Eric,
Some wayward proposals, taking up that you were looking
for a course on philosophy and theory of design.
At the University of Technology, Sydney, Susan Stewart
and I experimented one year using Bruce Sterling's
Shaping Things as the Design History course text. The
first half of this book has a nicely schematic history of
design, though obviously with a view to the internet-of-
things future for which he lobbies. We hoped the text
would get the students to think historiographically about
design history.
I would also recommend the writings of Jan Michl:
http://janmichl.com/english-only.htm
His piece "On Seeing Design as Redesign" is a beauti-
fully argued account of why the practice of designing is
a dialectic with history of design.
Apropos current in discussions on this list, Mikka Pantzar
(whose "Domestication of Everyday Technologies: Dynamic
Views on the Social Histories of Artifacts is included in
Buchanan et al's _The Designed World_) wrote a related
article called "Do commodities reproduce themselves
through human beings? Toward an ecology of goods"
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/02604027.1993.9972382#preview
which contextualizes the outcomes of design within histories
of their diffusion, describing the ways in which people must
co-evolve to accommodate these newly designed aliens.
I would worry that a summary history of design would
only be possible by presuming some underlying constant
(and so ahistorical) form of designing that is linearly deve-
loping over time. More accurate, or at least more interesting,
would be to interrogate how what was called designing at
different times in different places are utterly different kinds
of practices within thoroughly distinct networks.
Hope this helps.
Cameron
___________________________________
Assoc.Prof. Cameron Tonkinwise
Director of Design Studies
School of Design, Carnegie Mellon University
MMCH 202A, Pittsburgh, PA 15213-3890
ph (+1) 412 268 6937
email: [log in to unmask]
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