Roundtable:

When the International Conference for the Study of Design History and Design Studies (ICDHS) was first established in Barcelona in 1999 it was devoted to the theme of Historiar desde la periferia: historia e historias del diseño/design history seen from abroad: history and histories of design. This had been one of the growing concerns of an increasing number of researchers outside the dominant Anglophone world of publication and dissemination who sought a more representative delineation of the history of design activity in their own countries and language. As a global language Spanish - the language of Anna Calvera and other colleagues organizing the 1999 Barcelona conference - is spoken by more than 10 times as many people outside Spain than in it; more notably, perhaps in the context of the 2014 conference in Aveiro, Portuguese is spoken by more than 20 times as many people outside Portugal than within it. The fundamental ICDHS position has led to change over the past 15 years, bringing into the wider public domain a wider range design historical research that has previously had no natural home, unsupported by societies and, in some cases, by institutions. Nonetheless, it is still the case that our understanding of design and the history of design does still not encompass such activity in more than a modest percentage of the 200 or so countries in the world, has been dominated by research into the design activities of those belonging to the first industrialised world, and has usually fallen in line with the general preoccupation of design commentators and historians in its concentration on free-market, rather than socialist, economies. As I have sought to convey in several papers and publications over the past decade1, analysis of mainstream histories of design and design history readers has shown them to be largely restricted to narratives that embrace between 5 and 10% of the world’s countries.