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Design by Accident: For a New History of Design
A counterhistory and new historiography of design.
In Design by Accident, Alexandra Midal declares the autonomy of design, in and on its own terms. This meticulously researched work proposes not only a counterhistory but a new historiography of design, shedding light on overlooked historical landmarks and figures while reevaluating the legacies of design's established luminaries from the nineteenth century to the present. Midal rejects both linear narratives of progress and the long-held perception of design as a footnote to the histories of fine art and architecture. By weaving critical analysis of the canon of design history and theory together, with special attention to the writings of designers themselves, she draws out the nuances and radical potentials of the discipline―from William Morris's ambivalence toward industry, to Catharine Beecher's proto-feminist household appliances, to the Bauhaus's Expressionist origins, and the influence of Herbert Marcuse on Joe Colombo.
In Design by Accident, Alexandra Midal declares the autonomy of design, in and on its own terms. This meticulously researched work proposes not only a counterhistory but a new historiography of design, shedding light on overlooked historical landmarks and figures while reevaluating the legacies of design's established luminaries from the nineteenth century to the present. Midal rejects both linear narratives of progress and the long-held perception of design as a footnote to the histories of fine art and architecture. By weaving critical analysis of the canon of design history and theory together, with special attention to the writings of designers themselves, she draws out the nuances and radical potentials of the discipline―from William Morris's ambivalence toward industry, to Catharine Beecher's proto-feminist household appliances, to the Bauhaus's Expressionist origins, and the influence of Herbert Marcuse on Joe Colombo.
- GenresDesign
408 pages, Paperback
Published September 17, 2019
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
March 4, 2022
“Man’s relationship to the world could be modified only through the daily use of beautiful objects”
William Morris, „The Lesser Arts“, 1877
“The problem for us […] is how to serve up an ice cream in such a way that he [the customer] loses the desire to eat it for the rest of his life. Or an ice cream that, once it has been bought, grows bigger than him and humiliates him. Or that becomes a piece of the world surrounding him and frightens him […]. In short, an ice cream with no alternatives: either you eat it or it eats you. Or rather: it starts to eat you as soon as you have finished it. And then we think: apple-bombs, poisonous sweets, false information, in short Trojan blankets, beds, or horses that are brought into the house and destroy everything in it. We want to let in everything that stays outside the door: carefully constructed banality, deliberate vulgarity, urban fittings, dogs that bite.”
Archizoom Associati, in Domus, October 1967
“Design […] moved out of the shadows and away from its decorative obsession thanks to the creative and theoretical actions of architects […] design’s own actions are now developing; they show a tendency toward a total occupation of the built environment, based on the two social conditions that are the confusion of values and the weakness of architecture in our era. This takeover of the environment relies on industry which, after having inadvertently birthed design, used it as a means of subjugating the world of creation. Just a few years after its birth, design became imperialist and universal. This attempted putsch is unacceptable. “A healthy (and extremely necessary) questioning of the environment must involve the appropriate division of territories between the different disciplines.”
Claude Parent, L’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui, 1969
*
DESIGN BY ACCIDENT is probably one of the most anticipated and hyped design theory monographs in recent years. May not be a very high threshold, as there is so little academic design discussion that every such publication is an event per se. Actually, this is what DbA discusses: that design has never really had an autonomous voice or even a territory, because more established disciplines such as architecture, art, industry etc. have tended to see design as their own periphery or at best – protégé. And design theory from the beginning has been projection of what was expected from design by architects, art theoreticians and others. The most attention has been given to the complex relationship between architecture and design, where the former´s attitudes towards the latter tend to shift between paranoia and patronage. Illustrated by the quote above.
This all gives us a portrait of dysfunctional family a la Wes Anderson: the industry is always at work, architecture is a drama queen who constantly, speaking over all others, tries to organize domestic life, artworld cuts middle only to speak about own personal traumas, as youngest disciple design remains stubbornly silent, only to leave home as soon as possible. At the same time all parties are constantly making openings and attempts to fix and build relationships – attempts that mostly are comically failed from the beginning.
The first print edition of DbA sold out right away. To get one, I even contacted book-boutiques from Australia to Hungary – because it was during a quarantine, and I had time for obsessive online shopping – but to no avail. By the time the e-Book was made available one could already expect that this monograph maybe didn’t exceed all expectations: despite its initial popularity one could find almost no reception about the work. It is never a good sign.
