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182
Globalizing Design History and
Global Design History
D. J. Huppatz
For at least a decade, design historians have been arguing that a global perspective
on the discipline is essential. However, despite some initial efforts, the project of
a global design history remains in its infancy. In response to the growing interest
in globalization, this article considers the potential possibilities and problems in
globalizing design history, albeit from a limited, Anglophone perspective. It begins
in the first half by reviewing recent debates in historiography over world and global
histories, so that we might more confidently position global approaches to design
history. The second half of the article assembles initial attempts to globalize design
history as well as themes and methods for further research, plotting potential themes
and methods for globalizing design history, drawing upon existing scholarship and
knowledge. Following historian Jerry H. Bentley, I am proposing design historians
both ‘globalize history and historicize globalization’, in order to ensure the ongoing
relevance of the discipline and engage with contemporary developments in other
disciplines.
Keywords: Eurocentrism—globalization—historiography—modernization
A decade ago, in a special issue of this journal devoted to ‘the global future of design
history’, Christopher Bailey argued that ‘the need to develop a genuinely global field
of enquiry has moved beyond being a challenge to becoming a duty’.1 In The Design
History Reader, Grace Lees-Maffei declared that ‘the globalization of design history
remains a priority for all interested in the present and future validity of the discipline’.2
Evidently, some design historians agree that a global perspective is vital, but the issue of
what a global design history might look like remains only partially addressed. Following
historian Jerry H. Bentley, I am proposing design historians both ‘globalize history and
historicize globalization’.3 By engaging with such mainstream historical challenges,
design history might also begin to overcome what Victor Margolin characterized as the
field’s marginal status.4
A brief note on globalization
Political scientists, sociologists and economists first used the term globalization in the
1980s to describe recent international political, economic and social transformations.5
In various fields of inquiry, globalization emerged as the preferred term to describe a
multiplicity of trans-national forces—political, economic, cultural, ecological and technological—that
have increased in velocity and intensity over the past five or six decades.
Globalization can be understood as the ‘increasing liquidity and growing multi-directional
flows’ of these intra-planetary processes, ‘as well as the structures they encounter
and create’.6 The literature on globalization over the past twenty-five years—a trickle of
material in the 1980s that became a flood in the 1990s and 2000s—now seems overwhelming.7
For better or worse, globalization is an unavoidable keyword of our age.8
However, the critique of ‘metanarratives’, totalizing stories claiming to encompass the
whole of humanity, perhaps most famously expressed in Jean-François Lyotard’s The
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Postmodern Condition, deserves serious consideration by scholars wishing to develop
a global perspective.9 Postmodern and post-colonial theorists illuminated numerous
issues—from the exclusion or marginalization of women and indigenous people to the
repression of colonial violence—that render problematic claims to universal experience
and a singular, totalizing narrative. Thus, both caution and precision are required to
proceed with the globalization of design history.
To make my position clear, I understand globalization as a dynamic and multi-directional
series of flows—of people, material goods and information across geopolitical
borders—rather than as a single, deterministic process in which the inevitable outcome
is a homogenized world modelled on Europe or the United States of America. There is
a legitimate fear in the latter understanding of globalization, but, as I shall argue below,
the term is more absorptive than some early commentators proposed.10 Since the 1960s,
the growing awareness of a global consciousness—that is, of inhabiting an increasingly
interconnected and interdependent planet—is a shared experience that seems undeniable
on various levels. However, this is not to say that globalization is historically inevitable,
nor prophetic of a future state (which may entail as much ‘de-globalization’ as
further globalization). It is hardly controversial to acknowledge globalization as a set of
quantitative changes brought about by digital communications technologies, international
financial markets or increased carbon emissions, but to argue that these constitute
qualitative changes is. From a historical perspective, some processes attributed to
recent globalization may be merely a continuation of processes that have been active
and trans-planetary for a long time (in forms such as the telegraph, inter-regional trade
and pollution, for example). It is necessary to understand the major positions in historical
thinking about such large-scale social, political, economic and technological processes
before addressing the potentials for repositioning design history.
World history: civilizations, structures, systems
It is only today that it has become possible for the first time even to imagine
a whole world consisting of peoples who have in the fullest sense entered into
history and become the concern, no longer of the colonial administrator or the
anthropologist, but of the historian.
E. H. Carr, 196111
In the 1960s, English historian E. H. Carr was not alone in imagining a history capable of
encompassing the ‘whole world’. Although constructing a ‘world history’ was not a new
ambition,12 it acquired new methods and approaches in the 1960s and 1970s. It is worth
noting the parallel between Marshall McLuhan’s contemporaneous concept of a ‘global village’
connected by new communication technologies and world historians’ similar compression
of time and space into coherent ‘village stories’.13 Thus, the historiographic account that
follows is not arbitrary, but begins at the start of the ‘global era’ with a new understanding
of the world and its people. I will focus on the three best-known historians of large-scale
developments across broad geographical expanses—William H. McNeill, Fernand Braudel
and Immanuel Wallerstein, scholars who laid the foundations for later global historians.
William H. McNeill’s The Rise of the West: A History of the Human Community (1963)
was perhaps the most successful attempt to paint a comprehensive world-picture of
human history. McNeill’s narrative set the standard for world history, and presented new
possibilities for understanding the interactions between, and the integration of, premodern
civilizations. The four major civilizations that dominate McNeill’s story—Europe,
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China, India and the Middle East—finally converged in the 1850s as a new era dawned.
‘Instead of four (or with Japan, five), autonomous though interconnected civilizations,’
argued McNeill, ‘a yeasty, half-formless, but genuinely global cosmopolitanism began
to emerge as the dominant reality of the human community.’14 However, this is not
‘global cosmopolitanism’ as we might understand it in the twenty-first century, but
specifically the triumph of ‘Western civilization’.
McNeill’s more accessible book, A World History (1967), reiterated a decisive shift in
the mid-nineteenth century. The culmination of the democratic and industrial revolutions,
he argued, had global repercussions and ‘the result was to raise the power and
wealth of the Western style of life so far above those familiar to other civilizations as
to make resistance to Western encroachment no longer possible’.15 As for the fate of
non-Western people, McNeill writes:
From about the mid-nineteenth century, the age-old retreat of barbarian and savage
societies acquired a new velocity with the development of mechanical means
of transport and communication. As a result, within scarcely more than a single
century almost all the regions of the earth which in 1850 were still occupied
by such simple societies have been either pre-empted by civilized settlers or else
brought under civilized types of administration.16
In McNeill’s world history, barbarian and primitive cultures, whether beaten back by
a pre-emptive settler strike or a slower subjugation by colonial bureaucracy, retreat
before the inevitable rise of Western civilization.17
The ‘rise of the West’ proved a particularly popular historical narrative in post-war
American education in the second half of the twentieth century. In their comprehensive
historiographic survey of the American tradition, Benedikt Stuchtey and Eckhardt Fuchs
argue that during the Cold War, ‘Western Civilization’, an ‘obligatory introductory
course for history students at American universities, was actually world history with
the ideological and political mission of putting the USA at the top of historical development’.18
The primitive-to-present ‘rise of the West’ narrative found similar expression
in Kenneth Clark’s popular UK television series, Civilization (1969) and accompanying
book, and lives on in American art and design history textbooks such as H. W. Janson’s
A History of Art, Phillip Meggs’ A History of Graphic Design and John Pile’s A History of
Interior Design.19 Most recently, Niall Ferguson’s populist history Civilization: The West
and the Rest, titled apparently without a hint of irony, continued the triumphant ‘rise
of the West’ narrative.20
An alternative stream in world history, developed in France prior to the Second World
War, is associated with the so-called ‘Annales school’.21 The Annales approach focused
on ‘the longue durée’ of history in which cultures, identities and mentalities persist,
despite short-term political or social changes. Fernand Braudel’s 1949 study of ‘the
Mediterranean world’ in the age of Philip II, for example, encompassed a large geographical
region containing various cultures, religions and states, with the nationstate
and its institutions no longer providing the key narrative thread.22 In A History of
Civilizations (1963), in contrast to McNeill, Braudel was ultimately interested in ‘structures’
rather than ‘civilizations’: ‘these structures, are generally ancient and long-lived,
and always distinctive and original. They it is that give civilizations their essential outline
and characteristic quality.’23 Shifting the emphasis from episodic or event-dominated
histories, Annales histories typically focused on founding structures and Braudel in particular
stressed integrated research across the social sciences.24 Annales historians concentrated
on the pre-modern world, and Georg Iggers argues that their approach was
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‘remarkably free of confidence in the superior qualities of a Western civilization built on
scientific and technological skills, and free of the concepts of modernization so central
to much social science theory’.25 Given Braudel’s interest in social history and material
culture, his work has had some impact on design historians.26
Expanding Braudel’s spatial and temporal scope, Immanuel Wallerstein’s The Modern WorldSystem
(1974), begins in sixteenth-century Europe and traces the development and spread of
capitalism. His work characterizes ‘the modern world-system’ from the sixteenth century at
‘a certain level of abstraction, that of the evolution of structures of the whole system’.27 For
Wallerstein, the modern world is characterized by a system unbound by political, linguistic
or cultural borders but inherently based on an unequal relationship between the developed
core and the underdeveloped periphery. However, Wallerstein’s analysis focuses on charting
the development of political and economic changes in the core, primarily Europe and the
United States. Although he followed Braudel in arguing for an interdisciplinary inquiry across
the social sciences, Wallerstein has shown little interest in material culture or the minutia of
everyday experience, and has had little direct impact on design historians.
