Dear Colleagues,

Here is Penny Sparke’s keynote speech from the DRS
Common Ground conference.

Penny Sparke is dean of the Faculty of Art, Design,
and 
Music at Kingston University, where she is Professor
of 
Design History. Prof. Sparke studied French literature
at 
the University of Sussex from 1967 to 1971 and 
completed her PhD at Brighton in 1975 with a thesis on

British Pop Design in the 1960s. She taught history of

design at the Royal College of Art from 1981 to 1999. 

Penny Sparke is one of the best-known design
historians 
working today. Her 1986 book, An Introduction to 
Design and Culture in the Twentieth Century, is one 
of the most widely used in the field. 

Please feel free to share this with your friends and
colleagues.

Best regards,

Ken Friedman


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Design and Culture Revisited

By Penny Sparke

First of all I’d like to thank the organisers of the
conference for asking me to come and talk to you all
today. I’m very conscious that my approach towards the
study of design is rather different from those of many
of you who have given papers over the last few days.
The emphasis at this conference is on interpreting and
elucidating the design process with the help of a wide
range of quantitative and qualitative methodologies to
increase our indepth understanding of this thing we
all call ‘design’. My work has tended, rather, to
position design – defined as process, end result and
socio-cultural phenomenon – into a broader historical
context and the methodology I have used in doing this
has been largely derived from historical enquiry and a
range of other methods deriving from the humanities.
The aim of my work, and of my design historian
colleagues who I am representing today, is like that
of all of you, to increase our understanding of design
in the broadest sense by understanding the object of
study as operating within a broad nexus of forces –
social, cultural, technological, economic, political
etc – all of which influence the ways in which it is
has been manifested.

I am also conscious that this conference is called
Common Ground and that the aim is to break down the
boundaries between disciplines and their
methodologies. In this spirit of interdisciplinarity,
which increasingly affects all of us, therefore, I
would like to spend some time outlining my approach to
design and its history and then to present some
current research to you as an example of where my work
is taking me at the moment. I present it as a
case-study of a cultural historical analysis of
design.

I have named this talk Design and Culture Revisited.
This is because one of the tasks I am currently
involved with is rewriting a text I published in 1986,
which was entitled An Introduction to Design and
Culture in the Twentieth Century. Although the book
was published in 1986 it was actually based on
research, teaching and reading undertaken in the late
1970s and early 1980s. I quickly realised, on
rereading it, that it needed to be thrown out of the
window and replaced by a new book. Although I had
attempted, back in the early 1980s, to provide a
cultural framework for an account of twentieth-century
design I had only really succeeded in providing a
narrative, which had some reference to cultural
context, but with no real understanding of what it
meant, methodologically, to position design within a
cultural frame. I had been very aware, back then, of
the early work of men such as Raymond Williams and
Richard Hoggart in defining a field called ‘Cultural
Studies’ back in the 1950s and 1960s. I was also very
conscious of the work of members of the Independent
Group, Reyner Banham among them, who had worked hard,
again in the 1950s, to break down barriers between
so-called ‘ high’ and ‘low’ culture. I was also keen
to relate to what was then recent work by Dick Hebdige
and other people emanating from the Birmingham Centre
for Comtemporary studies in the area of subculture and
‘reading’ the artefacts of cultural production with
the help of semiotics.I had not, however, been able to
fully integrate the movement of design in the
twentieth century into a framework that derived from
their work. Instead my account was simply a loosened
up version of an account which still depended upon the
modernist paradigm.

Since the early 1980s a considerable amount of work
has been produced under the heading of ‘Cultural
Studies’ which now makes it much easier to see ways in
which one could integrate a discussion of design into
a cultural frame. Design has become an interesting
topic for scholars across a whole range of
culturally-oriented disciplines, from anthropology, to
sociology, to social psychology, to social history to
cultural geography, to literature. I say ‘design’ but
I should more properly, perhaps, use the term
‘material culture’ which refers to the whole spectrum
of material goods and structures which form part of
the everyday environment. They have all been designed,
of course, but the interest shown by these disciplines
in them lies less in the process that produced them
than in their meanings in the context of consumption.
I haven’t got time here to fully explore the rise of
the concept of ‘material culture’ from the 1980s
onwards as it has a number of different academic
backgrounds and a range of objects of interest – from
vernacular architecture to Tupperware bowls among them
– but, for historians of design, it has been of great
importance. Its prime usefulness has been its ability
to understand the designed artefact as existing beyond
the meanings intended by the designer or fed in
through the production process. This is a rather
controversial statement in some ways as it suggests
that historians of design can work with a concept of
design which ignores the designer and the design
process. I would argue that it does not do this but
that it rather extends the idea of the design process
to include consumption and use.

