chequered path of art and design education in post-war. Britain. This can be traced .... Albert Museum/Royal College of Art, design history degree courses exist in English ... Birmingham and Middlesex also offer MA courses.) The formation of ...
ESIGN HISTORY AND BRITISH DESIGN EDUCATION. AN APPRAISAL
During the last fifteen years design history has become established as a scholarly field. From its origins in British art schools, it has had an impact on European and American Design education, although it remains most highly developed in the United Kingdom. This paper will examine the emergence of design history and consider its place in design education. The development of design history is closely allied to the chequered path of art and design education in post-war Britain. This can be traced to 1960 with the first report of the National Advisory Council on Art Education, chaired by the artist Sir William Coldstream. The «Coldstream Report» established the Diploma in Art and Design (DipAD) as a degree equivalent qualification which succeeded the more vocational National Diploma in Design. Two elements of this change were of particular significance. One was that fine art was seen as central to art and design education. The other was the introduction of the History of Art and Complementary Studies as a mandatory 15% of study. History of art was to be taught to all students as a general course which covered «the major arts in several significant periods of time». 1 In addition to taking a general course common to all students, each student should learn the history of his own subject. A course in fashion should include the history of costume, a course in furniture the history of furniture and so on.
The report recognised that the inclusion of an academic element for the first time would create a need for more wellqualified art history teachers. The committee was more blinkered on the teaching of the history of design subjects, History of this kind can probably often be taught by a specialist teacher of the subject itself.
Effectively, this established the validity of teaching the history of the subjects signified as «chief studies» by the Coldstream Committee: Graphic Design, Three-Dimensional Design, Textiles and Fashion. Design education thus became institutionalised. Added to this, the lack of scholarship in design history at the time resulted in «history» teaching often consisting of little more than dossiers of styles, materials and techniques relating only to a particular chief study. 1. The first Report of the National Advisory Council on Art Education. I960.
Tants deDmem,IW/6, pp. 277-283
Ten years later, in 1970, Coldstream chaired a second committee charged with reviewing the previous decade. One outcome was that fine art was no longer regarded as necessarily central to higher education in design. A watershed had been reached, but course content and teaching methods were still the subject of much debate. The substitution of the DipAD by Honours degrees in 1975 opened up the issues anew. Graphic designers associated with the Council for National Academic Awards (CNAA), the validating body for all non-university degrees, expressed dissatisfaction that the DipAD regulations had stated that complementary studies should be taught and assessed separately from studio work. They argued that the Coldstream Committee's intention to secure the critical and intellectual underpinning of courses had resulted in inappropriate and even irrelevant teaching of the history of art and complementary studies. Many studio tutors reasoned that their practice was underpinned by theoretical knowledge and therefore they were best equipped to teach its history. It was not they however, but art historians, who were the first to originate and teach design history courses in British art schools and polytechnics. Opinions varied about the suitability of art historians to teach design history. It should be remembered that in the early 1970s art historical scholarship focused chiefly on style, attributions, dating, authenticity, rarity, reconstruction, the detection of forgery, the rediscovery of forgotten artists and the meanings of pictures.2
These concerns and approaches, already being challenged by art historians, were too narrow and circumscribed to be applicable to design history.3 Alliance with architectural history proved to be more fruitful. The third level Arts course run by the Open University in the History of Architecture and Design (1890-1939), 1975, produced valuable course material. Other seminal texts included Fiona MacCarthy, All Things Bright and Beautiful (1972), later developed as A History of British Design, 1830-1970 (1979), and Gillian Naylor, The Bauhaus (1968), and The Arts and Crafts Movement (1971), both recently revised. However, as Clive Dilnot noted in 1984, the coherence of a design historical attitude was both slow in forming and not bound by any rigid framework or set of texts.4
The original intention of those involved was «of keeping the discipline open and relativistic». This has resulted in much methodological, theoretical and historical debate,5 which serves to remind us that design history, unlike many design courses, is culturally, not institutionally, defined. 2. According to Roskill, Mark, What is Art History?, 1974. 3. See Rees, A. L., & Borzello, R, (eds.), The New Art History, 1986, for the significant developments in art historical ideology which began to have an effect on scholarship from the mid 1970s. 4. Dilnot, Clive, «The State of Design History. Part I: Mapping the Field», in Margolin, Victor, (ed.), Design Discourse, The University of Chicago Press, 1989, p. 220. 5. See Walker, John, and Attfield, Judy, Design History and the History of Design, Pluto Press, 1989.
Hazel Clark
The emergence of undergraduate and Masters degree courses in the history of design throughout the 1970s helped to establish design history as an academic discipline. With the exception of the Open University and the Victoria and Albert Museum/Royal College of Art, design history degree courses exist in English polytechnics, not universities. 6 This can be accounted for by the continued relationship of design history to design practice. It is perhaps also a reflection of the flexibility of public sector education in adapting to the new. (Currently undergraduate courses in or including design history are run at Brighton, Leicester, Manchester, Middlesex, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Sheffield and Staffordshire polytechnics. B i r m i n g h a m and Middlesex also offer MA courses.) The formation of the Design History Society in 1977 provided another landmark. Its aim was to develop design history by promoting research and disseminating and publishing the results. Conferences, seminars, visits and, since 1988, the scholarly Journal of Design History,1 have helped to create an international arena for debate. The resulting discussions on subject matter, resources, methodology and relationship with other areas have helped to develop and challenge the discipline. Now, fifteen years on, things have changed considerably. Not only are there specialist courses, but design history and theory forms part of the curriculum of most design degree courses. The content is generally aimed at contextualising, rather than being «complementary» to, the main study area. Ideally, pedagogy will provide a cultural and historical awareness of the existence, nature and manifestation of «design» both within and beyond a specific subject area. The teaching methods employed are either the traditional lectures and seminars or, increasingly, integrated projects. Museum and library research into a historical artefact or period can, for example, be a valuable means of stimulating ideas and informing a design brief. Design history tutors can play a valuable role in introducing alternative perspectives to studio work and by encouraging students to analyse and examine the context of their practice, rather than merely «solving problems». There are considerable advantages in such teaching. However, historians must be aware that such proximity to studio practice may cause their own discipline to become bound by institutional definitions of the subject. The divisions of Graphic Design, Three-Dimensional Design, Textiles and Fashion, laid down in the second Coldstream report, still dictate the parameters of many design courses. Some have carved out their own niches, such as fashion or furniture design, but usually within one of the three areas.8 As a consequence, the design history desired by many courses has tended to remain the history of a «discipline» (defined according to institutional divisions). In higher education it is only the specialist design history courses which have been able to explore the breadth of the subject. The new challenges facing British higher education in the 6. The MA course in the History of Design was established by the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Royal College of Art in London in 1982. 7. Published quarterly by Oxford University Press. 8. The MA Design course at Glasgow School of Art is a notable exception where design is seen as a multi-disciplinary activity, which encompasses history, theory and practice.
form of demographic change, economic restraint and political imperatives are already having an effect on the curriculum. Modular schemes are, for example, enabling students to plan their own programmes and thus break down artificial divisions between subject areas. Design courses have been slower to adapt than other areas. Many stand by the view that embryonic designers need three years fulltime study in a particular discipline. While this may have been true in the past, it will be much less so in the future. The design profession is changing and companies are requiring versatility, rather than specialisation, from their employees. In this climate design history should finally become recognised, not as a separate discipline or an appendage of studio practice, but as its bedrock.
