Since the 1990s, in response to dramatic transformations in the worlds of technology and the economy, design – a once relatively definable discipline, complete with a set of subdisciplines – has become unrecognizable. Consequently, design scholars have begun to address new issues, themes and sub-disciplines such as: sustainable design, design for well-being, empathic design, design activism, design anthropology, and many more.
The Routledge Companion to Design Studies charts this new expanded spectrum and embraces the wide range of scholarship relating to design – theoretical, practice-related and historical – that has emerged over the past four decades. Comprising forty-three newly commissioned chapters, the Companion is organized into the following six sections:
Defining design: discipline, process
Defining design: objects, spaces
Designing identities: gender, sexuality, age, nation
Designing society: empathy, responsibility, consumption, the everyday
Design and politics: activism, intervention, regulation
Designing the world: globalization, transnationalism, translation.
Contributors include both established and emerging scholars and the chapters offer an international scope, covering work emanating from, and relating to, design in the United Kingdom, mainland Europe, North America, Asia, Australasia and Africa.
This comprehensive collection makes an original and significant contribution to the field of Design Studies.
Penny Sparke is a Professor of Design History and Director of the Modern Interiors Research Centre (MIRC) at Kingston School of Art, Kingston University, London. Her publications include Elsie de Wolfe: The Birth of Modern Interior Decoration (2005), The Modern Interior (2008) and An Introduction to Design and Culture, 1900 to the Present, 3rd edition (2012). She is the present Chair of the editorial board of the Journal of Design History. Fiona Fisher is a Researcher in Design History at the Modern Interiors Research Centre (MIRC), Kingston School of Art, Kingston University, London, where she is Curator of the University's Dorich House Museum. Her publications include Designing the British Post-War Home: Kenneth Wood, 1948–1968 (2015) and, co-edited with Christopher Breward and Ghislaine Wood, British Design: Tradition and Modernity after 1948 (2015). She is the present Managing Editor of the Journal of Design History.