Perhaps the most significant impact of post 1980
Cultural and historical 
Studies to design history has been the scholarship on
the subject of Consumption. Back in the mid 1980s
Adrian Forty’s book, Objects of Desire, presented a
strong (probably over strong) case for taking the
designer out of the equation and for seeing design
exclusively as a result of socio-cultural forces.
Although it was critiqued as being excessively
one-sided it served, nonetheless, to demonstrate that
the Pevsnerian approach to design history had
over-stressed, as had the ‘great men’ theory of
history, the agency of designers who after all were
themselves products of their socio-cultural
environments.

The history and theory of consumption emerged as a
counter-balance within a range of disciplines which
had ignored it in favour of approaches which
prioritised the role of production. Social historians
were quick to rise to the challenge and the work of
Neil McKendrick, John Brewer .and others served to
make us rethink the roots of the industrial revolution
– the starting point up until then of all historical
accounts of design which tended to assume, along with
Nikolaus Pevsner, that the advent of mass production
and the division of labour represented a qualitative
shift in the history of the designer, the design
process and the history of taste. Consumption history
taught us that social change and a desire for material
goods preceded the means of making them widely
available. Other disciplines to embrace consumption
have included sociology, social psychology and social
anthropology or, as one branch of it came to be
called, material culture studies. Studies ranged from
Colin Campbell’s reworking of Max Weber thesis about
Protestantism and the rise of modern capitalism to
Martyn Lee’s analysis of the political economy of
consumption to work in American material culture –
Simon Bronner’s. Consuming Visions: Accumulation and
Display of Goods in America, 1880-1920.

The emphasis upon the analysis of designed goods in
the context of consumption took its lead from the
shift in Cultural Studies, in the late 1970s and early
1980s, towards a structuralist and post-structuralist
approach. This served to  move design historical
enquiry beyond the modernist, Pevsnerian teleological
approach and sought to understand objects as part of a
system or as texts. Hebdige’s reading of subcultures
and Judith Williamson’s analysis of advertisements
were cases in point. Design History learnt a lot from
these studies and increasingly looked to Cultural
Studies as offering theoretical models with which to
discuss the designed artefact. . At the same time
there was a consciousness that while a consideration
of consumption helped to broaden the picture and take
an analysis of design and history away from the
designer’s intentions and the narrow and rather
limited theorising that took place within design
circles it was not possible to ignore the arena of
production and the changing picture of the profession.
Design History became, as a result, much more
interdisciplinary in its approach, seeking to embrace
Cultural Studies methodology at one end of the
spectrum while maintaining other feet in technological
history, the history of the design profession and its
accompanying theoretical base and in a broader
ideological, social, political and economic history as
well. This can best be understood if we consider the
example of an analysis of the life-cycle of a product
from, that is, its choice of material and means of
manufacture to the imput of the designer based on
his/her intentions, influences and ideas to its impact
on the everyday world – one which has cultural,
ideological, psychological, social, political and
economic ramifications.

A number of lessons were learnt from Cultural Studies
which helped design historians position their object
of study into a theoretical frame which borrowed from
a range of disciplines and which concentrated on a
number of cultural themes which had been isolated by
cultural historians as in need of consideration to
prevent their marginalisation from hegemonic culture.
. Analyses of both historical and contemporary design
began to borrow from cultural theorists and to focus
on issues such as modernity and postmodernity in their
broadest senses, and on the relationship of cultural
categories such as gender, sexuality, ethnicity,
post-imperialism, national identity etc. on design and
material culture. Together the new modes of entry into
discussions about design forced historians to move
away from the internalised picture of design and its
process which had developed within modernist
discourse. The opening up that came with the
application of these broader cultural themes made it
possible to bring to design and its history a range of
theoretical tools deriving from the writings, of,
among many others, Benjamin and Adorno, Foucault,
Baudrillard, Barthes, Bourdieu, Said, the feminist
theorists, among them then Kristeva and Irigaray., as
well as the huge number of scholars who addressed the
question of consumption from a myriad of perspectives.
By the mid 1980s work had been undertaken to show how
design history could move forward, redefining itself
as a postmodern discipline, or multi-discipline as it
did so. 

