Dear Eric
I use a one page model of "History of Design" that starts with the use of
Fire about 2 million years ago and through each major break through that
humans designed as they journeyed through time and place to arrive at
today. This will continue into the future as well. We will design our
future, however clumsily, we will move forward through time.
I also use a three legged stool that shows the three legs of human
knowledge generated through Design, Art and Science, in that order. You can
download it from my dropbox link here below as a 450 kb pdf file .
<
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/27333579/Stool%20%26%20History%20of%20Design%20Model_Comp.pdf
>
With warm regards
M P Ranjan
from my Mac at home on the NID campus
17 August 2012 at 10.50 pm IST
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*Prof M P Ranjan*
*Design Thinker and author of blog -
www.Designforindia.com<http://design-for-india.blogspot.com/>
*
E8 Faculty Housing
National Institute of Design
Paldi
Ahmedabad 380 007 India
Tel: (res) 91 79 26610054
email: ranjanmp@g <[log in to unmask]>mail.com
<[log in to unmask]>web site: http://homepage.mac.com/ranjanmp
<http://homepage.mac.com/ranjanmp>web domain: http://www.ranjanmp.in
<http://www.ranjanmp.in/>blog: <http://www.design-for-india.blogspot.com>
education blog: <http://www.design-concepts-and-concerns.blogspot.com>
education blog: http://www.visible-information-india.blogspot.com
<http://www.visible-information-india.blogspot.com/>
------------------------------------------------------------
On 17 August 2012 10:13, CAMERON TONKINWISE <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Eric,
> Some wayward proposals, taking up that you were looking
> for a course on philosophy and theory of design.
>
> At the University of Technology, Sydney, Susan Stewart
> and I experimented one year using Bruce Sterling's
> Shaping Things as the Design History course text. The
> first half of this book has a nicely schematic history of
> design, though obviously with a view to the internet-of-
> things future for which he lobbies. We hoped the text
> would get the students to think historiographically about
> design history.
>
> I would also recommend the writings of Jan Michl:
> http://janmichl.com/english-only.htm
> His piece "On Seeing Design as Redesign" is a beauti-
> fully argued account of why the practice of designing is
> a dialectic with history of design.
>
> Apropos current in discussions on this list, Mikka Pantzar
> (whose "Domestication of Everyday Technologies: Dynamic
> Views on the Social Histories of Artifacts is included in
> Buchanan et al's _The Designed World_) wrote a related
> article called "Do commodities reproduce themselves
> through human beings? Toward an ecology of goods"
> http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/02604027.1993.9972382#preview
> which contextualizes the outcomes of design within histories
> of their diffusion, describing the ways in which people must
> co-evolve to accommodate these newly designed aliens.
>
> I would worry that a summary history of design would
> only be possible by presuming some underlying constant
> (and so ahistorical) form of designing that is linearly deve-
> loping over time. More accurate, or at least more interesting,
> would be to interrogate how what was called designing at
> different times in different places are utterly different kinds
> of practices within thoroughly distinct networks.
>
> Hope this helps.
>
> Cameron
>
> ___________________________________
> Assoc.Prof. Cameron Tonkinwise
> Director of Design Studies
> School of Design, Carnegie Mellon University
> MMCH 202A, Pittsburgh, PA 15213-3890
> ph (+1) 412 268 6937
> email: [log in to unmask]
>
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