McNeill, Braudel and Wallerstein set the agenda for later historians interested in globalization,
by constructing historical frameworks for understanding large-scale processes
unbound by the nation-state.28 Other historians, also referred to as transnational historians,
have proposed alternative long-term and broad geographic histories.29 Janet
Abu-Lughod, for example, in an analysis of trade and communication networks linking
Western Europe, the Middle East, China, India and Southeast Asia, stretched Wallerstein’s
‘world-system’ back to the thirteenth century.30 Philip Curtin’s ‘comparative world history’,
Cross-Cultural Trade in World History, similarly examined pre-modern trade networks
in an attempt ‘to avoid a Western ethnocentric outlook’.31 While Wallerstein’s
world-system stretches back 500 years, Andre Gunder Frank and Barry Gills argued for
a ‘world system’ stretching back at least 5,000 years, without a decisive break around
1500.32 Indeed, it is possible to trace trade networks, migration, cultural exchange and
communication between geographical regions back to the prehistoric era. Consequently,
recent globalization can be understood as an intensification and expansion of already
existing processes, interactions and flows rather than as a radical break. Precisely when
the division between a world comprised of primarily local or regional experiences and a
globally interconnected one occurred is still a topical debate among historians.33
Dilemmas: Eurocentrism, modernization and the people
without history
[. . .] and indeed it can be argued that the major component in European culture is
precisely what made that culture hegemonic both in and outside Europe: the idea
of European identity as a superior one in comparison with all the non-European
peoples and cultures.
Edward Said, 197834
Regardless of temporal divisions, from the 1980s onwards, several dilemmas haunting
the world historical project came to the foreground. As well as postmodern critics of
the ‘metanarrative’, Indian scholars associated with the Subaltern Studies group and
influenced by Edward Said’s Orientalism offered alternative historical perspectives.35
Additionally, critiques of modernization and progress, coupled with an increasing recognition
of what anthropologist Eric Wolf referred to as ‘the people without history’,
further dismantled many assumptions of world historians.36 There is an inevitable
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overlap between these critical perspectives, and, rather than aim to provide a comprehensive
overview of postmodern or post-colonial theory, my intention is to summarize
the major dilemmas faced by contemporary global historians.
An initial critique of world history, particularly the ‘rise of the West’ narrative, was that
it is inherently Eurocentric. Historians Michael Geyer and Charles Bright, for example,
argued that world history ‘[. . .] has remained intimately linked to totalizing Western
world images and stereotypes. The very act of mapping and thinking the world implicated
historians from around the world into a nexus of histories of imperial power from
which their “other” worlds and histories were either excluded entirely—subaltern to
the point of non-existence—or rendered subordinate.’37
In Provincializing Europe, Dipesh Chakrabarty exposed what he termed European historicism,
a mode of thinking that ‘posited historical time as a measure of the cultural
distance (at least in institutional development) that was assumed to exist between
the West and the non-West. In the colonies, it legitimated the idea of civilization.’38
The underlying structural unity of mainstream historical processes, he argued, posited
the non-West in a perpetual catch-up game with the civilized West. Following poststructural
theorists such as Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault, post-colonial theorists
such as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Homi K. Bhabha questioned Western conceptual
systems derived from the European Enlightenment, including history.39 The price
paid by ‘the rest’ for the rise of the West was not only in colonial plunder, violence and
occupation, but also in colonial structures of knowledge and conceptual categories.40
World history of the 1960s and 1970s, as outlined above, was thus understood to be
inescapably Eurocentric, not only in its content but in its narrative structure and conceptual
categories.
As history was professionalized in nineteenth-century Europe, the non-West was relegated
to the realm of anthropology, archaeology, African or Oriental studies. Historian
Patrick O’Brien argues that it was during the nineteenth century that representations of
European civilization as culturally advanced became the norm: ‘Hegelian presumptions
that Europe maturing into the West represented a model for modernity and progress
became present in the writings of most historians, who implicitly, and often explicitly,
derived that assumption from a succession of canonical social scientists, including
Malthus, Hegel, Tocqueville, Saint Simon, Comte, Mill, Spencer, Marx and Weber.’41
Meanwhile, non-Western people were understood to be ‘without history’. African
historian Steven Feierman writes that any examination of African history reveals that
the organizing concepts and methods of history are never neutral but ‘the categories
that are ostensibly universal are in fact particular, and they refer to the experience of
modern Europe’.42 He concludes: ‘[i]f what is European is defined as normal, then the
non-European appears to be disordered, abnormal, primitive.’43 As written, taught and
popularly understood in Europe from the nineteenth century, history emerged within
a West/non-West dichotomy with its associated preconceptions of civilized/primitive
people.
In Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in 19th-Century Europe, Hayden White characterized
historical consciousness as inherently Western, ‘a prejudice by which the presumed
superiority of modern industrial society can be retroactively substantiated’.44
This suggests that, like Eurocentrism, modernization was similarly embedded within
European historical thinking. Geographer James Blaut described European history as
‘the colonizer’s model of the world’, in which Europe was characterized as the dynamic
core of historical development and technological change, and the rest of the world as a
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stagnant periphery.45 Samir Amin argued that Wallerstein’s ‘world-systems’ continued
this Eurocentric narrative in its ‘mythic construct’ of a centre/periphery relationship
established as a binary opposition between Europe and the Rest.46 Earlier ideas about
historical civilization and progress morphed into economic theory’s modernization in
which ‘progress means developing along a particular path towards a particular sociopolitical
and economic state of organization—Western modernity’.47 Modernization
theories privilege Western technological and cultural progress that diffuses to the rest
of the world. In history, this narrative sequence can be distilled as ‘first the West, then
the Rest’.
The twin dilemmas of Eurocentrism and modernization have proved difficult to
overcome for historians, with Arlif Dirlik, for example, arguing that ‘confronting
Eurocentrism requires ultimately a confrontation of history and the project of modernity
as a whole’.48 From this position, any narratives purporting to be universal and all
claims to ‘world history’ are inevitably Eurocentric and infused with the idea of modernization
as a teleological process. However, Chakrabarty argued that post-colonial
historians, rather than abandon history, have actively engaged in a ‘politics of translation’
between Western and other modes of thinking. His aim in ‘provincializing Europe’
is to ‘write narratives and analyses that produce [. . .] translucence—and not transparency—in
the relation between non-Western histories and European thought and its
analytical categories [. . .]’49 How might historians proceed with the construction of
such ‘translucent’ global histories?
Globalizing history and the new global history
A new generation of historians has begun to rethink large-scale histories across a broad
geographical expanse. A promising position is the new global history (as differentiated
from world history) that aims to mature beyond ‘the scientific and technological
triumphalism of the West’.50 In contrast to world history, global history refers to a
revised notion of large-scale temporal and geographical narratives, explicitly inclusive
of the ‘multiplicity of “globalizations”‘.51 This project aims to avoid Eurocentrism, reject
the dichotomy of modern and traditional cultures, avoid technological determinism,
and remain open to other approaches and disciplines (from post-colonial and feminist
theory to anthropology and sociology, for example). The new global history also proposes
to acknowledge the heterogeneity of globalizing processes, the interaction of
the local and the global, and to incorporate existing local, regional and national histories.52
An accessible introduction is the Monash/Warwick Global History Collaboration,
founded in 2011, an online resource containing bibliographies, teaching and research
resources.53
Importantly, the erasure of non-Western structures of knowledge and conceptual categories—so
often implied in critiques of Eurocentrism—was never complete. A global
comparative historiography dedicated to comparing how various cultural traditions
viewed historical change has been underway for almost a decade. Historical texts,
methods and traditions of the non-West, long suppressed or ignored, have been collected
into accessible anthologies and overviews.54 This integration and interaction of
different historical traditions is an ongoing project, but it is yet to make an impact on
large-scale historical narratives. Translating between Western and non-Western knowledge
and conceptual categories may be one path towards the ‘translucent’ histories
advocated by Chakrabarty. Ultimately, this approach requires rethinking the assumption
of a linear, progressive transition from ‘traditional’ to ‘modern’ cultures or practices;
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that is, thinking beyond the modernization paradigm that posits the traditional as preindustrial,
feudal, rural, undemocratic and religious, and the modern as industrial, capitalist,
urban, democratic, secular and scientific. These categories—embedded within
the Eurocentric historical project—uphold the metanarrative of ‘progress’.
A related project that Bruce Mazish refers to as the ‘New Global History’ is ‘dedicated
to the study of the new globalization that has emerged some time in the period
after WWII’.55 This is perhaps more straightforward as a characterization of historical
accounts of the ‘global era’ beginning in the 1950s or 1960s (though Mazish opts for
the 1970s as the significant turning point). Historians engaged in analysing recent globalization
aim to avoid the economic perspective of globalization as the most advanced
stage of development, the linear narrative of technological progress, the political narrative
of the nation-state’s inevitable decline, the geographical narrative of spatial shrinkage
and the cultural perspective of ever-increasing homogenization. Instead, the New
Global History aims to explore these issues as tensions between convergence and fragmentation,
as well as the impact of such global forces on local people, communities
and cultures.56 New topics that arise from this era include new ‘actors’ such as multinational
corporations, Non-Government Organizations (NGOs) and global activists, as
well as new themes as diverse as global communications, politics, economics, environmentalism
and human rights, ideally analysed from a multi-disciplinary perspective.
Towards a global design history
The most crucial problem for globalizing design history is a definition of design. If we
define design as the conception and creation of artefacts for mechanized mass production—‘industrial
design’ in its purist sense—then the British Industrial Revolution
of the eighteenth century seems a logical origin.57 However, if we define design as
the conception and creation of useful artefacts in general, then the scope of inquiry
expands to include ‘pre-industrial’ objects.58 Many popular and enduring design historical
surveys have adopted the former approach, with the exception of popular
American textbooks, as noted above, which follow the more comprehensive ‘world
history’ approach.59 Other options for constructing general design historical narratives
are to trace the development of ‘modern design’ or to begin in the twentieth
century. Implicitly—if not explicitly—these are founded on assumptions about British
industrialization and European exceptionalism.60 Regardless of approach, the Western
‘grand narrative’ that extends from ‘Lascaux to Brooklyn’ (as Paul Rand put it) or, less
ambitiously, from the Industrial Revolution to the present, prevails as the dominant
framework for most design historical teaching and scholarship. If design historians are
serious about establishing a global perspective, the dilemmas of world history outlined
above need addressing.
