Design and the Question of History

Reviews / Votes

A forceful and inspiringly articulated set of essays ... Compelling and insightful. * Journal of Design History * This is a work of intense and vital scholarship. Fry, Dilnot and Stewart cut to the heart of what is at stake in how we question design, history, and the future. Design history will either rise to the challenge of this book or fade into irrelevance. -- Matthew Kiem, University of Technology Sydney: Insearch, Australia The provocative essays in this volume are at once a critique of history and a call for its relevance to the present and future. Within the provocation is the question of how design and its history can inform our actions in a world that presents extreme difficulties but also unprecedented opportunities to create a positive future. -- Victor Margolin, University of Illinois, USA Design and the Question of History offers an ambitious, compelling, and urgent challenge to design studies and to history. The world we live in has been fashioned and fabricated by design. The futures we can live are determined by these histories. This is scholarship that matters. -- Ben Highmore, University of Sussex, UK This is unashamedly a work of design philosophy. In fact, it is exactly the kind of philosophy that is needed now, as it confronts vital issues not just for design and the 'post-discipline' of history, but also of 'now' and the future. Fry, Dilnot and Stewart approach their common project with different voices, their passion and seriousness shining throughout. -- Anne- Marie Willis, German University in Cairo, Egypt Design and the Question of History argues that the world we inhabit, and its devastation, are thoroughly a product of design. This claim requires a rewriting of the relation between history and design, from which there emerges a powerful ontologically-oriented view of design that may lead us into entirely novel ways of worlding and visions of the human. -- Arturo Escobar, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, USA