Brief thoughts on design and history
At a SXSW panel on Uses and Abuses of History in the Education of Designers:
Miodrag Mitrasinovic: the history of “contexts” is crucial to design education – “history is the history of artifacts in context; if you remove the artifact from its context, then you don’t get it.”
Meikle: Design history has traditionally been a sort of ‘great man’ discipline where the thing (rather than a given person) is the object of analysis; shift in emphasis toward process and larger context is useful from the perspective of history as a discipline.