Why Do the Theory and History of Design Matter?

Practising designers have, since time immemorial, had an ambivalent relationship with the theory and history of their field. The history of design itself tells us that design began as a purely craft activity, which under the pressure of professionalisation gradually began to transform into a discipline taught first at specialised, yet still practically oriented schools, and later, in response to sociopolitical events in the world, design turned more and more towards the wider contextual aspects of making. It was, of course, the legendary Bauhaus, with its left-wing programme and the democratisation of design, that brought a strong sociopolitical charge into design, but also, under the leadership of its director Walter Gropius and other brilliant teachers, a systematic theoretical curriculum. In doing so, the Bauhaus paved the way for theory and history into the design curriculum, and today these subjects belong to the essential intellectual equipment of every designer who wants to consider themselves a fully educated graduate of a design school.

That a subject forms the core of a field does not mean that students take it seriously. In the Czech context alone, we can recall how under the communist regime our parents had to cram the basics of the philosophy of Marxism-Leninism. Students have no idea what good it should do them to cram factual data, the various birthplaces of important historical figures and to recite the founding dates of movements in the correct linear order. It is not their fault. Teachers of design history and theory are often unable to answer the students’ basic question, which for many of them is too mundane, too anti-intellectual to pay attention to: why are the theory and history of design important, from a practical point of view, for what designers do?

It will most likely sound like the chauvinism of theory, but I have full confidence that theoretical research itself holds fundamental insights explaining, in clear and accessible language, why a detailed and serious study of the theory and history of the design field will make everyone involved better practitioners of their design discipline. It will be necessary to give up the aura of mystical genius, cultivated for far too long, with which the work of designers is surrounded, whether for ideological, commercial or purely self-serving reasons, when it is convenient to hold on to the image of the designer as a loner who shuts himself in his studio for a few days or weeks and after that time emerges with an already finished and perfect product.

From my point of view, I see three important theorists or historians of design who, with their analytical insight, have uncovered the secretive world of design for us. I count among them Nigel Cross, Christopher Alexander and, last but not least, the excellent Czech theorist Jan Michl, who spent most of his academic career in Norway as a professor of the history and theory of design at the Oslo School of Architecture and Design (AHO). And it is with Jan Michl that I begin this first part of the following series of articles on the importance of the theory and history of design.

In his influential article Vidět design jako redesign Jan Michl argues that designers never start ex nihilo, i.e. from zero, but always build on the previous solutions of their colleagues. If designers always started their work from scratch, so to speak, they would never really get anywhere, because they would have to reinvent the wheel and rediscover America again and again, and they would never really get to the real problem they are supposed to solve; instead, every new design project would mean going through the whole history of design, from the flint to the quantum computer.

Of course, designers never do anything of the kind, precisely because they have at their disposal the results of the work of previous designers, whose ideas and proposed solutions are hidden not only in textbooks or in essays by theorists or by the designers themselves, but above all in the physical, or today digital, artefacts themselves, which are the embodiment of the results of a demanding design process and mental effort. But what does it mean when we say that every designer builds on previous solutions?

As an example, let us take today’s ubiquitous smartphones and other smart mobile devices. These are themselves descendants of computers, and those in turn of massive mainframe computers that took up one or more rooms. It is not only the physical character of the first computers that is unimaginable to us. Let us recall that the first computers could be programmed, if at all, only by physically moving and reconnecting cables, which created on the fly the logic of how the computer would process incoming data. Perhaps the best-known mainframe, ENIAC, required 174 kilowatts of power, 17,468 vacuum tubes, 1,500 relays, 500,000 soldered joints, 70,000 resistors and 10,000 capacitors to run. Yet ENIAC and similar supercomputers of the time, sprawling across rooms, had a minuscule computing power that even a ten-year-old calculator surpasses today.

If a contemporary designer wanted to quickly design a new app for the Apple Watch smartwatch that would help monitor a man’s heart rate and, in case of anomalies, would quickly call his wife’s number and the ambulance at the same time, he would have absolutely no chance of creating such an app, because he would first have to work out how to cram ENIAC and all its vacuum tubes and cables into a device that can be worn on the wrist. The ENIAC example may seem exaggerated, but only because the development of computing technologies advanced exponentially over a period short enough, from a human perspective, for us to be able to hold this contrast of changes in our historical consciousness. Yet essentially all technologies and cultural artefacts in our (i.e. Western) culture have gone through an entirely identical development, whether immaterial ones such as natural language or material artefacts such as vases, toothbrushes or body coverings. Their development, however, was not so dramatic, and it is spread out on the historical timeline over several hundred or even thousands of years, and thus it escapes our cognitive skills, which in many respects are still adapted to thinking about what is spatially and temporally close.

