This thesis explores how designers might approach human behaviour as a material to be worked on. Unlike politicians, economists, lawyers, philosophers, psychiatrists and many others, designers have few disciplinary resources to draw on in this space. Indeed, it is barely discussed at all. Contemporary designers are, we are told, supposed to treat people and things differently, and ensure that the latter are subservient to the agendas of the former - calls that become all the more insistent when designers are looking for ways to incorporate the design of services and organisations into their practice, a project that summons the prospect of breaking this taboo. But what would a form of design that took human behaviour as its object actually be like? This thesis takes up this question as an issue in the philosophy of design, through investigating a long and rich history of suspicions about designers - namely, suspicions that they might extend their material palette from dead materials to living human beings. This exploration uncovers the emergence in the Industrial Revolution of today’s fears that designers might ‘treat people like things’; but it also uncovers an older, almost lost history of ideas about design, which understood its applicability to human beings in a way that, today, is strikingly unfamiliar. Here we find the almost forgotten but still-lingering link between craft and being crafty, encapsulated well by the lost ancient Greek concept of mêtis, 'cunning intelligence'. Mêtis isolates that aspect of design at work when extraordinary effects are elicited from unpromising materials, connecting design to political intrigues, daring military stratagems, the operations of impresarios and salesmen, and other instances wherein, through ingenious means, the weak prevail over the strong. By uncovering and developing these ideas, the thesis provides a view of design that connects it to human behaviour not through domination but through clever manipulation, a morally complex but undoubtedly potent approach that informs an alternative conception of how human behaviour might be understood as the object of design. The principle contribution of this thesis is, therefore, to provide a novel examination of human behaviour as the object of design; its main achievement is to provide the design disciplines with, on the one hand, an exposition of the implicit associations this project has at present; and on the other, the disinterment of mêtis and related ideas as a promising counter-perspective.

As the modernising Irish state sought to project a positive image of post-war Ireland, a paradox emerged: how could the symbolism of national distinctiveness (heretofore synonymous with the past) be reconciled with modernity? This thesis outlines the role which graphic design played in attempts to resolve tensions between the national and the modern. The thesis examines how design was mobilised as a symbol and agent of modernisation in Ireland in the run-up to and immediate aftermath of the 1958 ‘Programme for Economic Expansion’, widely considered to be the manifestation of an explicit state-led programme of modernisation. It examines the gradual replacement of the outward symbols of Republican Nationalism with a pervasive symbolism of modern efficiency, suggesting that this was a visual manifestation of the drive towards ‘organisation’ and rational management that gripped the civil service. It examines the paradoxical situation whereby designers in Ireland sought to present themselves and the nation as modern and professional, while the Irish Trade Board (charged with both design and export promotion) looked to professional designers abroad to present Ireland and her exports as traditional. Central to this discussion is the critique by designers (particularly those associated with Ireland’s first professional body, the Institute of Creative Advertising and Design) of so-called ‘Stage Irish’ versions of national image-making. An examination of their work and writings provides evidence for a series of alternative visual strategies for being Irish and modern —often quoting Celtic and early-Christian artefacts in otherwise modernist settings— which I have termed ‘Celtic modernism.’ From the early 1950s onwards, debates over ‘tradition’ and ‘modernisation’ were given visible form in the contentious issue of which letterform to use for the Irish language: ‘roman’ or ‘Gaelic’. This culminated in 1965 in the decommissioning of the Irish alphabet – at which point typography, that most everyday and habitually overlooked of visual material, became briefly visible and highly charged. The final section of the thesis focuses on the relationship between language, typography and identity. It argues that the debates about language reform in the mid twentieth- century led to a reconsideration of the variety of ways of ‘being Irish’ typographically and that the ‘Celtic’ associations of the uncial letter in particular offered potential for the negotiation of tradition and modernity. The thesis concludes that design in Ireland was presented as a means and a metaphor of modernisation. It attempts through an examination of a range of design examples, to follow Roland Barthes’s injunction to ‘track down in the decorative display of what- goes-without-saying’ the ideological constructions hidden in plain sight.

