Judy Attfield

"This collection of key essays about the domestic environment appears at a moment when the home is no longer dismissed as an insignificant feminine area, but is increasingly recognised as one of the fundamental units of human culture and, as such, of immense importance as a site for the study of society. While attending to individual case studies it also offers a synoptic view of the culture of design from a variety of perspectives. These range from the history of design education, to the view of a dying breed of craft-based designer-makers, to changes within the carpet and furniture industries and consumers taking control of the design of their own homes through doing their own interior design. It shows how apparently insignificant everyday objects as the coffee table can be seen as a sign of shift in the balance of power from production to consumption at a particular historical moment in the middle of the twentieth century. And thus it is possible to see how consumers adapted to modernity that revolutionised their lives through their consumption choices of such commodities as domestic furnishings." "This volume collects under one cover some of Judith Attfield's previously published best writings, containing essays such as 'Inside Pram Town: a case study of Harlow house interiors 1951-1961', that have since become classics in the History of Design."--BOOK JACKET.

Writings on Popular Design and Material Culture

Bringing Modernity Home

John Albert Walker

An essential overview as well as a theoretical critique for all students of design history. Walker studies the intellectual discipline of Design History and the issues that confront scholars writing histories of design. Taking his approach from a range of related fields, he discusses the problems of defining design and writing history. He considers the different methods that leading scholars have used in the absence of a theoretical framework, and looks critically at a number of histories of design and architecture.

Design History and the History of Design

What do things mean? What does the life of everyday objects reveal about people and their material worlds? Has the quest for 'the real thing' become so important because the high-tech world of total virtuality threatens to engulf us? This pioneering book bridges design theory and anthropology to offer a new and challenging way of understanding the changing meanings of contemporary human-object relations. The act of consumption is only the starting point of object's “lives”. Thereafter they are transformed and invested with new meanings and associations that reflect and assert who we are. Defining designed things as “things with attitude” differentiates the highly visible fashionable object from ordinary aretefacts that are too easily taken for granted. Through case studies ranging from reproduction furniture to fashion and textiles to 'clutter', the author traces the connection between objects and authenticity, ephemerality and self-identity. Beyond this, she shows the materiality of the everyday in terms of space, time and the body and suggests a transition with the passing of time from embodiment to disembodiment.

The Material Culture of Everyday Life

Wild Things

Pat Kirkham

This book looks at women's contributions to modern design. It also explores how women as consumers have shaped contemporary design and the assumptions made by male designers about women's tastes and lives. The role of design education is also covered.

Women & Design

A View from the Interior

This book examines design history from a feminist perspective. It exposes the socially constructed nature of design history, and the assumptions of male designers and architects about women's tastes, women's place and the way women live. And it illuminates women's relationship to design both as designers and those designed for. Women have gained a footholf in pottery and textile design, and predominate in the field of domestic design. Why are they still a minority in the areas of architecture and industrial design? What part does design education play in this exclusion? Contains: Part One: Images of difference ; Objectifying gender: the stiletto heel ; Representations of women and race in the Lancashire cotton trade ; Tarting up men: menswear and gender dynamics ; From Alcatraz to the OK Corral: images of class and gender ; Part Two: Women as designers ; Women textile designers in the 1920s and 1930s: Marion Dorn, a case study ; Pottery women: a comparitive study of Susan Vera Cooper and Millicent Jane Taplin ; Women architects ; Part three: Women in design production ; 'If you have no sons' : furniture-making in Britain ; Powerful women: electricity in the home, 1919-40, Sexual division of labour in the Arts and Crafts Movement ; The Arts and Crafts alternative ; The inter-war handicrafts revival ; Part four: A place of their own ; A view from the interior ; The designer housewife in the 1950s ; Inside Pram Town: a case study of Harlow House Interiors, 1951-61 ; Appendix: Women at the Archive of Art and Design.

Feminism, Women and Design

This collection of essays both defines and reassesses the concept of utility. In considering the place of ethics in the recent history of art and design, the text offers a way into the issues which concern design decision-makers today.The text presents topics such as the investigation in to hitherto undiscovered designs for a utility vehicle, it gives a perspective on the philosophy behind the concept of utility as a design theory and offers a critique of the dangers of good design. The text approaches the subject as a continuing history that has attempted to improve the human condition, through a process of rational thought in the construction of the material world. Using the history of Utility as a design theory, the text suggests ways in which the past can teach us something of the present, and reveals why, on the cusp of the new millennium, Utility is important.

Judy Attfield

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