Dear colleagues,
The following lines are a trial of sharing my anguishes and doubts on my
professoral practice in design history awakened by E. Stolterman request
for good and shsort overviews.
It is very hard to choose design history texts as it is hard to define
the teaching perspective. I think this kind of dilemma is shared by all
historians, not only design ones.
For sure, there are few known books on design of 90% of the world.
Fallen 2010 book is a very good one for historians, but not for those
who intend to become practitioners, I think. It' s much more
historiography than design history.
I run a 48 weeks (3 semesters) course and try to understand the
situation of peripherical countries, specially my own, Brasil. Because
probably that will be my students reality (although I have ex-students
working in Germany, in the USA, in France). To do so, I must make sure
that design history is one (specially if we are talking from the 19th
century on) because the history of the world became one. In the sense
that what happens in Sweden has its counterpart in Ghana.
When car industry established itself in Brasil in the fifties (American,
German, French industries) their lobby destroyed the national weak
automobile industry and also many initiatives in public transport. So
what was a resistence perspective from design point of view?
But of course I have always many doubts on what I am teaching. If I
choose following as Adrian Forty, Heskett and others to lighten some
aspects or situations of design which prove a kind of thesis - in fact
in my case the problematic situation of design in peripherical
countries, specially those whose Gini index are so bad as in Brasil - I
will let aside many chapters of canonic history taught by many authors,
somee of them having a kind of post-pevsnerian narrative ( but not a
very critical one). I have already done it, 'forgetting' entire periods
of this canonic history, but my students frequently came back to tell me
I had not taught them enough about Bauhaus etc..
From this point of view it's extremely scarce what we have researched
to build a world design history.
Beat Schneider in his design overview states the postmodern concern of
gender, peripherical countries etc. But in his book ther is almost
nothing written or photograpahed on these subjects. There are many good
studies regardidng particular practices, but the big narratives are
still attached to Positivist history.
I think general social, political, economic histories (with great
limits) could and still can be written because there were many regional
and specific history narratives to feed them.
And this is one of our problems. When T. Love says we know nothing about
design in Middle East countries, that is truly a big hole for all
design historians. And when I say peripherical I mean Russia, Portugal,
Slovenia , Albania...not only Iran, Thailand, Vietnam, Colombia and Senegal.
In Brasil, although we have very good anthropology courses, few people
studied Indian artifacts from design point of view. I always admire the
'zarabatana', a weapon which launches poisoned arrowes built with one
of the toughest woods of the world. This is a very interesting
design/technical artifact and a good research on it would illuminate
many aspects of South American Indians design practices and their
differences regarding our colonial invadors, Portuguese mainly but also
French and Dutch.
This kind of research is understood by many colleagues like pre or
proto design and is directly implicated in epistemological cross roads
like those discussed by R. Buchanan (Rhetoric Humanism and Design 1995).
And this is another big question of design history. May I start it from
the invention of fire, from paleolithic era, from Renaissance or...?
I think a great effort and collective effort will be necessary to build
a more comprehensive design history, not slicing it by countries (Design
in Italy, design in Brasil etc.) but understanding relationships inside
the history.
As I said these are doubts and anguishes.
All my best
Ethel
|