Synopses & Reviews
Design and the Question of History offers a new perspective on the historical significance of design, showing how design is an agent of historical change rather than a single aspect.
Despite a historical sensibility being essential in making critical and directional choices, Design History presents an extremely selective view, which cannot deliver the historical knowledge to sufficiently and sensitively inform designers and design thinkers practice. Focusing on how the relationship between design and history is understood and presented, this book uses a methodological approach to address this problem.
The book covers the issue of history and how design in history needs to be understood by recognising that design is always historically embedded in a relational context; the efficacy of Design History as a sub-discipline within design; and the delivery of a more substantial historical sensibility to emergent designers, identifying the pedagogic problems it presents and discussing the agency of such knowledge in practice.
This book is the flagship of the Design, History & Futures series, edited by Tony Fry, Lisa Norton and Anne-Marie Willis.
Synopsis
Radical rethinking of the relationship between design and history.
Synopsis
Design and the Question of History is not a work of Design History. Rather, it is a mixture of mediation, advocacy and polemic that takes seriously the directive force of design as an historical actor in and upon the world. Understanding design as a shaper of worlds within which the political, ethical and historical character of human being is at stake, this text demands radically transformed notions of both design and history. Above all, the authors posit history as the generational site of the future. Blindness to history, it is suggested, blinds us both to possibility, and to the foreclosure of possibilities, enacted through our designing.
The text is not a resolved, continuous work, presented through one voice. Rather, the three authors cut across each other, presenting readers with the task of disclosing, to themselves, the commonalities, repetitions and differences within the deployed arguments, issues, approaches and styles from which the text is constituted. This is a work of friendship, of solidarity in difference, an act of cultural politics. It invites the reader to take a position - it seeks engagement over agreement.
About the Author
Tony Fry is an adjunct professor, Griffith University, Brisbane and is a visiting professor at several universities internationally. Tony has published ten books, including Becoming Human by Design (Bloomsbury, 2012), Design as Politics (Bloomsbury, 2010) and Design Futuring (Bloomsbury, 2008).
Clive Dilnot is professor of Design Studies at Parsons The New School for Design, New York, USA. Recent publications include Ethics? Design? (2005) and the text for Chris Killip: Pirelli Work (2007).
Susan C. Stewart is Director of Postgraduate Studies and Curriculum Development, Design School, University of Technology Sydney, Australia.
Table of Contents
Preface, Pre-face Essential Reading
Book 1: Wither Design/Whether History, Tony Fry
Introduction
1. Rememberings & Dismemberings
2. Another History, Another Designing
3. Design in the Maelstrom of Time
Book 2: History, Design, Futures, Clive Dilnot
Preface
Introduction: The structure of existence is undergoing a fundamental change
1. Unhappiness: Lack of History, Lack of the Future
2.The Artificial
3. Destructiveness and its Overcoming
4. Apparatus History Acting
Book 3, Susan Stewart
And so to another setting …
… On Care and Education
Index