A significant hurdle in conceptualizing a global design history is the discipline’s preoccupation
with modernism and a particular canon of modernist designers and design
icons.61 Narratives of modernist design—typically following Pevsner’s initial blueprint in
Pioneers of the Modern Movement—are based on a ‘diffusionist model’ whereby modernism
begins in Western Europe and diffuses outwards. The fixation on modernism is
aligned to an often-unstated narrative in which the vanguard of design culture naturally
follows technological progress and socio-economic development. Design historians
typically adhere to the ‘first the West, then the Rest’ dictum. Denise Whitehouse
characterizes this as a geographical ‘power play’ grounded in ‘design history’s agreed
definition of design as the product of industrialization, technological innovation, and
mass manufacture, which excludes countries that lack mass manufacturing and its
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technologies but that nevertheless shape sophisticated design cultures’.62 To restate
the initial problem, if our definition of design is limited to artefacts conceived by professional
designers and produced by mechanized mass production, then is design history
inherently Eurocentric (or more specifically, inherently Anglocentric)?
This question has provoked some design historians—in both Europe and beyond—to
start building alternative narratives. Beginning in Barcelona in 1999, progress towards
a more inclusive global design history has occurred at the biannual International
Conference on Design History and Design Studies (ICDHDS).63 Papers and discussions at
these conferences have uncovered a wealth of local and regional design histories—particularly
from Spanish-speaking countries—that challenge the long-accepted European
canon as well as modernist ideas as they were transferred, adopted and adapted in
non-Western contexts.64 Convenor of the first conference, Anna Calvera, suggested
two approaches for globalizing design history:
a common, large narrative of the World History of Design, open-minded enough
to be shared by different regions or nations. It permits a research approach that
works from the general to the particular. The second research direction aims at
finding points and aspects to be compared between different local, or rather
national, identities notable for their differences. This approach works from the
particular to the general and, through sharing particularities, it should introduce
new interpretative models (might we also call these larger narratives?) that are
adapted to local realities.65
Victor Margolin has adopted the first approach, the ‘common, large narrative’, for
his three-volume World History of Design (forthcoming, 2015). Margolin has meticulously
documented design from the prehistoric era to the present, including regions of
the world absent from earlier design histories. However, while admirable in expanding
existing knowledge, the World History of Design—particularly the first volume’s
coverage of prehistorical to modern design—is modelled on a narrative framework
derived from McNeill and Braudel.66 In an earlier theoretical overview, Margolin advocates
‘a narrative that emphasizes social actors and the forces with which they interact’
rather than a chronology of styles or nation-based histories.67 These social actors, he
argues, include not only individual designers but also governments and institutions.
Thus a world history of design, argues Margolin, functions ‘as a history of how empires,
nations and other political entities have used it [design] to advance their political and
economic agendas, while also showing how designed objects and images have contributed
to the formation of national and global sensibilities’.68
Another holistic project exemplifying the ‘common, large narrative’ is Pat Kirkham and
Susan Weber’s 2013 edited volume History of Design: Decorative Arts and Material
Culture, 1400–2000.69 Allocating equal weight to major geographical entities—East
Asia, India, The Islamic World, Africa, Europe and the Americas—the volume’s scope
is comprehensive and earlier Eurocentric models have been displaced by a more even
geographical spread. However, given each geographical entry is a discrete overview of
the material culture of a particular time, place and culture, there is little sense of the
global production and consumption of objects. A further limitation for this type of
design history survey is its museological focus on material objects, a focus which tends
to exclude Margolin’s broader inclusion of various social actors, including governments
and institutions.
The second, a comparative approach suggested by Calvera, follows Braudel’s possibility
of a network model rather than a one-way flow from centre to periphery.70 Calvera
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also acknowledges that peripheral histories tend to be characterized by chronological
delay and dependence on models from the centre.71 However, self-conscious marginalization
is potentially problematic. Tony Fry argued in an essay on Australian design
that design in a marginal locale is dependent on distant centres, with the local designer
operating ‘as one of the key mediators gatekeeping the induction of the elsewhere’.72
Similarly, Gui Bonsiepe has long advocated design in what he refers to as the ‘periphery’.
His history of the ‘Ulm Model’, for example, addresses the development of industrial
design pedagogy and practice in Latin America.73 The fundamental problem with
this approach is that terms marginal and periphery immediately situate design activities—whether
Australian or Latin American—always already in a subordinate relation
to a (real or perceived) centre. Ultimately, design histories that adopt a centre/margins
or centre/periphery model adhere to the ‘first the West, then the Rest’ sequence.
However, self-consciously using this model may well be a useful strategy in certain
circumstances, such, for example, as analysing colonial relationships in design history.
In contrast, the short essays in Global Design History (2011) illustrate alternative
approaches. Editors Glenn Adamson, Giorgio Riello and Sarah Teasley aimed to correct
what they claimed was ‘the dominant, lopsided representation of the history of design as
occurring primarily in Western Europe and the United States’.74 The essays follow either
a comparative or a ‘connections’ approach based on analysing global flows of objects,
people and ideas. From the ‘global Renaissance’ to pre-modern Japanese, Chinese and
Indian examples (design here is clearly not defined by industrialization), to reimaginings
of twentieth-century design and contemporary globalization, the collection represents a
series of promising beginnings. In another article, Adamson and Riello discussed the possibilities
of an object-based approach in order to ‘show how the object itself can produce
its own global history or can be used as a way to challenge, revise, or relativize established
narratives’.75 These examples consciously resist the totalizing ideals of a ‘world history’
or an overarching narrative. How such ‘microhistories’ might be incorporated into
larger historical narratives (or even whether this is a desirable aim), remains to be seen.
Beyond these beginnings, there are alternate options for globalizing design history.
Existing research on peripheral design cultures, typically framed in national or local
terms, could be repositioned within a global context. However, the aim of this strategy
should be to remap earlier periods while acknowledging different understandings of
design, its processes, production and consumption within different cultural contexts.
Rather than understand the periphery as an imitation of Europe, there needs to be
an understanding of the multi-directional nature of global flows—this may require
developing both new terms and new structures for analysis. One strategy is to build
upon existing scholarship on European or American design and to ‘provincialize’ or
‘globalize’ it. Rather than begin afresh, this entails adopting a global lens to existing
design historical knowledge. As examples of the latter approach, I will consider two
significant design historical moments: mid-nineteenth century Britain and inter-war
Germany. Rather than a comprehensive coverage, I offer these as illustrations of global
lenses applied to already existing design historical knowledge.
Globalizing design reform
[. . .] the designers in this country are just as likely to be called upon to frame a
design which will suit the taste or the want of it, of the African savage on the coast
of Mozambique, as that which may be necessary to meet the requirements of the
inhabitants of Mayfair.
Henry Cole, 185176
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Design reform in mid-nineteenth century England—encompassing the Great Exhibition of
1851, the Journal of Design, the establishment of design education and national design
policy, as well as characters such as Henry Cole, Owen Jones and Gottfried Semper—
constitutes an important topic for design historical scholarship and teaching. While
typically framed within an English context, what Arindam Dutta has termed the ‘South
Kensington system’—comprising a pedagogical model, a legal framework for design patents,
an exhibition culture and the rhetoric of design reform—was also (to some extent) a
global phenomenon.77 The dissemination of both the system and its colonial imagination
(an image of the world centred on England) had a significant effect on design education,
exhibitions, publications and policy in various parts of the British Empire and beyond in
the nineteenth century.78 The particular discourse of design reform was initially bound
to British colonial trade and tracing its diffusion, adoption and adaption ‘from Mayfair
to Mozambique’ could provide alternative narratives to the common Anglocentric one.
The 1851 Great Exhibition, for example, has been the subject of a revised, global perspective
in recent years.79 The first international event dedicated to display the material progress
of industrialization, the Great Exhibition also represented a potential new world order
of ‘free trade’ beyond national boundaries. Not surprisingly, the Exhibition and the ‘South
Kensington system’ align neatly with McNeill’s periodization of the 1850s as the era of the
great ‘convergence’ into a global cosmopolitanism. The Exhibition encapsulated a hierarchical
ordering and compression of global cultures, but a very particular one: a British imperial
world-picture based on the logic of centre and periphery. McNeill’s civilization/savagery
dichotomy was made concrete via displays of (British) industrial objects and (colonial) primitive
crafts.80 The broader discourse of design reform and policy located the professional
designer and industrial manufacturing in Britain while the colonies provided raw materials
and an export market.81 Finally, as systemized approach to design education, the South
Kensington model was replicated in some British colonies, particularly Canada and Australia,
but was also adopted in other countries, such as the United States, Brazil and Japan.82
Rather than seeing late nineteenth century design culture in England as contained within
a nationalist context, a global perspective might offer new insights. The design reform
discourse, extending through the Arts and Crafts movement, could also be framed globally,
with the spread of information via The Studio and the exports of Morris & Co. to
the colonies, for example.83 In this case, the diffusionist historical model needs adjusting
to acknowledge the adoption and adaptation of Arts and Crafts ideas in their new
contexts. In England meanwhile, Morris’ (and others’) self-conscious turn to vernacular
sources might be as much a reaction to the increasingly global trade of commodities,
ideas and people, as it was to mechanization.84 Acknowledging the imperial context
of mid-nineteenth century British design might also be a first step in shifting the narratives
of triumphant technological progress and British exceptionalism that haunt design
history. A comparative method could entail juxtaposing British industrial products with
those of China or India, not as products of an inferior civilization without machines or a
‘purer’ culture closer to nature but as mass-produced objects exported and consumed
globally (although in many cases informed by British interests or by markets established
by Colonial powers). Just as Cole envisaged British-designed objects produced for global
export, mid-nineteenth century Chinese and Indian mass-produced objects were equally
produced for global export.85 Beyond production, a further research angle would be
to analyse how these were objects promoted and consumed in their final destinations.
