Dear Terry and Glenn,
I think that the interesting query/quest is to ask when did Design entered
your language, spite of your own word for it, and meaning what?
Cheers,
Eduardo
----- Original Message -----
From: "Terence Love" <[log in to unmask]>
To: "'Eduardo Corte Real'" <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Monday, June 23, 2008 3:49 PM
Subject: RE: the opposite definition
Hi Eduardo,
Good post.
On the history of desgn might be worth also to look up 'naqsband' in Farsi.
There is a good and incredibly subtle literature on design from around 800
AD in Iran.
Best,
Terry
-----Original Message-----
From: PhD-Design - This list is for discussion of PhD studies and related
research in Design [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Eduardo
Corte Real
Sent: Monday, 23 June 2008 10:35 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: the opposite definition
Dear Glenn and All,
I have been doing some (re) search in what should be called the Middle
History of Design. You may recall Clive Dilnot's essay "The State of Design
History" in which was confirmed the range of Design History starting with
the Arts and Crafts Movement. I think there were pretty good reasons for
that, especially considering that this movement put to work what was
promised in the Hegelian notion of Modernity (a existential historical
condition and not, as before, a notion of continuity or opposition to
Antiquity) that included a role for art in everyday life. Jurgen Habermas
gives a good account of this in a book called "The Philosophical Discourse
of Modernity"(I don't know if it was translated to English).
However, there is no doubt that the word Design existed since the 14century
as Gunnar pointed out. The question is what was its meaning in this period.
To a fraction of this period I call the Middle History of Design, being the
Pre-History of Design, the period in which no similar word existed. There is
a Wittgensteinean twist in this. Maybe Design existed before the word but
probably it was better not to speak about it J
To be more precise, the Middle History of Design
starts with the emergence of a word meaning project and drawing that I
roughly could place in the early 1600's in England and in the early 1400's
in Italy. Therefore, we have a very interesting period between 1400's and
the middle 1850's in which the practical arts were little by little
emancipated as liberal arts by gravitating around this new scientia Disegno,
Design, Diseņo, Desenho. This period prepared the word to be active in the
industrial Era as meaning the artistic way of producing everyday objects, or
better, the way of producing artistic everyday objects. By the way, that's
why the conjunction Art& Design makes sense because an artist could easily
be a designer and vice versa; seldom some design objects moved from everyday
life to art museums; and last but not the least, some educational
institutions (in the Academia and beaux arts traditions) find to be very
clever to share resources and intellectual strategies among art and design.
I sense that Design History is probably coming to an end simply because by
encompassing all the human activities that need foresight, Design History
will be too vast to make sense as a History field. In my shortsighted view
this is equivalent to the end of Design because a subject matter without the
possibility of constructing a History of it do not exists.
As I said in the previous post, maybe it would be clever to take a look at
what Design means in non-English languages when is used as Design (when it
started to substitute words like Angewandte Kunst or Gestaltung or Desenho
or Disegno) to define a core of what is design globally wide instead of
giving credit to all activities that are self designated as Design Something
in English, simply because the word is fancy and there is no better one.
This would permit also exclude from our cogitations Design as an innate
human activity, which is only valid in English, from the centre of Design
Studies giving room to the studies about what designers do and the result of
their work.
I think that the next ICDHS conference in Osaka next October will give us
very good clues about this.
Cheers,
Eduardo
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