Forthcoming book!

Publication of one’s first book in the discipline of design history typically does not begin with a personal confession. Whereas expressing gratitude to supportive friends, family, and colleagues is expected, more intimate revelations of the political commitments, feelings, and beliefs that motivate one to research and write are not, in general, encouraged. It is only the most prolific of writers for whom this is tolerated, and even anticipated. 

I would like to break with this practice. This is my first book. Each of the three case studies in it was born out of a sense of quiet sadness. The more slowly I looked at the objects of my study, and the more extensively I explored my early twentieth-century sources, the more fully I realized that the story I was about to write was one that could not end well. For this book is a story of human failure—including my own—to see each other and the more-than-human life world around us. To borrow the words of the artist Robert Smithson, if vision has been “strangled by the other senses” in our supermodern moment, my attempts as a historian at its recuperation through the study of designers a century ago for whom seeing was a paramount problem of connecting—as modest as these attempts are—come too late for many of the animal and plant species that they looked at, looked with, experimentally represented, and that are studied in this book. The natural world that entered into these designers’ “boundary-form” designs is disappearing from our distracted view.

And it is here that I am slightly hopeful that this book can do more than rehearse our failures. For if the visual holds any power, historicizing it by looking at how designers a century ago experimented with modes of seeing as they defined modern design for China is instructive. These were designers (and more famously, brush-and-ink painters) whose practices of seeing were connective, ductile, and boundary-crossing, moving across and dwelling within diverse arenas of material knowledge, whether natural sciences, textbook representations of the biophysical world, Japanese museums, connoisseurship of Song-dynasty scrolls, scientific associations, classrooms, or gardens. They also were open to improvisation and alive to the work of design as an imaginative mediator between emotions and living form. Like the designers themselves, the things they designed and pictures they painted travelled inside China and out. 

In an ecocritical vein, echoing the voice of the modern designer Chen Zhifo from a century ago, I propose that it was the designers’ self-conscious movement across such boundaries that created knowledge of a certain type: theirs was a knowledge in movement. Their gestural, dynamic designs and new styles of seeing and design thinking echoed the moving real environment around them. 

And through their designs they challenge us—all of us—to join in that rhythm. 

Available for preorder at Routledge on September 1. Please encourage your library to purchase a copy.