Terry:
In response to your post I will first of all withdraw the appellation of 'scholar' and recognize your expertise in the areas of design, research, and entrepreneur etc. as you describe it. Second, I'll start with your last paragraph and question the assumptions you make about the relation of what you call design failures and design history. To my mind, one has nothing to do with the other. No one ever said that design history was a substitute for design methodology or project reasoning. So, to get to your initial questions:
Design history, in my opinion, does have the or a central role in design education but it has an integral role and I believe it always will and should have. What does design history contribute to the formation of a designer?
1: It provides a context for socializing a student into a design profession. The student learns about different appproaches to design, different desired outcomes, ways that designers have seen design in relation to their own social or political beliefs and most important the student sees that design history is made by designers working within varied sets of possibilities for designing.
2) Students become literate in terms of knowing what has been designed and being able to discuss design projects of the past. Students learn to think critically about designs, to evaluate them, both past and present, and to form value criteria for their own work based on assessments of what has been done in the past.
3) Students can find and identify work from the past that they like and that may form a basis for work they want to do themselves.
4) Students become literate in terms of knowing something about design and its history.
5) Students understand that design practice is embedded in value systems, whether their own or someone else's. Design does not happen in a vacuum and always has social consequences.
Design history does not teach students how to design but it informs designing a a source of aesthetic and ethical value judgments. As I don't teach design, I don't know what any design teachers would use design history for instrumentally.
Design, like most subjects, can be taught without any history but then you are training people who may know how to achieve results instrumentally but may not know how to give them value nor may they know how to build on precedents to create something in the present.
The basic point I want to make is that if we agree that design is a cultural practice (and we may not agree on this), then the ability to work within a framework with an historical dimension is crucial. Living in history, I believe, is a cultural trait. Living ahistorically is living without a cultural reference. if you want to argue that cultural literacy is of no or little value, then I recognize your argument and will let it stand to be evaluated as such.
Victor
Victor Margolin
Professor Emeritus of Design History
Department of Art History
University of Illinois, Chicago
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