History from Things: Notes on the History of Industrial Design

Abstract

However paradoxical it may seem, the history of industrial design has for a long time, been able to ignore business history, just as the history of enterprise has been able to avoid a real confrontation with the history of products. Far from being a sort of play on words, this opening statement deserves serious consideration and, at the same time, requires some explanation. For what reason, then, have the planes on which these two branches of history operate intersected so rarely? Why is it that two such closely interconnected worlds have generated two separate fields of study and of knowledge? The history of enterprise is a recently formed discipline, and one which is trying to create its own identity, in part through the confrontation with other fields of study. At a congress on industrial design held at the Milan Politecnico,l Valerio Castronovo had addressed the question of the relationship between the history of industry and the history of industrial At the time, he had attributed the backward state of studies of the industrial system to the low level of interest that business historians have shown so far in a subject like that of design. But the scarce interest shown by business historians has been matched by that of historians of industrial We can attempt to come up with some further explanations in order to sound out the problem. At least two points of my argument are of decisive importance to the reliability of the reasoning. The first concerns strictly disciplinary motivations, closely bound up with the way in which the history of industrial design has developed; the second refers to the marginal role given to artifacts, when they are not entirely absent, in the process of historical reconstruction. I would like to commence, however, on the positive side by recalling that there have been significant exceptions in the historiography of both sectors. Thus, it is possible to cite important cases in which the history of an enterprise has been reconstructed around problems of industrial design, or on the basis of motivations or questions that arise directly from the study and the history of industrial Although they are very well known even to nonspecialists, I would like to mention by way of example the meticulous reconstructions of the history of the British pottery industry and Josiah Wedgwood's factories at Etruria and of Thonet bentA longer version of this essay was published in Archivie Imprese 14 (July-December 1996): 231-58.