From Form to Context: Teaching a Different Type of Design History
Prasad Boradkar
A good history of design isn’t a history of design at all. It’s a history of ideas and therefore of culture.
—Tibor Kalman1
The writing of design history is gradually evolving from a chronologically framed documentation of styles and their creators to an account that more frequently situates artifacts (objects, images, and spaces)2 within broader social contexts. It would be optimistic to say that we have traveled some distance in terms of placing design history within a more socially defined discourse—but more realistic, perhaps, to say that we still have further to go. This evolution in the writing of a culturally oriented design history is based primarily on these notions:
1. Formal analysis is incomplete knowledge.
2. Objects and images are under-theorized in design research.
3. We tend to neglect cultural meanings generated in practice by audiences.
This essay does not attempt to outline design history’s object of study, but it strives to emphasize that an inquiry into the social significance of artifacts should be included as one of its pivotal concerns, and it further offers possible models for so doing. One of the first steps in contextualizing the history of graphic design can be treated as part of a continuum of design evolution, undetached from the histories of other design disciplines such as architecture, interior design, or industrial design.
Though the task of teaching such a history is difficult to accomplish in the one or two semesters typically available, such an approach can set the stage for a more holistic understanding of designed artifacts. Although several graphic and industrial design educators, theorists, historians, and writers have begun to expand the premise of design history, three distinct areas additionally need to be tackled in further detail—context(s), critical perspectives, and cultural models. Together, these three form the key components of a structure that can be used in teaching a more socially informed history of design.
Context(s)
The history of graphic design cannot be learned by studying merely the history of graphic design. It is critical that graphic communications be situated within a variety of venues, including cultural, social, political, environmental, and economic contexts. And, in accomplishing this, disciplines and areas of study such as visual culture, media and cultural studies, anthropology, political economy, sustainability studies, as well as material culture, can function as valuable resources. An engagement with discourses derived from such diverse sources will lead to a higher awareness of the role of images as signifiers of culture, human relations, and society, and thus will provide a notably more well-informed understanding of the larger significance of graphic design activity.
For example, Peter Jones demonstrates how situating the analysis of postage stamps within a historical/cultural context can reveal appreciably more than the expression of graphic creativity—that, in fact, these stamps serve as signifiers of national identity, fetishizing of technology, modernization, and the like.3 In Malek Alloula’s postcolonial critique, postcards featuring photographs of veiled Algerian women sent by French colonizers back home between 1900 and 1930 unmasks new meanings. In his analysis, Alloula shows that these postcards reveal the colonial gaze of the oppressor, the stereotyped French perception of the native, and the Oriental eroticizing of the Algerian woman.4
Critical Perspectives
Complex analytical frameworks based on specific theoretical positions can help uncover particular meanings of artifacts. British author and literary critic David Lodge lists the following as some of the types of perspectives that are regularly used in the analysis of literature: “historical, biographical, rhetorical, mythical, structural, Freudian, Jungian, Marxist, existentialist, Christian, allegorical, ethical, phenomenological, [and] archetypal.”5 Such approaches may be similarly employed in critiquing visual messages. When situated within a feminist perspective, the analysis of an advertisement can reveal the unique conditions and meanings generated by the politics of gender, and, if situated within a Marxist perspective, it can highlight issues of class and labor. Similarly, an allegorical perspective will emphasize stories behind the message, just as a Freudian analysis can underscore issues relating to subconscious desires. Each critical perspective is fundamental to creating the condition for a specific interpretation. In a Marxist analysis of packaging design, Wolfgang Haug delivers a scathing critique of Andy Warhol’s record sleeve concept for the Rolling Stones’ Sticky Fingers, released in 1971. The cover art features an image of the male body in tight jeans photographed from waist to mid-thigh, clearly showing the outline of the penis. A fully functional metal zipper is attached to the cover, and, according to Haug, “the buyer acquires the possibility of opening the package, and the zip and finds . . . nothing.”6 It is his contention that commodity aesthetics (the form of a product and its packaging) promises much more than it can deliver, leaving the unsatisfied audience with a desire for more. This critique implicates the form-giving aspect of design as an activity that prevalently provides value to the capitalist system at the expense and disappointment of the user.
Critical Perspectives
Having asserted that “culture is one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language,” British cultural theorist Raymond Williams further defines it in three parts as: (i) the independent noun which describes a general process of intellectual, spiritual, and aesthetic development; (ii) the independent noun, whether used generally or specifically, which indicates a particular way of life, whether of a people, a period or a group . . . [and] (iii) an independent and abstract noun which describes the works and practices of intellectual and especially artistic activity.7
Cultural models may be described as mechanisms devised with the explicit purpose of gaining a clear understanding of specific occurrences in the world. In order to ground the contextual meanings of visual messages, cultural models that highlight any of the elements from Williams’s definition of culture above can be highly effective.
