A Companion to Contemporary Design since 1945

Anne Massey, Dana Arnold

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781119112372, 9781119111184
• eBook ISBN: 9781119111207
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: History of Art

A critical overview of contemporary design and its place within the broader context of art history

A Companion to Contemporary Design since 1945 introduces readers to a collection of specially commissioned essays exploring the complex areas of design that emerged through the latter half of the twentieth century, design history, design methods, design studies and more recently, design thinking.

The book delivers a thoughtful overview of all design disciplines and also strives to stimulate inter-disciplinary debate and examine unconsidered convergences among design applications in different fields. By offering a new perspective on design, the articles assembled here present a challenging account of the boundaries between design history and its cognate disciplines, especially art history.

The volume comprises five sections—Time, Place, Space, Objects and Audiences—that discuss environments for design and how we interact with designed objects and spaces. Notable features include:

• 24 new essays reflecting the current state of design history and theory, and examining developments on a global basis
• Contributions by eminent scholars and practitioners from around the globe
• Enriched throughout with illustrations

A Companion to Contemporary Design since 1945 provides a new and thought-provoking revision of our conception and understanding of contemporary design that will be essential reading for students at both undergraduate and graduate levels as well as researchers and teachers working in design history, theory and practice, and in related fields.

Part I
Time

1
Contemporary Design History

Sarah Teasley

In 1995, I spent the summer designing and building web pages in Kanazawa, a regional city in Japan. Writing and dreaming in Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), I worked alongside engineers at the region’s first Internet service provider, a mid‐size conglomerate, to produce promotional webpages for hotels and tourist attractions. I was not a trained designer: I had taught myself basic photography and graphic design out of interest, and thanks to a childhood spent with computers could train myself to code in HTML and to use software such as Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator.

My efforts to render Kanazawa’s famously succulent prawns even more enticing on tourist websites tell a story about social change: I had begun a summer internship in the conglomerate’s central administrative division. As a woman, I was assigned a turquoise and white uniform and directed to stuff envelopes alongside the other young women in the administrative track, which ran alongside the career track for male university graduates. But my line manager swiftly moved me to the IT division, in a more specialized role, once my amateur computing and design skills became known, and I was offered a full‐time role in the company following university graduation. It is unclear whether a Japanese woman would have been offered the same opportunity, so difficult to say whether my reassignment represented a re‐evaluation of women’s roles within the company, but at the very least indicates that the firm was open to foreign hires. My male colleagues’ employment itself demonstrated change as well: some had postgraduate degrees, which complicated their position and salary in an age‐based system predicated on joining companies immediately after university graduation. These attributes made us misfits. But they also represented a corporate strategy that valued internationalization and specialist technical knowledge, within a national corporate culture of preferring malleable – and Japanese – male generalists (Matanle 2003; Ogasawara 1998).

My web design role also tells a story of economic and technological change: by the summer of 1995, Japan was several years into the post‐economic bubble economy that would soon become known as “the lost decade” (Fletcher and von Staden 2014). Around me, acquaintances’ firms were suffering, even closing, and the term risutora (restructuring, or corporate layoffs) had entered quotidian use. But from my superficial vantage point, the firm that provided the internship seemed less affected, perhaps because it had diversified its portfolio from energy and chemicals, the firm’s earliest divisions, to include building systems and computer hardware and software back in the 1960s. The firm’s location in Kanazawa also buffered it from the Great Hanshin Earthquake, which heavily damaged the Kobe–Osaka area in January 1995, and from the Aum Shinryo‐kyo sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway system in March that same year.

As a respected and well‐connected firm already offering comprehensive systems installation and maintenance, my employer was well positioned to profit from the World Wide Web’s arrival in Japan. My role as graphic designer, web developer, and copywriter had nothing to do with a corporate interest in branching into online advertising or graphic design; rather, the Web’s arrival represented an opportunity to provide a new level of regional infrastructure. The availability of software such as Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator and the ease with which one could learn to use them, given time, a manual, and increasingly user‐friendly interfaces, meant that an amateur with a computer, a color scanner – essential for translating analog photographs into digital images – and access to examples of similar designs could create and publish her own graphic products, outside the existing industry.