Globalizing international Modernism
The Bauhaus remains an important institution for design historians. It is difficult to
imagine a general survey of the field that does not feature at least some of its iconic
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objects, designers, publications or its pedagogical model. While a great deal of scholarship
exists on the Bauhaus in its German context, it could also be understood as global.
Importantly, the Bauhaus was unusually cosmopolitan in its student body and international
in its aims from the beginning.86 Like the dissemination of the ‘South Kensington
system’, we might also consider a ‘Bauhaus system’ disseminated around the world
by designers who taught or were educated there. The Bauhaus diaspora in the United
States is well known and documented, but for the rest of the world the scholarship
is patchy. After the Second World War, for example, the Bauhaus diaspora spread to
the USSR and Eastern bloc countries in Europe, as well as to Israel, Japan and Africa.87
Recent publications on the global impact of Bauhaus pedagogy, Japanese designers at
the Bauhaus and the visit of Rabindranath Tagore to the Weimar Bauhaus add to the
image of a global Bauhaus.88 However, studies of the Bauhaus system’s diffusion need
to avoid a concentric model whereby peripheral cultures are characterized as merely
imitating the German original.89
In Bauhaus Dream-House: Modernity and Globalization, Katarina Rüedi Ray argued
that the dissemination of Bauhaus ideas occurred through both the ‘threads of communication
and influence’ of personal relationships, as well as through ‘new communication
technologies—expanding exponentially in the inter-war period’. These, she
argued, ‘connected the Bauhaus with far-flung individuals, organizations, and audiences’.90
Following this idea, the role of communications technologies in the inter-war
period—from cheap illustrated printing, advertising and newspapers to radio, cinema
and the telephone—in moulding an international community of modernist designers
and institutions has not been fully recognized by design historians. This recognition
could acknowledge modernist design as a parallel project of designers and consumers
around the world responding to various economic, political, technological and social
changes rather than simply a diffusion of ideas from Germany. However, the uneven
distribution of this project and the limitations of the international flows of information
and people would also need to be taken into account.
Beyond the Bauhaus, the inter-war period in Europe was notable for the development
of various modernist design ideals, including a self-conscious international ambition.
The development of ISOTYPE by Otto Neurath and his collaborators in Vienna, for
example, often portrayed as ‘industrializing’ or ‘rationalizing’ visual communication,
was founded upon a universal ideal. His 1936 book, International Picture Language:
The First Rules of ISOTYPE, for example, outlined a consistent, logical ‘pictorial information’
system that could potentially subordinate ‘individual and national interests to the
needs of an international community’.91 Beyond its characterization as a rationalization
of visual language based on standardization, simplicity and efficiency, scholars have
begun to analyse how this particularly European system spread around the world in the
post-war era.92 However, it was not simply copied by non-Europeans, but was adapted
to local conditions, existing symbolic systems and cultural expectations.93
Many modernist designers operated in a trans-European, trans-Atlantic or international
context over the course of their careers and self-consciously pursued the twin ideals
of internationalism and universalism.94 Ironically, this trans-national practice is usually
framed within national histories that tend to downplay the global aspects of individual
designers’ careers, the travels of designed artefacts or their transnational production.
The national framework remains strong for various practical reasons—the prevalence
of national archives, funding bodies and institutional constraints, for example, can
work against framing scholarship across national boundaries. However, interconnected
histories have emerged of design’s role in national states’ international ambitions and
policy development, particularly American and Soviet design cultures during the Cold
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War.95 Networks of practitioners, the impact of improved communications technology
and travel in the modernist era were also significant—and a means by which designers
and consumers could envisage themselves as part of a modern global consciousness.
Multiple modernities
Another strategy is to abandon design history’s myopic focus on modernist design and
instead highlight more populist versions of modern design. Often downplayed, the varieties
of modern styling lumped together as Art Deco spread rapidly around the world
via films, journals, newspapers, graphic communications and consumer objects. Art
Deco or ‘moderne’ commercial, retail and apartment buildings and their interiors, for
example, transformed cities from Shanghai to Sydney and from Asmara to Bombay.96
The ‘impure’ forms of Art Deco’s variegated styling in the 1920s and 1930s represented
an urban, cosmopolitan style—an ‘international style’—that was adopted and
adapted (rather than copied) by designers around the world. A telling comparison in
the representation of Art Deco versus Modernism as ‘international’ styles was the two
Victoria and Albert Museum exhibitions: in 2003, ‘Art Deco: 1910–1939’, and in 2006,
‘Modernism: Designing a New World’. These two exhibitions (and accompanying catalogues),
covering roughly the same period, confirmed that Modernism was an exclusively
Euro-American phenomenon, while Art Deco was global. While the Modernism
exhibition focused on Europe, the Art Deco exhibition’s final part, ‘The Deco World’
featured examples of ‘moderne’ objects and architecture from Japan, China, India,
Australia, Latin America and South Africa.97 However, the emphasis on Paris as the origin
and original Art Deco confirmed a ‘first the West, then the Rest’ sequence.
Despite these possible global perspectives on existing scholarship, the diffusionist problem
remains. Diffusion, historian Raymond Grew argues, has possibilities if we shift
‘the focus to the process of diffusion’ and ‘[t]hen the object of study becomes the
process of adoption, resistance, assimilation, adaptation, and transformation, and the
analysis uses comparison more than sequence’.98 Studies of the spread of what Guy
Julier terms ‘design culture’—comprising institutions, publications, education, exhibitions
and the self-conscious professionalization of design activities—outside of Europe
and the United States has begun.99 For example, recent survey articles in this journal
documented the development of modern design cultures in Japan, Greater China and
Korea.100 This scholarship could potentially be integrated into broader historical narratives
in which it appears on equal footing with the development of modern design
cultures in European countries. A network model, as suggested by Calvera, could also
explore flows of information, designers and objects between ‘peripheral’ places. No
doubt there is a great deal of material documenting design in various places written in
languages other than English that is yet to be translated. Indeed, this issue highlights
the English language as a dominant factor that has shaped design history and limited
our understanding of design in a global context.101
A further challenge for globalizing design history is how to integrate indigenous or traditional
material culture into design history—or whether to include the ‘people without
design’ at all. Interestingly, The Design History Reader begins with an excerpt by Laurel
Thatcher Ulrich, ‘An Indian Basket, Providence, Rhode Island, 1676’. The basket was
clearly hand-made in a ‘traditional’ manner, yet in its materials, and in its context of creation
and reception, it is also a modern artefact.102 If a global design history is to proceed
along a material culture line, then it must acknowledge the plural notions of what might
constitute design in various cultures. Here, for example, an anthropological approach to
indigenous culture such as Nigel Barley’s analysis of everyday objects in Southern Nigeria
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is a useful model.103 But this need not be limited to traditional or vernacular artefacts
and practices, but should also include modern urban cultures that might mix imported,
modern and traditional artefacts and ideas. David Stairs’ brief survey on Ugandan design,
for example, rather than dwelling on imported objects and ideas, analyses vernacular
signage, traditional seating and objects such as sandals made from recycled tires. Stairs
recognized that ‘the influence of Western design often is diluted, absorbed, and made
Ugandan’.104 It is important not to assume indigenous or traditional design necessarily
equates to pre-industrial or primitive.105 Lastly, incorporating an indigenous perspective
might involve, as Stairs has, shifting emphasis from the production of designed artefacts
to local consumption and adaptations of industrial mass produced artefacts.
Design history in an era of globalization
The final but no less difficult task is mapping design practice in the global era. There
seems little controversy in characterizing design of the past fifty years or so as increasingly
bound up with global processes. Analyses of more recent globalization in design
already exist, but have a tendency towards mapping contemporary design rather than
historicizing it. In The Design Dimension, for example, Christopher Lorenz examined
the design industry’s globalization in the 1980s, largely in response to the international
success of Japanese cars and consumer electronics. Although early promoters of globalization
such as Theodore Levitt argued that the world’s consumer tastes and needs
were becoming increasingly homogenized through standardized products, Lorenz presented
the counter-view that ‘new life styles were emerging and new, differentiated
markets were opening up’.106 The 1980s globalization ‘hype’, Lorenz concluded, was
materialized by large corporations in their production and marketing of standardized
products throughout the world.107 Lorenz highlighted the era’s ‘awkward paradox’ in
relation to global products and brands by contrasting attempts at a singular global
design language with national variations.
Additional research on contemporary aspects of design and globalization are no doubt
valuable, but a design history of the last five or six decades might proceed across various
fronts.108 This could include, for example, new approaches to existing themes such as
analyses of the global production and consumerism of designed objects, global corporations
founded on particular design ideals such as Apple or IKEA, new global design consultancies
such as Frog, GK Design or IDEO, or the careers of individual designers who work
in a global context.109 Following the biographies of objects, companies, consultancies or
designers could contain global design histories within manageable case studies that help
illuminate a broader picture of design’s global movement over the past fifty years or so.
Related fields, particularly anthropology and material culture studies have much to offer
design historians interested in globalization, particularly for their analyses of how designed
objects are consumed in various contexts. Seminal texts, including Igor Kopytoff’s ‘The
Cultural Biography of Things’, first published in Arjun Appadurai’s The Social Life of
Things, and John Brewer and Roy Porter’s edited collection, Consumption and the World
of Goods, signalled not only anthropology’s turn to material culture but also its global
turn.110 From the 1990s, a range of scholarship has emerged from anthropologists and
sociologists that analyses the shifting contexts, mediation of and meanings attributed to
material culture on a global scale.111 However, much of this work remains centred on the
‘lives’ of commodities as they circulate around the globe, while their conception, design
and production remains little analysed. For design historians, the latter themes of conception,
design and production have great potential for additions to work already done on
tracing the global trajectory of objects or future inter-disciplinary collaborations.