The years between 1945 and the early 1980s are the most celebrated in Italy’s design history. From the rhetoric of reconstruction to the postmodern provocations of the Memphis design collective, Italy’s architects played a vital role in shaping the country’s encounter with post-war modernity. Yet as often as this story has been told, it is incomplete. Craft was vital to the realisation of post-war Italian design, and an area of intense creativity in its own right, and yet has been marginalised and excluded in design historiography.

This study examines the creation and professionalisation of a recognisable English couture industry in the mid-twentieth century and in particular the role designer collaboration played within this process. The focal point is the Incorporated Society of London Fashion Designers, a design group established as a wartime measure in order to preserve and protect a number of London’s made-to-measure dress houses and to promote the creative aspirations of the wider British fashion industry. The focus on this specific design group and collaborative practice, rather than the individual couturiers, offers an exceptional case study of designers working in association and the impact this can have on design practice. A number of central themes emerge that focus on the networks and mediated representations that supported this field of design. In dealing with these themes this study recognises that the Incorporated Society’s formation and operation did not occur in a vacuum but within a specific industrial, political, economic and social infrastructure. It therefore explores the networks and narratives that were used to sustain its specific form of luxury fashion production throughout a particularly turbulent period. Today London is acknowledged, alongside Paris, New York and Milan, as one of the world’s major fashion cities and this thesis aims to achieve a better understanding of the role couturier-collaboration played in the early development of this recognition. Through the analysis of an extensive range of previously unconsidered primary material it questions whether and how, through the process of collaboration, the London couturiers established unprecedented and much needed cohesion for British design talent and the exact nature of their role within the construction and understanding of London as an internationally recognised fashion centre. The period under consideration allows not only an exploration of the creation of a London couture industry but also the cultural politics of design practice throughout a difficult period of economic depression, war and post-war reconstruction. In so doing, it explores the wider significance of the Incorporated Society’s elite made-to-measure dressmakers both for and beyond the discipline of Design History.

The Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia was often labelled a country “in-between”. Following the split with Stalin in 1948, socialist Yugoslavia established its “third way”, one that was based on workers’ self-management as an alternative to both capitalism, as well as to Soviet-style communism. Yugoslavia’s “in-betweenness” was emphasised in public rhetoric and propaganda during its existence, and has since been carefully examined by economic, political, social and cultural historians. This thesis explores this narrative about Yugoslav exceptionalism through the lens of design practice, asking to what extent has the experience of its unique system of self-management been “designed”. It positions design practice as an active agent in the processes of construction of Yugoslav socialism, through an in-depth analysis of important public projects, mass produced objects, design institutions, exhibitions and publications. Designing Self-Management offers a new understanding of post-war modernity in Yugoslavia by contextualising the analysis of design practice within the structures of self-management and, vice versa, by situating the study of self-management within the framework of design. To understand the impact design had on the experinece of self-management, this thesis positions the study of Yugoslav socialism within wider discussions about post-war modernity and seeks to reassess its claim to exceptionalism. On the one hand, the Yugoslav economic and social system that was based on workers’ councils proposed a more authentic and democratic form of socialism, in contrast to the dictatorial regimes of Eastern Europe. However, the success of self-management was indexed to the materialisation of the “good life” that was characterised by Western-style consumerism. Between 1955 and 1975, the Yugoslav experience of everyday life was shaped by modern mass-produced goods, mass housing, increased mobility, and the proliferation of pop-culture, all provided through the system of self-management. This lived experience of post-war modernity was not unique to Yugoslavia. Instead, it was part of broader social, cultural, political and economic processes that shaped everyday life on both sides of the Cold War divide. Within this context, Designing Self-Management examines the role of design in shaping Yugoslav post-war modernity, focusing on the spaces and places of everyday life, and the objects that defined them: from kiosks to washing machines; from telephones to public seating systems; from mass housing blocks to TVs and radios. Each chapter examines a specific space through a case-study approach. Chapter 1 focuses on design practice within the workplace through the work of designers in Iskra and Rade Končar companies. The second analyses spaces of consumption through printed pages of Svijet magazine and physical spaces of department stores, supply centres and the Zagreb Fair. In the third chapter, the home is examined through normative discussions about kultura stanovanja (domestic culture), as well as DIY practices shaped by Naš dom and Sam svoj majstor magazines. The final chapter looks at public space through K67 kiosk designed by Saša Mächtig as well as UNI87 seating system produced by Jadran company. All four chapters explore the relationship between design discourse and practice, government policies and propaganda, and consumers-self-managers, and argue that the material culture of everyday life shaped Yugoslav citizens’ understanding of and compliance with self-management. This builds on research undertaken across public and private archives, such as the Archive of Yugoslavia in Belgrade, Rade Končar Archive in Zagreb, Croatian State Archive in Zagreb, Ljubljana Historical Archive in Kranj, Archive of the Technical Museum and Museum of Architecture and Design in Ljubljana.

