Dear Terry,
I take your propositions very seriously and, I have argued over time, as a devil's advocate, that Design has no need of a history of Design , as such.
In my general approach with students I recommend that there are always at least these four positions that might be usefully taken by an academic:
the historical
the analytical
the critical and
the theoretical.
By historical I mean some contextual understanding that informs the objects of attention. I don't really care when something happened unless knowing when it happened helps inform what I am trying to understand.
Knowing that something did actually happen/exist is probably the starting point. That is, the phenomenological, spatio/temporal existence of things (ideas included) is startlingly relevant to the here and now-ness of designing. (I include the having-existed in this class of startling things.)
This approach might best be seen as the history of being-here-now. I think such kinds of history are very relevant to Design. Some part of such histories might include catalogs and taxonomies and even slide shows of things like ugly Coca Cola bottles on wet Wednesday afternoons.
keith
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