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Daniel J. Huppatz
Beyond such smaller scale studies, larger themes await the attention of design historians.
Design and development, for example, were global issues for designers, particularly in the
1960s and 1970s. As a theme extending from the Eames’ 1958 India Report to the 1979
Ahmedabad Declaration, design’s role in development has once again become a popular
idea among designers and critics.112 Another possibility, suggested by Jonathan Woodham,
is analysing the role of design organizations such as the International Council of the Societies
of Industrial Design (ICSID, founded in 1957), the International Council of Graphic Design
Associations (ICOGRADA, founded in 1963) and the International Federation of Interior
Architects/Designers (IFI, founded in 1963).113 Such global bodies confirmed the idea that
design was international and potentially poised to solve global problems. Finally, sustainability
is clearly a contemporary global issue but also one with which professional designers have
been concerned since at least the 1960s: no-one has comprehensively mapped its history to
date.114 Obviously, this brief list is not comprehensive, but it would seem to me that design
historians contemplating design’s history since the 1960s cannot avoid a global perspective.
Conclusion
Establishing a global framework for design history is important, but, as I have demonstrated
above, it is not necessarily a singular project or one that requires comprehensive
geographic coverage. Furthermore, a global design history need not negate local, regional
or national histories, nor reject existing methods, but might more usefully build upon
existing knowledge and methods. Historian Raymond Grew argued that global history
could become ‘another way of regrouping interdisciplinary and cross-cultural research—a
continuing project and not the expression of a single theory’, and global design history
could be characterized in the same way.115 As a first step, it seems to me that the crucial
issue is reframing existing knowledge so as to avoid European exceptionalism by which
‘design’ originated in Europe and then flowed out to the rest of the world. The next step
would involve a better understanding of the multi-directional nature of flows, particularly
flows of designed objects (of which much work has already been done in related
fields, as noted above), the movement of designers, interactions between design-related
institutions (from consultancies and design-led corporations to educational institutes and
professional associations) and the circulation of information related to design production,
processes and thinking. Critically, a global design history begins with an acknowledgement
of design cultures in the rest of the world as equal to those of the West and an
understanding of the global as a dynamic set of processes and interrelations.
D. J. Huppatz
Swinburne University of Technology—Interior Design, Victoria, Australia
E-mail: dhuppatz@swin.edu.au
D.J. Huppatz is Senior Lecturer at Swinburne University of Technology’s School of
Design in Melbourne, Australia. He recently completed an edited collection, Design:
Critical and Primary Sources, for Bloomsbury.
If you have any comments to make in relation to this article, please go to the journal website on
http://jdh.oxfordjournals.org and access this article. There is a facility on the site for sending e-mail
responses to the editorial board and other readers.
Acknowledgements:The author would like to thank Denise Whitehouse, Grace Lees-Maffei and Kjetil
Fallan for their generosity, advice and support, and the anonymous reviewers of this article for their
thoughtful reviews.
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Globalizing Design History and Global Design History
Notes
	 1	 C. Bailey, ‘The Global Future of Design History’, Journal of
Design History, vol. 18, no. 4, 2005, p. 233.
	2	 G. Lees-Maffei, in The Design History Reader, G.  LeesMaffei
& R. Houze (eds.), Berg, Oxford & New York, 2010,
p. 469.
	3	J. H.  Bentley, ‘Globalizing History and Historicizing
Globalization’, in Globalization and Global History, B. K.
Gills & W.  Thompson (eds), Taylor & Francis, Hoboken,
NJ, 2012. p. 18. In his excellent summary of the issues,
historian A. G. Hopkins phrased this project as questions:
‘what can historians contribute to the debate on globalization,
and what can the debate on globalization contribute
to the study of history?’; A. G. Hopkins, ‘The History
of Globalization—and the Globalization of History?’, in
Globalization in World History, A. G. Hopkins (ed.), Pimlico,
London 2002, p. 21.
	4	 V. Margolin, ‘Design in History’, Design Issues, vol. 25,
no. 2, 2009, pp. 94–105.
	5	An early and influential characterization of globalization
is in economist Theodore Levitt’s 1983 essay, ‘The
Globalization of Markets’ (Harvard Business Review, vol.
61, no. 3, May-June 1983, pp. 92–102). This and other
‘classic’ essays on globalization are collected in M.  B.
Steger (ed.), Globalization, The Greatest Hits: A  Global
Studies Reader, Paradigm Publishers, Boulder, CO, &
London, 2010 (Levitt’s essay is at pp. 16–32).
	6	 G. Ritzer, Globalization: The Essentials, Wiley-Blackwell,
Oxford & Malden, MA, 2011, p. 2. Ritzer further elaborates
on the ‘liquid’ trope in ‘Globalization I: Liquids, Flows,
and Structures’, ch. 1 of Globalization: A Basic Text, WileyBlackwell,
Oxford & Malden, MA, 2010, pp. 1–32.
	7	 Hence the large number of short introductory texts and
readers currently available. Among the many introductions,
M.  B. Steger, Globalization: A  Very Short
Introduction, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2009, is a
useful short summary of globalization’s economic, political,
cultural and ecological dimensions. Of the many readers,
F. J. Lechner & J. Boli (eds), The Globalization Reader,
3rd edn, Blackwell Publishing, Oxford & Malden, MA,
2008, contains important articles from the past twentyfive
years across various disciplines. The classic cultural
perspective on globalization is A. Appadurai, Modernity at
Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization, University of
Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, MN, 1996.
	 8	 Raymond William’s 1976 classic Keywords: A Vocabulary
of Culture and Society (Croon Helm, London) did not
include ‘globalization’, but a 2008 revised version did. See
L. Grossberg, ‘Globalization’, in New Keywords: A Revised
Vocabulary of Culture and Society, T. Bennett, L. Grossberg
& M. Morris (eds), Blackwell Publishing, Oxford & Malden,
MA, 2005, pp.  218–23. Grossberg’s narrowly Marxist
definition of globalization reduces it to a characteristic of
capitalism.
	9	J.-F. Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A  Report on
Knowledge, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis,
MN, 1984.
	10	See, for example, Theodore Levitt’s early essay ‘The
Globalization of Markets’, op. cit., and the early popular
book on globalization, T.  Friedman, The Lexus and the
Olive Tree, Farrar, Strauss & Giraux, New York, 1999.
	11	 E. H.  Carr, What is History?, Penguin, London, 1961,
p. 199. Carr was also a diplomat, so his interest in international
relations and its history was not surprising.
	12	 One of the earliest historical narratives, written in the
fifth century BCE by Herodotus, was an account of various
inter-regional wars in what was then conceived to be
the ‘world’. See Herodotus, The History, D. Grene (trans.),
University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1987.
	13	In his introduction to Understanding Media, McLuhan
writes: ‘Today, after more than a century of electric technology,
we have extended our central nervous system in
a global embrace, abolishing both space and time as far
as our planet is concerned.’ M. McLuhan, Understanding
Media: The Extensions of Man, McGraw-Hill, New York,
1964, p. 3.
	14	 W. H.  McNeill, The Rise of the West: A  History of the
Human Community, University of Chicago Press, Chicago
& London, 1963, p. 727.
	15	 W. H. McNeill, A World History, Oxford University Press,
Oxford & London, 1967, p. 411.
	16	 Ibid, p. 416.
	17	 The distinction and narrative framework was repeated in
numerous reprints under various titles and was still intact
in a 1993 student version: W. H. McNeill, A History of the
Human Community: Prehistory to the Present, 4th edn,
Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1993.
	18	 B. Stuchtey & E. Fuchs (eds), Writing World History, 1800–
2000, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2003, p. 2.
	19	The original editions are K.  Clark, Civilization, Murray,
London, 1969; H. W. Janson, A History of Art: A Survey
of the Visual Arts from the Dawn of History to the Present
Day, Thames & Hudson, London, 1962; P.  Meggs, A
History of Graphic Design, Van Nostrand Reinhold, New
York, 1983; and J. Pile, A History of Interior Design, Wiley,
London, 2000. Each of Janson, Meggs and Pile has been
revised and updated since these original editions but the
narrative framework remains intact. See also my article on
the search for origins for this narrative: D. J. Huppatz, ‘The
Cave: Writing Design History’, The Journal of Writing in
Creative Practice, vol. 3, no. 2, 2010, pp. 135–48.
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	20	 N. Ferguson, Civilization: the West and the Rest, Allen
Lane, London, 2011, p.7. Not surprisingly, Fergusson draws
upon Clark (Civilization, op. cit.), McNeill’s Rise of the West
(op. cit.) and Fernand Braudel’s A History of Civilizations (R.
Mayne (trans.), Allen Lane, London, 1994) in his introductory
chapter (see pp. 1–18). He begins his narrative with
‘Western Civilization 1.0’, which ‘arose in the so-called
Fertile Crescent stretching from the Nile Valley to the confluence
of the Euphrates and the Tigris’ (p. 17), continuing
the bizarre Civilizations narrative that situates the origins
of ‘the West’ in the geographic East.
	21	 The term refers to a loose affiliation of historians formed
around the journal Annales d’Historie Economique et Sociale,
founded by Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch. A useful overview
is P.  Burke, The French Historical Revolution: the Annales
School, 1929–1989, Polity Press, Cambridge, UK, & Malden,
MA, 1990, and a good comparison between the Annales
approach to history and Wallerstein’s ‘world-systems’ analysis
is R. E. Lee (ed.), The Longue Durée and World-systems
Analysis, State University of New York, New York, 2012.
	22	 F. Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean
World in the Age of Philip II, S. Reynolds (trans.), 2 vols,
Harper & Row, New York, 1972. The original French edition
was in 1949 (La Méditerranée et le Monde Méditerranéen
à l’époque de Philippe II, Librairie générale française, Paris).