For me the greatest impact of these discoveries was to
enable discussions about design to take place which
bypassed the hegemonic model of modernism. Not only
did it mean that the emphasis upon a particular canon
of objects and a particular stable of designers could
be bypassed it also opened up the possibility of
thinking about designers as amateurs and, indeed as
consumers. It allowed a history of design to exist
which went back before the industrial revolution and
it allowed for a consideration of design which did not
focus exclusively upon notions of avant-gardism,or of
‘good design’. It was a more challenging approach as
it meant seeing modernism as just one of the
ideological routes taken by designers in the twentieth
century, albeit the one which had been
institutionalised and therefore dominant but which
was, nonetheless, only one option. It became very
clear to me that the discussions of twentieth century
design that came from this perspective were only
concerned with the modernising effects of design and
material culture and not with all the other numerous
cultural roles it had played in everyday life.

It is important to reiterate, however, that this
emphasis upon the multiplicity of design’s meanings in
the context of consumption did not reduce the
importance of production. Indeed design history was
also looking at work being undertaken in the arena of
technological and professional history which was
opening up ways in which design’s place in the
industrial and commercial process could be better
understood .
David Hounshell’s work on the American system was
particularly illuminating as were studies on the early
advertising and marketing professions which shed light
on the evolution of the professional designer for
industry. Most importantly, I would like to stress
that design history, from the mid 1980s onwards,
positioned its object of study at the intersection of
production and consumption and felt it important that
that unique position should be maintained. As social
historians became increasingly interested in the
divisions between the world of work and leisure,
between the public and the private spheres from the
mid nineteenth century onwards so design historians
listened to those debates, keen to understand how they
affected our understandijng about production,
consumption and design.

I would now like to talk a little about my personal
response to these new directions

One aspect of this work which was close to my heart
was the discussion about the gendering of the spheres
in the 19th century. A number of studies of
consumption had highlighted the importance of women as
key consumers and it began to be apparent to me that
gender difference played an important part of the
story of twentieth century design. In addition to the
feminist ‘hidden from history’ search for female
designers who had been overlooked and which was
initiated in the 1970s and 1980s by writers such as
Isabelle Anscombe it seemed that gender was implicated
in design in a number of other ways as well. Most
importantly it seemed to me the insertion of the
concept of the ‘feminine’ into twentieth century
design history did not only serve to swell the
modernist canon by adding work to it, it also served
to undermine its dominance and suggest that another
set of values could underpin our analyses of it. The
work of Alison Light in the field of literary studies
was particularly useful to me as she focused on the
concept of what she called ‘feminine modernity which
seemed to be a useful way of talking about women’s
contribution to twentieth century design, both as
producers and as consumers. Work on the concept of
‘popular culture’ which had also interested Cultural
Studies scholars for some time – in Britain from
Hoggart onwards – also seemed pertinent to the study
of women’s production, much of it undertaken on an
amateur basis and never entering the modernist canon.
Andreas Huyssen’s eloquent discussion of the gendering
of high and popular or mass culture was also crucial
to the subject I was interested in. Above all the work
of Pierre Bourdieu in defining the concept of
‘cultural capital’ and creating the concept of
‘habitus’ or taste cultures provided an important
frame into which I could position design in order to
unpack its gendered aspects. Crucial also was the work
of non-essentialist feminist historians who positioned
gender as being culturally-determined. Also very
important ot me was the work of literary historians
such as Rachel Bowlby and others who had focused on
the importance of trivialised activities such as
shopping to feminine culture from the mid nineteenth
century onwards.

This nexus of ideas provided me with a starting point
with which to attempt to insert the concept of the
‘feminine’ and women into the picture of twentieth
century design which forms the subject matter of my
1995 book As Long as It’s Pink: the sexual politics of
taste. Like Adrian Forty’s book, mine was intended as
a polemical study which sought, in essence, to redress
a balance rather than to provide a definitive
historical account. I set out to provide a kind of
parallel story to that of Pevsner but to show where
women fitted into the picture and where gendered
cultural forces were in evidence Frequently, it turned
out, the emphasis on modernism had concealed women’s
input, creating a hegemonic model and a set of terms
of reference which excluded it. As such the study is
of much significance for women’s studies as it is for
design studies but for me the two disciplines no
longer had a barrier dividing them. 

The key message of the book, I suppose, is one which
we knew all along, ie: that modernism was not only
gendered masculine in terms of stereotypical cultural
values but its protagonists also fought to protect
that stereotypically rational model of masculinity.
More significantly, however, the secondary message is
that we need to adopt an open-ended, relativistic,
view of the concept of taste if we want to be able to
address and make meaningful the ‘design’ input of a
larger sector of the population than that of the
official design profession. In terms of the issues
addressed by Cultural Studies – ethnicity,
multiculturalism, post-imperialism, gender and
identity etc – this is a very important shift. We
could extend this, I believe, to include the notion of
‘design for need’ which was put to us as a challenge
by the first keynote lecture of this conference. It
can be seen as another face of design which does not
fit into the modernist canon. 

