Ghosts of the Profession

G. Beegan, P. Atkinson & D. Sugg Ryan, Ghosts of the Profession
Special Issue of the Journal of Design History 21(4), 2008.

Professionalism, amateurism and the boundaries of design
Gerry Beegan and Paul Atkinson

The focus of this special issue is the constantly changing relationships between amateur and professional practice during the last century or so, over the course of the ascent of modernism in design. In Europe and the United States this period has seen the emergence and growth of the design professions and concurrently the development of design practice as an unpaid undertaking in myriad forms from handicrafts, to DIY, to digital tinkering. Given the porous nature of the boundaries between professional and amateur, this introduction does not attempt to define once and for all these slippery terms. Indeed, the Special Issue demonstrates that it is impossible to do so. Rather, it examines the themes of influence and alterity that recur in design in diverse locations, periods and practices. As we shall see the terms amateur and professional can have positive and negative connotations and are often contrasted with each other.

As a whole, the special issue demonstrates that professional and amateur practice are always connected, even when the relationship is one of repudiation. Professional practice defines itself by its distance from the unschooled practitioner yet, as the essays in this collection demonstrate, the vernacular is an inescapable part of modern design. At the same time, the professional is often a categorization that amateur designers reject, as a limitation to their creativity or originality. These essays look at the conscious appropriations of vernacular design by professionals and at the rejection by amateurs and working designers alike of professional specialization. They emphasize the complexity of the interchanges between the professional designer and the dilettante, the amateur and the vernacular maker. Professional organizations, educational standards, journals, systems of licensing are instruments through which professions try to define themselves. In the design professions this self-definition is a continual struggle, in part because everyone engages in design through the quotidian choices we make, from the font and type size in which weset an office notice to the color we paint our homes.

The special issue can be accessed from Oxford University Press here:

Do It Yourself: Democracy and Design – the exhibition

Press Release: April 2006

‘Do It Yourself: Democracy and Design’ explores the history of the DIY movement and the freedom it has given the consumer to take control of the design and manufacture of goods rather than relying on professional design and production processes. The exhibition examines the advice leaflets, manuals and guide books, retail catalogues, newspaper reports magazines and later, radio and television programmes, as often the only evidence that remains of what for many has been a significant part of everyday life.

‘Do It Yourself: Democracy and Design’ covers a period of some three centuries in total, in an eclectic mix of sections including 18th and 19th Century home crafts, 1920s and 1930s women’s magazines, the Cold War nuclear fallout shelter, the Mirror sailing dinghy, and punk fanzines. Together, these sections show how, historically, all forms of DIY have enabled the consumer to rail against the prescribed design edicts or social mores of the time, providing an accurate yardstick by which the popular aesthetics of design can be measured. These sections have been researched and written by a series of established and respected design historians across the UK and the USA, and the whole curated by Paul Atkinson. The exhibition is supported by the academic institutions of the authors, and by Oxford University Press, who are publishing a special issue of the Journal of Design History to coincide with the exhibition.

The exhibition was on display at:
design centre north, Barnsley: 5 May – 17 June 2006
Museum of Domestic Architecture and Design, Middlesex: 25 July – 10 September 2006

A gallery of photographs from the exhibition is available here:

A review article of the exhibition appeared in the Yorkshire Post Magazine, the text of which can be found here:
A PDF file of this article with images is downloadable here:

Do It Yourself: Democracy and Design – the publication

P. Atkinson, Do It Yourself: Democracy and Design
Special Issue of the Journal of Design History 19(1), 2006.

The theme of this special issue arose from a perceived need to generate a discourse around the interface between ‘design’ taken as a function of the activity of ‘professional’ designers and being part of an established cycle of the design, production and consumption of goods; and ‘Do It Yourself’ taken as its antithesis – a more democratic design process of self-driven, self-directed amateur design and production activity carried out more closely to the end user of the goods created. Historically, productive and creative activities of this kind have allowed consumers to actively engage with design and the design process at a number of levels, and to express a more individual aesthetic unbounded by the strictures of mass-production and passive consumption. The agencies which have mediated this interface between design and DIY – the advice leaflets, manuals and guide books, exposition and retail catalogues, newspaper reports and magazines and later, radio and television programmes are of particular interest here. They are often the only evidence of what for many has been a significant element of the fabric of their everyday life – the results of the activity itself, due to their individual and personal nature, often disappearing without trace with the passing of time.

Do It Yourself acts as a democratising agency allowing people, paradoxically, to react against the principles and edicts of design connoisseurship whilst simultaneously enabling the emulation of those above them in social hierarchies. DIY has acted as a leveller of class – overcoming the social stigma of manual labour out of sheer necessity, and permitting the working classes to engage in leisure activities from which they were previously excluded. This special issue attempts to broaden the existing work in the area by taking this aspect of design democracy as its unifying theme, and thereby expanding the notion of DIY from the narrow perspective in which it is often held.

The special issue can be accessed from Oxford University Press here:

A Bitter Pill to Swallow

P. Atkinson, ‘A Bitter Pill to Swallow:
The Rise and Fall of the Tablet Computer’
Design Issues 24(4): 2008: 3-25.

Abstract

The first tablet computers appeared at the tail end of the 1980s, and they generated a huge amount of interest in the computer industry and serious amounts of investment money from venture capitalists. Pen operated computing was seen as the next wave of the silicon revolution and the tablet computer was seen to be the device everyone would want to use. It was reported in 1991 that ‘Nearly every major maker of computers has some type of pen-based machine in the works’.

