From Visual Culture to Design Culture

Abstract

From Visual Culture to Design Culture The past ten years of academia have seen the establishment of Visual Culture, Material Culture and, most recently, Design Culture as scholarly disciplines. Visual Culture partly has emerged from art history through its incorporation of cultural studies. Material Culture’s provenance is in a mixture of anthropology, museum studies, and design history. The term “design culture” has been used more sporadically, and not just in academia. It also has been employed in journalism and the design industry itself. But if design culture is to be consolidated as an academic discipline, what relationship would it have to these other categories and, indeed, to design practice itself? Given the foci of Visual Culture in images, and that of Material Culture in things, they should, theoretically, provide a scholastic springboard for Design Culture. Visual Culture is now firmly established as an academic discipline in universities across Europe and the Americas. It sports two refereed journals,1 at least five student introductory texts,2 and three substantial readers.3 Undergraduate and postgraduate courses have been established. While differing in their approaches, Visual Culture authors generally include design alongside fine art, photography, film, TV, and advertising within their scope.4 Visual Culture, therefore, challenges and widens the field of investigation previously occupied by Art History. This project was instigated in the 1970s within the then-called “New Art History.” Proponents turned away from traditional interests in formal analysis, provenance, and patronage to embrace a more anthropological attitude to the visual in society. Henceforth, all visual forms are admissible into the academic canon—a notion spurred on by the rise of Cultural Studies, Popular Culture Studies, Media Studies and, indeed, Design History. As the academic discipline of Visual Culture emerged through the 1990s, its central concern was the investigation of the relationship between the viewer and the viewed. Nonetheless, despite this apparent openness, this article contends that the methods of Visual Culture have limited use for developing an understanding of the cultural role of contemporary design in society. Victor Margolin previously has suggested the need for doctoral-level studies of design and culture.5 In essence, 1 The Journal of Visual Culture (Sage, founded 2002) and Visual Culture in Britain (Ashgate, founded 2000). 2 For example, see Malcolm Barnard, Approaches to Understanding Visual Culture (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001); Richard Howells, Visual Culture: An Introduction (Cambridge: Polity, 2001); Nicholas Mirzoeff, An Introduction to Visual Culture (New York: Routledge, 1999): Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright, Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001); and Visual Culture: An Introduction, John Walker and Sarah Chaplin, eds. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1997). 3 For example, see Visual Culture: The Reader, Jessica Evans and Stuart Hall, eds. (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2001); Nicholas Mirzoeff, The Visual Culture Reader (New York: Routledge, 1998); and The Feminism and Visual Culture Reader, Amelia Jones, ed. (New York: Routledge, 2003). 4 Malcolm Barnard, Art, Design, and Visual Culture: An Introduction (London: Macmillan, 1998) includes some short references to design. 5 See Victor Margolin, “Design History and Design Studies” in The Politics of the Artificial: Essays on Design and Design Studies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002).