As this account of desk‐top publishing (DTP) in Kanazawa indicates, the Web’s arrival in Japan in the 1990s was one of a number of historical developments that positioned design in new arenas. These changes brought new actors into areas previously occupied and shaped by self‐consciously professional designers. Websites, web design, and the Internet behaved as an open space – technology that had not yet “stabilized,” to use the science and technology studies (STS) phrasing – that could be occupied by a conglomerate with a burgeoning IT division and performed by a non‐professional designer. In twentieth century Japan, as in many other Organisation for Economic Co‐operation and Development (OECD) countries, graphic and industrial designers had organized for social and professional recognition of the designer as a skilled, irreplaceable member of the production team (Fischer and Hiesinger 1995; Insatsu Hakubutsukan 2008). Now, new technologies, uses, and users were destabilizing the industry, and designers who had fought for recognition of their professional status feared replacement by amateurs with DTP skills and a general degrading of graphic aesthetic sensibility and technique as a result. New practices existed alongside older and older new ones, creating a hybrid environment in which a foreign intern could use Photoshop, analog photography, and fax machines together, working alongside a team of suited men in a turquoise and white “office lady” uniform, despite her reassignment to a skilled role.

My work that summer had only marginal if any historical impact, but illustrates important shifts and conditions in contemporary Japanese history and the contemporary global history of design. (Or at least it would if anything remained of it; the websites evanesced years ago.) But I had forgotten about the experience, even after beginning to research the history of 1990s Japan through its industrial and graphic design industries. In that project, design journalist and educator Watabe Chiharu and I focused research efforts on professional designers in Tokyo, as visible in products and photographs from the period, published in industry journals, and interviewed in oral histories (Design History of Now 2014). I had not recalled my experiences as a web designer in regional Japan let alone thought them relevant. I overlooked them because they were at once too intimate and too distant, both in time and – with their amateurishness and location in a regional conglomerate, far from Tokyo’s storied design offices – from canonical or mainstream histories of Japanese design. I also overlooked them simply because the historian usually narrates someone else’s story, not one’s own. Why would I have thought to connect my own experiences either with design history or with Japan’s contemporary history more generally?

I begin with this anecdote as it illustrates the difficulties of compiling contemporary history. Not least that contemporary history, what we might call history of the recent past, intersects with the realm of personal experience. It suffers from proximity, or from what we might more aptly call an “in‐between‐ness of distance” that makes it neither history nor the present. Writing in 1975, historian John Dower noted, “For Western scholars, occupied Japan remains something of an anomaly: too remote (1945–1952) for most economists and political scientists, still uncomfortably close for historians” (Dower 1975, p. 485). Writing in 2018, the 23 years to 1995 provide a similar gap. Writing or even seeing “history that has just happened” presents a challenge because it is no longer fresh in the mind, yet not so long ago for public opinion to regard it as worth chronicling or archiving. The events of 20 or 30 years ago are close enough to make us believe we remember them, but far enough that events are anything but fresh in the mind, making it easy to misremember them.

As the anecdote suggests, design historians can suffer from a blind spot when it comes to spotting the “significant quotidian” in recent history. This chapter raises and considers the particular challenges presented by the task of compiling design histories of the recent past – or, equally, history of the recent past through design, or history of recent design pasts. While acknowledging design history’s occlusions, the chapter also posits that design history, as a set of approaches, perspectives, and techniques, offers a potentially strong mode for undertaking histories of the contemporary, by design historians and others alike. It suggests that the approaches and perspectives possible in the history of design – attention to lived experience, materiality, and the everyday; an understanding of experience as interface with artifactual environment; and a concern with the making and experience of the artifacts, environments, and experiences that shape our physical and emotional interaction in the world – might provide an effective net for catching and seeing that history.

Combined with methods for communicating histories that activate such an understanding of affect as a designer would – or in collaboration with artist and designers – the chapter suggests that design history offers a powerful script for compiling and communicating histories of the recent past, and for placing those histories in relation to decision‐making now. To make its points, the chapter revisits ground familiar to design historians and contemporary historians alike. I claim neither originality nor novelty in the treatment of either topic or set of methods. Rather, the intention is to invite historians working with contemporary questions and material to engage with design historical approaches, and to articulate avenues, tools, and challenges for researchers and students in contemporary design history, studies, research, and practice. To this end, the chapter draws primarily on evidence and literature in design history, with reference to some methodological reflections on contemporary history.

The chapter is organized in three sections. The first explores the temporality, scope, and subjects of contemporary design history. The second discu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• List of Illustrations
• About the Editor
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Series Editor’s Preface
• Introduction
• Part I: Time
• Part II: Place
• Part III: Space
• Part IV: Object
• Part V: Audiences
• Index
• End User License Agreement