Yet, in the space of just a few years, the tablet computer and the notion of pen computing sank almost without trace. Following a series of disastrous product launches and the failure of a number of promising startup companies, the tablet computer was discredited as an unfulfilled promise. It no longer represented the future of mobile computing, but was instead derided as an expensive folly – an irrelevant sideline in the history of the computer.

This article traces the early development of pen computing, the appearance, proliferation and disappearance of the tablet computer, and explores possible reasons for the demise of this particular class of product.

This article can be downloaded for free from MIT Press

The Best Laid Plans of Mice and Men

P. Atkinson, ‘The Best Laid Plans of Mice and Men:
the role of the computer mouse in the history of computing’
Design Issues 23(3): 2007: 16-46.

Abstract

There is a well documented technical history of the computer mouse that describes its invention in the early 1960s and its consequent development over time before its ‘public’ release with the Apple Macintosh in 1984. A number of computer magazine articles, journal articles, book chapters, online archives and web encyclopaedia entries have traced various aspects of the history of the production of the device, although the consumption of the computer mouse does not appear to have been addressed. How did people react to the introduction of the mouse? Why did it take so long to become a mass-produced item? How did it become the single most accepted interface technology? What did the mouse represent, and what does it represent today?

Through a series of interviews with the inventor of the mouse and the designers and engineers who developed it, along with an analysis of the textual and visual promotional material of the time, this article explores the history of the mouse in the context of its original application, its subsequent improvements through work at Xerox and Apple, and its later wholesale acceptance by the personal computer industry. It is argued that this wholesale acceptance cannot be totally explained purely by the ‘ease of use’ provided by the computer mouse, and that particularly in the context of the workplace, there were other, less obvious but highly significant socio-political factors at play.

A full text version of this article can be downloaded from here:

Man in a Briefcase

P. Atkinson, ‘Man in a Briefcase:
The Social Construction of the Laptop Computer
and the Emergence of a Type Form’
Journal of Design History 18(2): 2005: 191-205.

Abstract

Dominant design discourse of the late 1970s and early 1980s presented the introduction of the laptop computer as the result of ‘inevitable’ progress in a variety of disparate technologies, pulled together to create an unprecedented, revolutionary technological product. While the laptop was a revolutionary product, such a narrative works to dismiss a series of products which predated the laptop but which had much the same aim, and to deny a social drive for such products, which had been in evidence for a number of years before the technology to achieve them was available. This article shows that the social drive for the development of portable computing came in part from the ‘macho mystique’ of concealed technology that was a substantial motif in popular culture at that time.

Using corporate promotional material from the National Archive for the History of Computing at the University of Manchester, and interviews with some of the designers and engineers involved in the creation of early portable computers, this work explores the development of the first real laptop computer, the GRiD ‘Compass’, in the context of its contemporaries. The consequent trajectory of laptop computer design is then traced to show how it has become a product which has a mixture of associated meanings to a wide range of consumers. In this way, the work explores the role of consumption in the development of digital technology.

A full text version of this paper can be downloaded from here:

The (In)Difference Engine

P. Atkinson, ‘The (In)Difference Engine:
explaining the disappearance of diversity
in the design of the personal computer’
Journal of Design History 13(1): 2000: 59-72.

Abstract

At the time of writing there is a clear perception of all office computers as being more or less identical. Discussion with users entails repetitive rhetoric as they describe a landscape of boring beige boxes. The office PC is indeed a ‘clone’ – an identical, characterless copy of a bland original.

Through the exploration of an archive of computer manufacturer’s catalogues, this article shows how previous, innovative forms of the computer, informed by cultural references as diverse as science fiction, accepted gender roles and the discourse of status as displayed through objects, have been systematically replaced by the adoption of a ‘universal’ design informed only by the nondescript, self-referential world of office equipment.

The acceptance of this lack of innovation in the design of such a truly global, mass-produced, multi-purpose technological artefact has had an enormous effect on the conception, perception and consumption of the computer, and possibly of information technology itself. The very anonymity of the PC has created an attitude of indifference at odds with its potential.

A full text version of this article can be downloaded from here:

Computer Memories

P. Atkinson, ‘Computer Memories:
The History of Computer Form’
History and Technology 15(1-2): 1998: 89-120.

Abstract

This paper looks at the computer as a truly global form. The similar beige boxes found in offices across the world are analysed from the perspective of design history rather than that of the history of science and technology. Through the exploration of an archive of computer manufacturer’s catalogues and concurrent design texts, this paper examines the changes that have occurred in the production and consumption of the computer in the context of the workplace, from its inception as a room-sized mainframe operated through a console of flashing lights, to the personal computer as a ‘universal’ form, reproduced by many manufacturers. It shows how the computer in the past has been as diverse as any other product, and asks how and why it now appears as a standardised, sanitised object. In doing so our relationship with the office computer, past and present is explored, revealing a complex history of vicissitude.

A full text version of this article can be downloaded from here: