DESIGN HISTORY
CADN Courses (not all courses offered every year)
CADN 6B03: Canadian Art, Design and New Media Art History
This course addresses contemporary artistic, new media art or architectural/design practices in Canada. Depending on the instructor’s specialization, the course may analyze case studies of particular artists, designers or architects; specific art and design scenes in the country’s regions and metropolitan centres; Canadian arts institutions, policies and representation in international projects; criticism and theory; and issues such as nationalism, sovereignty and multiculturalism.
CADN 6B05: Contemporary Indigenous Art, Design and New Media Art History
Depending on the instructor’s specialization, this course will survey pioneering and contemporary work by Aboriginal artists, new media art practitioners, or architects/designers. The rich heritage of First Nations’ culture continues as artists and designers translate traditional values and approaches into modern and postmodern contexts. Such work serves multiple functions: asserting Aboriginal voices and methodologies, critiquing Western aesthetics and politics, and forging alternative theories and cultural analyses.
VISD 6B02: Contemporary Architectural Theory
This course covers canonical and contemporary texts by architectural historians, theoreticians and practitioners. The work, ideas and methodologies presented here will form a conceptually organized foundation for architectural intellectual discourse. Architectural theory, in this context, simultaneously provides a parallel to the precepts of art history and an example of a counter-discourse.
VISD 6B03: Issues in Communication Design
Over the past fifty years, communication design has moved from the design of static typography, graphic design, and illustration destined for print (which nonetheless remains a key medium), to a diverse field of practices in kinetic and temporal media, digital and interactive graphics, and innovative modes of advertising, branding and marketing. Addressing both contemporary issues and practices in communication design, along with their historical precedents, specific topics may include: the contemporary return of ornament, graphics and popular culture, data visualization and information design, animation, and advertising in the expanded field.
VISD 6B04: Living with Things
Although all human-made and human-altered things (buildings, field stone walls, suburban family rooms and the contents of the Dollar Store) are expressions of culture and operate as texts, the engagement with the material world is difficult and poses interpretive challenges. This course, interested in the roles of objects in everyday life, will investigate both the theory and practice of studying everyday material culture. The categories of ideology, identity, nostalgia, style and stylistic change, class, semiotics, and aesthetics, among others, will be considered.
VISD 6B05: Case Studies in Design History
This course investigates the history of design history, its emergence as a scholarly field, and the development of a design-specific methodology. As well, it provides an opportunity for case studies in modern and pre-modern design practice. As a young discipline, design history has sought to establish a critical framework distinguished from art history and material culture where the study of designers and their work has long resided. Challenged by the culturally-charged idea of “design” replete with valorizing narratives, famous actors and fetishized objects, the study of design’s history offers an example of academic culture in the context of advanced capitalism.
VISD 6B06: Contemporary Issues in Design History
Addressed to art history and its application to contemporary design practices, this course considers recent developments and emerging sites in contemporary design and architecture.
VISD 6B07: Issues in Environmental Design
Environmental design today includes a diverse range of interventions and practices acting on architecture, urbanism, landscape, and interior design, as well as hybrid practices spanning combinations of these as well as spatial engagements from art and other design fields. This course explores contemporary issues in environmental design, along with their historical precedents. Specific themes and topics will vary according to individual faculty member’s interests, but may include: urban ecologies, ambient experience design, technology and the built environment, and spatial politics.
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Suggested Readings
Allen, Barry, Artifice and Design: Art and Technology in Human Experience, Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2008.
Banham, Reyner, The Architecture of the Well-Tempered Environment, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984.
Baudrillard, Jean, The System of Objects [1968], London: Verso, 2006.
Bayley, Stephen, Taste: An Exhibition About Values in Design, London: Boilerhouse Project, Victoria and Albert Museum, 1983.
Bayley, Stephen, Ugly: The Aesthetics of Everything, London: Fiell, 2012.
Berleant, Arnold, Aesthetics and Environment: Variations on a Theme, Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2005.
Bloemink, Barbara and Joseph Cunningham, Design ≠ Art, London: Merrell, 2004.
Brewer, John, J.H. Plumb and Neil McKendrick, eds., The Birth of a Consumer Society: The Commercialization of Eighteenth Century Life, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982.
Buchli, Victor, ed., The Material Culture Reader, London: Berg Publishers, 2000.
Clark, Hazel and David Brody, eds., Design Studies: A Reader, London: Berg, 2009.
Coles, Alex, Design Art: On Art’s Romance with Design, London: Tate, 2005.