The primary aim of this work is to give voice to the silent history of graphic design in Greece, long uncharted and undocumented in both the international forum and the local design community. This study focuses on the professional modernisation of graphic design and its role in providing the means for change in Greek society. The research is supported by interdisciplinary analysis of commercial advertisements, posters, leaflets and magazines, as well as other supporting documentation, in the historical and cultural context of Athens, Greece from 1945 to 1970. The time examined was a transitional and vociferous period in the history of Greece, one of intense and rapid economic modernisation during the post-Second World War decades from the mid-1940s to 1970. This was a time when, along with broader changes in the social, economic and political life of Greece, important developments in design education, print technology, and professional organisation marked a new age for graphic design, as a profession emerging from the broader ‘graphic arts’ field (inclusive of both technological and creative processes) and claiming autonomy over the more established fine arts sector. All four chapters deal with modernisation in relation to the assumed divisions of traditional/modern, continuity/change, centre/periphery. Main areas of investigation are: trade organisation, graphic design education, advertising and urbanisation, electricity and tourism promotion. This research offers a view of the ways the ‘modern’ and the condition of modernity were experienced in the case of Greece through certain applications of graphic design and its agents of influence: graphic designers, artists, managers, publishers, the state and private entrepreneurs. The research benefited significantly from a number of interviews with design professionals and related individuals. The present endeavour has a modest aim: to enable understanding of how and why Greek graphic design at the time came to be, and to stress the validity of the visual as a means of historical documentation.

This thesis investigates how British women since the 1970s have used dress to resist dominant ideals of femininity and womanhood. I focus on examples of subcultural and alternative style as anti-fashion, as a rebuke to and also as the manipulation of the fashion system. The research is based on oral interviews with women in four case studies: punks in the 1970s, women who lived at Greenham Common Peace Camp in the 1980s, black women in hip-hop in the 1980s and 1990s, and Muslim women in the hijab since 2001. Participants were found using a combination of opportunity or volunteer sampling and snowball sampling techniques to gather a sample of approximately five interviewees per case study. The case studies are deliberately disparate, but they have been chosen because each one represents an important turn in British gendered identity politics of the last forty years, since punk style was interpreted by subcultural theory as resistance. They offer a wide range—from subcultural to religious dress—of cross-cultural examples to explore gender in terms of ethnicity, class, and nation, and to explain the ways in which these notions interact and overlap within contemporary British culture and history. Through my juxtapositions I provide an alternative narrative, a ‘new’ analysis of style as gendered to challenge any empiricist logic of conventional scholarship and to expose the fashion system as cyclical. This is a post-postmodern interdisciplinary investigation. I analyse the postmodern techniques of collage, bricolage, mixing and sampling in women’s style, where appropriation and customisation act as revolutionary practices of deconstruction of 5 meaning and interrupt grand historical narratives, However, I move beyond any postmodern focus purely on image and spectacle, or on simulacra and representation to locate women’s behaviour in situated bodily practice, and within their extended biographies. My interviews focus on women’s material and experiential views of their dress and style with an emphasis on their interpretations of style as lived experience. In this way I offer a turning out of fashion history; one that analyses the agentive action of each group’s style which I define as the punk ‘cut’, the Greenham Common ‘layer’, the hip hop ‘break’ and the ‘fold’ of the hijab. My emphasis is on the analytics of construction as displays that reveal the structures behind the fashioning of gender and identity, and I explore how these create new temporal and spatial subjective positions for women such as deterritorialisation for punks, utopianism for women at Greenham, reality for women in hip-hop, or a heterotopia in the case of British women in hijab. This study throws into crisis essentialist ideas: about the body, gender, a fashion object or the fashion system and its ideals to question the performativity of identity and history. Through its multi-layered discussion and interdisciplinary breadth, the thesis pushes at the boundaries of conventional design and fashion history scholarship in its exploration of embodied style as intertextual, and women’s fashion histories as shifting and mutating.

