visualizingdesignhistoryananalyticalapproach（visualizingdesignhistoryananalyticalapproach）.docVIP

Visualizing design history: an analytical approach Abstract This project is about imaging complexity. It harnesses design’s intrinsic capacity for giving visual form to concepts and relations, using graphic design to interrogate its own history. There are two main threads to this research. The first is a critique of the construction of design history. It uses Philip Meggs’s A History of Graphic Design and Steven Heller and Elinor Pettit’s Graphic Design Time Line: A Century of Design Milestones as examples of the problems and limitations in historical writing about design. The second thread represents graphic design history in diagrammatic form, laying the groundwork for alternate ways of surveying the field. The research does not seek to supplant the written historical survey but rather to suggest complementary, design-based strategies. My approach is a speculative one, grounded in design experimentation. By recourse to external analogies—the ideas of the homunculus, the ancient continent of Pangea, and Mr Beck’s London Underground map—I employ inventive and imaginative approaches to visualise the web of forces and events that is design history. I approach this task not as a historian but as a designer seeking new applications for design thinking while making knowledge about design available in new ways. Keywords: graphic design history, envisioning, information design, timeline design 1. Introduction 1.1 Multiple graphic design history perspectives The creation of design history has been challenged by a number of writers, who have argued that it is far from an objective or neutral enterprise. For example, Clive Dilnot argues that design historians place too much emphasis on the individual designer, instead of adopting a socio-historical approach, examining design activity against its economic and cultural context. Adrian Forty sees the writing of design history pejoratively, as an activity steeped in connoisseurship, the goal of which is to erect a canon o