Paul Willis’s concept of homology may be considered as one such model. “Essentially, [homology] is concerned with how far, in their structure and content, particular items parallel and reflect the structure, style, typical concerns, attitudes, and feelings of the social group.”8 For example, fashion, music, art, graphics, and products may be interpreted as exhibiting stylistic similarities as well as the zeitgeist of the 1960s. The dreamy ethereal music, drug-inspired lyrics, and strange rhythms of some of the songs of bands such as Cream, the Beatles, and Jefferson Airplane led to the design of posters and album covers that exploded with psychedelic colors and free-flowing forms. Dylan’s poster by Milton Glaser, with swirls of bright colors described as “a symbolic crystallization of its time,” and the lava lamp, with lazily floating globs of oily light, expressed similar aesthetic and cultural ideologies. Research assignments constructed around homological analysis of specific time periods that help students connect graphics to objects to sound to motion become excellent pedagogical tools, which may be used to explore an expanded history of design.9
Paul du Gay’s circuit of culture, with some alteration, can serve as a basis for the contextual study of artifacts. In order to gain a better historical perspective, the model, originally composed of five segments (production, representation, consumption, identity, and regulation) can now be expanded to include evolution. Production of objects, images, and spaces refers not only to processes of design and technological manufacture but also to practices of cultural production that often layer meanings into these artifacts. Of particular significance to graphic design is representation, which in part refers to how artifacts are portrayed in popular media. Consumption involves the active production of meaning by audiences, a practice that also leads to the generation of specific identities. Finally, regulation deals with the effects that artifacts have on individuals and institutions, often engendering responses such as control and adaptation. The addition of evolution to du Gay’s circuit makes a provision for the study of changes in form and meaning that artifacts manifest in time as well as during their life cycles. For example, the UPS logo, from Paul Rand’s 1961 design to Futurebrand’s 2003 version, can be critically analyzed from six different approaches using the expanded version of du Gay’s circuit of culture.10
Conclusion
Context(s), critical perspectives, and cultural models (used individually or in conjunction with each other) can become guidelines for projects and research papers in history courses. In an Arizona State University industrial design course, Twentieth-Century Design (typically taken by sophomores), I have experimented with creating a research assignment titled “ImageMusicObject.” Students are asked to select five objects (products, buildings, etc.); five images (posters, photographs, CD covers, etc.); and five examples of music (songs, albums, etc.) from an assigned decade for analysis. The crux of the student project is not simply to identify and critique these fifteen items individually, but to find patterns of homology among them in terms of style, attitudes, and the spirit of the age. By employing one of the critical perspectives mentioned above (such as feminist or Marxist), students contextualize these artifacts in terms of the politics of power of class, race, and gender—all issues germane to cultural studies discourse. Informed by Dick Hebdige’s work on subcultural style, some students analyzed grunge graphics, fashion, and the associated music in light of emotions such as apathy and dissatisfaction felt by youth in the early 1990s. Others studied the hip-hop aesthetic as well as expressions of masculinity and race through designs of music videos, CD covers, logos, tattoos, cars, and jewelry.11
Situating objects, images, and spaces within contexts, critical perspectives, and models can reveal meanings that, in traditional pedagogical environments, have been invisible to design students. Such an expanded basis for the history of design will not diminish the typical design concerns of aesthetics and style, but it will contextualize them with an awareness of the social and cultural landscape. These methods of teaching history possess the capability to awaken a consciousness that purely chronological and/or formal accounts often put to sleep. Such methods can enliven the debate in the classroom significantly and engage students more deeply in the subject. Furthermore, design history courses employing these ideas and techniques have the added value of imparting contextual and critical-thinking skills to complement the creative-thinking skills typically emphasized in studio courses. The education of a graphic designer is only partially complete without a history course structured around the concerns of everyday life.
Notes
1. Tibor Kalman, “Good History/Bad History,” in Tibor Kalman: Perverse Optimist, eds. Peter Hall and Michael Beirut (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1998), 80.
2. For lack of a better descriptor, the term artifact is employed in this chapter to encompass physical objects and visual messages as well as interior and exterior spaces.
3. Peter Jones, “Posting the Future: British Stamp Design and the ‘White Heat’ of a Technological Revolution,” Journal of Design History 17, no. 2 (2004): 163–176.
4. Malek Alloula, “From the Colonial Harem,” in The Visual Culture Reader, ed. N. Mirzoeff (London: Routledge, 1998), 317–322.
5. David Lodge, Small World (New York: Penguin Books, 1995), 24.
6. Wolfgang Haug, Critique of Commodity Aesthetics: Appearance, Sexuality and Advertising in Capitalist Society (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 1986), 86.
7. Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), 76–80.
8. Paul Willis, Profane Culture (Boston: Routledge, 1978), 191.
9. Philip Meggs, A History of Graphic Design, 3rd ed. (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1998), 394.
10. Paul du Gay, Stuart Hall, Linda Janes, Hugh Mackay, and Keith Negus, Doing Cultural Studies: The Story of the Sony Walkman (London: Sage, 1997).
11. Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style (London: Methuen, 1979).