Abstract

ABSTRACTThis paper explains how design history can become a tool for better design practice. Design historians are inclined to perceive the aesthetic idioms pertaining to past artefacts as expressions of particular periods, and their aesthetic validity as limited to the periods in question. This tends to turn design history before the Bauhaus into an overview of extinct aesthetic species. However, the ‘objects of the past’ in fact exist right now, in the present, both physically and as multiple images. What is needed to turn the aesthetic captives of design history into a treasure trove for present-day designers is to develop an ability, lost in teachers and students alike, to see the pre-Bauhaus world of aesthetic idioms as part of our present. In order to achieve this, we design historians should cease to subscribe to the self-serving modernist claim that there is just one genuinely modern aesthetic idiom.

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