As manufacturing has become globally fragmented, so too has the work of design. Complex supply chains conceal sources of creativity and innovation, posing new challenges for researching design history. There is little understanding of how the globalization of manufacturing in the late-twentieth and early-twenty-first centuries has affected design practice or how design authorship might be identified in mass-produced objects. This case study follows a pair of steel-toed boots named Vanessa from concept through design, development, and production, moving from Canada to Italy, Mexico, and beyond. It maps components, equipment, and expertise, making it possible to trace sources and relationships of design. Analysis reveals how the boots reflect shifts in global trade and the concentration of knowledge and resources in new locations. It also shows how the globalization of production has influenced the role of the product designer who acts as intermediary within transnational networks, combining predesigned components and practices from around the world. The manufacturer, Mellow Walk, has experienced the transition from a regional manufacturing economy to one that is globally integrated. The company was founded in the 1990s when most Canadian footwear factories had closed due to global competition. It is unique as the last fully integrated footwear factory in Ontario, meaning that management, design, production, sales, and shipping happen under one roof. Mellow Walk nevertheless depends on international suppliers and, in this sense, represents many other footwear brands around the world.
{"title":"Follow the Boots: A Case Study of Design and Global Value Chains","authors":"E. Hodson","doi":"10.1093/jdh/epad018","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/jdh/epad018","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 As manufacturing has become globally fragmented, so too has the work of design. Complex supply chains conceal sources of creativity and innovation, posing new challenges for researching design history. There is little understanding of how the globalization of manufacturing in the late-twentieth and early-twenty-first centuries has affected design practice or how design authorship might be identified in mass-produced objects. This case study follows a pair of steel-toed boots named Vanessa from concept through design, development, and production, moving from Canada to Italy, Mexico, and beyond. It maps components, equipment, and expertise, making it possible to trace sources and relationships of design. Analysis reveals how the boots reflect shifts in global trade and the concentration of knowledge and resources in new locations. It also shows how the globalization of production has influenced the role of the product designer who acts as intermediary within transnational networks, combining predesigned components and practices from around the world. The manufacturer, Mellow Walk, has experienced the transition from a regional manufacturing economy to one that is globally integrated. The company was founded in the 1990s when most Canadian footwear factories had closed due to global competition. It is unique as the last fully integrated footwear factory in Ontario, meaning that management, design, production, sales, and shipping happen under one roof. Mellow Walk nevertheless depends on international suppliers and, in this sense, represents many other footwear brands around the world.","PeriodicalId":45088,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Design History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-07-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47224647","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"“How we live and how we might live”: Design and the spirit of critical utopianism","authors":"B. Katz","doi":"10.1093/jdh/epad020","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/jdh/epad020","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":45088,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Design History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-07-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47587428","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Modelling the Metropolis: The Architectural Model in Victorian LondonA History of Architectural Model Making in Britain: The Unseen Masters of Scale and Vision","authors":"Czaee Malpani","doi":"10.1093/jdh/epad033","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/jdh/epad033","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":45088,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Design History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-06-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47698938","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
In 1980, Frigidaire Australia launched an advertising campaign in popular women’s magazines calling for readers’ opinions on refrigerator design. Soon after, Frigidaire held the Group 200 Women’s Design Conference in Sydney, leading to the release of the G2 refrigerator in 1981, which was promoted as being “designed” by the women involved in this market research. This example offers insights into evolving public understandings of design in mainstream Australia in the early 1980s. It also demonstrates the troubled position of design in relation to the maturing second-wave feminist movement, and particularly amid feminist debates regarding domestic labor. Furthermore, Frigidaire’s marketing strategy can be read as an example of the emergent neoliberalization of design in the 1980s. The article finds that, despite Frigidaire’s marketing rhetoric, the women participants had little agency over the G2’s design. The politics of identity (in this case, a subtle form of feminist agency) was effectively co-opted by capital to encourage consumption. Nonetheless, the Women’s Design Conference was meaningful in a discrete sense, as a moment in time when a group of women (mostly middle-aged “homemakers”) recognized their own domestic knowledge as design expertise. This may be the only saving grace from what was otherwise a thoroughly unambitious attempt to incorporate women’s knowledge into product design.