From my work on the feminine and design, or taste as I
found it more useful to call it as the word ‘design’
became increasingly gendered for me, I began to be
more interested in the twin concepts of ‘identity’ and
‘modernity’ which were high on the Cultural Studies
agenda in the 1990s. Based in the psycho-analytical
writings of Freud and the later work of Lacan the
question of identity subsumed a range of topics, among
gender and sexual identity, ethnic and national
identity. All of them had clear interfaces with
material culture and design and work began on
extending them into this field. 

Growing from my interest in gender, women’s cultural
contributions in particular, in the mid 1990s I began
work on a project which is slowly coming to
culmination. Having completed a study which took a
broad sweep I now focused on a much tighter topic –
the early twentieth century work of the American
interior decorator, Elsie de Wolfe. As a case-study it
serves many purposes which fit the cultural studies
agenda very neatly and which extend my desire to
discuss design as a culturally-constituted phenomenon.
These include:

A woman’s contribution to ‘design’ which crossed
production and consumption (she created her own
interiors as well as others for paying clients).

She crossed the amateur/professional divide.

A contribution to the debate about interior
design/decoration which has a strongly gendered aspect
to it and which focuses on the latter’s
marginalisation from modernism

She worked at the height of Veblen’s notion of
conspicuous consumption in the USA in the context of
what later came to be called ‘cultural capital’ by
Bourdieu

The domestic interior has a strong role identity
formation, particularly, arguably, for women.

She combined historical style (17th and 18th century
French) with a ‘modern approach’ thereby helping to
create what came to be called feminine modernity

She challenged conventional sexuality by having a
female partner for many years

She used her profession as a means of moving into a
new class

She created an aesthetic language of the home for a
second generation of new rich

She worked mostly with women thereby creating the
notion later called ‘homosociality,.

She helped to create a new language of ‘’Americanness’

She worked across cultures ( France and the USA)
therefore showing how one culture can influence
another.

Through her background in the theatre and her
reputation as a consumer of couture clothing she
presents an approach towards the elaboration of the
interior which does not derive from architecture.

She provides an insight into the way a branch of the
design profession was formed

She both challenges and reinforces the cultural
significance of the concept of the ‘separate spheres’.

For all these and a few other reasons this work
touches a number of issues which help to elaborate the
relationship of femininity, class and national
identity with the production and consumption of
design. It also serves to challenge the hegemony of
modernism from another perspective and provides
insights into the formation of modern consumer culture
based on desire and aspiration

To return to my task of rewriting my book on Design
and Culture I hope it is now clear how, over the last
two decades, work emanating from within Cultural
Studies and the application of some of the theoretical
writings that have influenced scholars working in that
field, has utterly transformed the task of the design
historian such that it is no longer possible nor
desirable to perpetuate the modernist, Pevsnerian
paradigm. A number of PhD students working with me are
extending these new approaches, one, for example, is
looking at the material culture of the British Navy in
terms of identity formation in relation to class and
gender while another, is looking at the way in which a
sense of national identity was created through the
insertion of the concept of design into the
modernization of Barcelona in the 1980s and 1990s.
Studies such as these cross the production/consumption
divide and make a nonsense of the distinction between
them Design is embedded in them both and studies of it
blur the differences between them. Design historians
have had to consciously create interdisciplinary
bridges to ensure that they cover the intellectual
spectrum that is inhabited by design. 

My new text will have to acknowledge all these new
inroads as well as reflecting the paradigm shift in
its very structure. Consumption and the commercial
system upon which it is dependent – advertising,
marketing retailing, rather than production, will be
seen as a determining with technology following its
lead. The acknowledgement that twentieth century
design was a product of market capitalism does not
render it impotent as an agent of change however.
Rather there is an understanding that it has to work
hand in hand with cultural change in order to perform
this role.

I hope that by demonstrating to you how I see design
as an element of both production and consumption I
have shown how the work I and other historians of
design have been doing provides another route into a
deeper understanding of design’s past and present. The
aim of this work is to provide a contextual picture of
‘design’ in order to explain how it works within
culture as a whole. I see this work as complementing
parallel studies which investigate design’s inner
workings in a more scientific manner. In the end the
‘common ground’ we all inhabit is our shared interest
in the phenomenon we call ‘design’ and I hope that the
perspective of the cultural historian can be seen as
contributing new knowledge to the project we are all
undertaking together. 

Penny Sparke

August 2002


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