The history of design criticism in the latter half of the twentieth century in the US and the UK is punctuated with self-reflective interruptions during which design critics were acutely self-conscious about their purpose, role in society, relationship to their publics and use of critical techniques and formats. This thesis examines a selection of such moments and considers the extent to which they disrupted, and even redirected, the ways in which design criticism was practiced, produced, and consumed. The chapter focuses are as follows: a selection of articles published in the design magazines of the mid-late 1950s and early 1960s which forcibly activated a new set of values with which to engage with expendable, mass produced product design; a protest at the International Design Conference at Aspen in 1970 which posed a challenge to the established conference lecture format and to a lack of political engagement on the part of the liberal design establishment; a set of articles by cultural critics that critiqued the prevailing celebratory commentary on style and lifestyle in 1980s London; an independent exhibition that offered an alternative view of contemporary design in contrast to government-endorsed design exhibitions in 1990s London, with an additional focus on an intensification of thought about the designed object as a potentially viable critical format; and, lastly, a debate between the authors of a US design blog and an established British design critic writing in Print magazine that drew attention to a rift between the energetic amateur impulses of blogging culture and the editorial values of traditional print media. Three main problematics are used to provide continuity throughout the discrete time periods of this thesis, as well as points of comparison between the critical works examined: criticism’s contesting conceptions of its instrumentality, purpose and methods; criticism’s idealized perceptions of, and actual engagement with, its publics; and, finally, criticism’s adoption of a literary sensibility and narrative qualities in an attempt to transcend the limitations of design’s promotional and market-based concerns. In identifying five moments of historical discontinuity in the practice of design criticism, therefore, this thesis assembles a time-lapse portrait of the intellectual, stylistic and material constitution of design criticism between the early 1950s and the early 2000s, and in doing so, aims to contribute meaningfully to a growing historiography of design criticism.

