The Design History Reader

by Grace Lees-Maffei (editor), Rebecca Houze (editor)

The first systematic and comprehensive reader on Design History, this book examines the role of design and designed objects within social and cultural history. Extracts range from the 18th century, when design and manufacture separated, to the present day. Drawn from scholarly and polemical books, research articles, exhibition catalogues, and magazines, the extracts are placed in themed sections, with each section separately introduced and each concluded with an annotated guide to further reading.   Covering both primary texts (such as the writings of designers and design reformers) and secondary texts (in the form of key works of design history), the reader provides an essential resource for understanding the history of design, the development of the discipline, and contemporary issues in design history and practice. Selected Attfield, Jeremy Aynsley, Rayner Banham, Roland Barthes, Jean Baudrillard, Walter Benjamin, Pierre Bourdieu, Christopher Breward, Denise Scott Brown, Ruth Schwarz Cowan, Clive Dilnot, Buckminster Fuller, Paul Greenhalgh, Dick Hebdige, Steven Heller, John Heskett, Pat Kirkham, Adolf Loos, Victor Margolin, Karl Marx, Jeffrey Meikle, William Morris, Gillian Naylor, Victor Papanek, Nikolaus Pevsner, John Ruskin, Adam Smith, Penny Sparke, John Styles, Nancy Troy, Thorstein Veblen, Robert Venturi, John Walker, Frank Lloyd Wright.

Genres: Design, Nonfiction

520 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2010

About the author

Grace Lees-Maffei is a Professor of Design History and Director of the Professional Doctorate in Heritage (DHeritage) at the University of Hertfordshire. Grace's published work is available in The Design History Reader (Berg 2010), Writing Design: Words and Objects (Berg 2012), Made in Italy: Rethinking a Century of Italian Design (Bloomsbury 2013), Design at Home: Domestic Advice Books in Britain and the USA since 1945 (Routledge 2013), Iconic Designs: 50 Stories about 50 Things (Bloomsbury 2014), Designing Worlds: National Design Histories in an Age of Globalization (Berghahn, 2016), Reading Graphic Design in Cultural Context (Bloomsbury Academic, 2018), Design and Heritage (Routledge 2022) and in journals including Design Issues, Design and Culture, Arts and Humanities in Higher Education, Women's History Review, Modern Italy and the Journal of Design History.
Prof Lees-Maffei is Book Series Editor, with Prof Kjetil Fallan (University of Oslo), for Cultural Histories of Design (Bloomsbury), and Advisory Board member for AIS/Design Storia e Ricerche, Journal of the AIS/Design (Associazione italiana degli storici del design).

Reviews

[Yokusun Basi]

The Design History Reader by Grace Lees-Maffei (2010)