{"title":"Co-option or Recognition? Second-wave Feminist Politics and the Frigidaire Australia Women’s Design Conference, 1980","authors":"Jesse Adams Stein","doi":"10.1093/jdh/epad009","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/jdh/epad009","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 In 1980, Frigidaire Australia launched an advertising campaign in popular women’s magazines calling for readers’ opinions on refrigerator design. Soon after, Frigidaire held the Group 200 Women’s Design Conference in Sydney, leading to the release of the G2 refrigerator in 1981, which was promoted as being “designed” by the women involved in this market research. This example offers insights into evolving public understandings of design in mainstream Australia in the early 1980s. It also demonstrates the troubled position of design in relation to the maturing second-wave feminist movement, and particularly amid feminist debates regarding domestic labor. Furthermore, Frigidaire’s marketing strategy can be read as an example of the emergent neoliberalization of design in the 1980s. The article finds that, despite Frigidaire’s marketing rhetoric, the women participants had little agency over the G2’s design. The politics of identity (in this case, a subtle form of feminist agency) was effectively co-opted by capital to encourage consumption. Nonetheless, the Women’s Design Conference was meaningful in a discrete sense, as a moment in time when a group of women (mostly middle-aged “homemakers”) recognized their own domestic knowledge as design expertise. This may be the only saving grace from what was otherwise a thoroughly unambitious attempt to incorporate women’s knowledge into product design.","PeriodicalId":45088,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Design History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-06-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47595277","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract A popular 1941 gallery show in Chicago entitled “The Advance Guard of Advertising Artists” included five prominent European advocates of modernist design and four Americans who did daring and innovative work. All but one of these designers is today included in the mid-century design canon. The odd man out was Frank Barr (1906–1955), a Chicago letterpress printer with a modest, entirely local reputation both before and after the exhibit. This article explores Barr’s career to explicate the meaning of avant-garde design during at the period and shed light on the larger question of canonical status. Chicago was a major industrial and printing hub that nonetheless seemed provincial in design terms into the 1930s. Many design professionals educated there (like Barr) had remained content with the opportunities the city provided. The arrival of the New Bauhaus in 1937 injected new vitality into the local design scene and gave birth to a fresh sense of Chicago’s potentially international credentials. Barr’s career spanned the two decades of this transition and provides a useful case study of provincialism, avant-garde status, and internationalism.
{"title":"Frank Barr: Avant-Garde Designer in Mid-Century Chicago?","authors":"Paul F Gehl","doi":"10.1093/jdh/epad010","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/jdh/epad010","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract A popular 1941 gallery show in Chicago entitled “The Advance Guard of Advertising Artists” included five prominent European advocates of modernist design and four Americans who did daring and innovative work. All but one of these designers is today included in the mid-century design canon. The odd man out was Frank Barr (1906–1955), a Chicago letterpress printer with a modest, entirely local reputation both before and after the exhibit. This article explores Barr’s career to explicate the meaning of avant-garde design during at the period and shed light on the larger question of canonical status. Chicago was a major industrial and printing hub that nonetheless seemed provincial in design terms into the 1930s. Many design professionals educated there (like Barr) had remained content with the opportunities the city provided. The arrival of the New Bauhaus in 1937 injected new vitality into the local design scene and gave birth to a fresh sense of Chicago’s potentially international credentials. Barr’s career spanned the two decades of this transition and provides a useful case study of provincialism, avant-garde status, and internationalism.","PeriodicalId":45088,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Design History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-06-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136355852","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
More than a decade before Hitler became the leader of the Nazi party, on the other side of the Atlantic, the Ladies’ Home Journal hit on the perfect insignia for their new “Girl’s Club”: a swastika. This was far from anomalous; an examination of American fashion and lifestyle publications shows that the swastika was a fashionable motif for dress, home decor, and particularly jewelry from the turn of the twentieth century until the outbreak of World War II. Moreover, the swastika continued to be used as a decorative motif even as news of life under the Third Reich was published in American newspapers. This regular use in fashion and consumer goods suggests that Americans did not want to recognize the dissonance between the way that they wore the swastika and the symbol in its German context. This distinction began to disintegrate in the mid-1930s, as conflict over the use of the symbol revealed fracture lines between those affected by its anti-Semitic connotations and those who thought that these connotations were either acceptable or easy enough to ignore. The lifecycle of the swastika in American culture in the first four decades of the twentieth century offers a unique case study of how a sign can gain and lose meaning; after arising as a seemingly superficial fad, the persistence of the motif took on increasingly problematic associations raising difficult questions of how to contend with new readings of old signs.
