What We Talk About When We Talk About Design History: Design Observer
From the packaging of our belongings to the presentation of our surroundings, most of us recognize that design has, over the course of the past century, become a ubiquitous component in everyday life. Design is signage and graffiti and labels and lace, posters and propaganda and toothbrushes and teapots: objects and artefacts that captivate and delight us, frustrate or provoke us, but why?
This is where design historians come in.
Design history is, after all, social history: it’s an evolutionary (and somewhat cautionary) tale of use and abuse, of innovation and migration, of the inevitable tide of obsolescence that puzzles some of us to such a vexing degree that we simply have no other choice but to become design historians to start making sense of things.
And we begin, like all historians, by doing research.