	23	 Braudel, A History of Civilizations, op. cit. The original
French edition was in 1963 (Le Monde actuel, histoire et
civilisation, Belin, Paris).
	24	 See Braudel, A History of Civilizations, op. cit, especially ch.
2, ‘The Study of Civilization Involves all the Social Sciences’,
pp. 9–23, in which he refers to both Michel Foucault and
Claude Lévi-Strauss.
	25	 G. G.  Iggers, Historiography in the Twentieth Century:
From Scientific Objectivity to the Postmodern Challenge,
Wesleyan University Press, Middletown, CT, Hanover &
London, 1997, pp. 63–4.
	26	 See, for example, A.  Calvera, ‘Local, Regional, National,
Global and Feedback: Several Issues to be Faced With
Constructing Regional Narratives’, Journal of Design
History, vol. 18, no. 4, 2005, pp. 373, 380, 381; and V,
Margolin, ‘A World History of Design and the History of
the World’, Journal of Design History, vol. 18, no. 3, 2005,
p. 236. Perhaps of most interest to design historians has
been Braudel’s later Civilization and Capitalism trilogy, particularly
F. Braudel, Civilization and Capitalism, vol.1: The
Structures of Everyday Life, S. Reynolds (trans.), University
of California Press, Berkeley & Los Angeles, CA, 1992,
in which he addresses themes such as houses, interiors,
transport and technology.
	27	 I. Wallerstein, The Modern World-System: Capitalist
Agriculture and the Origins of the European WorldEconomy
in the Sixteenth Century, Academic Press, New
York, 1974, p. 8. He differentiates his analysis of the ‘worldsystem’
from earlier histories of empires and nation-states,
primarily on the basis of a ‘world-economy’. See also his
later overview, I.  Wallerstein, World-Systems Analysis:
An Introduction, Duke University Press, Durham, NC, &
London, 2004, p. 16.
	28	 See P. N. Stearns, Globalization in World History, Routledge,
London & New York, 2010, esp. pp. 1–11.
	29	 For an accessible overview of transnational, world and
global histories, see C. A. Bayly, S. Beckert, M. Connelly,
I. Hofmeyer, W. Kozol & P. Seed, ‘AHR Conversation: On
Transnational History’, American Historical Review, vol.
111, no. 5, 2006, pp. 1441–64. I have not used the term
‘transnational’ in this article because, following Bayly’s
comments on p.  1442, the term ‘transnational’ seems
problematic when discussing history prior to the nineteenth
century spread of nation-states. ‘Transnational’ also
implies the use of the nation as a central analytical category,
potentially marginalizing other interactions between
regions, cultures, or individuals.
	30	 Janet Abu-Lughod reveals that parts of Euro-Asia were
integrated into a single, ‘world system’ as early as the thirteenth
century, though this was obviously not global in
today’s sense; J. Abu-Lughod, Before European Hegemony:
The World System AD 1250–1350, Oxford University Press,
Oxford & New York, 1989.
	31	 P. D.  Curtin, Cross-Cultural Trade in World History,
Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1984, p. ix.
	32	 B. K.  Gills & A.  G. Frank (eds), The World System: Five
Hundred Years or Five Thousand?, Routledge, London &
New York, 1993. See also B. K. Gills & A. G. Frank, ‘The
Five Thousand Year World System in Theory and Praxis’, in
World System History: The Science of Long-Term Change,
R.  A. Denmark, J.  Friedman, B.  K. Gills & G.  Modelski
(eds), Routledge, London & New York, 2000, pp.  3–23.
The hyphen is a differentiating factor between the two
approaches: Gills and Frank argue that Wallerstein’s
‘world-history’ charts the development of capitalism from
its origins in Europe and relegates the rest to an undifferentiated
periphery.
	33	 See, for example, Stearns, op. cit. Stearns proposes four possible
turning points for the global convergence: around 1000 CE,
around 1500, around 1850 and after the Second World War.
	34	 E. Said, Orientalism: Western Concepts of the Orient,
Penguin, London, 1991 (1978), p. 7.
	35	 The Subaltern Studies Collective, formed in 1981, comprised
historians who shared an interest in colonial and
post-colonial Indian history, and included Ranajit Guha,
Partha Chatterjee and Dipesh Chakrabarty.
	36	 E. Wolf, Europe and the People without History, University
of California Press, Berkeley, CA, 1982.
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	37	 M. Geyer & C.  Bright, ‘World History in a Global Age’,
American Historical Review, vol. 87, no. 4, 1995, p. 1036.
This was an early critique of world history and an attempt
to revise world history into global history. From another perspective,
Islamic historian Marshall Hodgson was another
early critic of McNeill’s world history in particular as both
‘diffusionist’ and ‘Westernist’. See M. G. S. Hodgson, ‘On
Doing World History’, in Rethinking World History: Essays
on Europe, Islam, and World History, Cambridge University
Press, Cambridge, 1993, p. 93.
	38	 D. Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial
Thought and Historical Difference, Princeton University
Press, Princeton, NJ, 2000, p.7.
	39	 See R. Young, White Mythologies: Writing History and the
West, Routledge, London & New York, 1990, for an overview
of the poststructuralist critiques of a European totalizing
universal project, including those of Foucault, Derrida,
Sartre, Spivak, Said and Bhabha.
	40	 Even before post-colonial theory, the civilization/barbarian
dichotomy that is at the foundation of world historical
narratives recalls Walter Benjamin’s dictum: ‘There
is no document of civilization which is not at the same
time a document of barbarism.’ W. Benjamin, ‘Theses on
the Philosophy of History’, in Illuminations, H. Zorn (ed.),
Schocken Books, New York, 1969, p. 256.
	41	P. O’Brien, ‘Historiographical Traditions and Modern
Imperatives for the Restoration of Global History’, Journal
of Global History, vol. 1, no. 1, 2006, p. 12.
	42	S. Feierman, ‘Africa in History: the End of Universal
Narratives’, in After Colonialism: Imperial Histories and
Postcolonial Displacements, G.  Prakash (ed.), Princeton
University Press, Princeton, 1995, p. 50.
	43	 Ibid, p. 48.
	44	 H. White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in
Nineteenth Century Europe, Johns Hopkins University
Press, Baltimore, MD, 1973, p. 2.
	45	 J. M.  Blaut, The Colonizer’s Model of the World:
Geographical Diffusionism and Eurocentric History,
Guilford Press, New York, 1993.
	46	 S. Amin, Eurocentrism: Modernity, Religion, and Democracy,
A  Critique of Eurocentrism and Culturalism, R.  Moore &
J. Membrez (trans.), 2nd edn, Monthly Review Press, New
York, 2009, p. 103. (Originally published in French in 1988 as
L’eurocentrisme, critique d’une idéologie, Anthropos, Paris.)
	47	 B. Bowden, The Empire of Civilization: The Evolution of
an Imperial Idea, University of Chicago Press, Chicago,
2009, p. 71. Bowden traces the idea of progress from the
European Enlightenment to its present uses.
	48	A. Dirlik, ‘History Without a Center? Reflections on
Eurocentrism’, in Across Cultural Borders: Historiography in
Global Perspective, E. Fuchs & B. Stuchtey (eds), Rowman
& Littlefield, Lanham, MD, 2002, p. 276. Although arguing
for alternatives to history and modernity, Dirlik presents
none.
	49	 D. Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial
Thought and Historical Difference, Princeton University
Press, Princeton, NJ, 2000, pp. 17–18.
	50	 O’Brien, op. cit., p. 36.
	51	 B. K. Gills & W. Thompson, ‘Globalizations, Global Histories
and Historical Globalities’, in Globalization and Global
History, B. K. Gills & W. Thompson (eds), Taylor & Francis,
Hoboken, NJ, 2012, p. 4.
	52	A comparison between the Journal of World History
(founded in 1990)  and the Journal of Global History
(founded in 2006) suggests the difference in approaches,
while initially clear, has become more subtle with the
increasing overlap of authors, themes and methods.
	53	 Monash-Warwick Global History Collaboration <http://artsonline.monash.edu.au/global-history>
accessed 18 July
2014.
	54	 G. G. Iggers & Q. E. Wang, with S. Mukherjee, A Global
History of Modern Historiography, Pearson, Harlow, 2008,
p. 15.
	55	 B. Mazlish, The New Global History, Routledge, London &
New York, 2006, p. 12.
	56	 See the early anthologies, B. Mazlish & R. Buultjens (eds),
Conceptualizing Global History, Westview Press, Boulder,
CO, 1993, and B.  Mazlish & A.  Iriye (eds), The Global
History Reader, Routledge, London & New York, 2004.
	57	 This is the starting point for John Heskett, for example in
his classic Industrial Design, Thames & Hudson, London,
1980. Heskett’s narrative traces the development of design
in Europe and the United States. The rest of the world is
mentioned briefly in the ‘Conclusion’. It is also worth noting
that there is not necessarily a definitive line separating
industrial and pre-industrial artefacts.
	58	 Victor Margolin is perhaps the most prominent design
historian representing this position. ‘Rather than considering
design to be a product of industrialization,’ he argues,
‘we need to think more broadly about the conception
and planning of material and visual culture.’ Margolin, ‘A
World History of Design and the History of the World’, op.
cit., p. 239.
	59	 For the American textbooks, see note 19 above.
	60	 Enduring surveys such as P.  Sparke, An Introduction to
Design and Culture: 1900 to the Present, Allen & Unwin,
London, 1986. J.  Woodham, Twentieth Century Design,
Oxford University Press, Oxford & New York, 1997, and
D.  Raizman, History of Modern Design, Laurence King
Publishing, London, 2nd edn, 2010, trace the development
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of design in Europe and the United States. The exception
to the Western focus of all three books is the inclusion of
post-war Japanese design.
