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The editor has gathered together a body of writing in the emerging field of design studies. The contributors argue in different ways for a rethinking of design in the light of its cultural significance and its powerful position in today's society. The collection begins with a discussion of the various expressions of opposition to the modernists' purist approach toward design. Drawing on postmodernist theory and other critical strategies, the writers examine the relations among design, technology, and social organization to show how design has become a complex and multidisciplinary activity. The second section provides examples of new methods of interpreting and analysing design, ranging from rhetoric and semiotics to phenomenology, demonstrating how meaning is created visually. A final section related to design history shifts its emphasis to ideological frameworks such as capitalism and patriarchy that establish boundaries for the production and use of design.
. Focusing on the difficult relationship between art and social change, Margolin brings important new insights to our understanding of the avant-garde's role in a period of great political complexity.
"Authored by pre-eminent design scholar Victor Margolin, World History of Design is an indispensable new multi-volume work, providing a comprehensive and detailed historical account of design from prehistory to the end of the twentieth century"--
Emerging from the world of commercial art and product styling, design has now become completely integrated into human life. Its marks are all around us, from the chairs we sit on to the Web sites on our computer screens. One of the pioneers of design studies and still one of its most distinguished practitioners, Victor Margolin here offers a timely meditation on design and its study at the turn of the millennium and charts new directions for the future development of both fields. Divided into sections on the practice and study of design, the essays in The Politics of the Artificial cover such topics as design history, design research, design as a political tool, sustainable design, and the p...
The heydey of the poster was the last decade of the 19th century, when the poster came into its own as the perfect advertising medium, touting plays, periodicals, patent medicines, and a vast array of newfangled manufactured goods from bicycles to dynamite.
Discovering Design reflects the growing recognition that the design of the everyday world deserves attention not only as a professional practice but as a subject of social, cultural, and philosophic investigation. Victor Margolin, cofounder and an editor of the journal Design Issues, and Richard Buchanan, also an editor of the journal, bring together eleven essays by scholars in fields ranging from psychology, sociology, and political theory to technology studies, rhetoric, and philosophy. The essayists share the editors' concern, first made clear in Margolin's Design Discourse: History, Theory, Criticism, with the the development of design studies as a field of interdisciplinary research. T...
This book is about the expanding realm of visual culture: in architecture, art, design, advertising, photography, film, television, video, theatre performance, computer imagery and virtual reality. It is also about Visual Culture Studies, a relatively new academic discipline, or rather range of disciplines, that scholars employ to analyse visual artefacts. Unlike many other texts on the same subject, it foregrounds the ‘visual’ and is systematic and accessible. Visual culture provides an overview of the subject that pays heed to the achievements of both traditional and new theory whilst directing the reader to a large body of literature via references and an extensive bibliography. Walker and Chaplin discuss the concepts of ‘the visual’ and of ‘culture’ as well as the field and origins of Visual Culture Studies; coping with theory; models of production and consumption; institutions; pleasure; the canon and concepts of value; visual literacy and poetics; modes of analysis; culture and commerce; and new technologies. This book is designed for those studying the history and theory of fine arts, design and the mass media.
Exploring the ways in which sustainable development is being used by an emerging group of artists who combine fresh aesthetic sensibilities with constructively critical approaches to the production, dissemination, and display of their art, this book considers environmental issues in the context of art and design.
The Aesthetics of Design offers the first full treatment of design in the field of philosophical aesthetics, challenging the discipline to broaden its scope to include the quotidian objects and experiences of our everyday lives and concerns. In doing so, it contributes to the growing field of Everyday Aesthetics.