In response to Ken Friedman's excellent post on the Design: Definitions, History, Etymology, I would add a couple of resources which may be of use. Both take a Keywords (Raymond Williams) approach to design. Rather than searching for any essentialist notion of design, these works attempt to excavate the meanings of design within specific historical contexts. They see design as having a constantly negotiated meaning—negotiated by various groups and interlocutors, each with their own needs and priorities. The first is a paper from the Journal of Design History:
Young, A. 2015. Commercial Art to Graphic Design: The rise and decline of commercial art
in Australia. Journal of Design History. 28(3), 219-234. doi:10.1093/jdh/epv021
A more thorough account can be found in my doctoral thesis, where I attempt to excavate the meaning of graphic design historically in an Australian context, and within the wider discourse of design generally. While this was written a number of years ago, during which time the terrain has changed dramatically to include a number of newly emergent discourses, it still has value in its approach and historical data:
https://www.academia.edu/28835460/A_Genealogy_of_Graphic_Design_in_Victoria
kindest regards,
Alan Young
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