{"title":"“Something Really Very Odd and Singularly Appropriate:” The Fashionable Swastika in the US Before 1939","authors":"Caroline Elenowitz-Hess","doi":"10.1093/jdh/epad002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/jdh/epad002","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 More than a decade before Hitler became the leader of the Nazi party, on the other side of the Atlantic, the Ladies’ Home Journal hit on the perfect insignia for their new “Girl’s Club”: a swastika. This was far from anomalous; an examination of American fashion and lifestyle publications shows that the swastika was a fashionable motif for dress, home decor, and particularly jewelry from the turn of the twentieth century until the outbreak of World War II. Moreover, the swastika continued to be used as a decorative motif even as news of life under the Third Reich was published in American newspapers. This regular use in fashion and consumer goods suggests that Americans did not want to recognize the dissonance between the way that they wore the swastika and the symbol in its German context. This distinction began to disintegrate in the mid-1930s, as conflict over the use of the symbol revealed fracture lines between those affected by its anti-Semitic connotations and those who thought that these connotations were either acceptable or easy enough to ignore. The lifecycle of the swastika in American culture in the first four decades of the twentieth century offers a unique case study of how a sign can gain and lose meaning; after arising as a seemingly superficial fad, the persistence of the motif took on increasingly problematic associations raising difficult questions of how to contend with new readings of old signs.","PeriodicalId":45088,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Design History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-06-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49523690","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract “Wild design” refers to do-it-yourself (DIY) and makeshift solutions between 1978 and 1992 during the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) early reform period. For self-design and making activities, the lifestyle magazine was a channel to access and circulate self-help manuals and DIY prescriptions. Investigating two lifestyle magazines – Culture and Life (wenhua yu shenghuo) and Beyond Eight Hours (baxiaoshi yiwai), this study examines advice and self-help manuals, and analyses the scope and value of wild design in creating a new perception of modern life. Unveiling the conditions within which people were making, and the processes and ideals of making that were prevalent in the PRC’s early reform period, wild design broke down the binary tensions between the real and ideal, native and foreign, old and new, and the vernacular and the modern. The vernacular modernism demonstrated a desire to extract the maximum value out of objects, a love of the “new,” and suggested a set of pragmatic approaches to obtain that “new.”
{"title":"Wild Design in China’s Lifestyle Magazines (1978–1992)","authors":"Yaxi Liu","doi":"10.1093/jdh/epad014","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/jdh/epad014","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract “Wild design” refers to do-it-yourself (DIY) and makeshift solutions between 1978 and 1992 during the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) early reform period. For self-design and making activities, the lifestyle magazine was a channel to access and circulate self-help manuals and DIY prescriptions. Investigating two lifestyle magazines – Culture and Life (wenhua yu shenghuo) and Beyond Eight Hours (baxiaoshi yiwai), this study examines advice and self-help manuals, and analyses the scope and value of wild design in creating a new perception of modern life. Unveiling the conditions within which people were making, and the processes and ideals of making that were prevalent in the PRC’s early reform period, wild design broke down the binary tensions between the real and ideal, native and foreign, old and new, and the vernacular and the modern. The vernacular modernism demonstrated a desire to extract the maximum value out of objects, a love of the “new,” and suggested a set of pragmatic approaches to obtain that “new.”","PeriodicalId":45088,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Design History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-06-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135139533","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Unworking: The Reinvention of the Modern Office","authors":"Amy Thomas","doi":"10.1093/jdh/epad031","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/jdh/epad031","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":45088,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Design History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-06-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42224407","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Designs on Democracy: Architecture and the Public in Interwar London","authors":"E. Herring","doi":"10.1093/jdh/epad032","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/jdh/epad032","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":45088,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Design History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-06-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46836959","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Luxury After the Terror","authors":"P. McNeil","doi":"10.1093/jdh/epad019","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/jdh/epad019","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":45088,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Design History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-06-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43046429","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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