Jan Michl speaks of every designer, and I would add every artefact too, being connected by an imaginary umbilical cord. We can understand this to mean that the past inevitably contributes to, shapes and limits the present and our future. Not in a deterministic way, but in that nothing arises out of nothing, and therefore even the most creative innovations and technological marvels will always be connected to the past by building on what already existed. In other words, every new thing is de facto another iteration (a newer version) of what already exists, and according to what this new iteration brings that is new, we can then assess how innovative and creative the new iteration is. Is there some theoretical, or even scientific, framework that could encompass this iterative, gradual development, and not only of design artefacts?

In his article, Michl explicitly refers to the theory of evolution in biology and its founder Charles Darwin, and to the evolutionary theory of culture. The latter is not new in itself. Michl himself cites important publications from the history and philosophy of technology that analyse the development of technological artefacts through the lens of evolutionary theory. Among the main publications arguing for the evolutionary development of technological and other artefacts, Michl lists The evolution of technology by George Basalla and The evolution of useful things written by Henry Petroski.

The theory of evolution in biology, whose foundations can be traced back to Darwin, tells us that we can explain the complexity of living nature, of animals and of humans, by postulating that biological things do not arise out of nothing, but through gradual adaptation to the environment in which the organism lives. The more demanding the environment the organism inhabits, the more likely it is that only those individuals of the given population will survive and have offspring who are extremely well equipped to survive in an otherwise harsh and inhospitable ecological niche. For the process of evolution through the mechanism of natural selection and adaptation to be able to work over a longer period, the organism needs to be sufficiently biologically diversified. For the more “versions” or “different iterations” of an organism there are, the more likely it is that some version of the organism will have suitable characteristics that help it survive in the given environment. The diversity of an organism is all the more necessary in the evolutionary process the more dynamic the environment is and the faster it changes the selection pressures on the organism.

This necessarily simplifying model of how biological evolution works nevertheless seems to present an ideal model that can be applied by analogy to explain how artefacts develop in human society as well. Naturally, bearing in mind that in this application of a biological process to cultural artefacts it needs to be slightly adapted and further explained. Thus, for example, in the evolution of cultural and technological artefacts it is not nature as such that “selects” and “chooses”; rather, the social, economic and cultural pressures of human communities have a much greater influence on the selection of artefacts. The reason why many artefacts exist is to be found in the fact that the given culture shows such characteristics as create a demand for the artefact. In a purely indigenous society we would hardly find a demand for a cheaper and more powerful electric car if no individual in such a society has any idea what electricity is. Similarly, Western society has lost its appetite for making sharp spears and arrows for the bow to hunt game, because we long ago left the problem of obtaining food to experts who use modern methods of animal husbandry and the subsequent technological processing of meat.

Cultural and biological evolution, however, show a similar property concerning the conservation of already existing solutions. Although we see new iterations in biological evolution, certain characteristics of given organisms will no longer change. It is statistically unlikely that after some time we would start meeting neighbours in the street who do not need oxygen to survive and whose blood does not contain haemoglobin to transport oxygen in the body. In cultural evolution, technological obsolescence is one of the main problems of the capitalist economy of today’s Western world, so there is no need, for the purposes of this article, to explain in detail that most technologies will not return to the limelight, and if they do, then only in an entirely new role, mostly after being resurrected by artists for whom obsolete objects become aesthetic objects that deserve to acquire the status of a cultural artefact (this process of how art absorbs obsolete media and technologies is fascinating in itself and would deserve a separate article; I know of Graham Harman, who comments on this phenomenon against the background of Marshall McLuhan’s media theory).

Every biological organism of today is a mirror of its evolutionary development. Like the geological layers of the Earth, biological organisms too reveal to us information about their history and the sedimentation of the historical interaction between organism and environment, which we find in the DNA code. After all, it is precisely the modern possibility of sequencing the DNA codes of organisms that has become the best way to argue for the theory of evolution, for the DNA code contains not only instructions for the organism’s present life, but above all it is that sediment, or better, that repository of the ways in which the organism has coped with inhospitable conditions throughout its existence.

Similarly, any cultural or technological artefact contains its own specific DNA, which we can read and examine, provided that we have suitable tools for this analysis. Reading the DNA of artefacts for the purposes of design is as demanding as reading and understanding the biological development of organisms, for in both cases, to fully understand why their DNA code has the form it has, we need to know the detailed historical context in which they developed.

In other words, the materiality of artefacts is a repository of the problems, requirements, goals, hopes and passions our ancestors were exposed to, and of the ways in which particular artefacts were supposed to satisfy all of it. Some artefacts did better, passed through the sieve of selection pressure, and that is why they are still with us; other artefacts were badly designed, or someone simply designed them at the wrong time in the wrong place. Why was that so? And how can we study the historical DNA of artefacts so as to learn from the past, so that the future artefacts of present and future designers have the greatest possible chance of passing through the sieve of selection and playing a role in our lives for a while? And how do these selection pressures and sieves work in the first place?

