Writing Design: Words and Objects

Description

How do we learn about the objects that surround us? As well as gathering sensory information by viewing and using objects, we also learn about objects through the written and spoken word - from shop labels to friends' recommendations and from magazines to patents. But, even as design commentators have become increasingly preoccupied with issues of mediation, the intersection of design and language remains under-explored.Writing Design provides a unique examination of what is at stake when we convert the material properties of designed goods into verbal or textual description. Issues discussed include the role of text in informing design consumption, designing with and through language, and the challenges and opportunities raised by design without language. Bringing together a wide range of scholars and practitioners, Writing Design reveals the difficulties, ethics and politics of writing about design.

Grace Lees-Maffei is Reader in Design History in the School of Creative Arts at the University of Hertfordshire and is co-editor of The Design History Reader (Berg, 2010).

Writing Design is long overdue. For well over a century, critics, historians, theorists and designers themselves have used a multitude of words to describe, suggest, denote, evoke and critique that evasive concept of 'design'. Now, for the first time, a group of scholars have set out to reflect on that long-standing practice and to make us think more deeply about the complex relationship that exists between words and things. * Professor Penny Sparke, Kingston University, London, UK * This volume promises to become essential reading for anyone interested in the historical and contemporary circumstances by which words describe design, and design defines language. From a range of international perspectives, the book's contributors show how the interrelationship between language and design is never passive, but always subject to mediation, negotiation, and at times contestation. * Jeremy Aynsley, Professor of History of Design, Royal College of Art, UK * Writing Design will be a pivotal book on the fast-filling Design Criticism bookshelf. Design Criticism manifests variously as a journalistic practice, a mode of political resistance, a literary genre, an interpretive tool - and now as an academic discipline. The growing number of pedagogical initiatives in Design Criticism demands a literature that supports and challenges these academic endeavours with new research, provocative thinking and thoughtful analysis. Writing Design collects important scholarship - representing a spectrum of approaches, viewpoints, and geographical origins - that explores the rich relationship between design and language and draws attention to the written word as an artefact, worthy of as much scrutiny as the designed entity it describes. As such, this carefully selected compendium of essays helps to stake out the territory, and provides students with a broad view of the field, its key debates, themes and issues, as well as with inspiration for their own research, and case studies for close analysis. I look forward to the Design Criticism bookshelf soon groaning under the weight of many more anthologies, theoretical treatises, narrative histories and polemical tracts of the same calibre as this pioneering volume. * Alice Twemlow, Chair, MFA Design Criticism Department School of Visual Arts, USA *