Dangerous Liaisons: Relationships between design, craft and art

The introductory essay [co-authored] examines the background and current interconnections between design, craft and the fine arts. This Special Issue was able to expand the debate by showing how attitudes to materials – from 19C sculpture to current fashion – appropriate craftsmanship to reinvigorate notions of handmaking

Reading Graphic Design in Cultural Context

Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 2019.Reading Graphic Design: •Is a much needed examination of graphic design in the expanded field •Forms an introduction to writing critically about graphic design through twelve chapters providing exemplary analyses of the semantic richness of the selected case studies •Goes beyond aesthetic judgments to explore how graphic design and illustration function as fields of industry and commerce in the West •Will inform, challenge and entertain undergraduate students of graphic design internationall

Design History: The State of the Art

© Copyright 2016 College Art Association. This manuscript version is mad available under the Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivatives 4.0 International license (CC BY-ND 4.0) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/ The version of record, Grace Lees-Maffei, ‘Design History: The State of the Art’, College Art Association, November 16, 2016, is available online via doi: 10.3202/caa.reviews.2016.153Design is a rich word. Its core meaning is a plan, so it refers by extension to evidence of the activity of planning, such as blueprints, technical drawings, and sketches on the backs of envelopes. However, it is also used to refer to the products of the activity of designing, such as designed objects, systems, and behaviors. Design history encompasses the study of design in order to find out about the past, and the study of the past in order to better understand design. Here I will briefly sketch the development of design history for those unfamiliar with it, including the international spread of the subject, and then focus on the current state of the field with reference to several key topics and work currently in progress.Peer reviewe

From National Histories of Advice Discourse to a "Transatlantic Domestic Dialogue"

Grace Lees Maffei, "From National Histories of Advice Discourses to a 'Transatlantic Domestic Dialogue", US Studies Online, March 2015.Contribution to a Society for the History of Women in the Americas (SHAW) series on the British Association of American Studies (BAAS) website U.S. Studies Online.Peer reviewedFinal Published versio

Design (History) and Heritage (Studies) : An Introduction

© 2021 Informa UK Limited. This is the accepted manuscript version of a book chapter which has been published in final form at https://www.routledge.com/Design-and-Heritage-The-Construction-of-Identity-and-Belonging/Lees-Maffei-Houze/p/book/9780367540487#This introduction makes the case for bringing design history and heritage studies together as timely and relevant to the current state of the art in each field. It provides contextual accounts of design history and parallel developments in heritage studies and critical heritage studies. It explains the structure for the book in six sections addressing design fields, and introduces the chapter contributions and links between them. It offers alternative reading routes attentive to chronology and geography. Three core themes of the book are: interrogating conceptual models and definitions of heritage; examining the significance of intangible cultural heritage for the understanding of design past and present; and questioning structures of ownership, belonging, and identity politics at the intersections of design and heritage. Above all, Design and Heritage shows how heritage is designed. In closing, we reflect on the potential for future work in and between these fields to the benefit of bot

Hospitality and Home: British and American Cultures of Entertaining

© Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 2020.The eighty years from 1920 to 2000 saw tremendous changes in the ways that hospitality was practiced in people’s homes. These transformations were brought about by broader cultural shifts - acting in different ways within different social class fractions, and in different regions - and by economic factors. Six key factors can be identified as instrumental here: informalization, the development of the hospitality industry as a context for domestic hospitality practices, shifting conceptions of domestic privacy, increased numbers of home owner-occupiers, the amount of media attention paid to the home and the innovation and acceptance of social media channels into our social lives and our homes. This chapter addresses these factors in turn in a chronological sequence that examines the period 1920 to the present as a series of episodes.Peer reviewe

Getting a Handle on It: Thomas Lamb, Mass Production, and Touch in Design History

© 2023 University of Pennsylvania Press. All rights reserved. This is the accepted manuscript version of an article which has been published in final form at https://doi.org/10.9783/9781512824216-011This chapter proceeds from the premise that the hands which operated the machinery of capitalism were not merely a unit by which the power needed to perform the labor required was calculated but, rather, they were sentient and individuated, and are themselves worthy of the focal attention of the historian. I reflect on the construction of knowledge about the senses from the perspective of a design historian using tactile research methods to understand the design process. I examine a case study of design production with reference to the work of Thomas Lamb, the ‘Handle Man’, as it is evidenced in the Thomas Lamb collection at Hagley Museum and Library

Real imagined communities: : National narratives and the globalization of design history

Kjetil Fallan, and Grace Lees-Maffei, 'Real Imagined Communities: National Narratives and the Globalization of Design History', Design Issues, Vol. 31 (4): 5-18, January 2016, doi: 10.1162/DESI_a_00360, https://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/DESI_a_00360. © 2015 Massachusetts Institute of Technology.The nation state is no longer the only socio-cultural or political-economic unit forming our identities and experiences, if it ever was, although national and regional histories of design have demonstrated cogent frameworks for the discussion of common socio-economic, cultural, and identity issues. In the context of celebrations and moral panic alike about the effect of globalization, recognizing that the much-vaunted global chains of design, manufacturing, and commerce are still composed of national endeavors is critical. This article argues for a reinsertion of the national category into contemporary academic understanding of design—both past and present. It provides a timely examination of the historiographic and methodological value of national frameworks in writing design history. We begin by examining how the dominant national paradigm ceded to the global as an academic, and mainstream, preoccupation, and then reintroduce the national into the global in design history.Peer reviewe

A GATHERING OF FLOWERS : ON DESIGN ANTHOLOGIES

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in The Design History on 12 May 2017, available online at: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/14606925.2017.1323426 Under embargo. Embargo end date: 12 November 2018.Over the past decade, anthologies – also called ‘readers’ – of design history and theory have proliferated across publishers’ catalogues. These books perform important pedagogical functions: they define fields and establish canons of authoritative texts, authors and concepts. While detractors argue that the easy availability of textual sources online means that we no longer need anthologies, the opposite argument can be made: the overwhelming volume of electronic information sharpens the need for concise, edited selections. This article examines the practices of selecting, editing and publishing anthologies and reasons for their increasing popularity, particularly in design education, at the present time.Peer reviewe