That said, the book, the monograph really is extremely interesting and at the same time frustrating to read. All the necessary elements are there – the author has in-depth knowledge, and she knows how to present, the source material is rich – it is worth to highlight that the author has worked through several original texts in Italian and French, not available in English – but the whole does not really come together. The book begins as a thorough historical view to the context of the development of design theory, but soon starts to backtrack and repeat, jumping back and forth between eras and topics. The source material ends in somewhere 1980s-1990s, without any explanation given for this time gap. Even the monograph´s main title remains largely cryptic: only when worked through the text, one can assume it is the paraphrase to another, rather obscure architecture-theoretical work, quoted in text but not extensively explained. Not to mention some spelling errors here and there.
Since this is a dissertation, I could assume that the reason may be that the whole volume largely consists of separate papers, published earlier and then arranged into the monograph in a bit of a rush.
All in all, piece by piece, as a „genealogical Odyssey” the material is very enjoyable. I personally was most entertained by the Italian architecture and design radicals from the 1970s: their operatically playful, tricky, witty, immoral actions and statements still possess a refreshing effect in an otherwise rather conservative field of design thought.
William Morris, „The Lesser Arts“, 1877
“The problem for us […] is how to serve up an ice cream in such a way that he [the customer] loses the desire to eat it for the rest of his life. Or an ice cream that, once it has been bought, grows bigger than him and humiliates him. Or that becomes a piece of the world surrounding him and frightens him […]. In short, an ice cream with no alternatives: either you eat it or it eats you. Or rather: it starts to eat you as soon as you have finished it. And then we think: apple-bombs, poisonous sweets, false information, in short Trojan blankets, beds, or horses that are brought into the house and destroy everything in it. We want to let in everything that stays outside the door: carefully constructed banality, deliberate vulgarity, urban fittings, dogs that bite.”
Archizoom Associati, in Domus, October 1967
“Design […] moved out of the shadows and away from its decorative obsession thanks to the creative and theoretical actions of architects […] design’s own actions are now developing; they show a tendency toward a total occupation of the built environment, based on the two social conditions that are the confusion of values and the weakness of architecture in our era. This takeover of the environment relies on industry which, after having inadvertently birthed design, used it as a means of subjugating the world of creation. Just a few years after its birth, design became imperialist and universal. This attempted putsch is unacceptable. “A healthy (and extremely necessary) questioning of the environment must involve the appropriate division of territories between the different disciplines.”
Claude Parent, L’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui, 1969
*
DESIGN BY ACCIDENT is probably one of the most anticipated and hyped design theory monographs in recent years. May not be a very high threshold, as there is so little academic design discussion that every such publication is an event per se. Actually, this is what DbA discusses: that design has never really had an autonomous voice or even a territory, because more established disciplines such as architecture, art, industry etc. have tended to see design as their own periphery or at best – protégé. And design theory from the beginning has been projection of what was expected from design by architects, art theoreticians and others. The most attention has been given to the complex relationship between architecture and design, where the former´s attitudes towards the latter tend to shift between paranoia and patronage. Illustrated by the quote above.
This all gives us a portrait of dysfunctional family a la Wes Anderson: the industry is always at work, architecture is a drama queen who constantly, speaking over all others, tries to organize domestic life, artworld cuts middle only to speak about own personal traumas, as youngest disciple design remains stubbornly silent, only to leave home as soon as possible. At the same time all parties are constantly making openings and attempts to fix and build relationships – attempts that mostly are comically failed from the beginning.
The first print edition of DbA sold out right away. To get one, I even contacted book-boutiques from Australia to Hungary – because it was during a quarantine, and I had time for obsessive online shopping – but to no avail. By the time the e-Book was made available one could already expect that this monograph maybe didn’t exceed all expectations: despite its initial popularity one could find almost no reception about the work. It is never a good sign.
That said, the book, the monograph really is extremely interesting and at the same time frustrating to read. All the necessary elements are there – the author has in-depth knowledge, and she knows how to present, the source material is rich – it is worth to highlight that the author has worked through several original texts in Italian and French, not available in English – but the whole does not really come together. The book begins as a thorough historical view to the context of the development of design theory, but soon starts to backtrack and repeat, jumping back and forth between eras and topics. The source material ends in somewhere 1980s-1990s, without any explanation given for this time gap. Even the monograph´s main title remains largely cryptic: only when worked through the text, one can assume it is the paraphrase to another, rather obscure architecture-theoretical work, quoted in text but not extensively explained. Not to mention some spelling errors here and there.
Since this is a dissertation, I could assume that the reason may be that the whole volume largely consists of separate papers, published earlier and then arranged into the monograph in a bit of a rush.
All in all, piece by piece, as a „genealogical Odyssey” the material is very enjoyable. I personally was most entertained by the Italian architecture and design radicals from the 1970s: their operatically playful, tricky, witty, immoral actions and statements still possess a refreshing effect in an otherwise rather conservative field of design thought.
December 17, 2020
Interesting approach to the history of design and indeed where the discipline fits somewhere between architecture and art. Extensively researched.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews