Promoting Scandinavian design history

Abstract

It is surprising, in view of the international interest in Scandinavian design, to find that studying this subject on a scholarly level is not at all widespread in the Nordic countries. To increase the amount of research in this field scholars need to be able to publish and get feedback, both from editors and translators and from colleagues. Awareness of this need led to the founding of the annual Scandinavian Journal of Design History seven years ago, which publishes scholarly articles in English, written by Nordic scholars on all topics, and by those abroad on Scandinavian Design. The author’s work on this journal has been complemented by her role as Librarian of the Danish Museum of Decorative Art, which for the last 100 years has been responsible for collecting and preserving Danish decorative art and design documentation. During the last 10 to 15 years the development of design and of design history has brought about a re-evaluation of the criteria for information retrieval. And this has also focussed attention on the problem of proper terminology in this relatively new field – in Danish, but also in other Scandinavian languages – and on the search for exact equivalents in English.