Coles, Alex, Design and Art, Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007.
Colomina, Beatriz, Privacy and Publicity: Modern Architecture as Mass Media, Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996.
Csikzentmihalyi, Mihaly and Eugene Rochberg-Halton, The Meaning of Things: Domestic Symbols and the Self, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981.
Daston, Lorraine and Peter Galison, Objectivity, New York: Zone Books, 2007.
Dodson, Mo and Jerry Palmer, eds., Design and Aesthetics: A Reader, London: Routledge, 1995.
Eisenman, Stephen, Design in the Age of Darwin, From William Morris To Frank Lloyd Wright, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2008.
Fallan, Kjetil, Design History: Understanding Theory and Method, New York: Berg, 2010.
Forty, Adrian, Objects of Desire, Design and Society Since 1750, London: Thames & Hudson, 1986.
Foster, Hal, Design and Crime, London: Verso, 2002.
France, Isabelle, ed., The Theory of Decorative Art, ed., New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000.
Fry, Tony, Design as Politics, Oxford: Berg, 2010.
Golec, Michael, The Brillo Box Archive: Aesthetics, Design, and Art, Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College Press and the University Press of New England, 2008.
Grafton, Anthony and Daniel Rosenberg, Cartographies of Time: A History of the Timeline, New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2010.
Harris, Daniel, Cute, Quaint, Hungry and Romantic: The Aesthetics of Consumption, Toronto: Harper Collins, 2000.
Herskovits, Melville, Man and His Works, New York: Knopf, 1952.
Heskitt, John, Toothpicks and Logos: Designing Everyday Life, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.
Hill, Richard, Designs and Their Consequences, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999.
Hoete, Anthony, Reader on the Aesthetics of Mobility , London and New York: Black Dog Publishing, 2003.
Iliescu, Sanda, The Hand and the Soul: Aesthetics and Ethics in Architecture and Art, Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2009.
Kaier, Christina, Imagine No Possessions: The Socialist Objects of Russian Constructivism, Cambridge: MIT Press, 2005.
Kubler, George, Things in the Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1962.
Lees-Maffei, Grace and Rebecca Houze, eds., The Design History Reader, London: Berg, 2010.
Levin, Faythe and Cortney Heimerl, Handmade Nation: The Rise of DIY, Art, Craft and Design, Princeton Architectural Press, 2008.
Lloyd-Jones, Peter, Taste Today: The Role of Appreciation in Consumerism and Design
(Oxford and New York: Pergamon Press, 1991.
Loesberg, Jonathan, A Return To Aesthetic: Autonomy, Indifference, and Postmodernism, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005.
Lupton, Ellen, and Abbott Miller, Design Writing Research: Writing on Graphic Design, London: Phaidon Press, 1999.
Margolin, Victor, Design Discourse: History, Theory, Criticism, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989.
Margolin, Victor, The Politics of the Artificial: Essays on Design and Design Studies, Chicago: University of Chicago Press 2002.
Miller, Bernie and Melony Ward, eds., Crime and Ornament: The Arts and Popular Culture in the Shadow of Adolf Loos, Toronto: YYZ Books, 2002.
Mumford, Lewis, Art and Technics, New York: Columbia University Press 1983.
Pasztory, Esther, Thinking with Things: Toward a New Vision of Art, Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005.
Poynor, Rick, Design without Boundaries: Visual Communication in Transition, London: Booth-Clibborn Editions, 1998.
Risatti, Howard, A Theory of Craft: Function and Aesthetic Expression, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007.
Sadler, Simon, The Situationist City, Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998.
Sennett, Richard, The Conscience of the Eye: The Design and Social Life of Cities, New York: Knopf, 1990.
Sennett, Richard, The Craftsman, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008.
Smith, Stephanie, Beyond Green, Towards a Sustainable Art, Chicago: Smart Museum of Art, NY Independent Curators International, 2005.
Strelow, Heike, Ecological Aesthetics: Art in Environmental Design: Theory and Practice, Basel, Boston: Birkhäuser, 2004.
Sudjic, Deyan, The Language of Things, London: Penguin, 2009.
Tilley, Charles, Reading Material Culture, Hoboken: Blackwell, 1990.
Tufte, Edward, Visual Explanations: Images and Quantities, Evidence and Narrative, Cheshire: Graphics Press, 1997.
Vidler, Anthony, Warped Space: Art, Architecture, and Anxiety in Modern Culture, Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000.
Walker, John A., Design History and History of Design, London: Pluto Press, 1989.
Last Modified:2/16/2012 8:21:28 AM
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