serving similar purposes, such as weapons, from the Stone Age to the more recent past and from different places were displayed together (instead of being arranged geographically), so that progressions from simple to complex, from the homogeneous to the heterogeneous, would be revealed. Representative rather than exceptional items were required for this purpose, so ordinary and typical specimens were acquired rather than rare, beautiful or valuable ones.
Pitt-Rivers believed that artefacts, like plants and animals, could be classified into genera, species and varieties. In the museum's classification scheme a category such as weapons is subdivided into defensive and offensive, then subdivided into kinds such as archery, blow guns, bolas, boomerangs, clubs, firearms, etc., some of which are then further subdivided into sub-types or by materials or place of origin. Overall a development can be witnessed from a simple, crude weapon such as a club to a more sophisticated, complex weapon such as a flint-lock gun. The scheme is described in greater detail in Beatrice Blackwood's The Classification of Artefacts in the Pitt-Rivers Museum, Oxford (1970).
Those who have visited the museum will recall the fascination of its crammed display cases. At a glance the collection demonstrates the extraordinary inventiveness of humanity, the tremendous variety of artefacts which we have created over the centuries.
Charles Jencks, the architectural historian, is another theorist willing to apply biological ideas of evolution to his object of study. In his book Modem Movements in Architecture (1973) he situates all architecture from 1920 to 1970 within one of six species which he calls 'traditions' or 'movements'. They are: logical, idealist, self-conscious, intuitive, activist and unself-conscious. He claims that the last-named accounts for 80 per cent of the built environment. The basis for this classification seems to be the ideas and attitudes of architects. Jencks provides a diagram or 'evolutionary tree' which, in fact, represents the various species as streams which swell and narrow and, at times, flow into one another. Within each stream the labels of various styles and types of architecture appear along with the names of famous architects in chronological order and in differently-sized typography to signal relative importance.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Design History and the History of Design"
by .
Copyright © 1989 John A. Walker.
Excerpted by permission of Pluto Press.
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgements, vi,
Introduction, ix,
1 Design History and the History of Design, 1,
2 Defining the Object of Study, 22,
3 Craft and Design, 38,
4 Designers and Designed Goods – the Proper Objects of Study?, 45,
5 Production-consumption Model, 68,
6 General Problems of History-writing, 74,
7 Varieties of Design History, 99,
8 Style, Styling and Lifestyle, 153,
9 Consumption, Reception, Taste, 174,
'Conclusion', 197,
FORM/female FOLLOWS FUNCTION/male: Feminist Critiques of Design, by Judy Attfield, 199,
Bibliography, 226,
Index, 236,