	61	 Various scholars have made this point. See, for example,
C.  Dilnot, ‘The State of Design History, Part I: Mapping
the Field’, Design Issues, vol. 1, no.  1, 1984, pp.  4–23,
esp. pp.  14–17; T.  Fry, Design History Australia, Hale &
Iremonger, 1988; and D. Whitehouse, ‘The State of Design
History as a Discipline’, in Design Studies: A  Reader,
H. Clark & D. Brody (eds), Berg, Oxford & New York, 2009.
	62	 Whitehouse, op. cit., p. 62.
	63	 Another initiative worth noting is the UK-based Globalising
Art, Architecture and Design History project (GLAADH),
2001–2003, comprising workshops, resources, website,
curriculum development initiatives and collaborations.
These resources are still available online < http://www.
glaadh.ac.uk/> accessed 6 February 2015.
	64	 Limited accessibility of these conference proceedings is
an impediment for further dissemination of these ideas.
The ICDHS website (<http://www.ub.edu/gracmon/icdhs/
index.html> accessed 30 October 2014) has information
about each of the nine conferences to date. Some of the
conference links include conference paper abstracts and/or
links to publications of conference proceedings. My own
lack of Spanish language ability is also an impediment in
accessing some of this material which is only available in
Spanish.
	65	 Calvera, op. cit., p. 372.
	66	 Although not published at the time of writing (the first
two volumes are due out in February 2015), the Table
of Contents clearly outlines the narrative structure, and
Margolin has theorized the project in in ‘A World History
of Design and the History of the World’, op. cit., 2005,
pp. 235–43.
	67	 Margolin, ‘A World History of Design and the History of
the World’, op. cit., p. 241. The limitations of a nationalist
framework are further discussed in D.  J. Huppatz,
‘Introduction: Reframing Australian Design History’, Journal
of Design History, vol. 27, no. 2, 2014, pp. 205–23.
	68	 Margolin, ‘A World History of Design and the History of
the World’, op. cit., p. 242.
	69	 P. Kirkham & S. Weber (eds), History of Design: Decorative
Arts and Material Culture, 1400–2000, Yale University
Press, New Haven, CT, & London, 2013.
	70	 Calvera, op. cit., p. 374.
	71	 In her own research, Calvera has convincingly situated the
local design culture of Barcelona within a global context.
See, for example, A.  Calvera, ‘Design in Barcelona: Its
History and Its Future in the Globalized Scene’, The Design
Journal, vol. 4, no. 2, 2001, pp. 4–13.
	72	T. Fry, ‘A Geography of Power: Design History and
Marginality’, Design Issues, vol. 6, no. 1, 1989, p. 26.
	73	 Among his many publications on this topic, see especially
G.  Bonsiepe & J.  Cullars, ‘Designing the Future:
Perspectives on Industrial and Graphic Design in Latin
America’, Design Issues, vol. 7, no. 2, 1991, pp. 17–24;
and G. Bonsiepe, ‘The “Ulm Model” in the Periphery’, in
Ulm Design: The Morality of Objects, H.  Lindinger (ed.),
The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1991, pp. 266–8. In the
latter, Bonsiepe notes the HfG Ulm’s international faculty
and student body and traces how in the 1960s their pedagogical
model reached the Escola Superior de Desenho
Industrial in Rio de Janeiro, and the National Institute of
Design, Ahmedabad.
	74	G. Adamson, G.  Riello & S.  Teasley, ‘Introduction:
Towards Global Design History’, in Global Design History,
G.  Adamson, G.  Riello & S.  Teasley (eds.), Routledge,
London & New York, 2011, p. 2.
	75	G. Adamson & G.  Riello, ‘Global Objects: Contention
and Entanglement’, in Writing the History of the Global:
Challenges for the 21st Century, M.  Berg (ed.), Oxford
University Press, Oxford, 2013, p.  193. Their examples
covered various historical periods and included a suit of
armour presented by the Emperor of Japan to England’s
James I in 1613, the Victoria Terminus railway station in
Mumbai and a contemporary soccer ball.
	76	 Henry Cole (1851), cited in A.  Dutta, The Bureaucracy of
Beauty: Design in the Age of its Global Reproducibility,
Routledge, London & New York, 2007, p. 161. Dutta cites the
full reference as Appendix to the Report of the Proceedings
of the Designs Office from the 1st July 1829 to the 31st
December 1852, Furnished in Conformity with the Directions
of the Lords of the Committee of Privy Council for Trade.
	77	 See Dutta, op. cit., 2007. This book is a crucial reference
for understanding how the dissemination of design
reform worked, particularly in an Indian context. On the
South Kensington museum program, see T. Barringer, ‘The
South Kensington Museum and the Colonial Project’, in
Colonialism and the Object: Empire, Material Culture and
the Museum, T.  Barringer & T.  Flynn (eds), Routledge,
London & New York, 1998, pp. 11–28.
	78	 As well as Dutta, op. cit., see also M.  Rampley, ‘Design
Reform in the Habsburg Empire: Technology, Aesthetics
and Ideology’, Journal of Design History, vol. 23, no. 3,
2010, pp. 247–64.
	79	 See P.  Young, Globalization and the Great Exhibition:
the Victorian New World Order, Palgrave Macmillan,
Basingstoke, 2009; and J. A. Auerbach & P. H. Hoffenberg
(eds), Britain, the Empire, and the World at the Great
Exhibition of 1851, Ashgate, Aldershot & Burlington, VT,
2008.
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	80	 Stacey Sloboda argues that Owen Jones’ The Grammar
of Ornament (London, 1856), is both an imperialist and
a cosmopolitan ordering of visual language through comparisons.
See S.  Sloboda, ‘The Grammar of Ornament:
Cosmopolitanism and Reform in British Design’, Journal of
Design History, vol. 21, no. 3, 2008, pp. 223–36.
	81	This tradition continued through nineteenth and early
twentieth century World’s Fairs, again central to design
history (and these have also been subject to colonial and
global readings). See, for example, Z.  Celik, Displaying
the Orient: Architecture of Islam at Nineteenth-Century
World’s Fairs, University of California Press, Berkeley, CA,
1992, and P. Greenhalgh, Ephemeral Vistas, The Expositions
Universelles, Great Exhibitions and World’s Fairs, 1851–
1939, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1988.
	82	Starting points for research on the spread of South
Kensington pedagogy are: M. Stankiewicz & D. Soucy (eds),
Framing the Past: Essays on Art Education, National Art
Education Association, Reston, VA, 1990; and M. Romans
(ed.), Histories of Art and Design Education: Collected
Essays, Intellect Bristol, 2005. Of particular interest are
the two articles in these volumes by Graeme Chalmers
on the Canadian adoption of the British model. On Brazil,
see A. M. Barbosa, ‘Walter Smith’s Influence in Brazil and
the Efforts by Brazilian Liberals to Overcome the Concept
of Art as an Elitist Activity’, Journal of Art and Design
Education, vol. 3, no. 2, 1984, pp. 233–46; on Japan, see
A. Okazaki, ‘European Modernist Art into Japanese School
Art: the Free Drawing Movement in the 1920s’, Journal
of Art and Design Education, vol. 10, no. 2, pp. 189–98
(the Japanese connection to South Kensington methods is
intriguing but briefly stated in this article).
	83	 See, for example, W. Kaplan, The Arts and Crafts Movement
in Europe and America, Thames & Hudson, London, 2004,
an exhibition catalogue charting the Arts and Crafts movement
across two continents—a useful start on the transnational
Arts and Crafts, as was K. Livingstone & L. Parry,
International Arts and Crafts, V&A Publications, London,
2005, an exhibition catalogue which covered Europe,
America and Japan.
	84	 The importance of mechanization in nineteenth-century
design in Britain is often overstated in design history. See
Adrian Forty’s ‘Design and Mechanisation’, for example, in
A. Forty, Objects of Desire: Design and Society Since 1750,
Thames & Hudson, London, 1986.
	85	 This is a project that could be carried back to the seventeenth
century, by examining the trade conducted by the
Dutch and British East India Companies, for example, as
Anne Gerritsen has for Chinese ceramics and John Styles
for Indian textiles— mass produced artefacts for global
export. See A.  Gerritsen, ‘Global Design in Jingdezhen:
Local Production and Global Connections’, in Adamson,
Riello & Teasley, Global Design History, op. cit., pp. 25–33;
and J.  Styles, ‘Indian Cottons and European Fashion:
1400–1800’ in Adamson, Riello & Teasley, Global Design
History, op. cit., pp. 37–46.
	86	 Japanese designer Iwao Yamawaki noted in a 1931 letter
from the Bauhaus, for example, ‘Germans, French, Dutch,
Russians, Czechoslovakians and two Asians, including myself,
as well as some Turks and blacks, form a large international
body’; Y. Iwao, ‘Reminiscences of Dessau’, Design Issues, vol.
2, no. 2, 1985, p. 64. To situate the Bauhaus in a broader
political context, John Maciuika’s research on the earlier
Werkbund in the context of German colonial and global ambitions
is a useful model: see J. V. Maciuika ‘The Globalization
of the Deutscher Werkbund: Design Reform, Industrial Policy,
and German Foreign Policy, 1907–1914’, in Adamson, Riello
& Teasley (eds), Global Design History, op. cit., pp. 98–106.
	87	 Perhaps the most interesting character of the diaspora
was Ernst May, who, after designing buildings and cities
in Germany in the 1920s, went to the Soviet Union
in the early 1930s. Then in 1933, he purchased a coffee
plantation in the British colony of Tanganyika (now
Tanzania), later moving to Nairobi where he opened an
architectural practice and designed modernist buildings in
Kenya, Uganda and Tanganyika. See K. K. Gutschow, ‘Das
Neue Afrika: Ernst May’s 1947 Kampala Plan as Cultural
Program’, in Colonial Architecture and Urbanism in Africa:
Intertwined and Contested Histories, F. Demissie, Ashgate,
London, 2009, pp. 236–68.
