Global Histories of Design, 1400-1800
7th Global Arts workshop
Friday 6th February, at the Seminar Room A, Research Department,
V&A Museum
PROJECT DESCRIPTION
a) Institutional Background: This event is the final installment in a series of seven
scholarly gatherings under the heading of Global Arts, an AHRC-funded Network
including the University of Warwick, the Ashmolean Museum, and the V&A. It is also
the second in a more targeted series of workshops which will lead to a book entitled
Approaches to Global Design History. The first of these events, “Design in the Global
Economy.” will be convened by Dr. Sarah Teasley at Northwestern University on
December 5 and 6, 2008. A third and final event, “Global Histories of Design, 1800 to
the Present,” will take place at the Royal College of Art on May 1 and 2, 2009. An
indicative description of the Global Design History project follows.
b) Disciplinary Background:
The original orientation of the discipline of Design History (since its emergence in the
1970s) towards individual (“named”) designers and iconic objects, most of them
postdating 1850, has given way to a much broader set of interests. Studies of
gender, consumption, and critique; investigations of business practice; an extension
of the field’s chronological coverage back to the medieval period; and theoretical
engagements with a wide array of cognate disciplines such as art history, literary
criticism, cultural history, sociology, anthropology and the history of science have all
enriched this still-young scholarly field.
c) Emergence of Global Design History
However, design history has remained constrained within a model of expertise based
in area studies. Euroamerica has remained the clear centre of the discipline. Only in
the last few years have design historians in Europe and the United States begun to
study a broader geography, with particular emphases on Japan, India, China, and
Brazil—and even here, the tendency has been to extend the franchise of the
discipline without challenging its basic methodologies.
Recently, however, small but active design history communities have emerged in
South America, Japan, and Hong Kong. A few scholars have written exemplary
works of design history that are explicitly global in their reach. Also encouraging is
Global Histories of Design, 1400-1800
7th Global Arts workshop
Friday 6th February, at the Seminar Room A, Research Department,
V&A Museum
the development of graduate coursework in the history of design in Asia. This
maturing of the field’s spatial outlook raises a tantalizing new possibility: that design
history might contribute to a vital project sweeping the humanities at present, the
broader understanding of ‘globalism’ and processes of globalization. The proposed
volume is intended as a major contribution towards this objective.
d) Questions to be addressed
While addressing questions of method, the book will also offer statements about
specific contexts within the field of global design history: the influence of Ottoman art
and architecture on Europe, Persia and India; the European adoption of Asian
aesthetic forms; the Latin American adoption of Asian and European decorative
solutions; the role of capital cities in creating international design, etc. Some papers
will focus on very short timeframes and locales (even on specific objects), while
others will map extensive chronologies and geographies. Authors will reflect on nonEuropean traditions in design history; on how such traditions could be meaningfully
studied by comparing and connecting them and by relating them to better-known
European approaches and narratives. The book will also analyse the relationship
between local generation of design and global frameworks of historical investigation.
The very definition of the word “design” is obviously at stake in such an endeavour.
For the purposes of this project, we propose that design historians are a loose
collective of scholars with common interests in such key issues as materiality,
aesthetics, interactions between production and consumption, and professional
practice. While we are aware that “design” may look very different to a specialist in
Chinese architecture and a specialist in French fashion, we nonetheless contend that
this field can act as a common ground between such disparate contexts. From this
perspective the fluid usage of the term “design”, and its various translations and
adoption in diverse geographies, is itself a subject worthy of study.