In recent decades, scholars have begun to substantially reassess the economic and political significance of the craft guilds of sixteenth and seventeenth century London. Revisionist work by economic historians (Epstein and Prak, 2008), has convincingly overturned the notion that guilds were unanimously restrictive of commercial growth, opposed to innovative practices and exploitative of their members. Several political and social studies (Rappaport, 1989; Archer, 1991; Gadd and Wallis, 2002) have demonstrated the dynamic and philanthropic nature of these corporate bodies, which provided avenues for occupational mobility and charitable support; ensuring that London remained stable despite the extraordinary demographic, financial and social pressures of the final decades of the sixteenth century. The longstanding interpretation of ‘guild decline’ in the early modern era has thus been widely problematized and shown to be anachronistic. This thesis proposes a new methodology for examining the craft guilds of late sixteenth and early seventeenth century London, and suggests that the established scholarship has overlooked the significance of artisanal knowledge, skills and identities in the construction of meaningful communities of workshop practitioners, small-scale merchants, and the regulators of the crafts and trades. In this study, the built environments and material artefacts associated with London guilds are considered as active cultural and social agents (Appadurai; Kopytoff, 1986) which both reflected, and in turn reinforced identity formation, and the ritual and political boundaries of communal life. The changing structure of livery halls, their internal configurations and external designs, and the material furnishings and collections gifted, displayed and utilised within these institutional homes, are shown to be essential means through which guildsmen established competing claims for civic authority and professional artisanal accomplishment. Using textual, visual and material evidence from a range of London craft guilds - primarily, but not exclusively, the Goldsmiths’, Armourers’, Carpenters’ and Pewterers’ Companies - this work examines the physical and epistemological place of artisanal cultures, c.1560-1640. It considers the collaborative processes through which workmanship was evaluated by master craftsmen on early modern building sites, and the political and social value of such artisanal skills, techniques and knowledge within their associated livery halls. It is demonstrated that through the donation of visual and material artefacts to company buildings, and their subsequent use in the convivial, political and religious rites of the guilds, craftsmen were able to shape their reputations and post-mortem legacies. Their material gifts and bequests reveal that guild halls were simultaneously sites of memorisation (Archer, 2001), sociability, craft regulation and artisanal innovation. Within communities of living guildsmen, freemen wished to be remembered as affluent civic philanthropists, guardians of illustrious histories and, crucially, as masters of their respective artisanal practices. The changing spatial and material environments of guild halls are shown to be social products of complex organisations, which honoured both commensality and hierarchy; fraternal values and political and epistemological distinctions. The rebuilding projects of the London livery halls are considered in juxtaposition to the strained spatial and political relationships between guild halls and city workshops, and contemporary efforts to uphold the authority of liverymen to inspect artisanal standards and material quality within the wider urban environment.

This thesis discusses nineteenth- and early twentieth-century representations of Brazil, with em-phasis on Brazilian national identity and the country’s engagement with modernity. It addresses these broad themes by focusing on the national participation in key international exhibitions, from Brazil’s first official appearance at the International Exhibition of 1862 in London to the Brazilian Centennial Exposition held in Rio de Janeiro in 1922. Using a multidisciplinary theoretical and methodological framework, this thesis examines ‘national objects’ – exhibits, exhibition displays, publications and pavilions – shown at home and abroad. It questions what sort of national identity these objects materialised and how they propelled Brazilian experience of modernity. Despite being a multicultural and diverse country, from 1862 to 1922 Brazil was frequently repre-sented by its exhibition commissioners as a homogeneous and cohesive nation. In less than a hun-dred years, Brazil turned from being a liberal but slavery-bound Empire to become an oligarchic Republic. Alongside manumission, urban expansion, and industrialisation, the nation underwent unprecedented political, economic, and cultural changes. These changes, however, were displayed differently at home and abroad. This thesis, thus, is concerned with the cleavages in the national representation from the Empire to the Republic and questions what sort of nation was being repre-sented abroad, and why. This thesis reveals that the Brazilian exhibitionary efforts during this period largely excluded representations of its population, especially of those who did not conform to the modern and civi-lised images attributed to the nation by the state. It also sustains that, despite their commercial and economic imperatives, exhibitions were used by the Brazilian state, during Empire and Republic, for the affirmation and conservation of political power. This thesis is tested in five chapters. The first discusses previous attempts at studying exhibitions in Brazil and abroad, and defines the con-cepts considered in this thesis. The second chapter addresses issues of agency and representation by examining the imperial representation sent to the Centennial International Exhibition in Phila-delphia in 1876. The third chapter focuses on two exhibitions, one Imperial and one Republican, to enquire about ruptures and continuities in the Brazilian representation abroad. This chapter centres on the displays of Brazilian raw materials mounted at the Exposition Universelle of 1867 in Paris, and at the Louisiana Purchase International Exposition in St Louis in 1904. The fourth chapter examines objects that communicated Brazilian ‘civilisation and progress’ at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893. These objects were used by the newly instated republi-can government to manipulate national historical symbols that legitimised their ascension to power and promoted them as the future. The final chapter investigates the Rio exhibition in 1922 as a place where modernisation and modernity were made visible for a Brazilian audience.