Hola to all.
Concurred.
Adding to the list Gui Bonsiepe and Lily Iran (for their peripheral
perspective).
Maria de Mater O'Neill
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http://catedrammo.wordpress.com/
http://marimateroneill.com
http://rubberbandpr.com
On Sun, Aug 11, 2013 at 1:40 AM, Victor Margolin <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> I have wanted to post some thoughts for quite a while about how design is
> theorized. What is missing from the tendencies to create design theory is a
> body of work that studies in depth the work of past theorists. What often
> occurs is that there is a quest for new universal theories that have no
> relation to the work that others have done before to consider the same
> subject. In fields like sociology or anthropology or psychology, the
> extended writings of the grand theorists have been studied and researchers
> in the field have come to some understanding of how those theorists
> approached the challenge of theorizing their field. Thus, new theorists
> have contended with those who came before them as part of the process of
> moving their own ideas forward.
>
> We lack such a tradition in design research, in large part because there
> have been hardly studies of the extended work of the best thinkers in the
> field. While E.P. Thompson wrote an impressive book about William Morris’
> political beliefs, we have barely any literature about anyone else’s
> thinking. I could cite, for example, among British scholars Bruce Archer,
> John Chris Jones, Stanley Morison, and Nigel Cross. French scholars include
> Abraham Moles, while Italians or writers in Italy would take in Tomás
> Maldonado, Gillo Dorfles, and Andrea Branzi. Victor Papanek is a major
> American thinker who wrote several books and many articles that are just
> beginning to be discussed. Current thinkers like Don Norman, who has
> written numerous books and articles, deserve analysis as well. Among
> Germans, there are several biographies of Jan Tschichold but no sustained
> analysis of his total writings. Nor are many scholars who wrote only a
> limited amount studied. One problem is translations. Some writers like
> Siegfried Maser in Germany or Gilbert Simondon in France have not been
> translated into English; hence they remain invisible to those who do not
> read these theorists’ original language. Without serious study of the long
> line of major thinkers who have written extensively about design, we have
> no basis for creating future theory except to start from scratch each time
> someone has a new idea. This situation has made it difficult to create a
> shared process of theorizing design whose equivalent is central to any
> developed field. What would be good to see is MA and PhD students writing
> theses and dissertations about some of these thinkers and more mature
> scholars publishing articles on their work. As a start, we can consider the
> body of writing about Lewis Mumford who published extensively on technics
> as well as architecture. We can also look to architecture where there is a
> tradition of writing about the field’s thinkers such as Manfredo Tafuri or
> art history where there are books and articles on Erwin Panofsky and
> Clement Greenberg among others. To engage the thinkers in a field is a mark
> of a field’s maturity. We have not seen it yet in design studies or design
> research, where design itself remains the dominant subject of reflection
> and this lack of writing has become an obstacle to developing a mature
> discourse.
>
> Victor Margolin
> Professor Emeritus of Design History
> Department of Art History
> University of Illinois, Chicago
>
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