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Eric, I faced a similar challenge to yours about ten years ago. I was asked to teach one of our freshman-level lecture courses meant primarily for students in industrial design, interior design and visual communication design. Fortunately, the course had the title Design Awareness, which was an open door to many approaches including bits of history. What I quickly discovered by the textbooks available is that design history is whatever has become de rigueur in any one of the design disciplines. There were few if any textbooks that took an overarching approach to teaching the context of design and designing at the entry level. Moreover, it also became clear that some faculty members in one design discipline are not always comfortable in someone from another design disciplines teaching the context of design and designing of their discipline. As an industrial designer by education and practice I was made to feel that somehow interior design or visual communication design was special and needed someone from that same discipline to teach it. Yet, and as we know, designing is a universal human activity. I had only been teaching the course a few years (by the way, the course is one of these massive 400-500 student lecture courses and is also offered online) when my Dean suggested that I grow the course by recruiting students in disciplines other than design such as business and engineering. I had no objections to this new challenge; if anything, it was an opportunity to look at design from a perspective greater than just industrial design, interior design and visual communication design. Logically, this perspective brought me to Simon and his definition of design and others such as Jared Diamond (I think of Ranjan and his comment about going back two million years). From this perspective, designing was clearly much more than the all-too-common Industrial Revolution-Bauhaus-Postmodernism model. Cutting to the chase, the course and its challenges provided me with the opportunity to write a textbook for it. It is available from Barnes & Noble, both as a hard copy and an ebook. If you are interested in learning more, please contact me off line. Good luck with your course. Jacques Giard PhD Professor of Design The Design School 480.965.1373 http://jrgiard.macmate.me/jrgiard/Welcome.html Go Green! Please do not print this e-mail unless it is completely necessary.