	88	K. Rüedi Ray, Bauhaus Dream-House: Modernity and
Globalization, Routledge, London & New York, 2011;
H. Čapková, ‘Transnational Networkers—Iwao and Michiko
Yamawaki and the Formation of Japanese Modernist
Design’, Journal of Design History, vol. 27, no. 4, 2014,
pp. 370–85; Y. Iwao, ‘Reminiscences of Dessau’, Design
Issues, vol. 2, no. 2, 1985, pp. 56–68. On the Indian connection,
see R.  Bittner & K.  Rhomberg, The Bauhaus in
Calcutta: An Encounter of the Cosmopolitan Avant-Garde,
Hatje Cantz, Ostfildern, 2013. This is an exhibition catalogue
of a recent exhibition revisiting the 1922 artistic
exchange. While the transcultural issues raised are fascinating,
the focus was modernist art rather than design.
	89	 In Australia, for example, there have been numerous attempts
to elevate the post-war career of Australia’s only Bauhaus
Master, Ludwig Hirschfeld-Mack. After fleeing Germany in
1942, Hirshfeld-Mack taught in a regional high school and,
although he continued to create work in various media, he
had virtually no impact on Australian design culture.
	90	 Rüedi Ray, op. cit., p. 88.
	91	 E. Lupton, ‘Reading Isotype’, Design Issues, vol. 3, no. 2,
1986, pp.  47–58. Despite appearing neutral, Lupton
exposes Neurath’s stylized icons as rhetorical and culturally
specific.
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	92	See K.  Bresnahan, ‘“An Unused Esperanto”:
Internationalism and Pictographic Design, 1930–70’,
Design and Culture, vol. 3, no. 1, 2011, pp. 5–24.
	93	See the comprehensive global coverage of ISOTYPE’s
development and dissemination in C.  Burke, E.  Kindel
& S. Walker, Isotype: Design and Contexts, 1925–1971,
Hyphen Press, London. This includes, for example, Eric
Kindel’s essay on Marie Neurath’s work in British colonial
West Africa in the 1950s, ‘Isotype in Africa: Gold Coast,
Sierra Leone and the Western Region of Nigeria, 1952–
8’ (pp.  449–97). Finally, see also N.  Vossoughian, Otto
Neurath: The Language of the Global Polis, NAI Publishers,
Rotterdam, 2008.
	94	See Paul Greenhalgh’s useful overview, P.  Greenhalgh,
‘Introduction’, Modernism in Design, Reaktion Books,
London, 1990, pp. 1–24.
	95	See D.  Crowley & J.  Pavitt, Cold War Modern: Design
1945–1970, V&A Publishing, London, 2008. A good overview
of the use of design as ‘soft power’ by both superpowers
is G. Castillo, Cold War on the Home Front: The
Soft Power of Midcentury Design, University of Minnesota
Press, Minneapolis, MN, & London, 2010. On the Soviet
side, see also D. Crowley & S. E. Reid, Style and Socialism:
Modernity and Material Culture in Post-War Eastern
Europe, Berg, Oxford, 2000. However, all of this scholarship
focuses on Europe (and the USA in the case of the
first two) in the Cold War. Much work remains on establishing
the use of design in the rest of the world during
this era.
	96	See C.  Benton, T.  Benton & G.  Wood (eds.), Art Deco
1910–1939, V&A Publications, London, 2003. A  more
recent exhibition and catalogue focused on Art Deco
in Japan is K. H. Brown (ed.), Deco Japan: Shaping Art
and Culture, 1920–1945, Art Services International,
Alexandria, VA, 2012.
	97	Benton, Benton & Wood, op. cit.; and C.  Wilk (ed.),
Modernism: Designing a New World, V&A Publications,
London, 2006.
	98	R. Grew, ‘On the Prospect of Global History’, in
Conceptualizing Global History, R. Buultjens & B. Mazlish
(eds), Westview Press, Boulder, CO, 1993, p. 239.
	99	Julier describes ‘design culture’ in detail in ch. 1 of
G. Julier, The Culture of Design, Sage, London, 2nd edn,
2008, pp. 1–17.
	100 Y. Kikuchi, ‘Design Histories and Design Studies in
East Asia: Part 1’, Journal of Design History, vol. 24,
no. 3, 2011, pp. 273–82; W. S. Wong, ‘Design History
and Study in East Asia: Part 2 Greater China: People’s
Republic of China/Hong Kong/Taiwan’, Journal of Design
History, vol. 24, no. 4, 2011, pp. 375–95; Y. Lee, ‘Design
Histories and Design Studies in East Asia: Part 3 Korea
and Conclusion’, Journal of Design History, vol. 25, no. 1,
2012, pp. 93–106.
	101 An interesting paper in this regard is C.  Cheng &
Y. Ping-Yu, ‘A Discussion on the Changes and Progress
of Design-Related Terms’, paper delivered at the
International Association of Societies of Design Research,
November 2007. The authors trace the etymology of the
word ‘design’ in Chinese.
	102 L. T. Ulrich, ‘An Indian Basket, Providence, Rhode Island,
1676’, in Lees-Maffei & Houze, op. cit., pp. 15–21. This is
a provocative beginning to the anthology.
	103 N. Barley, ‘Design in a Tribal Context’, Journal of Design
History, vol. 5, no. 2, 1992, pp. 103–11.
	104 D. Stairs, ‘Okuwangaala: the Persistent Vitality of the
Vernacular’, Design Issues, vol. 18, no. 3, 2002, p. 87.
	105 Other starting points for considerations of African design
are the Design Issues special issue on South African design:
M Sauthoff & I. Sutherland (eds), Design Issues, vol. 20,
no. 2, 2004, and the South African-based journal Image
and Text: A Journal for Design, from 1992, available online
at <www.imageandtext.up.ac.za> accessed 23 July 2014.
	106 Levitt, op. cit.; C. Lorenz, ‘Global Hype and Reality’, in The
Design Dimension: Product Strategy and the Challenge of
Global Marketing, Basil Blackwell, Oxford & New York,
1986, pp. 136–44.
	107 This homogenization was the target of the first wave of
anti-globalization protests in the 1990s, the sentiments of
which were expressed by Naomi Klein; see N. Klein, No
Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies, Flamingo, London,
2000, esp. ch. 1, ‘New Branded World’, pp. 3–26.
	108 A good early account is in H.  Aldersey-Williams, World
Design: Nationalism and Globalism in Design, Rizzoli, New
York, 1992; while more recently, a Design Issues special
issue, ‘Design in a Global Context’, Design Issues, vol. 25,
no. 3, 2009, contained a variety of responses to globalization
in design, as does J. R. Bryson & G. Rusten, Industrial
Design, Competition and Globalization, Palgrave Macmillan,
2010.
	109	 On global companies, see H. Aldersey-Williams, World
Design: Nationalism and Globalism in Design, Rizzoli,
New York, 1992, especially the chapter ‘Globalism,
Nationalism, and Design’, pp. 8–17. More recently, see
S.  Kristoffersson, Design by IKEA: A  Cultural History,
Bloomsbury, London & New York, 2014, for a good
model. For a good example of a global design career, a
biography of Marc Newson is a good illustration—born
and educated in Sydney, Newson cultivated a global
design career in the 1990s by basing himself firstly in
Tokyo, then Milan, then Paris and finally, London. On
his career to 2003, see C.  L. Morgan, Marc Newson,
Thames & Hudson, London, 2003.
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	110 I. Kopytoff, ‘The Cultural Biography of Things:
Commoditization as Process’, in The Social Life of Things:
Commodities in Cultural Perspective, A.  Appadurai,
Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1988, pp. 64–92;
J. Brewer & R. Porter (eds), Consumption and the World of
Goods, London, Routledge, 1993. See also the Journal of
Material Culture, founded in 1996.
	111 For a good overview of material culture and globalization,
see R.  J. Foster, ‘Tracking Globalization: Commodities
and Value in Motion’, in Handbook of Material Culture,
C.  Tilley et  al. (eds), SAGE, London, 2006, pp.  285–
302. For more recent scholarship in consumption studies,
including a range of specifically global topics, see
F. Trentmann (ed.), The History of Consumption, Oxford
University Press, Oxford, 2012; and for a more recent collection
of essays on ancient, early modern and contemporary
material culture, see H. P. Hahn & H. Weiss (eds.),
Mobility, Meaning and Transformations of Things: Shifting
Contexts of Material Culture Through Time and Space,
Oxbow Books, Oxford, 2013. A slightly different approach
to tracing the effects of global commodities worth considering—from
a cultural studies perspective—is represented
by Scott Lash and Celia Lury’s Global Culture Industry:
the Mediation of Things. See especially their analysis of
Swatch and Nike in ‘The Mediation of Things: In Medias
Res’, in S.  Lash & C.  Lury, Global Culture Industry: the
Mediation of Things, Cambridge & Malden, MA, Polity
Press, 2007, pp. 109–34.
	112 For an overview, see V.  Margolin, ‘Design for
Development: Towards a History’, Design Studies, vol.
28, no.  2, 2007, pp.  110–15. See also S.  Balaram on
the Declaration’s impact in India, ‘Design in India: The
Importance of the Ahmedabad Declaration’, Design
Issues, vol. 25, no. 4, 2009, pp. 54–7. The work of Victor
Papanek as both an author and activist would be essential
to this project.
	113 J. Woodham, ‘Local, National and Global: Redrawing the
Design Historical Map’, Journal of Design History, vol. 18,
no. 4, pp. 257–67.
	114 Two useful summaries of early sources on ecological design
and its history are P. Madge, ‘Design, Ecology, Technology:
A  Historiographical Review’, Journal of Design History,
vol. 6, no. 3, 1993, pp. 149–66, and P. Madge, ‘Ecological
Design: A  New Critique’, Design Issues, vol. 13, no.  2,
1997, pp. 44–54.
	115 Grew, op. cit., p. 244. This article is a useful summary of
possible directions for global historians.
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