These are all entirely legitimate questions to which the theory and history of design should provide answers. The theory and history of design must become an evolutionary biology for cultural and technological artefacts, a kind of evolutionary culturology, which can provide students with fragments of the evolutionary story of the artefacts around us. Following the example of the scientific study of languages (linguistics), the theory and history of design must become the study of the etymology of artefacts, uncovering, alongside the materiality of artefacts, also that equally important sociocultural layer of artefacts, which plays an equally important role in explaining why some artefacts cease to exist and why some are successful even though on paper they are nothing exceptional – an ideal candidate for such an analysis has long been the products of the aforementioned company Apple, which on paper often do not have the latest processors or memory, yet are among the best-selling technological artefacts ever, thanks to the fact that alongside their materiality they carry with them an enormous semantic sediment of the “cool factor”, “rebelliousness” and social prestige.

If the DNA code of biological organisms is a window into the history of the development of life on Earth, the examination of the DNA of human artefacts is a material window into the history of how all the objects around us shape what it means to be human. At the same time, this window reveals a very intimate relationship of mutual interactive evolution and formation between humans and their objects.

If current approaches in the theory and history of design are unable to explain this relationship between humans and objects, they deprive their students (and everyone else interested) of the enormous wealth hidden in all the objects around us, from teaspoons to those quantum computers.

As Jan Michl argues, designers know all this implicitly and touch upon this wealth whenever they mention how they were “inspired” by the objects and solutions of other designers. Michl argued that it is high time to demystify this being inspired, to cleanse it of its magical aura, and to begin studying it systematically with rational tools and methods. The first important step is to start teaching all students that no one except the good Lord creates out of nothing, and that it is therefore perfectly fine if, in every design project, designers devote a large part of their design process to a theoretical-historical analysis of existing objects, whose material, social, cultural and economic DNA stories will form the basis for designing solutions to the current design brief. Demystifying this part of the design process could, moreover, quickly help designers themselves to have rational arguments in their practice for why to undertake this research, which may also show positively in their being able to bill their clients explicitly for this work.

It is surprising, but in this respect digital design, often wrongly reduced to “UX design”, is ahead, for UX design de facto began to bill clients for the research part of a design project and even introduced into the commercial sphere such concepts as user research, personas, sitemaps, wireframes and prototypes, which have become separate “deliverables”, i.e. work outputs that clients explicitly pay for. And in many respects only for them, for today it is already common for UX design and graphic/web design to be done by two or even three different design firms.

Demystifying the “inspirational” phase of the design process could make design more transparent. And not only for clients, who will know more about what they are paying for.

As Nigel Cross, a design theorist and long-standing editor of the journal Design studies, writes in his well-known article Designerly Ways of Knowing, the systematic study of material culture and its evolution could be beneficial not only for design students, but also for all of us. If we accept the basic thesis of this text, that material culture contains within itself an evolutionary story of how designers – indeed, no, how humankind solved the problems it faced through the creation of cultural and technological objects, it means that, according to Nigel Cross, material culture conceals a way of thinking about problems and about the world that is specific to design. Although it is designers who generate this designerly thinking, nothing prevents non-designers too from learning how problems can be solved by designing objects. This does not mean that we should reduce the whole of design to solving problems (problem solving) alone. On the contrary, as we have said, the solution itself is always preceded by that reading and subsequently also writing of material culture, a hermeneutics of material culture if you like, which, as far as I know, even decades after Nigel Cross and Jan Michl wrote their articles, is still not taught as a subject of the general curriculum.

Media education in primary and secondary schools could have come closest to it. If it were taught properly. Unfortunately, it very quickly shrank to how to write documents in Word and similar trivialities. And no wonder, because the teachers of media education were in the overwhelming majority of cases inadequately educated. The ideal candidates for teaching media education would be people who know how the objects around us come into being, why they come into being, how they affect us and how we as humankind arrived at the point where ubiquitous media and technologies have precisely the form they have. I feel awkward keeping the reader in suspense like this, because it is quite clear that, to fulfil the pedagogical task of such media education in full, I would first and foremost call upon precisely the theorists and historians of design.

So, to sum up, why do the theory and history of design matter? Encoded in material culture are ways of thinking, knowledge and, last but not least, worldviews that should be available to all people as part of the general curriculum, for more and more social interactions are being stood in for and gradually even replaced by interactions with inanimate objects, which, however, are not passive and dead, but full of life. And we should know how to greet them properly, how to behave towards them and how to be on our guard against them.